Rashmi's Space

Clay figurines. Colourful. Vibrant. Bucolic. That is their trade. Dealing in snazzy, bright clay figurines, bowls, masks, wall-hangings. They sit by the side of the road. Their wares displayed along the pavement. So people can see when passing – on foot, in their cars. Every once in a while, someone passes in their car and then parks the car further along the road and comes walking back to inspect something that has caught their eye. They ask the price. Which is usually not too much. They still bargain. And eventually, at a much lesser price than the artifact is worth, they buy the piece. It will look amazing on their feature wall, they think. It will dazzle their boring passageway. It will welcome their guests warmly... But more often than not, no one buys much. Especially on working days. Busy days. When the adults are rushing to and back from work and the children are tired, being taken to school and back. But they still sit there. Their wares spread. Eve...

Gender specific roles are a big no-no in today’s day and age. A woman can do just as well, or better what the man does and the man can do everything that a woman can and would traditionally be expected to do. We, as a society, are slowly coming to accept that the man and the woman are equals. That the man is not ‘superior’ as our patriarchal society would have us believe. And many of us (to the utter dismay of the older generation) are trying to model this behaviour in the presence of our children as well. We are trying to get to a point where, as the women grace the high echelons of the corporate world, the men are conquering recipes (some traditional, some modern, and several accidental) in the kitchen, making friends with the children (yes, they are beyond just playing football with the boys and ignoring the girls altogether); and are helping clean the house (okay, that is stretching it too far.) My point is, that The Husband, who was, so far, only expected to drink endle...

We’ve all heard the expression ‘the wrong side of thirty” right? Actually, it could be the wrong side of anything – thirty, forty or fifty; but the idea is to denote that the so-called right side is passé. And more often than not, this phrase is used in relation to mentioning someone’s age. I know I have been hearing this phase for some time now; and I always thought that anyone on the wrong side of thirty was someone over thirty years old. Then when I turned thirty and I had a lot going on in my life,  I told myself that, cliché or not; for me, 30 was the new 20! And I decided that someone on the wrong side of thirty had to be someone who was more than thirty-five years old. And I had a long way to go! But now it is here. It is finally here. That phrase “ on the wrong side of thirty” is here to haunt me, forever! And so here I am, on the eve of my birthday, wallowing in self-pity that I am finally going to be that woman who is on the wrong side of thirty...

Every once in a while, I make it a point to go to my daughter’s school and have a chat with her teacher. On these occasions, I also have an added advantage of getting to talk to a few of her friends; and that is something that I look forward to. It is through these conversations that I get an idea as to how my daughter is faring among her peers. These conversations are a good yardstick to measure the emotional ability of my five-year old to be around and deal with other children who are from different backgrounds and of different temperaments. After all, just like a glass filled with water from the ocean is a representative of the entire ocean, so is a class of twenty children a representative of the world at large. So, on one such occasion, after I had met with her teacher, we were getting out of the school, when we saw  two children sitting on a bench near the supervisor’s office.