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[pratignya18]

Gru-ing my way through life

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life? Comfort is having everything you need to live a happy pleasant life. I live in the present. I have been focussing on working with the here and now. And it’s taken a lot of effort to learn to be satisfied with what I have today rather than aspire for and be dissatisfied with it. Growing up in a slightly bigger-than-average…

[pratignya18]

Getting future ready

What are you most excited about for the future? Mum was a vegetarian and we grew up on a healthy diet of vegetarian food. Dad introduced us to eating non-vegetarian by taking us to restaurants that prepared them. During those days, chicken tikka with toothpicks sticking out of them was all the rage. I remember gorging on them. We used to polish off 2 or 3 plates in one sitting and then used to…

[pratignya18]

Anything, for harmony

What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony? Tara was around 4 years old when she had her pups. The first six weeks were a lot of fun. The first couple of weeks the pups could barely see anything and were immobile. And Tara would come and sit down around them every couple of hours, close enough so they could smell her or the milk she produced but far enough away so she never trampled or…

[pratignya18]

Tuned in

What is your favorite genre of music? I don’t remember when Dad got the TV, but I have these vague memories of a group of kids sitting on the floor and watching the TV in my living room. We used to come in around 5.45 pm to watch the start of the 6 pm broadcast, that started with the Doordarshan moon. The wailing keening tune they had set for the formation of this moon on the screen was…

[pratignya18]

Blub blub blub!!

Describe your most memorable vacation. December 2015, Andaman Islands Sometime in 2014, my older sibling had completed her dive certification and decided to ensure all of us completed the certification as well. So, towards thes second half of 2015 we started to plan a dive trip to the Andamans. The most important thing here is that as a family, we occasionally plan such outings and everyone’s…

[pratignya18]

Zzzzz

On what subject(s) are you an authority? I am a sunshine girl. I wake up early. I open the curtains and windows and switch off the ACs and I have been told that I make a lot of noise while doing my usual morning chores. Usually, my home has the curtains left open for most of the day. Lights, streetlights, loud music, or street noise barely register on my radar and I can fall asleep when my head…

[pratignya18]

A little about love

What’s your definition of romantic? During my grade 7 vacations, Dad hired a VCR player and rented out a few VHS tapes for us to watch. We were only allowed to watch 2 new movies every day. That meant we got to watch close to 14 new movies a week that would cover the most recent films if they had a copy available. Dad had budgeted for a limited number of movies and it did not include the recent…

[pratignya18]

Taaaatu!

How do you express your gratitude? Teaching gratitude to my older kid was very easy, she would meet your eye, smile, and say a polite thank you. The younger kid, on the other hand, always turned beet red, opened his mouth and eyes wide, and looked down, so getting him to acknowledge and say ‘thank you’ was extremely tough. Most often, his beet-red face and downturned eyes were acknowledged as…

[pratignya18]

It was never ours.

What are you most worried about for the future? Yuddhakaale shastrabhyasam (last-minute preparations for war) never worked. It never worked during the war. It’s never going to work in real life either. But, I always tried to prove this wrong. And much to my irritation, Dad had ample opportunities to repeat this proverb to me. I had 12 papers in my grade 10 preliminary examinations and the best…

[pratignya18]

To ma’am, with love

What makes a teacher great? When my kid turned 2, I slowly started looking around for a space where we could leave her for a few hours every day. We considered the franchises. We thought of the stand-alone mom-and-pop places. If the school was nice, the facilities were not up to par, if the facilities were nice, then the student-teacher ratio was found lacking. There was always something wrong…

[pratignya18]

Yours toothfully!

Have you ever had surgery? What for? Back in the day, long before mobile phones became a thing, most of our communication was via word of mouth. For instance, as a practicing advocate, Mum used to go to court every day. The court complex is like a humungous college campus; cases are heard in the various rooms, and often, these rooms are allocated only in the morning, so the advocates had to get…

[pratignya18]

Graze-touch-kiss

What are your daily habits? I don’t know what the practice for other sports’ warmup is, but when we were practicing gymnastics, we had to start running 3 rounds around a 400m outdoor track. At 5 pm, all the students would rush down the stairs and start running around the track to complete the warm-up rounds. Some of them would bend down, touch the earth with their fingers, and then touch those…

[pratignya18]

Start small

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle? Sustainability takes forever and that’s the pointWillem McDonough We decided to visit Muscat a couple of months before we relocated, sort of like a recce of the place we were going to adopt. We landed at the old airport, which had an old-world charm about it. The airport was small, the whirring Acs in the…

[pratignya18]

In nom-nom heaven

What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten? It took me almost 6 months to visit my parents after I got married. In all the chaos of going to work with my spouse and reaching the office with the housekeeping staff, I was busy playing ‘house’ not realizing what I was missing. I lived in the same city as my parents, they lived in the south of south hometown and I lived in the north end of my…

[pratignya18]

Jean genes

If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be? When I was in Grade 10, my uncle visited India and he brought down a few hand-me-downs from cousins living closer to him. In that collection was a pair of levis, from the men’s collection, but we didn’t know any better. Typically, gifts were purchased in random sizes and were given based on the person who best fitted…

[pratignya18]

Om

How important is spirituality in your life? In any of the towns in south India, you will find that the residents typically wake up early and the first order of business is cleaning the front yard and creating the Rangoli. Mum always had a maid, hired to come in at 6 am (that was the earliest the maids woke up) to clean the house. I registered the practice after I got Tara home because the smell…

[pratignya18]

Time out

How do you practice self-care? When the kid was born, I was over the moon. Excited was an understatement and exhausted was the highlight. But I coped. I had never interacted with any other kid in the family, so I had no idea what was required to be done. The paternity leave got over faster than I expected. I remember every morning for those first 6 weeks when Mum had volunteered (because I…