This Sunday instead of a picture, let me share a video of India. Ganesh Chaturthi, which celebrate the birth of Lord Ganesh, the beloved elephant god and crusher of obstacles is celebrated with great pomp in Mumbai. This is THE major festival in the city and the celebration last for 10 days, at which point the Ganesha idols are brought to the sea or other water bodies for immersion.

This year, Ganesh Chaturthi fell on Friday 29th, and the society accross the street from mine has a big Ganesh Shrine on for the occasion. The whole festival starts with bringing Ganesh home, and it is usually done in big fanfare and oomph, in the case of the society in question, they brought him home the night before (Thursday Night). The video I am sharing below was however NOT taken on that day. But before I continue with my rambling, here is what I filmed on Saturday night from my bedroom window :


This particular housing society always take Ganesh for a tour of the neighbourhood after the first day Puja has been done. in an even grander, louder and oophier (is that a word?) manner than they brought him home. Tonight, he went on a big float decorated with lights and an escort of drums and trumpets. The rain was no bar, and it kept going. Bear with me about the quality of the video, I was house bound. Ishita was asleep (and didn't wake up despite the loud music), DH's was out and I couldn't just leave the house to get a closer look.

DH and several other people told me that Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai is a very specific ritual, and once you started bringing The Lord home, he must be brought back to the same place every year. Which is why a lot of appartment building, and neighbourhood usually put a communal shine up for people to bless Ganesh if they can't bring him in their home instead. DH personally don't celebrate the festival as such, nothing special goes in our home. Ishita learns about it in school, and they have a couple of Ganpati themed activities (including making idols out of modelling clay) and she loves the festival.

This post goes live on Sunday morning, but I am typing it Saturday night, over an hour after Ganesh left for his tour, there is a lashing rain, lightning, thunder, and the drums and trumpets still audible in the distance.

The festive season is there, the public holidays vortex is about to suck me in. From then until Diwali there is pretty much one school holiday a week, and thanks to a few politicos, this year we are seeing a repeat of the extended Ganesh Utsav, which will be a whole 5 days long thanks to a weekend that falls in the line up. On top of it, a vast majority of Ishita's friends are born between July and September. So much so that until The end of the Diwali break, my life is a succession of social engagement, parties, meet ups, and plots to keep my little monster occupied on those days off.
This is the time of the year I try to simplify things even more than usual, especially in the kitchen. As you all know, I love to cook...and eat. However, cooking is an activity that should remain stress free, and hassle free. So, when I find myself on edge, running from A to B, I'd rather put something simpler and far less time consuming to pull on the table than exhaust myself cooking a multi course meal. I cut corner, find shortcuts, and save myself oodles of times and sanity with a few essentials my kitchen is never without :




1) Always have the ingredients to make a cake on hand and a recipe you can do by heart. I have a basic sponge recipe that need only 5 ingredients. I can from that base make any flavour, and even turn them into cup cakes. If you don't have an oven, find a cold microwave mug cake recipe. Why? because on a stressed out day, a cake can fix anything.

2) Maggi Noodles, or any ramen type noodles really. Do I need to say more?

3) Your favourite tea, or selection of favourite teas. Because a cup of tea and a few munchies makes for the perfect stress relieving snack.

4) A pack of pasta, because this has been a houshold staple in Switzerland for ages. You are always guaranteed to have enough veggies on hand to toss together into a healthy topping. You can toss pasta with just about anything...ANYTHING and a meal on the table in 15-20 minutes. Toss a salad on the side if you feel the need to and you are good to go...tension free.

5) A few bags of frozen things in the freezer. There always be days of chaos, frustration and hair tearing in your life, especially if you have children. These days it is actually simpler to just pull a few cutlets, nuggets, meatballs out of the freezer, cut a few tomatoes and steam some broccoli than attempt a complicated recipe. My favourites are the chicken meat balls from Venky's that just go with anything. I can make them in a creamy sauce, a desi tomato gravy, an oyster sauce, grill them to use I a wrap or sandwich, add them chopped to a soup.

6) Ready to use masala paste mix to pull an Indian dish in minutes. Don't give me the stink eye, or protest that those ready to eat packs are disgusting just yet...hear me out. There is no question that those MTR meal pouch are tasting bad. These, are NOT the one I am talking about here. I am talking about these new masala mix that just help you make your gravy faster. You still have to chop your veggies, paneer or chicken. I have tried a few of these, and they all end up pretty much cutting the prep time in half, freeing as much as 15 minutes of my time in the process. Always have a few handy, a paneer dish will then pretty much be about just buying the paneer from your kirana store.

7) Instant soup packages. It is the same idea as above, saves you time, and you can always garnish then with fresh add ons like chopped carrots, corn kernels, toasted bread cubes or prawns. Serve it with fresh toasted bread and you have a light meal...in minutes. This has been a favourite of Ishita's for dinner this monsoon.

8) Corn flour (known as corn starch by some). All it takes is one teaspoon diluted in a little water to give a new dimension to any gravy or sauce. ONE TEASPOON! You can turn a watery Chloe gravy to a thick velvety one with it, or pull a creamy sauce out of the cooking juice from your chicken if you are cooking continental.

9) An assortment of basic seasoning from all the cuisines you cook the most. I always have olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, fish sauce, barbecue sauce, oyster sauce, chicken and veggie stock cubes and fresh cream around. With all these I can pull any seasoning I need for the dishes I usually cook often.

10) Last but not least, a stack of take out menus. Yes! Because there are days that will be so hectic, that cooking will not be an option...at all. Days it will be safer for all involved if you don't cook. And that is fine, don't feel guilty of that, we are all only human after all.



Cooking everything from scratch, at every single meal and on every single day is an idea that should die once and for all. Our lifestyle has envolved drastically over the decades, people in cities are living hectic lives. Taking a few shortcuts on occasion has never killed anybody, and if the worth of a woman was only measured by her excellence in the kitchen, she would have been a chef, not a homemaker.

Last year, I came up with a tool to teach Ishita the days of the week and the notion of time passing which you can see here.
That tool has sailed, and while she still isn't remembering all the days of the week in order, it has helped a lot. The poor thing got so abused and distorted and discoloured I just hat to let it go. Beside, this year she has to learn sight words in school. Words that she needs to be able to read just by looking at them. The list of them is likely to grow as we progress into the academic year, so I decided to find a way to rotate them on my kitchen door. This is what I came up with:


I took a big sheet of craft paper I had left from a previous project, taped little plastic pockets I cut out of page protector sleeves and used pretty masking/Washi tape to make it look good. And, because we aren't yet quite done with the days of the week, I used some duplicate princess stickers from her Princess album to assign one Princess picture to each day of the week. I also added a pocket for the Months and pasted a little square of transparent plastic on which we can write the date with a white board marker.
I wrote the sight words given to us by the school on business card sized paper and keep them in a basket nearby, every other day, I change the sight words by placing a new card in each pocket for Ishita to see and learn.

So far it is working great, and she is learning her sight words quickly enough and can now help me read some of her story books already.

Another week, another picture of India. This week, again, I will share something else than just a other landscape. Coconut trees usually spell tropical vacations and relaxation to many of my friends and family in colder climate where the only thing that will fall from trees are pine cones, acorns or chest nuts.
What they don't know is that coconut trees can pose a real hazard. Above, is the picture of our car and its broken windshield.
In our apartment building, our allocated parking spot is near a coconut tree. We never had a problem before, and to be fair the car is not directly sitting under the tree. The society management hired guys before the monsoon to trim all the trees and remove the big coconuts to prevent such accidents during the monsoon. Sadly, they forgot to trim that tree and all it took was a strong wind last weekend to dislodge one single coconut and send it flying on our car...smash!
Fortunately, it was our car and not someone's head that took the blow. A car can be fixed, it is inconvenient, and a bit costly, but our car insurance took care of most of the cost and a week later our car is as good as new. If that bad boy fell on someone's head...well I think it would be safe to say that this someone would no longer be part of this world.

These trees need a lot of maintenance, and regular trimming because even if a palm leaf falls it could hurt someone. I have seen branches fall right behind me or in front of me a couple of time in the park, this is scary enough. It is kind of ironic that the fruit that has so many health benefits be it in flesh or in oil could as easily kill you don't you think?

The monsoon is gently reaching an end. August is always a much dryer month than July, and by the second half of it, there is more days without even a drizzle than there are with rain. This is usually the signal that one can start going through an in depth cleaning spree and wipe mold off a lot of things.
To be fair, we all do some damage control all monsoon long. It is just that there are things that catch mold, that are just too daunting to clean knowing it will catch mold again in a few days, or weeks.

I personally don't bother cleaning the window frames until I know we are done with the wet days, and I certainly won't wash clothes I rarely wear until there is plenty of sunshine to dry them. A regular batch of laundry can take days to dry during that time of the year, no need to add more to the burden.
And clothes WILL smell musty and mold a little, despite taking measure like this one :


Measure which consist of using dehumidifying packs in every wardrobes. They help tremendously, but the humidity is just plain insane in Mumbai during the monsoon.

So, every year, we engage ourselves into what would probably be called Spring Cleaning in Europe. Take out everything out of cabinets and wipe away the fungus. Do loads of laundry to wash the Winterwear we get to only really wear a couple of days during the cold season in this city. We rub every surface clean, let small madly trinkets soak up the sun, and wash the windows clean.
It usually takes days to get all of this done, so we usually start by doing one small bit at a time not to feel overwhelmed by the whole process. This is what I attempted to start doing on Monday, thinking one cabinet unit would not take much of my time and would be gratifying. I, of course, didn't factor in the termites that happily claimed the place and my belonging as their own. The job ended up being long and tiring, but fortunately still highly gratifying.

My plan for the weekend is hopefully less ambitious and void of surprises. My mission will be to wash the mold off wooden surfaces. I already started with our Jenga game (yes that catches mold, I bet you had no idea!), and I will move to bigger things like the underneath of our dinning table. The best way to get the mold off and make sure it sanitises and prevent the mold to come back to quickly is to use vinegar. Forget expensive cleaners, just wipe off the mold with a damp cloth, and then use another cloth soaked in vinegar to wipe right after it. Vinegar not only clean and sanitize the moldy area, it also neutralises musty odours instantly.

By the end of that weekend I should have mold free furnitures, doors, door frames and window frames. What are you plans for the weekend?

We had a long, very long weekend in India. With Independence Day falling on a Friday, and Janamastami the Monday right after it. Four days to occupy at home. I say home, because that is what we did, the fair percentage of people that decided to escape the city that weekend probably ended up in that six hour long traffic jam on the express highway the paper was talking about on Saturday. And those who stayed in town probably hit the Malls on Friday to get the best discounts possible (readers from US, in India 15th August is the equivalent of your Black Friday).

This Monday, I figured out I could at least be a tad productive after a few days of just lazing around and going out for coffees. So, I decided to tackle the mess in a dresser unit we have sitting in the living room. The one I talked about many times already. Yep, the one that started as a cheap storage solution for our kitchen essentials in Bangalore pre-2010. The one that got abused, bruised and repurposed with every move. The one I ended up painting with 3D gold paint and swore to throw one day...soon. That one!
I use it to store all our DVDs in the open shelves, and all my craft supplies in the cabinets storage space. This is the space that usually gets messy really fast, and I don't even bother to clean it all up as there is a lot of...well...junk in some of the shelves. The monsoon usually doesn't help the situation much and a lot of things get soggy and a bit moody in there.

I thought this would be an easy, 30 minutes job. It was just a matter of emptying the entire dresser unit, sorting everything out, dusting what needed to be dusted and trash what needed to be trashed before putting it all back in the dresser...EASY!
It was easy until I opened the bottom cabinet where I store old diaries, notebooks and odd ends of craft paper. At a glance, things in there looked waterlogged (or just saturated with dampness). I was preparing myself to throw a lot of that crap away to be frank. Imagine my surprise when I lifted the first spiral note book to see it disintegrate and fall back on a massive swarm of termites. YES TERMITES! As in white ants, wood eating bugs...these little guys indeed!

The termites presence was not a shock, in the past year I called the society manager 3 times to get pest control to treat spots in my flat. They already ate half a bathroom door frame, left dirt tubes in another corner of the living room and in Ishita's room. The entire building is infested, and each time pest control came to eradicate them they came back by another route. Last April, the new society management sacked the previous company for doing a sloppy job and hired a new one that drilled holes all around the building, and on every floors to inject gallons of pesticide into the foundation. At this point, I thought we were finally free of these parasites once and for all.
Turns out the colony in question is still kicking strong. I haven't moved that cabinet in over a year, and they clearly made themselves comfy building a big network of dirt tunnels between the wall and the back panel of my old rickety dresser unit, eating away the shelves and their papery content undisturbed and undetected.

So, what was to keep me busy for 30 minutes ended up keeping me sweating and scrubbing, and vacuuming, and cleaning for over 2 hours. I started by grabbing the shelf on which the notebooks were and threw it in a garbage bag with all its content and took said bag outside immediately. I then took the can of Hit spray we keep to kill mosquitoes to spray the infested area enough to at least numb the termites long enough for me to sweep them away. If you are interested to know, Hit will kill them. When I found it out, I pretty much emptied half of the can in the cabinet.
I then pulled the dresser away from the wall to assess the damage better. That is when I noticed they pretty much built a mud pie on the wall and glued the cabinet to said wall. I gassed them with some more Hit spray and swept what was loose already to throw it away. Then, I took a huge roll of paper towels, the kitchen cleaner, and scrubbed off what was stuck to the wall and floor. At one point I ended up needing a kitchen knife to scrap some of it off. Once the floor and wall were both clean, I ripped the cheap MDF back panel off the back of the unit (it was easy, it was so eaten it came off crumbling) and threw it away. I then used the vacuum cleaner to vacuum clean every last bit of termite crap I could find before washing the area with more kitchen cleaner. Once the area was as clean as it could get and all the damaged bits of MDF gone, I sprayed what was left of the Hit spray in the hole in the wall through which the termite came and saturated the area.

Once all that was done, I finally could put everything back in said dresser. Needless to say that I took some extra care to check every single inches of my belongings for any signs of termite tubes or traces they could have left. That dresser unit is now bumped to the top of the list of things we need to replace in our flat. We already found something we like to replace it, and in fact, found it a few weeks ago. We have been talking about getting rid of that eye sore of a unit for months, if not years already.

Said unit is a brilliant example as of why MDF laminate furnitures are not a cheapest option to go for. The good quality laminate comes at a price (which can be as steep as hardwood). The cheap road side store options will end up breaking apart too quickly, bloat during the monsoon and invite unwanted guests into your home. There are solid woods native to India that are naturally termite resistant and once treated even more so. Teak is the best known one. Sadly it is a costly option. Sheesham is another sturdy and relatively bug resistant option, that once treated and polished is as good as teak at at a more affordable price. If you plan to get furniture made out of rubber wood, make sure you ask the wood to be treated and waterproofed as well to prevent water logging and termites problems. I did so with all ours, and they haven't lost shape in years.

Finally, this morning I decided to look for termites repelling alternative to the one offered by lest control. While you need pros to rigorously treat the ground around your building and repeat until the infestation is gone, it seems people can use natural ways to keep them at bay. In India, the method of choice is to bruise fresh neem leaves and let them steep in a bucket of water for 24 hours before using said water to spray areas that are termite prone. Apparently neem sap contains substances that will alter the behaviour of termite, lock their jaw and prevent them to feed, and put an end to their reproductive health as well.

Needless to say that at this point, I am all for it.

Today's picture of India isn't a place I visited. This something I ate instead. Where? In Manali, when DH and I spent the Holidays there in 2009. I would not even have knew it existed if one of our travel guides didn't mention it as something one has to try at least once. I bought that one at the German Bakery at the end of the Mall and ate it all by myself later that day. DH doesn't like cheese at all, and that one smelled enough to repell him. To me, it smelled good. What can I say? I am Swiss, we have far stinkier, sharper and stronger tasting cheeses. Kids eat them from a very early age, and develop a palate for them in no time at all.

Yak cheese tastes a bit like a sharper version of Emmentaler, which is a Swiss cheese made famous the world over because if its trademark holes, and is in fact just known as Swiss cheese in many countries (as if we had only one variant of cheese!!!). Emmentaler to tell you the truth is probably the blandest cheese we have in my homeland, and has a very sweet taste. Yak cheese has a lot of that sweetness to it, but has more fat, and a sharper under taste that made me think of a very mild Gruyere (another famous Swiss cheese...and no contrary to what the French from France think....it has no holes).

The travel guide that lead me to that discovery said: "Yak cheese is an aquired taste we urge you to aquire". The book was written in India for domestic tourists, and many like DH will shy away from cheese because its pungent smell to begin with. For me, it was nothing new. I imagined it to have a much stronger and different taste than it actually had. It was good, but not outstanding, out of this world awesome good. But then I suspect this was one type of cheese made with yak milk, I am sure there other recipes of yak cheese done accross the Himalayas.

Was a busy one. I got actively involved over the copyrights infringement issues those following me on Facebook will know about. I got all the stolen pictures taken down already. In one case not without the owner of the website calling me colourful names and informing me that he was immune to the concept of copyrights and could do as he pleased...no buddy you can't. This lead me to start going over ALL the pictures posted on my blog and adding watermarks to all the ones that never had one, and upgrading the watermark and picture URL on those who had one already, and I am far from finished. But let's say that from now on, my pictures are clearly marked as not being free for all to use. You know...just in case there are still some people that think otherwise.

I also managed to get some baking done this week. A batch of chocolate cookies that has already almost disappeared into a handful of digestive tracts that will remain anonymous. And a batch of carrot cupcake that vanished just about the same way. We were hosting the expat ladies play date over here, which explains were some of them went.

This week is also a short one in school, on the account of Independence Day which falls tomorrow turning this coming weekend on a very long one that will stretch until Monday, which has been marked on Ishita's school calendar as the day of the Parsi New Year. As it is customary every year and in most schools, kids usually go dressed in tricolour to school on the 14th to celebrate Independence Day together. I was quite happy to have anticipated last year by buying an outfit a size bigger, so she could wear it two years in a row.



This year DH will not be hooked to the phone managing last minutes warehouse woes and logistics problem so that others can shop and buy electronics on what is apparently the biggest sales day for retail companies after Diwali in India. So, we are planning to keep far from the shopping mall and its madness and relax at home. With such a long weekend, it is also fairly certain that half of Mumbai decided to flee the city for the hills around, so we aren't going out of town either. Ishita has been asking for some dim sums this week, therefore the probability we will go out and eat some is great.

And I spent the rest of my free time watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D on TV. Which thanks to Tata Sky+ I can record, watch at my convenience without having to endure the commercial breaks.

How was your week, and how do you guys plan to spend this long holiday weekend if you are living in India?

Once upon a time, there was a mobile phone service provider that was new, and had to get its message out there. They needed a strong commercial to sell their brand as a whole. And so, they came up with one of the most powerful ad I ever saw on TV...ever.



This commercial had no dialogues, just a succession of scenes in black and white, short lines of text to read, and a powerful music composed by AR Rahman. The first time I saw it was when I first arrived to India in 2003, I didn't know yet that airtel was a mobile phone service provider, but the ad spoke for itself, watching it once I knew it had to be something about telecommunications. There was no smart phones back in the days, just good old regular mobile phones that needed basic plans and services. The concept of having a mobile phone was relatively new in Switzerland, even newer in India. That commercial drove the point home beautifully and powerfully. Airtel enabled people to communicate and express themselves.

Commercial wise, they should have stopped at this message, but they chose to go downhill from there. Each of their following commercial campaign became dumber than the previous. Cheesy dialogues, idiotic situations, and far less focus on the product they were selling. The latest being this one :



The story line, for those who don't understand any Hindi at all, is that of a female boss asking her employee to work extra time, as the commercial progress, the man is stuck at work, the boss goes home. The boss suddenly morphs into a masterchef in her kitchen preparing a royal feast and call her husband to know when he'll be home. That is when you learn that the employee is the boss's husband. She then show him via video call what he is missing out with the food, and when the guy tells her he can't go home she tells him to explain to his boss that his wife told him to come...WHA...AT?

This commercial is wrong on all levels. It firs tells women that even if they are in a leadership position at work, they still need to be the perfect wife and cook a professional gourmet meal at home after a long day in office. And it tells men they better get used to their wives bossing them around in all spheres now that said women want equality. And, all this balderdash for...hold your socks...selling Smart Phone specific plans. if you missed the selling point...watch it again, and pay attentions to the few final seconds. I don't know about you, but the smart phone special plan is really the last thing I remember from that ad. First they don't explain why their plan is better than regular plans (I have a smart phone and don't even feel compelled to move to a better plan than my regular one). Then they manage to insult everybody, men, women, and the notion of feminism.

Airtel, please get your act together. You fail at empowering women the right way, you fail at delivering an engaged message, and you absolutely fail at selling your product with this commercial. You are a telecom company, not an activist organisation. Focus on what you are good at, which frankly speaking I start wondering about. Provide quality services and sell them right...this is what your commercials should be about. Leave the cause of women empowerment to those who know about it.

I decided to do a little Google reverse image search on my blog this morning. I do things like that from time to time, if I am not googling my blog URL, or running a image search directly on Goolge. And I occasionally find little surprises. Namely my pictures ending place without me having been informed about it, asked permission, or even getting a link back to my blog. I got a few of these thieves this morning, and reported it.

Let's be clear people. Just because it is on the internet, and because this is a blog does NOT mean it has fallen in the public domain. If you were under that impression, here is one link about copyrights to get you started. I am still writting this blog, it is active, and ALL content on it belongs to me, you can link back to it, you can ask my permission to reproduce pictures and paragraphs, but you CAN'T save picture and use them as your own on another site, or copy my articles and pass them as yours. You may not get caught today, but one day you could end up in big trouble.

Simply put, if you are taking any of my work, words or picture without asking me, and linking back to me you are STEALING. I work hours every week on that blog alone. This is MY WORK. How would you feel if someone took any of your work from you and was getting profit from it instead of you? My point exactly.

So let's be clear once and for all, everything on this blog, past, present and future IS copyrighted. There is nothing that falls in the public domain from it. You like what I write and what I show, you leave me a comment asking me if you can borrow it. be it on this blog, on Google + or Facebook. Because I made it clear I have presence on all these platforms. You can reach these with the buttons on the right column. The Facebook page even has my email address should you prefer contacting me privately. There is no excuse for you snagging my content shamelessly the way some do.

And rest assured that in all the cases I have been asked nicely about borrowing, I said yes. Unless you are trying to use my content for some questionable adult websites that is.

If you ever thought there was never a copyright on my blog, scroll down and you will see there is one. and again remember that displaying a disclaimer of copyrights on an intellectual property is optional since 1989 but that the abcense of one does not mean the content is not copyrighted. All intellectual property are copyrighted by default, unless stated otherwise.

My mission to make our study room more pleasant to the eyes continues. I tackled the wall art over the past few days. First I painted the frame of DH's college class picture green (you can see it in part on the right). Then, I decided to do a little painting myself. I few months back I started reading the book by Rhonda Byrne called "The Power". In it, the law of creation : "Imagine it, Feel it, Recieve it" really made an impression on me. Not because it is new and foreign to me, but because I have been applying this law countless time over the years since my childhood. I ended up knowing it under the technique of "Goal visualisation" when learning about Sophrology. Simply put, that simple little quote is part of my life, and in my case has always worked for me. I achieved great things implementing it.

So much so, that this quote seemed like the perfect one to have in our study. Which after all is a place in which I spend time to be creative, and productive. And, because I am...well...me, it had to be something crafty, original and homemade. And, for once, I didn't spend months and months working on it. First, because it is not a huge painting, and then because I was very clear about what I wanted it to be. I just took a little time deciding which colour and style I wanted, which for me is a quick decision, considering that all the paintings I painted in the past were long projects that kept me busy for weeks if not months.

Our study room is coming along nicely and we end up spending more and more time in it because of it.

Don't you love how our generation is ridiculously involved into being perfect parents?

No, I mean it, we are. And, we seem to have no excuses not to aspire to this parental ideal of perfection. Our own parents could get away with it. Bless their souls, they didn't have internet, google, Pinterest and about three bazillion TV channels and magazines to help them on their parenting journey. Poor things, they had to improvise, and use a lot of creativity to bring us up. Poor us kids! We were the guinea pigs of their trials and errors. We had to suffer the indignation of growing up without rainbow spaghetti, and our parents idea of a sensory bin was to let us play in the grass, sand and dirt...yes real dirt! Can you imagine the horror? What were they even thinking letting us play outdoor like that? And letting us be in the park with...gasp...just a ball to play with? Or, even insisting that there was some fun in going by the brook, or lake to just walk without engaging us into a structured activity like picking up 20 different types of leaves? How did we survive this caveman age of parenting and hours of free play? Why oh why didn't they even think of introducing us to 101 ways to use glitter? Clearly we have a mystery on our hands here I tell you. Miraculous even, that we survived eating all the cake we wanted at parties; and downed it with enough soft drinks that would get the judgy brigade of today go wild and condemn our own parents for child neglect.

Clearly, we had a lot of wrongs to right. Our parents were totally out of their minds thinking children only need food, sleep, water, love and a lot of space to grow. I will say it again: what were they thinking???? And so we came up with the idea that our children need to have every single nano seconds of their day under control...our control, because we owe it to them to be better parents than our own parents. Days loaded with games, quizzes, sensory bins, seasonal craft projects, structured TV time, mom and me cooking, activity classes, tuitions, coaching, educational trips...We dutifully pin craft projects and recipe on Pinterest to keep ourselves and our kiddos busy for at least three lifetimes. The perfectionist agenda wins above human needs. Perfection is the only thing that matters. No more giggling over an old shoebox of reject photo prints; the perfect way to preserve memories are through fancy scrap booking, and if we can't pull it off...sign up for a class to learn the art...we owe it to our kids after all? how could we bear for them to have any regrets about their childhood?

We also have the duty to relieve simpler times, but only when it comes to cooking.Our grand mothers sweating the whole day in the kitchen to make the perfect stocks, sauce, cakes and preserves must have had it right. Never mind that both mine took whatever short cuts available to deliver them whenever it came and were shocked to hear I had not other choice but make my own puff pastry in India. Our generation thrives on that kind of masochims. Unlike our parents and grand parents we have access to a battery of books, magazines and you tube videos to teach us how to cook gourmet restaurant food at home, raise kids the right way, how to clean everything better than a pro, and look our best doing it. We simply can't afford to let anything to chance the way our parent did, or else we could take the risk to be publicly humiliated for doing so.

So, here we are, pretending to be perfect...no striving to be perfect, aiming at being better than perfect, raising perfect kids. never loosing our cool, never admitting defeat, or confessing that parenting actually sucks a lot at times. We will hide the fact our kids do drink juice from time to time, because we might as well confess we are turning them into drug addicts. Our child smiling at the taste of a glass of juice is definitely not worth the judgy look from random strangers. And we have the duty to be utterly delighted at all of our kids antics, be it smearing poop all over the bathroom or throwing a plate of organic pasta and sauce across the pristine white living room. We must at all time marvel at their imaginative power, never yell because it would kill their spirit, keep a smile on our face and keep going. We have no right to have emotions of our own in this quest for perfection, because you know, kids grow up so fast. We must cherish these moments, even the bad ones. Let's cherish them moment of pent up frustration, or else we won't have much to tell our shrink in 20 years from now.

I say we, but I'll have no part in this. I think my parents had the right idea. I yell when I am angry, am tired when I feel so, smile when I am happy. My sensory bin, rainbow spaghetti less childhood rocked. And I therefore aim at being an imperfect parent.