100 Happy Days: Day 30 Sunday is a special Day.

Happiness is ‘reserving Sundays for family gapshup’.

Sunday is the day of rest; it is a day to spend quality time with close family members. It could be at home or at the social club or even at the beach. 

The idea is to maintain a bond amongst the family members.

This has been a custom in my family since many years. During my growing up years, Mom insisted that there be no appointment with friends for any movie or outings, Sunday to be reserved for family get together.  Every Sunday, we met, aunts, uncles and cousins, together we would spend day eating, chatting, joking, playing board games, we even fought sometimes, but love was the common string that tied us all.

All my cousins are close to me and I thank my elders for creating such a bond. 

And I also thank them for this tradition of spending Sundays with close knit family, the custom which is observed till date. I don't make any appointments with friends for any event, if that can be helped. 

Sunday is a family day.

So here I am, with the project of ‘100 Happy Days’I am posting pictures each day here on my blog then sharing the link on my page on FB too. You can enjoy my work either here or on my page at FB at Pushee’s World

Living in an Unsafe World

No, Don’t wish me ‘Happy New Year’ I am not in mood. There is nothing to celebrate. You tell me to move on, things are not going to change.

How can I?

I am still angry and distressed when I think about the suffering she went through at the heinous acts of six men. Each time I think of her, a chill runs through my spine. Did they have no consciousness and the sensitivity of a human being? Is their desire for violence so strong that they lose all their decency? What kind of parents do they have? Should I blame these parents who have been unsuccessful in instilling good values in their family? Or should I blame the system that does not enforce strict laws?

Good upbringing and proper communication with the parents plays a very important role in the development of a child. It depends on moral values instilled in childhood that shapes up their personality. Poverty and social status has nothing to do with the kind of person you will grow up to be.

Whatever values are induced in our system during childhood remains with us forever.

I lost my father at the age of 3years and childhood was difficult with limited funds to sustain but my mom was a strong woman who always reminded us to follow a clean path. She instilled fear in us from doing anything wrong. I don’t lie, nor steal or commit any crime, why? Because I belong to a polished family, where mom always stuck to the truth.

This was possible because there was no communication gap.

Who are these men then, who commit such crimes? Can I blame their parents? Are they violent because they did not grow up in healthy environment or they grew up in the house where there was no order and discipline? Maybe their parents were so busy in their own problems that they could not communicate with their children during their growing up years.

Or should I blame the system? 

So many crimes are committed everyday and there is no law to protect its’ citizens. There are no severe punishments and many of the crimes are not even reported because of the slack judiciary system, But then, I am thinking whether such crimes happen in foreign countries too and how do they succeed in controlling crime? whether people do eve-teasing just for fun to get some cheap thrills?

When I travel abroad I see lots of bare skin, on the beaches, in the clubs and even on the streets. Group of women are seen at the bar, drinking hard drinks, laughing loudly, dancing with strangers. They are not loose women, they are just girls who want to have fun. They are not molested or raped. Men don’t stare. Nobody bothers them.

Indians have never learnt to respect women. Whether you are Sita or Draupati, men will never respect you. This is the mind-set of Indian men. They feel their need to dominate over woman.

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.~ Gloria Steinem

However strict the laws will be, unless we change the attitude and mentality of men in the society, we will never be a free nation.

Chilling Times in Pune City

Pune is the city that is just 3 hours away from Mumbai by road, it’s the city where majority of my family lives, it’s the city where I have spend most of my free time doing nothing but sitting and lazing around, or going for movies, endless lunches and dinners and getting fatter with food, laughter, chit chat, teasing, ragging and love.

Pune used to be the city where nature smiled at all hours of the day, the weather was cool and birds cooed beautiful rhymes. We would wake up early hours to enjoy the cool breeze, in the evenings we would go for long walks on the main street, pick up sandwiches from ‘Mazzorin’ Sometimes we would go for long drives (long drives meant just two hours, driving through the lonely lanes, sometimes right up to the Pashan lake or to Khadakwasla dam, and sometimes a longer rides driving through the winding road up to Mahabhuleshwar, eating usal pav or egg omelets at way-side stalls, drink chai in an Irani restaurant.

There was no TV nor BlackBerry nor Iphones to distract our conversations. We played board games or simply joked all day. Simple things amused us, there was so much to talk about. Chatting would continue late nights and sometimes we would sneak out of house in the middle of night, go the Pune station to eat egg burchi from the road-side hawkers. We never worried about hygiene, never washed hands, never used sanitizers but surprisingly never really felt ill or had any stomach upset.

I can’t recall the conversation we had during those days but at the end of my usual one-month-stay, I always cried when I had to return home to routine life in Mumbai.

Not much has changed on the home front but a lot has changed outside my family home, out on the streets of Pune.

The greenery is slowly eroding and is replaced by huge, shiny malls, selling branded goods.

Traffic is disorderly, a big wigwam of cycles, auto-rickshaw, buses, cars, scooters, pedestrians all sharing the same space. Temper tantrums flying high in all directions, the weather that once Punites boasted is now humid. Redevelopment and constructions is the order of the day.

That quaint little city is now a bigger cousin of Mumbai, resembling in noise, breath and weather. The essence of place is lost forever.

Now the only reason I go to Pune is to visit my family and friends