A bit of Crazy!

When I posted " To all those who encourage me and applaud my madness.. a BIG Thank You..hoping to shock (hee Hee hee) and surprise (ho ho ho) with more as I continue to find ways to enjoy life king size...meet and make more friends...... after all I am retired only from a job after all !!"........... it got me thinking. Madness or being just plain crazy is definitely not a mental disorder....and if it is then disorder of what I wonder?  Can it be for loving and living out one's own beliefs or just madness for say name, place, animal or thing. 

When life gets crazy and out of control, films provide a great escape from it.  Everything is perfect as the celluloid lights up and the credit rolls. Everything is escapism till the lights go off and you realise that the fantasy has ended. Some of us manage to get back to the normal humdrum of life, while some choose to live on the fantasy to crazy proportions. "All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing.” ~ Ashly Lorenzana....It does not end there as when the craze for an actor takes over, people try to emulate the style, mouth dialogues, copy dancing moves & clothes and sometimes even behave like the actors themselves. People begin to  idolise and want to be like their idols. Even the wrong doings of their favourites in the real world gets brushed under the carpet because they can do no wrong and deserve no punishment according to their fans. That indeed is one kind of "crazy

Then there are some who are so crazy about animals that they will not allow a small act against any animal go unnoticed. Nearly everyone love animals, baring a few like me, who prefer to admire them from a distance. My sister has dogs and they are a part of her family. She finds it very difficult to understand why I and my younger sister cower in a corner of her house, waiting for her dogs to settle down. I am totally mortified by a dog licking me or a cat sitting on my lap, but then that's just me. Of course, I love animals and love watching God's beautiful creatures in the wild and I am in complete awe... just so long as they are not up close. I have a whole lot of friends who take love of animals to a whole new level of professing their love or disdain for violence against animals via social media, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Their social media pages will be full of images of their pets or favourite animal or raising arms against barbaric acts against animals and of course, I will support  them. James Cromwell says "Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life" while George Eliot adds "Animals are such agreeable friends -- they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms"....

What can I say to someone who is mad about eating..... and then the next best thing to eating food, is talking about it. Good food on the table, eating with loved ones, cooking or just being around food... that's all that matters to them. They shop for food, they even take pictures of food. They are the best people to call on, especially when one wants to know where to eat out or even better still going out to eat with them. No worries about what to choose from the menu if they are with you. Believe me when I say that I have many a times chosen a wrong dish to experiment with.  “There is no sincerer love than the love of food.” says George Bernard Shaw ........but a crazy foodie will only proclaim “I won't be impressed with technology until I can download food.”.

The one kind of madness and crazy that we really need to be careful of is - smothering love and forced competition!! I am talking about the pressures that parents are putting on children today. Competition and aiming for ranks is not what worries the children, it is the crazy pressure that is thrust upon them by the parents that makes them falter. There is a big world out there that they have to battle and bad grades makes mothers more mad. Crazy control over the child's time to study and pressure of not allowing him/her to free time is leading to social, emotional and physical stress for both the mothers and children. No matter how lofty are the goals you set for your children, end of the day it is going to depend on how your child is managing to achieve them.  "All five fingers are not the same" is a saying we've heard often enough..... but we have become blind sighted and put all energies into ensuring the child stays ahead.  Worth thinking about is this quote from Bruce Lee, “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.” ..... because, " At the end of the day, just know that God made you, so you can be your own individual" says Wyclef Jean.

Everyone needs a bit of madness, besides there is always a reason behind the madness. It requires loads of passion and determination beyond reasoning with a bit of restraint thrown in.  I have  loads of it in me and that keeps me optimistic that there is something more, something new out there to experience..... to live out and dream for.  I will just have to trust in my madness, whatever it may be....... because sometimes a bit of crazy is the only way to stay sane in this mad mad world.

Lit-O-fest, writing and me!!!

It all began with some out of the blue some random thoughts that began to flow in the middle of the night and from that day onwards a pen and pad always lay open on my bedside. The "filmy keeda" in me seemed to be wriggling its way onto paper and I began writing stories that had a touch of life and things that I had seen around me and on celluloid. I remember how it all started. I used to handle annual reports at the bank where I was working, collating data, coordinating shoots and actually proof reading the data for my colleagues something I did not need to but began to enjoy and love ensuring standardization in the data. This was probably the best time in my career. Those random thoughts seemed to be calling out to me and often during the lunch time I began to put down thoughts and mailed them off to myself and began fleshing them out at night...Writing has always been something I loved and even more surprising was the love for proof reading which somehow I became totally fascinated with ....  it was just something that I continue to do unconsciously for everything I read, sometimes to the dismay of my friends whose stuff I begin to correct.

Almost all my efforts  pointed me towards self publishing with exorbitant costs  to print, market and promote leaving me wondering what would I get out of the whole deal. Time flew as wrote and ran through a million options to get my stories out there.  No one seemed to want to publish short stories anymore and besides novels were being published dime a dozen.  I began to wonder how and what would make me so different from others.  Writing a novel was not for me definitely, as I cannot put it down until I know how it ends. It has to be short and sweet for me with a closure at the earliest. So that's why perhaps even a Saas-bahu serial on TV does not hold my attention sadly!  That did not stop me from writing as I shared my stories with friends, In fact to put it plainly forced them to read!!!...... and then Lit-O-Fest just happened to me like a rainbow on a rainy day.

My long journey of four years just melted into nothingness reading a mail acknowledging my manuscript submission to the festival that said " "Congratulations!  We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been finalized for the LIT-O-FEST 2016 Awards. Please do come on the 20th Feb to be a part of the LIT-O-FEST event and the award ceremony."   That was IT for me. Someone out there had thought my words were worthy to be read. That in itself was an achievement and to get to this day when I can a big thank you to Smita Parekh, Festival Director and her team at Lit-O-Fest for appreciating the writer in me. Yes, I won, I won in the "get published" section.  Whatever this holds for me in the future is just a big big dollop of icing and a culmination of a dream come true.

So let me share what Lit-O-Fest is.......Lit-O-Fest is a festival with a difference and a one of its kind initiative where publishing contracts are signed with deserving authors and what's more for free. It's a festival with a philanthropic perspective as this is an only platform where one-the-spot publishing contracts are signed with deserving authors. A friend Hariharan Iyer introduced me to this festival and  I submitted my manuscript in the short stories section a few months ago. 

The festival was held at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, on February 20- 21, 2016 and when I walked into the college premises on Day 1,  it was so heart-warming to be received by the students who escorted me to the multimedia room where an talk was already in session. As I sat there listening, I felt an immense sense of peace and happiness that comes with just being a part of something so laudable. Sailesh Lodha of Tarak Mehta fame brought a smile on our faces as he spoke on how we have lost our ability to laugh and finding laughter and humor in everything.  A session with Ram Jethmalaniji on money laundering in our country and its repercussions that followed was so eloquently put that I could not but marvel at this 93 year grand old gentleman. He actually refused to sit down but chose to stand and talk at the dais for over thirty minutes with such truth and passion. If this is not inspiring then for me nothing ever will.

The awards ceremony began with the Lit-O-Fest giving away the 'Living Legend’ award to legends Narendra Kohli, Kiran Nagarkar, Pankaj Dubey for Creative Leadership and Radhakrishnan Pillai in the education field. I had the privilege of being there to listen to them share their thoughts. Thereafter, I was called on stage to receive my award at the hands of Ram Jethmalani ji and what an euphoric feeling and honour indeed. Though knowing me, I did not let Shatrughan Sinha leave before expressing my disappointment to him. He was to give the awards away but was getting late and he very sweetly acknowledged me by saying he could not wait as he had another appointment. My bad luck.

I wish that I could have gone again on Day 2, but for another commitment.  It was not surprising to read that Day 2 saw sessions with Manoj Bajpayee and Shilpa Shukla, child abuse and  teenage tantrums with Kiran Manral, Harish Iyer and Sonali Shroff with the  event ith concluding with live band by Leslie Lewis.

We all live in a world of stress and competition and everyone is definitely impatient for sure and wanting things to happen overnight, including me,  but as the saying goes "there is a time and place for everything" .....and the time and place for me is definitely now....

A place under the sun!

A place under the sun!

It was that grim day the harsh words crashed my world. I wished standing there that I could curse the nine month pregnant counselor shared her thoughts about my daughter’s academic performance in the most rude, insensitive and uncaring manner, but then how could I a mother myself curse her, another to-be-a-mom. I remember stepping out of that room sobbing and promising myself that I was going to prove her all wrong; and we did. I never stopped pushing (may be a bit harshly too) and encouraging my daughter to fight her demons. She on her part, the fighter that she was, not only went on to complete schooling and college, of course, at her own pace. Fail she did, many a time, but she always refused to give up. Yes, I went through trauma with her and yes, I had to find ways to overcome her learning problems. What surprised me was that my friends with similar problems reaching out to me saying that my sharing had made them open up and accept their situations. Today when I look back I often wonder whether I should have exposed her to the world so blatantly and should I be sharing this today.  I think I did it right for today she is doing well for herself working with children. 

May be there is a mother out there who is worrying about sharing and letting people know and if you are let me say that “it’s perfectly okay’. After all it’s a cut throat competition out there that needs to be won, and I do know that it matters.  I had also somewhere along the line thought that maybe it's all my fault and that maybe I did not give enough time and attention, but remember it’s not you!  I do know it’s difficult to accept that our child is not going to make it to the top rung of the financial world like other children. After all, we all want the best future for our children and can’t seem to understand why they would choose careers in non-traditional jobs that don’t have a fast track career graph.  We, always, worry endlessly about society, what is going to happen in the future, what life will hold for them and never seem to realise that all five fingers are not the same, and when we do, time has fallen in between our fingers like sand. If only we would accept and appreciate that children today are completely aware of the immense opportunities that are out there in the world of the likes we never had dreamt of in our times.  On my part,  am glad that I never  hid in the shadows but went out there and sought answers and solutions and realised that there is always a helping hand out there and that each one of us, at the end of the day, definitely finds that  place under the sun.