My friend Alexandra from the blog "Madh Mama" just wrote an excellent piece about loosing yourself in your spouse culture, that you all must read. This is something people who are in intercultural relationships, women in particular can all relate to.




The interesting thing, is that very topic has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks. Mostly because some people keep thinking that just because I married an Indian man, I MUST do my damnest to be as Indian as possible. A lady I met recently even assumed that because I delegate the tiffin box cooking to my maid, it means I don't know how to cook Indian food. After 11 years in the country, that wears really thin. Nobody questions an Indian woman for having help in the kitchen.

What's more, it seems that some people are only really interested in how Indian a foreigner is in India. When ironically, the Indian diaspora abroad is known to cling to their own cultural values and work hard recreating a mini-India wherever they go.
In brief, if you are Indian abroad, you need to stay as Indian as possible. But, foreigners living in India are to adapt to India and if possible become more Indian than Indians.
I don't know about you, but how twisted is that? To be frank, I don't mind when people from India hold to their cultural heritage abroad. I never felt the urge to go and ask them "So do you cook western dishes?" Or ask a saree clad lady "Have you ever tried to wear jeans" or "Why do you not celebrate Christmas?".

Yet, I get asked these reverse questions ALL the time : "Do you cook Indian?" If it is not plain old "Can you cook?".
"Do you like to wear sarees, or salwaar suits" or "Why don't you do Puja for Indian festivals?".
With the added bonus questions related to parenting since I have a child.
Basically I am on perpetual interview that will help whoever asks determine how much I belong. Often as per standards that do not even apply to the modern urban dwelling Indian woman of my generation.

In many ways, the message that seem to transpire is that the West is less good, than India. The West is not worth learning about, just good enough to make big bucks and returning home. Foreigners that left the West probably did because they were having a crappy life and looking for a cultural upgrade.

This is sadly not even close from the truth. India is just not used to be a land of immigration. But, expats are coming to India, not just for love, not just for the ashrams, yoga and spiritual fix. There is a solid percentage of people that come here to work, on short to medium term assignments. Because they got sent by their company abroad to India. Just like Indians get sent abroad by theirs.
Some, will only work there a couple of years. Some will hang around longer. Some will get to know their soul mate in India, get married and stick around for life. We are a world that is going global, these scenarios will happen more and more.

After living in India for over a decade, let me tell you were I stand. I married my husband for him, not his nationality, not his culture. He loves me for who I am, and I love him for who he is. For all I care, he could come from another planet. I did marry the man, not his culture. His culture is part of the package but it is not all of it. If DH wanted a perfect Indian woman who dresses Indian, cooks Indian, breathe Indian and behaves an archaic form of Indian he would have married one.
He didn't, so how ironic is it that people assume I must turn Indian to be perfect and a good wife? My choices clearly don't matter, but apparently neither do his.

When it comes to our daughter, there is that expectation from those who don't know any better that she needs to be Indian and that it is my job to ensure that.
Well no offence, but I did. I grunted and screamed and pushed her out of my birth canal on Indian soil, and her father is an Indian national that ensured she has herself an Indian passport. So, do not worry about her being Indian, because she is. Her papers say so. She goes to school in India, she is surrounded by Indian culture in her daily life. So, please don't tell me that just because I decide to feed her Swiss cheese and continental dishes I am insulting her heritage.
The way I see it she is half and half, and it is not my job to teach her about Indian culture. My half of the heritage matter as much as the other half.

I married an Indian, but I am not Indian. I made India my home, just like many Indians made the US or Europe theirs, complete with their cultural baggage. So, don't Indianize me against my will. This is neither fair nor respectful to anybody.
Being a world citizen means you take from many culture, and blend them. It makes one a richer person, in every ways.



Just look at me. I can cook Indian food as well as I do continental cuisine. I'm not bad at cooking Chinese and pan Asian dishes either. I know how to eat with a fork and knife, my hands and chopsticks. I know how to say Thank you in quite a few languages because my parents told me if one must learn only one word in a foreign language it must be this one. I can wrap a saree and know how to wear an evening dress. I know which dress code applies where in both European situation as well as Indian ones. I know how to prep my home for both Diwali and Christmas and how to be a good hostess to Indian guests and Western guests alike. I travelled a lot as a kid and teenager and got exposed to a lot of different cultures early.

Those who choose to see me for who I am, know these things, and love me for them, and this is the vast majority I am talking about. If all you are interested in is my degree of Indianess you are missing a whole lot of me don't you think?

Once upon a blog, I briefly wrote about my believing in Feng Shui to some extent. I never elaborated on how I generally approached Feng Shui in my daily life though. Because, to be fair, I don't really do spend all my time optimising every areas of my home. I only use cures when there is a ill serious enough to address.

Before I continue, I will state once more that I am aware there is an Indian version called Vaastu. And I am not going to write about it, for I find it complex, and am absolutely not attuned to it the way I am to Feng Shui.

In Feng Shui, you use a tool called a bagua to identify the 9 zone of your home. Each zone represent a certain aspect of your life. Where these zone are in your home can be determined using two different methods. The traditional one requires the use of a compass and is linked to the Ch'i flow in your environmement.
The other, simpler and easier to implement is the "Doorway method", it takes into account the fact that Ch'i flows in through your entry door.

In both methods, you'll need the bagua. Which looks like this :



I prefer using the Doorway method when I am applying a Feng Shui cure to my home. With this method, you align the bottom of that grid with the side of your floor plan that has the main entry to your door. You door will therefore be in either the Knowledge, Career or Friend zone and the rest of your home in the remaining 9 areas.

Again, I don't optimise my home in whole, or at all. Unless there is a serious enough reason to do so. And you can find all these solutions on Google. It involves using specific materials, colours and items to facilities the flow of Ch'i in areas that might be clogged.
That said, I observe many basic guidelines in my daily life. Some that have even been proven to affect us in some research.



- First, I go by a firm "No clutter" rule. Clutter block the flow of energy in your home, gather dust, and become unhygienic.
Psychological studies have also shown that visual clutter can put your nervous system in "sensory overload" and increase stress, which in turn affects your whole body, health and wellbeing. Too much stimuli of any kind is stressful. Don't let your home affect you that way.
I try to keep only the things I need, and make sure they all have an appropriate storage solution for them.

"A place for everything and everything in its place" is a very wise moto to have.



- I open my windows often. It is said to ease the flow of Ch'i in your home and flush the bad energy out. Something that has a lot of truth, even if you don't believe in Life energy. It has been proven that in climates that have you live in shut quarter, the air inside your home can become three times more polluted than the outdoor. If you are familiar with the feeling of being in a stuffy environmement, this is why. Opening the windows often let you flush the stale air out and bring in energising fresh air to breathe.



- The best way to feel energised and happy is to be surrounded by positive energy. The best way to feel this positivity in your environmement is to be surrounded by things that soothe you and fee harmonious. Bring in colours to that speak to you in your decor. If you hate certain textures, colours or material, steer clear of them.
It doesn't matter how fashionable they are. The first person that need to be impressed with your home is you and your family. The others do not matter, they don't even live here.

As you noticed, the colour blue in all its hues speaks to me and it is found everywhere in my home. It grounds me, soothe me and makes me feel at peace



To conclude, Feng Shui can be as simple as making sure your home is kept neat, clean and non stressful. It doesn't take much to ensure a good flow of energy in your life. You'll recognise the problem areas of your life better and how to address them if you are a generally balanced and grounded person.

This week, I put the other half of that old Dupatta to use. You know, the one I cut in two and which first half alread was turned into a stylish table runner last November.
That dupatta was so wide I could get two of them, and had plans to paint the second panel of fabric all along.

I just didn't have any idea of what I wanted to paint and what colours to use. Summer has taken its toll on me, I have a million ideas in my head but not much left in the energy department to put them into action.

This table runner came as a nice quick and easy project to satisfy my urge to creat without sapping my energy. Between painting the fabric and gluing the fraying edge with fabric paint, we are talking a total of about 45 minutes. And it brought some sort of freshness to my dark, stuffy all shut inside interior.



I started by carefully folding and gluing the fraying edge that runs on one side of the length (from where I cut it in half las November). I could have stitched it of course, but in this heat, this would have driven me to the brink of sanity.
Wait, I might actually already be there...so let's say it probably would have sent me over the edge.

After my fabric glue work was done and dry, I took out the fabric paint I planned to use for that project and a broad flat brush.
Initially I planned to paint some horizontal stripes, but at the last minute, thought broken vertical lines would be more fun. The good thing with this paint is that it dries fairly quickly, so by the time I was done with one colour, the first end would already be dry enough to apply the second colour.

As always, be sure to protect the surface underneat when painting with fabric paint. It only comes off using a solvent once dry.

All in all, it wasn't just a quick project, it was also a cheap one:

- Fabric paint : 20 rupees for each 10ml jars
- Fabric glue : 19 rupees for a tube of 30ml (lots lots of leftover for other projects)
- Paint brush : 80 rupees

In had the Dupatta all along, so no expense there. I still have a little paint in each colour left, plenty of glue, and that flat brush will come handy on future paint project as well.

History has been made! I present you the first craft project featured on this blog that involve spray paint. And, rest assured it won't be the last.
Spray paint is the best way to paint metallic surface and I needed an excuse to buy some at my local art supply shop (it is also available online and probably in hardware and paint supplies stores in India).

Last December, I toyed with the idea of buying regular steel dhaba and turn them into fancy Christmas cookie tin, but time and the holiday got into the way. So much so I put the project on a back burner (I will try to get to that this festive season).
But, recently, we decided to buy a bunch of wafer rolls that came in this tin :


As you can see, it is a plain old generic commercial tin with nothing really attractive in its design. The type most will repurpose as a food storage canister and shove it in the back of the pantry cabinet with a hastily written label on it.
Well, not Moi mind you. I can't have too many cookie tins around to begin with. Then, cookie thins have to be pretty (I assure you, they HAVE to, that's a law).

And BAM the perfect excuse to get my hand on spray paint cans was born. Spray paint give you a fairly even coverage provided you use it right, dries quickly, and unlike acrylic paint that comes in tubes, won't stay sticky too long on metallic surface.


There are a couple of things you need to remember when working with spray paint :


I waited a day for the black strip and twirls to dry properly, and then wrote the text in white, using regular acrylic paint again. The idea was to give it a handwritten chalk label feel without it being actual chalk. So, when I smudged my fairly basic cursive penmanship work, I decided to leave some of that tiny smudge visible.
I decided to go with "Yummy" as a label. Because, just because it is a cookie thin doesn't mean there will always be cookies in it.

But, it is guaranteed that whatever its content, it is going to be yummy.

Exactly a year ago today, I was rescuing our cat from certain death. She was a scrawny 2 months old little thing back then. A bag of bone caked in mud who had lost most of her hair to malnourishment. A tiny creatures surviving on cockroaches and little water in the hottest month of the year. I didn't even care that I had a dog, that I already had my handful and was miserably hot and busy myself. I took her in because that was the only right thing to do. The first ever picture I took of her can be seen in that old blog post.

Now, she looks a bit more like this :


The first day I brought her home, she got scared of my dog instantly. I got bitten trying to prevent her from running away from Jasmine. This, of course led to a rabies scare, and whole lot of shots for the whole family.

A year later, the cat is a healthy girl, has all her hair, and is a decent size and weight. She went from feeling out at the mere sight of my do to go cuddle with her during nap time.
She is a typical cat who knows what she wants and has trained us all perfectly to cater to her whims and fancies.
From barely surviving hunting and eating roaches, she went to be a pampered furballs that absolutely needs to have both dry kibbles and canned food on her plate. All the while sampling the dog's food, that goes without saying.

Like all cats, she owns and rules the house that welcomed her in the first place. And, we all love her for it...including Jasmine.

Dear Summer,

You once again exceeded your welcome. Not that you were ever truely so in Mumbai. It might actually come as a shock to you, but we don't particularly like you over here. In fact, if you care for some cold hard truth, we are close to feeling genuine hate at the mere mention of your name.

We dread you, long before you decide to crash our party. We only really tolerate your intrusion because of the mangoes you bring. That is however short lived. All the mangoes in the world are not worth what you put us through for nearly 3 months.
You might be a shining star in other latitudes. Here you have as much appeal as a cold harsh Winter in those areas that worship you and celebrate you. What I am trying to say is that you suck.

When did you think it was even normal for people to soak through all their clothing in 5 minutes of just sitting down and doing nothing? Did you realise that we actually rejoice at the idea of 3-4 months of near constant rain? That we go as far as counting the days until the arrival of the monsoon just because it means you will finally leave us? That you make us crazy enough to fantasise about shivering while soaking wet? And that we all are making lists of all the things we can finally do again while celebrating the rain?

No seriously, think about it, think about it hard. How twisted is that? Come on! We favour waterlogged streets, mold and never drying laundry over you. If your weren't so sadistically psychopathic over here, you would get the hint and tone it down.
We end up hating the sight of frilly lightweight kurti, capri, shorts and spaghetti strap tops. And let's not talk about flip flops!
You might argue that we belong to a weird tribe of socks and sweat pants worshipers who dream about long sleeves and long pants. The fact remains that your steaming us to death is plain overkill and abuse.

Yes, Summer, we hate you and we want you out the door. We've had enough of your antics, and we feel that way years after years comes May.
If you haven't noticed already (and you should have done so) there are areas on this planet where people are eager to air their flip flops as much as we want to reconcile with our yoga pants, and steaming cup of teas. There are places were people are sick of cold and gloom (rightfully so, I know, I lived there). So, go and grace them with your warmth and blazing sun.
I can assure we won't mind or even miss you while you do so.

So, take your mangoes, ice cream, cold drinks and high electricity bills with you and leave. No need to even give us any notice...we are past caring about these petty formalities.

Regards, (just because I am polite)
Cyn the Puddle.

P.S your sneaking back on us in October calling yourself "Fall" doesn't fool us either...

Summer is starting to get on my nerves. Like it predictably does every year at around the same time. Summer vacations just make it that much worse.
Because, you know, kids aren't affected by seasons the way we grown ups are (lucky them).

I mentioned previously the the best way to keep kids entertained indoor is to just give them a craft project to do. Or just hand them the paint and let them go nut. The problem, is that it inevitably ends up with a big mess, that we poor parents have to clean. And cleaning after a craft project sucks. I hate doing it, I hate the paints gets pretty much everywhere it should not, and how long it takes to get the living room and dinning table back to normal.
Nod and clap your hands three times if you have been there. Good, we'll call that the secret handshake to get into the secret group of pissed off, drained out parents (we can't admit it publicly, because publicly, parenthood is the most awesome, supremely rewarding and always full of joy experience that every soul on this planet should be grateful about).

If you've been like me, craft projects meant a crap load of setting up, taping old newspaper sheets together, then taping said sheet to the table so the ceiling fan doesn't blow it away. Only to have your kids loose interest in the craft project after 5 minutes (when it took you 20 to tape the paper and set the paint on your improvised mat). 5 minutes of painting that messed the whole room, with paint having gone through the damned 5 layers of paper, the glass of water spilled all over (and absorbed into the wood of the table). A kid looked like it fall into rainbow pool (or possibly just Rainbow Brite's world). And if you gave them glue, the paper might be permanently fused to said table and your kid to the paper.
If you are less crazy and masochistic than I am, you probably stirred clear of craft projects all together after the first mess.

Fortunately, the fact that I am a bit crazy (and a glutton for punishment) means I found a way to same humanity from kiddie craft project daunting clean up. This is my secret trick this year (I would have found it sooner if 4 Summers in Mumbai didn't kill all my brain cells) :



Don't look at Ishita painting egg cartons, this is not the solution. And no it is not the pain that changed either. The trick is the relatively ugly plastic table cloth that seem to have come straight from the 80's. Yes dears and dearest! A PLASTIC table cloth! A plastic table cloth I keep just for craft project and was bought not for it's dashing colours and design but for its ability to stop my table from soaking up paint, water and glue.

It takes second to wipe out clean if you really care about that. Though seriously, just let the paint dry on it and fold away...less work and more sanity and vital energy spared. If the cover is littered with paper cuttings, glitter and stuff that comes of, just lift the corners, make a nice little budled and go shake it off over the dustbin. It is that easy!

What was a bit less easy, was finding a place to buy the silly thing. I was sure I would score in Big Bazzar, D Mart or even the small shops in the market near my place. Turns out it was a big fail, I could. Of find it anywhere local, and I was. It even picky about colours and texture, the only thing I wanted was something plastic. It was Amazon that came to my rescue, I ordered this one because it was cheapest available (sorry to disappoint you, it was not the colours...aww)

Now crafting is easy, takes no time to clean and I get to keep Ishita entertained longer. WIN!