Today I am having one of these days where my mind is a junction with too much traffic, million ideas, million projects, not enough time to think and feeling exhausted at the thoughts of sorting it all out while being exasperated at not being able to get at least one thing sorted out straight.
It’s one of these days when my brain’s external drive comes in handy, I always jot down ideas in there, some silly, some not. Today it’s time for a trivial one, because frankly I’m not up for much else, but my fingers were still itching to write, staring at a blank page on my screen didn’t get the thoughts sorted out in my head so I doubt writing on something a bit more elaborated that I took notes of in my book will work better. The first one on my list of silly rescue topics is my face cream, and I remember writing it down because I actually never thought that one would work as good as it does.

The face cream in question is this one:

See when the idea stroke I even took a picture!
Pond’s Age Miracle, that’s the name, and it is an anti-ageing cream, I’m not that old, and I don’t have wrinkles..yet, but my skin is a terribly dry one, in winter it’s torture, in Summer it’s still dry enough to be irritated by the sweat and give me rashes, that’s how bad it is. Now for years I have used all kind of cold creams, even tried Nivea (which funnily gave me even more rashes). In India I have tried all kind of Lakme creams, even the Pond’s cold cream. They all work to some extent but never long enough to keep me comfy, especially not in the Winter. As a kid my mom used to smear my cheeks in Peru balsam to keep them from turning tomato red and crack, as a teen dry skin had a perk though, I didn’t get as many zits as my peers (but wasn’t spared, just got less). While in India my cheeks are not as inflamed by the cold as in Switzerland (unless going to Manali) it’s still pulling, and I still have a stick of that same old trusted Peru balsam in my fridge (courtesy of family visiting) for emergencies. The problem is that it’s a sticky thing, and unless it’s cold outside, it’s not working too well on my face. So i had to find a solution.
Last year before shifting to Mumbai the monsoon brought some nice cold air in Bangalore, and with it my pulling skin problem. This time I decided that since regular moisturizing cream didn’t work I had to try something else. And I remembered that anti ageing creams are often richer and thicker than normal cream because the first sign of ageing is dryness of the skin, so with this logic in mind, why not give it a try? I picked up that one because it was the most affordable in that category, that way if it didn’t work on my painful skin then I wasn’t stuck with an over priced jar of creamy goo. Beside I am of those who aren’t easily won over by marketing promises, the whole get young again in 7 days….not my thing, all I wanted was to get a cooperative skin.
I remember feeling in bliss land at the first application, it’s was thick, creamy, hydrating but not oily the way some intense moisturization regular cream felt. Then the second surprise was that the feeling lasted beyond a couple of hours…in fact it did last almost the whole day! Just had to reapply at night and I was done, nice non-pulling skin, problem solved. if you ask me still today, that’s all I need. I kept using it, even in Mumbai where the skin felt less itchy in the monsoon induced over humid climate, and that is when I noticed that not only did my skin stopped pulling and reddening at the cheeks, it also looked firmer and plump and pretty much dare I say it? ….Younger.
Darn! That I didn’t see coming, a few weeks into using it, it was proving me that some of this whole marketing promises thing was to some extent true. Now I don’t think I noticed the change in the first 7 days, but I haven’t really paid attention, and beside I don’t have the fine line and age spots it claims to remove, probably too young for them to be on my face, but yes indeed my skin was firmer a couple of weeks into using it.
I still use it today, I forgot on occasion during the monsoon, but i still use it, my skin has never been happier, in Winter I need to use morning and evening without fail, but I didn’t need my Peru balm last year, and I didn’t suffer sweat induced rashes on my face this past Summer.
At 299 rupees a pot that is definitely costlier than your average regular face cream, but if you have a super sensitive skin, I’d say go upgrade to it, or probably any anti ageing cream of your liking, they are indeed richer and protect a delicate skin much better than others, then if you get the added bonus of a younger looking skin like I did, then fine. I’m still not sure if I would pin all my hope on these should I start getting wrinkles, it seems much better to admit to the inevitable truth: we get older everyday and it comes with cosmetic side effect. The issue I needed to tackle with was a physically painful skin, should a wrinkle come I will not sweat over it, I already have welcomed the grey hairs on my head without freaking out.

I wrote quite a couple of posts about maids in India, and in the nearly 9 years I have been there I had the very good, the good, the bad and the downright ugly, but there are things that no matter how many times you explain them, no maid will really grasp, not even the good ones like the one I have now. And frankly I gave up because it’s not worth loosing breath and saliva over these matters. If you are new to India, here is the list of the things you can if you want try to explain, consider a bonus if followed, but should not sweat upon.

- Draining baskets: at the exception of one maid, all asked for it, and I refused, because the basket in question is a giant space eater in which they will pile your washed dishes without any rhyme and order which could cause to breakage of your non steel glasses and plates. If you have a separate utility area where you can keep the damn thing out of sight, fine go for it, I never really had that luxury and the way I see it, the damn basket would cause me to use more expletive during the day having to move it around to use my tiny kitchen, or bump into it, for the few minutes it is used to drain a dishes each day…not worth the hassle. My Kitchen is modular, and I like it neat so I always store away the clean stuff promptly, but hey never stopped even my current maid for asking I buy one a million time.

- The other reason I do not want to buy one, is that my kitchen has a sink with a draining platform. The problem is that day in day out I end up with this scenario:

As you can see the draining area is clear and all the stuff are piled dripping wet on the granite counter. The reason being that despite my showing her how to do it right, explaining how to do it right and repeating a million time that the ribbed thing on the side of the sink IS the new draining basket my maid still soap up all the dishes one by one, pile them all soapy on the draining area, and then rinse them one by one and dump them on the granite. While the correct way would be to soap one, rinse it and place titled on the slots of the draining area, and take the new dish to repeat all over again. I had this draining system in all my flat but one, and in all the houses that had one I explained the system, only for the maid to ignore it, I even had a particularly cheeky one telling me that no there are too many dishes and it can’t be done, only for me to show that yes it could and be blurted to my face it is time consuming…that was the crappy Navi Mumbai maid I once upon a time told about if you were wondering. After so many years trying to explain how to stack the dishes…I gave up, they still don’t get it, probably never will. I just try to remember to clear them away fast and mop the counter dry so I get my workspace back and don’t get too much water leaking between the wall and the counter top as it has been sealed poorly, otherwise the storage area below gets wet.

- For them there is no such thing as too much soap, soap cleans, and more soap equals to cleaner. Don’t let them use liquid dish soap unless you plan on putting a dent in your budget, they can empty a bottle in a week (been there), get the good old desi alternative : dish soap bars, they will still disappear in a week, the difference is that a bottle cost about 90 rupees and a bar cost 15. And they don;t stop there, floor cleaner used in excess is apparently also better than just a cap for many, go for the cheap, or like me, go with none at all, the floor is mopped daily, and I’m not living in a hospital, so it doesn’t need to be 99.9% germ free, germs found in houses anyway help you build up immunity, and I do my wallet and the environment a huge favour. I would go for vinegar if it wasn’t so costly around here.

- Don’t bother confusing them with too many cleaning products, they will not remember half of what you told them, will end up using the same thing for everything anyway and you will loose your mind over it. I had a maid in Chennai who used the dish wash liquid soap to mop the floor I kid you not! Buy one floor cleaner, one dish soap, and a toilet cleaner and let it be, if you are a clean freak and want more stuff, keep it for yourself and do that speciality cleaning yourself.

- They strongly believe that huge bucket of waters poured all over the balconies and in the bathroom is better than moping these area. Even in my current flat, with my current maid where we have western style bathrooms with properly segregated wet and dry area she will wet it all over, never use a mop at all, and never even use a sponge to wash the basin. I tried telling all my maids to MOP the bathrooms, they simply don’t. Invest into a foam wiper blade thingy and wipe off the excess yourself to avoid breaking your leg. And never mind that they could clean a balcony with half the water, they still will fill the bucket to the rim and pour, water preservation is apparently not their concern.

- Back to the dishes, don’t bother trying to explain that a scotch brite sponge/scrubber can be used on the sponge side to clean melamine plates with patterns, non-stick coating pans and other fancy items with prints on them. The will use the green scrubber side for EVERYTHING even if there is nothing to wipe, there is one of Ishi’s tiffin box that lost a cartoon design in just a week, and I gave up buying non-stick pans eons ago, they will strip the coating in less than a month with vigorous scrubbing, never mind that nothing ever stuck to the bottom of said pan. If you have non stick stuff, clean them yourself if you value them, because no matter how many times you tell them not to scrub them, they’ll keep on doing it

- They have trouble getting the concept of dusting too, or they will bang a dry cloth on your furniture just spreading the dust somewhere else, or they will mop them with a dripping wet cloth. I managed to get mine to stop mopping them with a super wet cloth, but haven’t been able to make her switch to the proper microfiber duster that grab the dust without being soaked. Only WET cleanses, dry can’t do that in their mind. I even showed her how to dry dust…massive fail, she doesn’t get it, but since the dust accumulates so fast in India one need to dust twice daily, so she does it in the morning her way, I do it in the afternoon my own way. Don’t bother trying to make them use pledge, it’s costly and they won’t use it right and all it does is buy you around 12 hours of dust build up.

- if you are very particular about certain cleaning tasks and really really want them done a specific way, do it yourself, learn to pick your battle with household stuff in India, a spick span glossy home is not possible here, give the thing you don’t nit pick too much over to the maid, do the other yourself.

- if you don’t have a washing machine and care about your clothes, wash them yourself, the Indian way consist of banging them hard on a stone or the bathroom floor while wet, it will kill anything in just a few months, we used to let the maid clean them in the beginning, before we got a washing machine, the stains would not come out, the fabric looked worn out a few weeks after purchasing said item, and I even had neighbours reporting that they were constantly sewing button back on their husband’s shirts because the maid’s bang wash technique broke them.

- Remember that more than in the West your maid doesn’t come from a background where she will be used to multiple cleaning products, and gear, or know that certain items need to be washed with care. Provide her with tools she can understand, most maid will not get how to use a mop broom, so even if it breaks your heart to seem them squat on the flour to mop, let them do it. Each time I moved to a new place I always asked my maid what type of mop she wanted and what she was more comfortable using, the one I have now is the first one that asked for a mop broom and knows how to use it well, so we invested in a 800 bucks microfiber pad scotch brite one. It comes in handy when we spill stuff and both DH and I can mop the floor ourselves with it too, but if she was not comfy with it, we wouldn’t ask her to use it in the first place.

And more important than all for you not to loose your sanity is to remember than when you delegate a task, you must accept loosing a bit of control over it. You can offer tips, try to explain to a certain point, but that stops there.

Time clear the backlog of noodles again, this time another variant of the Nissin cup noodles. Like the pani puri variety, this is actually a SOUP noodle, not a full regular cup noodle like the chicken ones I reviewed already, it contains only 50 grams so is pretty much half the calories of a bigger pack, if you are in the market for some indulgence but still want to keep it manageable calorie wise, this is the size you might want to go for. Like the pani puri one, the packaging is cleverly made to make your brain think you are having a full meal (like the good old diet trick of using quarter plates instead of full dinner plates to hold your food).

There is almost no smell from the dry product, like for the pani puri flavour, you need to add the boiling water to release the aroma, and the smell is then very pleasant and has definitely the notes of the Manchurian flavour people in India are familiar with. If you have stumbled on my blog just now, Manchurian is a flavoured gravy that is part of the Indo-Chinese cuisine palette, and yes there is such a thing as an Indo-Chinese cuisine, I reviewed another Manchurian noodle in the past and explained it there, you can read it here.
Taste wise this noodle type is much much better than the Ching’s secret brand ones. Even though the noodles still aren’t close to have the texture and taste of something that has dipped into a Manchurian gravy, the oodles are at least in the soup the whole time which is probably what makes them tastier. That said it is not a big favourite of mine, and I actually tasted this one on two occasion, once for this review, but prior to that it was one of the many urban camping meals I inflicted upon myself in August 2011 when we were in the process of relocating to Mumbai from Bangalore. You know the infamous move that drained me out of all energy and had me hit the relocation wall. We stayed 3 days in our totally empty flat in Bangalore with a dog and a cranky toddler, with only one hot plate, a small pan and a few paper cups. While we ate out a few times, a few meals were spent at home, I needed something that would not require much preparation, and yes since I had some instant tomato soup packets but no mugs to pour them into I needed the cup noodle container. The supermarket back then only had the Manchurian variety, and in all the exhaustion induced haze, I remember that even back then I found that variety “just ok” not outstanding, but not bad either. As for Ishita, she refused to eat more than one fork full, so I guess this one is failing the fussy toddler test too.

I find myself very often reflecting on my life and surrounding, and am still amazed today at how things that were exotic growing up are really part of my daily life now and how what I grew up with is now the exotic. I get a kick out of it actually, in a good way, because I think both where I am now and where I come from is equally exiting and how they both contributed to make me the person I am right now, right this instant.
I also find myself wondering often about who read my blog, I know there is a fair amount of you guys out there, I get an average of 300 page hits a day, and I know from your comments that you come from many places and cultures, some find my living in India exotic and enjoy reading my take on it, some are Indian and are enjoying reading about my roots and my take on living in their own culture, thank you all for enjoying my blog.
Today I decided to give you some of snippet of what is pretty much a normal life to me, I think my whole blog pretty much reflect that, but summarizing it once in a while is a fun exercise.

- Where I grew up, leafy trees and pine trees were common, when I look at the palm trees around me I can’t help even 9 years later to think “wow  what would people back home think of that?” Palm trees are things you see during your beach holidays, not outside your apartment windows right? On the other hand, trees that loose their leaves in the Fall are now my exotic, I don;t see them around here, they are the thing I need to go on a holiday to witness.

- My kitchen is a nice blend of your average westernized kitchen and Indian one, the counter is too low for my taller frame, we have a gas stove sitting there that we back home would call a camping stove. I don’t have one but two “wok” or kadai as they are called here, a pressure cooker, continental style frying pans, a flat tawa, a concave one, and my sauce pans have no handles, I had a special plier to remove them from the stove in typical Indian style. My pantry contains both several type of lentils as well as pasta, noodles, peanut butter and nutella.

- I am a mom, my fridge door probably looks like yours in the west: full of post it notes, school craft project, grocery lists and ABC magnets. Inside it is full of veggies, fruit yogurt, Tupperware containers containing both Indian and continental leftovers. And of course I have a pack of French fries in the freezer for these emergency days, who doesn’t.

- Often on weekend DH and I call samosa, kachori and jalebi breakfast, we buy it from a chaat chop, the way my parents would go to the local bakery on Sunday morning to buy croissants and cinnamon rolls.

- I can’t make my own croissant, puff pastry isn’t available in stores, and all my best efforts to try making my own pastry have all failed miserably, even my grand ma questioned why I would embark on such a tedious work when stores sell it…uhm not in India! If I want a croissant we need to go to a coffee shop, they often taste horrible so I pass, and I don’t feel like spending 10 times the Swiss price for a good one in a 5 star hotel.

- Right now I’m wearing something close to my daily uniform wear: denim long shorts and a light cotton short kurta, East meet West. It’s comfy, and airy and I like it. You can live in India without wearing salwaar suits and dupatta everyday, or at all.

- Of course I have salwaar suits in my wardrobes, I wear them on occasion, but not all the time. In Winter you will find me cosy in a pair of stretch churidar and a cotton long sleeved kurta as often as you will find me in my good old sweat pants and long sleeved t-shirt…yes it can get cold in India!

- TV commercials come in English and Hindi on the English Channel…wait how cool is that, I watch TV in English! Where I grew up it was all in French, and if you understood German and Italian you could what the two other national channels, in the beginning my TV had only 6 channels, the 3 Swiss one and the 3 French national ones because we weren’t far from the border. When the cable came in the 90’s the only English channels were MTV and CNN or other news channels. So of course I get a kick of watching and hey understanding English ones now, I feel the same kick when a French movie comes and I can follow it without subtitles…ha!

- Now I am sure some of you might be wondering…wait her native tongue isn’t English? Nope it isn’t, I learned it in middle school, perfected it in high school and decided I wanted to have that one as my second language at a proficient level, so I practiced practiced practiced, without English I would never even have met my husband in the first place.

- I can understand Hindi and speak it a little, I’m far from being fluent though.

- When I run out of milk and eggs or anything basic during the week I buy it at the kirana store (mom and pop store), but we go once a week to the supermarket to stock up on groceries too.

- Back home we have the Alps, here it’s the Himalayas, right now they are both equally exotic, I can’t see them out of my window. But living in Mumbai we have the sea and beach. In my childhood days the beach was on the lake side and had just rocks for me to collect, Ishita doesn’t get rocks, she can collect seashells they are both super cool to collect for kids.

- Beaches in the Mediterranean area are super crowded with lots of flabby people in swimming trunks and bikinis. In Mumbai it’s equally crowded (and I mean EQUALLY) with fitter, more toned people wearing sarees, jeans and t-shirts, salwaar suits, and shorts. People on the beach in Europe sell ice cream, nougat, coconuts, French fries and donuts. Here it’s ice cream, fresh toasted peanuts, pani puri, cotton candy and corn on the cob, samosa, shaved ice, and pav bhaji. And of course when we go there we eat beach food…who doesn’t?

- My home is a mess, all homes are, you are likely to step on a clippo block and sit on a Dora doll.

- In Bangalore we often had monkeys coming in the neighbourhood, it might look fun, but it isn’t, they are aggressive, will go after your food if they can get into your home and it used to drive my dog banana. I get the exotic factor here. But I have friends in North America that have issues with bears and racoons going after their garbage and food and they aren’t happy about it the same way the sight of monkeys around made me crib. They went through my food stuff a few times when I was new to India, you then learn not to leave your balcony door open and feel grateful for bars on windows.

- We put stings of lights on the balconies for Diwali, and they come out of the box again in December to go on the Christmas tree.

- We have iPods and a docking station, we listens to English songs as often as Hindi ones, and I like instrumental music, both relaxation music and classical music as well as movie scores.

- Favourite Indian take out menu food: Naans, Afghani Chicken, Butter Chicken and kebabs. Favourite continental take out: Pizzas. We cook everything else at home or go to a sit down restaurant.

- Back home I was used to 4 distinct seasons, and each had their perks and pitfalls, I miss them now. But I have 3 nice ones here too: Summer, Monsoon, and Winter, even if in Mumbai the gap between the end of the monsoon and Winter often feels hotter than the Summer. Winter is that much sweeter when it comes. My favourite back home were Summer and early Fall and I used to hate Winter. Here I tend to dislike Summer, enjoy the Monsoon and absolutely love Winter.

- I may be living in India, but I am still Swiss, and I like it that way, I am enjoying new traditions, but I haven’t forgotten who I am, I just adapted myself to new surrounding. Christmas is still important to me, and I enjoy sharing that both with DH and Ishita, I put some twist on some of my family traditions and created new ones, that’s what families do. I’m not Indian, and guess what, I don’t want to be, and there is no reason why I should be so. Indians going abroad carry their traditions with them, celebrate their cultural heritage wherever they are. I am doing the same.

When you belong to any community such as the gori community, you come across ladies from all walk of life that have for only common denominator that they like you are in a relationship with a man from the desi community. And over the years being active in these communities you occasionally come across debates about the “proper” way to honour your husband’s culture, whether it’s wearing Sindoor, having a mangalsutra, wearing toe ring, fasting for karva chauth, dressing the part, what is the most accurate way to wear a saree…yada yada yada.
What has always amused me about these is that the ones who are the most dead bent on desi cultural perfections are often those who only visited India on occasion, rather than living in the country, they are the one that suddenly feel that because they married an Indian guy it means they are to guard and protect their partner’s cultural heritage abroad, more vehemently sometimes than many old school desi aunties. It however become very irritating when those same ladies are the one pointing out how sad it is that even Indian women living in India are no longer respecting traditions, traditions I might add they might not fully understand. Where on earth do they get the right to be so snotty about the lack of traditionalism in the women that grew up in the culture they are just now dipping in?
A while ago I wrote about cultural identities and my journey in this department, we all go through an adjustment phase when we are expats, my journey is less about morphing into the perfect Indian partner for my sweeter half, than it is about shipping myself half way across the globe to be in a relationship with the man I fell in love with. See for me, I fell in love with my husband, not because he is Indian, but because he is him, and well happen to be India, not that I care, he could have been from ay cultural background it wouldn’t have mattered. My initial efforts at wanting to fit in was more directed at the me being in India, I can say with confidence that if we had both lived in Switzerland I would not have started dressing up in salwaar suits simply because he was of Indian heritage, that would have been stupid, and not even suited for the Swiss climate and way of life.
The India I arrived into in 2003 was more conservative in certain aspect than it is today, and I would not have worn capri around or even shorts as I do now regardless of my state of mind, but obsessing about the perfect way to wear a dupatta or pleat  a saree, nope, first because there isn’t any such thing as perfection, and there isn’t even one unique definition of what is properly Indian or not, it’s not a single culture, it’s a mosaic of cultures we are talking about.

And as far as I am concerned, I never wore Sindoor on a regular basis, in the beginning I wore it only when I was going to the FRO and other government offices to get all my paper in orders, because yes it gives you some brownie points when dealing with people who are from a more traditional background, I did it when going to a wedding, wearing a saree and everything, we had relatives there, and it was a formal place, I used to do it regularly when visiting my in-laws, but no longer do it unless it’s again a more formal event. The Sindoor in DH’s family isn’t even red, it’s orange not all communities applies it the same too. The Mangalsutra…well I don’t even own one, they aren’t done in DH’s family, they aren’t even part of the wedding ceremony, not all Hindu communities in India put as much importance on it as it is believed to be by westerners, in DH’s family women wear whatever they want around their neck, often it’s just a simple gold chain with a pendant of their choice, but my MIL has worn pearls and bead neckwear as well. I like wearing necklaces, and I like not being stuck wearing one type all the time so that works perfectly for me.
The toe rings, I loved these always found them cute, and I wanted to wear them after getting married, my feet didn't agree with the custom, I have narrow, totally ruler straight toes, so what glides on it, glides back off immediately, there is no rounded toe tip to hold the ring secure on the toe at all, just casually roaming around with them was painful because in two stride the ring threatened to come off the toe forcing me to stop all the time to push them back where they belonged. I even lost a few simply riding pillion on DH’s bike! I tried to squeeze them so tight they would not move, but the metal would dig in my skin making me bleed…so they had to go. I wear a ring on my ring finger and that is about it, and it’s not even the one we exchanged during our engagement ceremony, because that one got bent when we were unpacking stuff in our flat in Navi Mumbai when my dog pulling on the leash at the sight of the parkers and movers dragged me across the hall and crashed me into a door frame, bending the ding in such a way that it gave me a nasty bruise and was even though to remove, I am yet to send it for repair, we need to find a trustworthy jeweller for that and it seems it’s not even worth the energy and time for such a tiny repair.
While some women need to advertise their marital status, I’m not of that flock, I couldn't;t care less what the people think, my husband has no problem with me not wearing any of the traditional wife attire so why should any random people opinion matter, beside it’s not even something guaranteed to ward off sleazy men that are dead set on trying to hit on a woman so why bother if it doesn’t truly have a deep meaning to me or my husband I ask you?
As for Karva Chauth, I haven’t done it once, never even knew it existed before some of the gori in the community bragged about how well they fasted and how proud they felt doing it. DH never asked me to, never mentioned it, and when I asked him about it he’s reply “it’s really is completely up to you”, and since it is up to me, I don’t think it’s very fair to just ask the wife to fast once a year to guarantee her husband a long life, like many things in Indian culture, it’s gender biased, women brand themselves wives, men don’t, women loosing their husband need to break bangles, rub of sindoor and bindi and live a life of austerity as widows, men who become widower can carry on with their lives, women need to fast to guarantee their husband a long life, the favour might get returned by some modern husband, but nothing in the tradition says a man should fast for his wife’s longevity…get the picture? Many feminist women in India are distancing themselves from these traditions for these reasons, fully aware of why they are doing so, there are many women that are traditional too and continue doing things the old way because it really truly means something to them as well.

And don’t get me wrong, I know gori who are traditional and do these because it works for them and because it makes both them and their partner happy. My beef is with those who just seem to be more in love with Indian culture (whatever definition of it they have) than with the man. In a way these ladies make me feel like their partner is just there to validate their love for all things Indians which well they are free to do, but the line is crossed when these same ladies start commenting on how sad it is that Indian ladies are no longer traditional, or brag about how they can perform all the pujas and rites with ease, and how they even do it better than the Indians themselves, generally just giving the impression that they are trying way too hard to be someone that deep down they aren’t but think they should be. That is called being more royalist than the king, and it’s dangerous.

One of the perks of working as a stay at home mom (yes it IS work) is that Monday blues doesn’t really exists when you have school aged kiddos. It is replaced by Monday High, at least for me and I am willing to bet a lot will nod several time reading it.
See as a mom you are on duty 7 days a week, there are no day off, and while yes weekends are usually family time and activity time, this is one of these days as a mom you don’t get much exclusive “Me time” if you get any at all.
Me time is precious, me time counts as much as family time, me time keeps a mom sane, me time happens only when everybody has left the house.
In my case, they are the 2.5 hours I get daily when she is in school, the 2.5 hours I know I can paint my nails without finding myself running for one of the many toddler emergencies, the 2.5 hours I know I can sit in front of my netbook and blog, the 2.5 hours I can pee without fear of hearing a screeching “mamaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” which could signal anything from my dog eating her snack to her wanting to get some paper to draw, or simply to make sure I didn’t fall into the toilet and got flushed away…apparently toilets are the portal to another dimension, moms should not be left in there alone…you get it, me time doesn’t mean doing big fancy things, it just mean really getting a breather.

Weekends are family time, there is mess, we don’t clean it, we go out ,take care of the groceries, eat less healthy food stuff, play…This is fun, this is a nice change in the routine, but this usually means that Monday morning I end up straightening the house, then drop Ishi in school and by then I just do nothing, just enjoy the bliss of finding back my daily break, the 2.5 hours that will energize me for the rest of the day and evening, the 2.5 hours I can organize, and plan things undisturbed.
My Me time falls after everybody left, husband at work, maid gone, daughter in school and all the assorted “wallas” have taken their turn ringing my doorbell, to deliver the milk, ask for the clothes to iron, take my garbage, cleaned my house…The doorbell goes mute until the evening…unless I ordered something from the internet that need to be delivered that is.
And just the thought of having these 2.5 hours that are mine for the taking and carry so much in possibilities is exhilarating, Monday is what brings that back.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband and daughter, but I love myself too.
This weekend had been particularly crazy, DH was working on Saturday and Ishi was so hyper that I took her to the mall, there is a bouncy castle and a choo choo train she loves there, we then had fun at the food court eating Lebanese food, we then did a little shopping because while I was there I might as well pick up a few of the stuff I was planning to buy the next time I came near the mall. Then we came home after a whole afternoon there, happy but tired. Sunday it’s PMS that hit me with a massive blast, moodiness, crankiness and waterworks, something that only chocolate, diet coke and TV can solve, and required a grocery shopping trip to put into action.

All this making Monday a much welcome day in my week…

I wanted to do a noodle review yesterday since it’s been a little while without any and I have a bunch of notes in my notebook. But I got stuck on the phone for 40 minutes with someone I didn’t even really wanted to chit chat with that much and by then all my energy was gone, so the noodle review is coming today.

First I’ve been putting off sampling tomato flavoured noodles for a while, from experience I know that what is “tomato flavoured” in India is likely to have a tomato KETCHUP taste, which I really don’t like much, I’ve never been a tomato ketchup fan ever, at the most I might dip a French fry in it now and then, but that stops there. So to ease my taste buds into the the tomato department I decided to first try Koka, because it’s the main imported brand of noodles in India and it’s likely to have a less ketchup-y taste than let’s say Maggi (I worry about sampling that one really), after all even lays potato chips have tomato flavoured ones that taste like they fell into a jar of the stuff.
I took advantage of the last month’s school set menu to prepare this one, because Noodles was on the tiffin menu one day a week and while Maggi noodles clump when cold, koka ones generally don’t, and that cut my own portion of noodles drastically too.
The taste make has a strong smell of tomato soup if you stick your nose in the pouch, that reassured me that the outcome would be less dreadful for my taste buds, while cooking the taste maker has a much more subtle smell than when opening the pack, which is another good thing for me.
Once cooked I sampled 3-4 forks of it and it was tasting just the right amount of sweet and sour in a very tomato soup like way, which was actually very pleasant considering I initially braced me for some nasties. It’s still not my favourite noodles, I won’t buy it again, because if I want some tomato flavour I can get it from tomato soup without that carbs and fat the noodles bring to it. If I am in for noodles that mean I did indeed decided to eat junk food and want all the junk without the illusion of health.
As for Ishita, she seemed to have liked it, the tiffin came back almost empty, and she got a little over half the content of the noodle pack in her box.

One of my regular reader suggested in the comment section that I should write a post about my making sure Ishita eats healthy and promoting healthy habits in my child, and since this morning I had no other idea of topics and was about to…ahem…do a noodle review, I figured out I might as well share my view on the topic now.
First thing first, there is some strong cultural aspects at play here, the way I see meals and dealing with a fussy toddler is I am aware not exactly popular in India.
From interacting with a lot of desi moms I came to know that a kid skipping a meal is seen as far more of a big deal than it is in Switzerland where I grew up. I have a lot of my friends who report having to cajole their kids into eating, or resort to cooking a different meal for them to eat if they reject the main dish of the day, or turn the vegetables into something that looks more like a junk food item to bribe their child into eating something. or take them outside to feed them while they are on the swing, or turn on the TV to distract them so they can jam the vegetables in their mouth without them suspecting.
I didn’t grew up with this pattern, like all kids back home, I was to sit at the dinning table, my mom cooked one meal to feed the family and it was this or nothing else, and the only thing that changed between the children’s plate and the parents’ plate was the size of the portion, we could whine all we wanted there was simply no way the vegetable casserole would turn into French fries or pasta if that wasn’t the menu of the day, rather we had the choice to or eat or go hungry until the next meal (and yes we did try going hungry…not worth it) The amount we were supposed to eat was of course age appropriate, and the memories I have are those of a 4-5 year old who had to finish the content of her plate before exiting the table. My mom said that before that she introduced veggies but never forced me to finish them, because toddlerhood is that time were kids are discovering taste and what their affinities are. That said, just because we had some affinities to chocolate and potatoes didn’t mean that was the only food we had on the plate. As a tot apparently the signal that I was done eating was when I started fidgeting, playing with the food or simply had my mind somewhere else, so my mom would take the plate away, and the meal was call quit until the next one, and it wasn’t the end of the world if I ate only two spoons of potato puree and half a French bean before loosing focus.
Our dinning table was in the kitchen, we had a big more formal one in the living room, but that was for special meals and parties, granted our flat was probably bigger than what you can find in India or even in more modern buildings in Switzerland the idea was that daily meals were a casual, cosy affair in the kitchen, WITHOUT TV, the TV time in my house was strictly regulated, the TV was never on unless we were watching something specific, and food in front of the TV was not permitted, unless it was a fruit from the fruit bowl my mom conveniently placed on the shelf of the entertainment unit, and that was to be had at snack time after school, or early in the morning on weekends which were the only two time slot my sister and I were even allowed in front of the TV. Meal time and TV never mixed in my family…EVER. Food was to be respected and savoured at the table, where discussions on every topic was encouraged, the advantage being that back in the days, even dual income families like mine still had time to sit together, blessed be the syndicate association strictly regulating work hours in every field. The school system even today still permit kids to go back home to eat as the lunch break for kids is about 2 hours, the catch is that school finishes later in the afternoon, but home cooked food is on the menu for most even today in a faster paced time where dual income is more of a norm than it was back in my childhood, parents make sure to leave already cooked food in the fridge to be reheated by whoever comes home first for lunch (adults get about 1 to 1.5 hour break at meal time too).

Now of course living in India I can’t replicate that whole model, DH works insane long hour, can’t come back home for lunch, and often all meals are just eaten with Ishi and I, what I do however do, is insist on her being seated at the dinning table away from the TV, on occasion it is on, but she doesn’t watch it while eating anyway. For years DH and I did without a dinning table, due to space constraints, so we ended up eating at the coffee table in front of the TV…the WORST mistake in my life, once you get used to eat in front of the idiot box it is though to break the habit. I did, because to be frank the concept wasn’t deep rooted in me, DH still has issues with it, and frequently eat while watching the new on TV…sigh
Sitting specially at one spot for meal is one thing, but i also apply the same logic my mom applied cooking only one meal, not giving any options, Ishi being a 3 year old can eat all we do, and that is exactly what ends up on her plate, in smaller quantities, and possibly cut in small pieces for ease of handling, if the fare is a continental one. I don’t discriminate, we cook all kind of cuisine. Of course like all 3 years old she has her preferences, and if she had her way she would eat pasta, fries and danone vanilla yogurt at every meal. It just doesn’t fly with me. Kids take several trial before liking a food anyway, so if you give up after one unsuccessful attempt that considerably limit what they will like to eat and make it challenging to put the right nutrition in their system. And no I don;t like the idea of milk powder drinks coming as a substitute, not after the age of two, beside Ishi seems to have a slight lactose intolerance, we give her fortified soy milk in the morning and at night and that is it, the rest of the day it’s water, and food, period.
Now, of course she still fusses over food, and yes green vegetables are evil, and she picks them out of her plate, unless it is broccoli which she loves, and I ignore her, if she doesn’t want to eat them, then be it, she’ll feel hungrier at the next meal, no biggie, but when she asks for yogurt instead of finishing her rice and vegetables, this is not going to happen, she threw fits over that, ended up in her room without food until the next planned meal or snack, and she understood quick that tantrums will not get me to soften on that issue. When I first introduced her to moon sprouts as the one shown in the tiffin picture the other day she hated them, she now loves them, at first cherry tomatoes were just ok, now she loves them. There are days she will have nothing to do with chicken, but if she is hungry she will eat it, so based on this, there will be a day when beans will fly, peas gulped down, and curry leaves won’t be plucked out of a poha dish.

There are two things I don’t like: cooking for the dustbin, and disguising food as junk food…the first one is a necessary evil at the time, and sadly some food do end up in the dustbin, but I am careful about quantities so the amount is small. The second is something I don’t do, it teaches nothing to the kid, other than the fact that it’s ok to eat your vegetables in a cutlet form and that you can dispense yourself with the hassle of peeling and cutting them to cook them in a more natural way, and it gives one the taste for oily fare…FAIL Call me crazy or even barbaric if you want, I feel happier if Ishita eats 4-5 nuts, and a broccoli floret and calls it a meal than seeing her wolf down something fried in which vegetables or protein or vitamin has been sneaked in. the first one at least developed her taste buds for the natural, and no toddler will ever starve themselves to death if they don’t see starchy stuff on their plate at all time…survival instinct runs deep in all species, give it some credit, your kids are smart and will eat anything if they have to.
Giving in to your kids at the dinning table and letting them eat only what they like or are used to is the best way to end up with a grown up with picky eating habits and a possibly dysfunctional diet. I’m going to brag a little her, but I grew up being put in front of a wide array of food I had to eat, my mom also refused to limit herself to the same few dishes, she would try new recipes all the time, from all type of cuisine. DH on the other hand grew up being the last kid in a desi family, putting him in the position of family pet, so that when he didn’t like one thing, his mom would immediately whip up something else just for him. As a grown up he is now extremely wary of trying new things or new textures, his vegetables need to have potatoes in, and swim in a tomato gravy, he can’t eat rice without it being dripping wet with or curd or gravy, he even finds pasta too dry for his taste, and trying some of the new “exotic” veggies you find in the market is out of question. In the continental fare he only likes dishes where...yup the food comes in a wet sauce. He doesn’t like South Indian food because it doesn’t come in a gravy and is vastly potato deficient, and the sandwiches and other more fast-food-ish fares need to come with enough tomato ketchup on the side. before knowing me he didn’t eat  fruits, he now prefers them for breakfast to anything, and a sizable amount of our grocery budget goes toward buying fresh fruits and nuts as we are three avid consumer (Ishi LOVES most fruits).

Healthy eating habits does indeed start early in childhood, and should be encouraged, and now I guess it is easy to understand why I don’t like Ishi’s school enforcing a set menu to serve that purpose but then ask us to put French fires in the box as part of the initiative. I have nothing against an occasional treat of French fries, far from it, comfort food has it’s purpose too, and beside, a handful of fries on a plate along with a protein serving and a generous amount of veggies isn’t evil. But putting it as a snack in a school meal? Definitely not!

I wrote a few weeks back about purging my wardrobe of all the things that are too small, frumpy, out of style and taste and possibly made me look like an auntie-ji. The purge seem to have spread to other areas of my house, inspired by a blog I found recently called the year of less, which you can read here, I applied some of her tips to my home, not all, because some are just not practical for me, and some are anyway common in India already. But still in the principle of my wardrobe purge, some other things just had to go, and it started with all the useless accessories coming with the food processor I bought in 2006. damn machine I use less and less now that it has no space to sit on my counter anyway. Some of the accessories were things I never used ever such as the citrus juicer thing, oranges that can be turned in OJ are so ridiculously priced in India that we buy the without sugar added juice carton anyway. There was the other fruit juicer attachment that I used once, and never again after realising that you need a truck load of fruit to make half a glass of liquid, and that the damn juicer would never come clean due to the design flaws making the pulp stick in inaccessible grooves, so much so that when I decided to trash it last week it was black with mold from that one time juicing adventure back in 2006! The grater plates took the plunge too, the food processor  (a Kenstar model if you must know) was so badly designed that it could not even grate a coconut as there was a gap of over one centimetres between the grater plate and the feeding hole, I ended up having to grate it by hand, and in fact even grating a bunch of carrots is going faster with a manual grater anyway. The egg white beater which I used before getting my electric beater also went, it wasn’t even doing a great job at it. And all I have left are the grinding and blending jars (which…yup…would be found on a mixie anyway), and I kept the chopping bowl and blade, for those now rare occasion of blitzing veggies away. Saved me lot’s of space in the kitchen cabinets! Our old vacuum cleaner died, and we bought a new one, because let’s face it, when the maid doesn’t come it saves us a lot of time, and we still needed one to clean the sofa, but this time instead of going for a big bulky one, we found one that is both a dust buster and floor cleaner when combined with the proper attachment, again saves us tons of space in the kitchen cabinets, and because it is less heavy to lug around, we already used it more in a week than we used the old one in the past 4 months.
A month ago I finally got  rid of all the music tapes we had, which if you ask me should have gone away years ago, but since we bought a docking station for our iPods 4-5 months ago, after DH finally realised that our stereo was useless as nothing except the tape player was working on it. We gave the thing to our maid, and I just recently got fed up with the shelves of tapes catching dust, so they all went away, next step would be to purge a few of the CDs as well, since we haven’t listened to one in quite sometime. Just yesterday I stumbled upon my old “minidisks”, if you are scratching your head at this one, well it’s because minidisks was a format that had some popularity in some European countries but never really took off outside Japan, it was in it’s time supposed to replace the audio tape, but launched around the same time as the basic MP3 players, and a few years before Steeve Job introduced us to the iPod. I took my portable player and disks to India with me in 2003, listened to it a bit over the years, until said player refused to work on battery, and as of now I don’t remember if I trashed the player already or not, so I decided to get rid of my disks, if the player shows up in another corner of my home, it will go, as I don’t have anything to play in it anyway.
Before attacking the obsolete Audio support collection, I also trashed all my make up, mascara and eyeliner being the exception. The reason being that two lipsticks are more than 10 years of age and I remember buying them as a teen in Switzerland! The other lot was stuff I purchased for our wedding in 2006. I rarely wear make up, if I do that’s just mascara and liner, which as i said I didn’t trash as I had to buy them for our daughter’s party last July, I haven’t worn foundation since my wedding, and I’m pretty sure the compact powder has been worn once or twice since then. The only make up I use is nail polish on my toes, and if I feel inspired or rather particularly parched, some lip balm. So why clutter my bathroom with things I don’t use or even need I ask you? I’m very basic when it comes to grooming, all I need is a shampoo, conditioner, face wash, shower gel, lotion for my insane dry skin, a face cream, deodorant and  toner to remove the pollution gunk off my skin after an outing, that’s it, I don’t use masks, primer, scrubs, serums, and other magic potions.

And you know what, getting rid of all that useless clutter felt great, really great, next on the agenda is organizing the dresser with all the paint and craft supplies, and I’m still hopeful one day DH will get rid of his college books and the mountain of SAP Xeroxed books we’ve lugged from place to place over the years…one day will come we will have more space in the storage shelve…One day!

So since I refuse to stuff a lunchbox with just oily stuff and want the school to strongly get the message that I am less than ok with it, but still know that if Ishi sees she has no cutlet in her box she will want to eat out of her classmates' tiffin here is what I put in hers:

Yes you are seeing right, there is only ONE vegetable nugget, other than me refusing to adhere to their screwed healthy food agenda, I know perfectly well what my daughter likes, and she never takes more than a bite or two off any type of nuggets, at the most if she is hungry or inspired enough she will eat one whole one. Which means that boiling a potato to make a home made one, mashing it, adding other veggies to the mix end up making more than one, and I refuse to cook for the dustbin…period. Sure I could eat the other myself, but then that means I am the one eating a fried meal when at this point I really am working on loosing a few pounds and am anyway struggling with PCOS induced insulin resistance efficiently putting potato based fried stuff in a not so okay to eat category.
We have a bag of veg nuggets in the freezer, because yes there are days where all that is left to eat in the fridge are tomatoes and cucumber, and having one or two on the side of a healthy salad on occasion won’t kill anybody.
I added long moong sprouts and cherry tomatoes to the tiffin this morning, simply because these two are food stuff Ishita likes, she actually prefers alfalfa sprouts but the store is not always stocking it, when we find it we both feast on them.
Now really it comes as a no brainer that adding fresh salad veggies to a tiffin is far healthier than putting 3-4 nuggets with a side of tomato ketchup huh?

Quite a few months ago I was praising my daughter’s school’s decision to come up with set menu for each month which parents were to follow. the school reasoning as explained to us was that they wanted the kids to have HEALTHY food in their tiffin. I saluted the move because a lot of stuff going into tiffins are fried stuff and junk food. I made a point to put salads, nuts and fresh fruits, but some parents sent their kids to school with Kurkure, namkeens, Maggi noodles and popcorns almost everyday. The first month menu was actually a great one, well balanced and all…that went all down from there, the school started putting more and more paratha, veg cutlets and starchy crap on the menu, with February seeing French fries on the menu…healthy much!
By April they had dropped the menu thing and I went back to putting a lot of things Ishi actually DOES eat and love: fruits, nuts and pasta salads loaded with vegetables (even if she picked only the tomatoes and olives to eat along with the pasta).Then Summer camp came and the free choice tiffin continued, Ishita was happy eating watermelon, sliced apples, sandwiches and salads the whole time. School started again in June and no set menu in sight, I was thinking that maybe they got bored with it and abandoned the project only to resurrect it in July, with somewhat healthy choices, the worst of the lot being the “cereal day” during which they just wanted us to toss a handful of dry  Kellogg’s sweet stuff in the box (I always balanced it adding nuts, because I don’t call Honey loops or chocos healthy).
Last month I started seeing it was once again heading in a dangerous direction with that menu of the month:

Monday: Whole wheat sandwich (fine by me, that’s healthy)

Tuesday: Maggi Noodles (and that is healthy how???????)

Wednesday: Upma or Poha (healthy, but utterly yucky when it sat in a tiffin for nearly 2 hours before being eaten…and you want kids to love new food stuff!)

Thursday: Cookies or fruits (I chose fruits for obvious reason, but I know cookie is the easiest option)

Friday: Kid’s choice (the day kids can call potato chips a tiffin fare if they want)

The worst in August was the Maggi Noodles, don’t get me wrong noodles taste good, many parents used to put them in the tiffin before the school went all gung ho and wanting to stop junk food issues at snack time…so why is the school putting it on the set menu if they wanted to promote healthy eating habits in school? Your guess is as good as mine, but I knew from the previous academic year that the healthy claims the school has to enforce the set menu turned out to be bogus.

Today I received the set menu for September, hold your socks!

Monday: Fruit or Sandwich (that one is fine)

Tuesday: Veg cutlet (yup the vegetable nuggets you fry in a tawa…healthy huh?)

Wednesday: Dosa or paratha (basically you have the choice between a fermented rice and lentil batter pancake that is turning rubbery if left to rest in a tiffin for 2 hours or a fried flat bread…second day of food stuff that need oil to cook)

Thursday: FRENCH FRIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Of course it is Junk Food anywhere else but when the school put it on the menu this is healthy! COME ON)

Friday: Kid’s choice (basically if your child want’s a repeat of French fires, you can put it in the tiffin again it’s freedom day!)

Now I don’t know about you, but I see something disturbingly wrong here, allowing note one, but 3 days in a row of fried food stuff to go on the menu. I brought it immediately to the attention of the teacher who looked at it like it was the first time she saw it…clearly the principal is the one behind this crap, and she pointed well Dosa is healthy…sure it’s the least horrible of the lot, it’s still essentially a starchy pancake, and the main issue is that a cold dosa that sat in a tiffin for hours before being eaten is the surest way to disgust a kid from wanting to eat them at all in the future. Needless to say I’ll replace that with some idli, made with the same batter but steamed instead of fried and which still taste good even eaten cold.
The thing that irks me the most out of this is the sheer hypocrisy of the school direction, if the plan was to teach healthy eating habits to the kids and prevent junk food from being in a tiffin box, WHY is there so much fried stuff and starchy empty calories stuff going on the menu? And that too in a month that has for teaching theme: Fruits of the orchard and vegetable from the garden! So basically our tiny tots will learn the name of all kind of fruits and veggies in the form of nursery rhymes, and activities, but when they will open their tiffin the only thing containing veggies will be a vegetable nugget! SCORE!

I’m thankfully not the only mom who think the school has lost it’s marble and credibility on that one, we all complained to the teacher about these ridiculous tiffin menu options. As for me, the cutlet will be a solitary one, with a side salad of fresh veggies and sprouts, the dosa will be replaced by an idli as I refuse to consider the paratha option and Ishi LOVES idli anyway, and the French fries will be oven baked, because if I don’t put them in the tiffin she will be eating off the other kid’s boxes anyway, and kid choice will not be kid’s choice, it’ll be a fruit or a salad!

Hair and how it is treated is an ethnic and strongly cultural affair. You never really get to realise it until you are taking yourself out of your own culture, and this is something that in the early days had me postpone getting just trimmed.

In Switzerland, women cutting their hair short, keeping them in style and colouring them is a very common thing, very few grown up lady keep them super long, and senior ladies are commonly keeping them short and set in curls, some die them even in their very old days, and other prefer to grey gracefully.
In India there is still a fair percentage of women that just trim them from time to time, and generally keep them long and simply braided in one single back braid doing very little in matter of styling with them. Oiling the hair is also something still widely practiced, even among the hipper crowd who will not shy away from a shorter sharper hair cut.
The difference in how hair is treated in both places has to do with the hair quality first. Oiling while great on Indian hair, is a total disaster on the thinner mane ladies in most of Europe have. I myself tried oil massages, to do as the roman do, thinking it was a great natural way to keep them soft and silky and encourage a thicker regrowth. The problem is my hair is the typical baby soft and thin European hair, it absorb everything and release nothing for days, so when they scalp met with coconut oil it absorbed everything, and the shampoo coming afterward didn’t even wash any of the oil of, the result was 5 days of icky oily strands, that refused to look glossy or silky, worse the oil that refused to wash away attracted more dust and pollution which triggered a case of insanely itchy scalp and argh! Hair fall! I figured out that it was maybe the amount of oil that caused it and tried using less, with more or less the same results, and after a couple of tries gave up, my hair quality does far better with conditioner and a hair mask than with oil, no wonder that the oil head massage doesn’t really exist in the West.
When you live in India you come to understand why ethnic minorities back home stick to specialized salons with people that understand their customer’s hair requirement better.
Over the year i have gone through trial and errors when it comes to salon and how they understand treatment and cuts.
The first year and a half in India I simply chickened out of even going to a salon, I let my hair grow long, and get damaged until one day I decided it was enough and armed with a copy of the magazine “Femina” where I saw a haircut I liked went to a Lakme beauty salon to get them cut simply because back then they were probably the only franchise of parlour that had high hygiene standard and a fairly westernized take on hair care. The problem was that the lady who took care of my hair had no idea how to replicate the cut, and no idea about layers and how to add body to thin Caucasian hair, and she simply cut it all straight in a bob the way she would treat a rather extreme trim on Indian hair. I changed salon sticking to Lakme a few months later and got a slightly better cut, but still a general lack of understanding about hairstyles and blow drying, back then I resigned myself to just have plain out of shape hair and on more than one occasion actually let them grow long simply because I didn’t want to explain yet another hairstylist how to handle them.
Then I found an international style salon, the people there were trained abroad, or foreigners themselves…the problem…the price was quite international too, the first time it was still somewhat reasonable at 500 rupees, and time after time the priced went up, and their pushy attitude to get me to buy their shampoos and and masks and styling products got on my nerves. The last time I went there was in 2010 right before we shifted to Navi Mumbai, I had it chopped short, paid 1000 bucks and then left it grow out, I never visited a parlour in Navi Mumbai, the one near our complex didn’t look great and going to the mall with a toddler or even having DH wait patiently entertaining Ishi to get my beauty fix was out of question, we then moved back to Bangalore, and with our salary woes, a haircut was a luxury, so I kept them growing some more last year in August we shifted back to Mumbai and it had been over a year of not cutting them, but I let them grow some more, to finally get fed up of split ends and hay stack looking strands in February or March this year!
Armed with a picture I went to a salon I knew as I went for pedicure there, the guy was not speaking much English, so I showed him a picture of a hair cut I had 10 years ago and liked, he didn’t quite get it, but the cut was good enough, 2 months later I went back to the same place to be handled by a different stylist who understood nothing of English…not a word, and just didn’t get that I wanted the same hair style just one inch shorter, I had to instruct him to cut the front in a bang, and he didn’t even got it right. SO I let it grow out again for 3 months, and this time I decided to try the salon next door to the one I went, my area is not short of salons, and that happened just today.
First pleasant thing: the staff speak English and understood what I wanted, I even brought my picture with me, telling I wanted the same hairstyle just slightly shorter…and that is EXACTLY what I got, the hair cut is the exact copy of what was on the picture with one inch less  give or take. They even understood the concept of blow drying it, a thing the other salon just didn’t get.
The final pleasant surprise was that it was CHEAPER than the other salon. Today I was charged 350 rupees for a  “New Style cut” at the other place I was charged 500 with no hair dryer coming in contact with me and a staff that just didn’t even speak a word of English.

And here are the things you should know about beauty parlour in India if you are an expat:

- Contrary to what is custom in Switzerland and probably in many other countries, you do not need an appointment to get a hair cut in India, you walk in and there will be someone taking care of you immediately, that if you ask me is a refreshing change, because back home I had to book my appointment sometimes weeks in advance, stylists are often busier than doctors (yes you need appointments to see a doctor too back home)

- In India the hair wash is not part of the standard service, they spray your hair wet and cut, the salons that do the hair wash are those of higher standards and the basic cut will cost you more. I personally prefer the Indian approach there.

- Choose a salon where they are used to STYLING hair, many very local run in the back of a house salons are just catering to the traditional Indian woman who come mostly for facial, eye brow threading and waxing of arms and leg and do basic trims on the side, these ladies are NOT trained hair stylist, they just deal with the split ends on long hairs of Indian women, and the only thing they will really have expertise in when it comes to hair is giving an oil massage.

- A good indicator of what salon is having trained hair stylists is the presence of “L’Oreal Professional” posters and product, the salon itself might not look grand and glossy, but the fact they are going for such products mean they have at least a basic understanding of hair care international style. In some of these salons they will understand just the basic of layers and cuts, in other you will get something better.

- If you have the money and are super particular about your hairstyle, opt for bigger salons, or international chains (not many but yeah the exist), they often carry the brand of hair care “Kerastase” which is extremely select about which salon they associate themselves with worldwide. Back in Geneva my stylist was a Kerastase consultant, and she told me how they are very particular about who can be a distributor for them. Of course you pay the price for these salons. And in India at least, be aware that such international looking salons are going to be more pushy about selling extra services and products to you, or sneak in extra stuff in your final bill

- While it is less of an issue for hair cuts, check the hygiene standard of the salon carefully if you are going for any other services, such as pedicures and facial, if something looks shabby and off, it probably is and it’s better to give a pass. I made the mistake once of thinking my local traditional salon could handle a simple pedicure and arm waxing…never again, I got an infection from them cutting a slightly ingrown nail wrong and using a questionably clean-ish plastic bucket and got rashes on my arms from a lotion they put afterward, that or was not appropriate for my  skin, or past it’s expiration date.
Look for salons that keep their premises clean, and staff that understand the importance of washing their hands between procedures and customers and keep their tools neat and clean. The salon I went to today was the first one that kept all their hair cutting scissors in specially designed holding case when not in use, wrapped in plastic and rubbed in alcohol once the job finished.

- If you don’t like something, SAY IT, like anywhere they can’t read your mind, and this is why a salon in which the staff understands English is essential. And take great care of explaining what you want, remember that they aren’t all familiar with dealing with a Caucasian hair type and that they are used to deal with still rather conservative hair cuts style and women. They might even be scared to chop too much of your hair off, so if you want something short reassure them that YES they can chop away and show them how much they can cut.

- If you have thin hair, don’t go for the hair oil massage, as I said, Caucasian hair don’t necessarily take well to it. My Sister managed to get something good out of an almond oil hair massage in India once, but she has insanely thick and dry hair that are considered exceptional in Switzerland. if you hair feels dry and frazzled in the humid Indian climate, you are better off investing in a good conditioner and hair mask, or use a leave in silicon based hair serum like “Livon” or “Silk n Shine”, coconut oil pure of with added extracts is far too greasy for our hair type.

- If you plan to colour your hair with a store bought kit, be aware that all variants that are to make hair golden brown or auburn contain a bleaching agent that the Western equivalent of the brand does not necessary carry, these hair dies are made with the black Indian hair colour in mind. I once bought a golden brown colour that is close to my natural one just to even my hue and get rid of whites…the problem is that I ended up with a thing closed to carrot red! it’s only afterward that I read that this hair colour was designed with the bleaching agent integrated to the solution so that black hair get the hue better…OOPS! If you can’t get your hair colours from back home, stick to darker shades in India.
As for myself I decided to forget worrying about my greys, and keep it natural for now, I’ll worry about colouring later.

If you live in  metro or bigger city, finding a hairstylist  understanding your requirement better, if you are living in a smaller city or town, I would advise to stick to simply basic hairstyles, short or long not to loose your mind over a badly executed more complex cut, remember that as a foreigner in India you likely to belong to an extreme minority ethnic group most professional has almost no understanding of.