Cyn's Adventure in India

Recently a fellow blogger posted picture of “Palak Murgh” (Spinach Chicken) that they ordered as take out from a restaurant to just show how unhealthy Indian food can be…the picture is revolting enough, have a look.
This picture would prove the media just about right on how unhealthy eating food from outside can be, since the witch hunt is on on junk food, restaurant food and canteen food in most urban area in the country, fit is the new mantra, fibre the spear point that should lead the battle against flabby waist and high BMIs, TV is out, treadmill is in, Ghar ka Khana shall rule!

Or really? I mean that depends what your home cooked food looks like, for us the maid cooks DH’s meals because he likes his North Indian food so much nothing else will do in his tiffin, I for myself prefer a diversified menu on my plate and the same old dal/sabzi/roti just gets depressing, even if my maid cooks well.
The only flaw my maid has, is in her oil usage, no matter how many time we told her to go easy on the oil we end up with something always looking like this:

This was yesterday’s chicken, no question the spices were well balanced and the dish yummy, but look at the amount of oil that floated back to the surface! this is a chicken dish, but let me assure you that vegetables and even dal all receive the same treatment.
I generally don’t eat her food more than twice a week, and tend to avoid eating in the evening as much as possible. She keeps wondering about my eating habits, to her a diet of grilled meat, salads and no dinner past 8pm is not enough. Since the beginning she keeps asking for us to buy ghee, because chapatti, paratha, and idli all are much tastier with it, and I have put my foot down on that one, because I know that should I allow ghee to enter my kitchen she will pour generous dollop of it on every dish in order to make them “tastier”, the way the one time we bought green chillies for one specific dish we found ourselves almost wanting to call the fire department for a week afterward because she decided all our veggies and dal dishes needed green chillies in excess, and she just couldn’t get that in our couple DH is the one who tolerate the spices the least, he often find food I consider ok too spicy, after all he is the Indian in the house, so he should be the one loving the heat.
My maid is of that large section of the population that think oil brings flavour to a dish, and that food should be tasty, she wants us to eat only tasty food, beat herself if the dish turns out to be not all up to her standard in the end despite my liking it (she thinks I’m too nice to say her cooking was bad on these days).

So all in all, yes restaurant food might not be healthy, a lot of salt and starch are used in it, and yup oil, but that doesn’t mean that all the stuff cooked from scratch in your own kitchen is by default healthier. An oily dish is an oily dish regardless of where it comes from, and I bet a freshly tossed  salad with a side of garlic bread in a restaurant still is far healthier than the chicken dish I had in my kadai last night. 

A question heard way too many times since in India, should I get a zit, a rash, a mosquito bite or a cold sore, you can bet there will be questions asked, and not just by friends and family that care, but total random strangers too.

I for myself find it a bit disturbing, because first that means the person has been staring at your face long enough to detect a “flaw’ and then they thought it would be good manner to ask about it, for what? No idea because other than satisfying their own curiosity, why should it matter that I have a zit or whatever other skin temporary issue I might be suffering. I won’t lie when I say on occasions I’ve even been tempted to just say it was a boil or a symptoms of a fatal and possibly highly contagious disease, but I’m not mean, I reply with the truth.

I come from a place where you DON’T ask such direct questions if you don’t know the person, and if you do, you will ask something like “What happened to you?” instead of asking directly about the origin of whatever “deformity” has afflicted you chin/lip/nose or cheek.
In India I had people desperate enough to try to sell me fairness cream (of all things) and in one case after I looked the brand promoter square in the eyes asking “Really, can’t you see I’m not going to need it” the lady to retort “You have a brown mark here, it’s not looking good, the cream will help” and me to say “Where I come from this brown spot in question is called a beauty mark” and stroll away. I had people point to every zit I ever had, and suggest I go see a dermatologist because it is “not looking nice” (I should give them that, they refrained themselves to say ugly), but really? Wouldn’t be better to just mind your own business people? I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, so leave my boils alone!

Of course while I apparently don’t look nice with a brown spot (debatable), and definitely not my best with a cold sore (I agree, but stop pointing), it seems I’m a downright criminal for actually having my daughter sport a mosquito bite! Back in Bangalore there were a few people in my building that just could not fathom how my daughter could get a mosquito bite despite the net on the window, the Odmos on her skin, and the “Good Knight” plug in device on. And let me tell you they were not concerned about the possible Dengue fever threat, nope, it was the fact that it was looking ugly on such a beautiful fair complexion (and yes while a cold sore on mama is not looking nice, a mosquito bite on a toddler is UGLY…their words).
This actually make me wonder what they would say if my daughter had one leg, 7 fingers on each hand, and a cleft palate…wait I just don’t want to know!

this whole thing just came back to my mind, because I just suffered through my practically annual cold sore break, I know it’s a virus, it keeps coming back, it hurts for a day, blister and ooze and disfigure me for a week, I made my peace with that, beside dabbing Listerine on the spot with a cotton pads proved to help a little.
I made my peace with the fact that when Herpes Simplex decide to peak it’s nasty head my lip will be unkissable, no biggie. But do I need to have people asking what’s on my face? Some thoughtful friends asked me “What happened to you, did you fell?” That I can understand, it’s at least thoughtful, and when I reply with the “It’s a cold sore” they usually just sympathise, while some aunties and stranger will assume it’s their birth right to tell me to do something about it because it’s not looking nice.
The one that cracked me up the most this time around though comes from my FIL who was there just for a night this Sunday who after having me explain that it was a cold sore, asked if I went to a Doctor for it, explained nicely that it comes about once a ear and it’s a dormant virus that pops every now and then and that it looks worse than it actually feel, and he wondered why there was no medicines to cure it. But coming from him it’s a genuine interest in a fact he didn’t previously know about, he doesn’t like when people around him are sick and in pain and wants to know if something can be done to feel better.

But even then, I don’t think I’ve been asked about what’s on my face as much in the first 24 years of my life as I’ve been asked in the past 8 years or so living in India, and don’t get me started about other body flaws due to weight fluctuation and bone structure!

There is no denying that each culture has their own parenting style, and that there is no good or bad way to raise your children, and yes I saw a lot of things that are done much differently in India than in Switzerland, this came back to my mind recently when I stumbled about this article titled “Why French parents are superior”, the author is an American who lived in France and studied differences in parenting between the French and the Americans, and noticed that the French do approach child raising with far less anxiety, which apparently leads to better behaved toddlers in public.
Now I am not going to go as far as claiming that the French are indeed superior to other parents, or that I know exactly what American parenting style is like. But I grew up in a far different parenting style than what I see around here, and yes the way I was raised is pretty much the way the author of that article describe as the French way.

The one paragraph that stroke me the most in this whole article is this one:

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

That pretty much sum up how I see things should be, and pretty much like the difference she noticed, I notice the same here, Indian parents nowadays want their kids to be stimulated all the time, and in many families I have seen that a baby or toddler is rarely left to play on his own, they are the family pet, they are constantly played with, carried around, stuffed with food, some parents obsessively try to get their 2 years old to recite all the rainbow colours and the alphabet, toys that make it to the Indian markets are all coming with brags about how educative they are, and what progress the child is expected to do with them. Playschools boasts an impressive list of achievements and academics, claim their imported soft play area is specifically designed to scientifically enhance a child’s development (and yes I read that one on a school leaflet). And if it wasn’t enough you have the bragging moms at the playground rubbing into the nose of all the others that their kids can count up to whatever, and knows all the States and possibly their capital city. The older the kiddo get the more achievements are expected. the tuition classes, dance classes, sport classes all pile up in the extra-curricular activity time, and it’s not unusual to hear or see a 7 year old kid up past 10 pm to study some more and be up at 5 the next morning to catch the school bus at 6-7am and cross the entire city to be at the top school. The mother of the child is of course expected to be at the child’s service, making sure enough food goes into the tummy round the clock and that a piping hot freshly cooked lunch will be sent along with the kid in a tiffin box.

A far cry from what I grew up with:

- Bedtime until the age of 10 was 8pm, no if, no buts no negotiations, I was allowed to watch the family movie on Friday night and that was it. After the age of 10 I was allowed to stay up until 9pm, but once dinner’s been off the table (at 7pm) I was to stay in my room and do a quiet activity of my choice: Finishing homework, reading, painting. Absolutely no TV, no music, no video games, no computer time (though that one was simple I had no computer until I was 14, and then it was such a crappy one that it wasn’t worth it)

- After school my time was left free for me to manage as I grew older. Elementary school was finishing at 4pm (6 hours of school a day in Switzerland, with a 2 hour lunch break in between so that kids could go home and eat home cooked food). The catch of that freedom was that by the time dinner was on the table at 6.30pm  I was to be done with my homeworks so my parents could check them, fortunately the school system made sure that homework time never exceeded more than one hour a day, and the homework were given for the whole week so that the child can if they want do more on a certain day and less on another, what mattered to the teacher was that the whole homework load was completed by Friday.
My parents while still checking the homework in the evening, didn’t really push us to do it diligently…why? Because they wanted us to learn the simple cause and effect principle, the school was strict about that, no homework done on Friday = detention which meant stay after school to finish doing them in a classroom…not fun. So much so I learned early that first detention wasn’t fun, then that if one day I finished my homework in 30 minutes I could do a little more from one of the other days and finish my load a day or two in advance and get more freedom later.

- After meal times is parent’s quiet time, so after lunch and after dinner, I was to just stay out of their hair, discussion time was meal time, and yes we were encouraged to discuss ANY topic and my parents would answer truthfully making sure that depending the topic the words and content would be still age appropriate, but they weren’t going to say something like “Once you get married you’ll know how” when we asked “How do you make babies” or refuse to answer a question about “What is murder exactly” my dad was a jail officer, so he had lots of stories about crime, criminals and what is in the law and what is not. No taboo in my family, and believe it or not I built a lot of my GK around the dinning table rather than in school, my parents loved to read and learn, and figured out the best way to pass their interest to us was to first leave a lot of books around the house, and then talk about them.

- Saturday morning and afternoon was chores day, fun individual activities and shopping, Sunday was FAMILY day, capitalised, it was a de facto no TV day past the morning cartoons (over at 10am) provided it was a rainy day, if it was a Sunny day we were out of the house early, in Winter to go skiing, in Summer to go Sailing, in the Spring to go cycling, in the Fall to go hiking. The rainy Sundays were cultural days, going to a national heritage site, or a museum, and when back home from that it was board game time, and boy we had an impressive collection, enough to fit a whole wardrobe I kid you not. All these activities might have had an educative side, but my parents never pushed it on us that way, beside if we wanted to play hungry hippos on board game time, then be it, my parents would not push trivial pursuit because it was more intellectually challenging, the focus was on having fun as a family during a specific time dedicated to that.

But back to cultural differences shall we? It is clear from the article and from snippets of my childhood life that the French way put as much value on the time of the parents than the one of the children, there is some balance they achieved that apparently the American do not (no proof here I’ll take the words of the author) and yes a sense of individuality that I see missing from the desi model. The desi mom breathe and live for the people around her, they all come first: kids, in-laws, husband, their needs are all more important than hers. And the urban progressive woman is struggling with this notion more than ever, tied between what she wants and what the society still want her to do.
As a woman in an intercultural relationship myself I feel the pull too, the deep inside me would want a more “French style” parenting, the realistic me see that it’s not possible because it takes two parents to grasp the notion, DH never grew in that pattern, and it takes a society that support it to do it. So Ishita grows up in yet another blended system, one that will define her the way my upbringing defined my childhood.
What is clear to me, is that while I haven’t enforced bedtimes as strictly  as my parents, I can’t see myself hovering above her the whole time, and sure need and deserve and indulge in my me time. So when her school has started announcing the admission being open for nursery 2 weeks ago I was the only parent to openly plan to put her in the afternoon batch : 12pm to 2.30pm. My reasoning being that the mornings are all spent preparing tiffins, having to supervise the maid, taking shower and whatnot that i don’t want to have to ship DD to school to still have the maid to watch over. Nope mind you school time is ME time. A few of the other ladies in the school are toying about the afternoon batch but are concerned that their kid will not have lunch at the right time at home, or might not nap at the same old schedule so are willing to bypass their own craving for peace and quiet so that their kid doesn’t get to deal with too much of a change in their schedule.

As I said two different approach to child raising, but where I will not venture is to go as far as saying that  one model is superior to the next the way the author of that article said. because it all boils down to what works for one person.
And contrary to what certain Indian stereotypes about western women, the fact I don’t raise my children the desi way doesn’t make me less family oriented, or them superior. 

A year ago on this exact same day I was bidding Navi Mumbai goodbye and good riddance, as I crammed the last few stuff we had to cram in our car to drive down to Bangalore.
Yes last year on the 8th of February we had packers in movers boxing our stuff and us looking forward to just be back in a city we knew and loved, it made us go through the whole stress and motion of moving with more or less flying colours, and we were seeing that move as permanent, or at least long lasting. Little did we know when I turned back to glance at the NRI Seawood Estate complex thinking “Boy I’m glad I’ll never see you again rotten buildings” that 6 months later we would be not only back in the boxes, but also back to Mumbai, which is of course different than Navi Mumbai. And that the irony of it all was that the first night we spent in the city was at a friend’s place in…you got it the NRI Complex in Navi Mumbai, so much for never seeing that gloomy crappy place again.

The positive was of course that we knew we wouldn’t be living in that hole again and a better apartment awaited us in a better looking, more entertaining, more central suburb of Mumbai.
I just remembered today that we were in transit at the same time last year, but as much as I missed every minutes away from Bangalore when I was staying in Navi Mumbai, the feeling is gone here, I don’t mind where we live, in fact I quite like it, and I don’t think a year ago I would have been able to say that I actually enjoy living in Mumbai. No I do not really miss Bangalore much, but I still think of the tiny 600sq ft apartment that came with a huge rooftop terrace we left in 2010 before all the madness we’ve been through after that. As tiny as it was and as much as we were considering living the place so that Ishita could get enough space to grow, that one flat was the flat we stayed in the longest: 5 years! The flat in which we built the most memories, had the most fun. It came with everything you can hope to get in a city: centrally located, bright, airy, functional, and with enough personal outdoor space to get your own little “garden”, and to top it all it was reasonably priced. And a place all our friends liked coming to because of the lazy weekend evenings we had drinking and eating take out food at our patio table among the plants and taking in the cool breeze, or our New Year gathering shivering in the Bangalore winter cold still on the terrace watching the fireworks around us…Nostalgia when you hold us!

In hope that one day we will be able to afford a great place on our own, here in Mumbai or elsewhere, in the meantime, here’s to having made it almost 6 months in this new place and not having to plan a relocation right away. Maybe in time we’ll grow to miss this apartment we are in right now, all we need is to build memories in there remember fondly.

Coming from a country were customer service is quite execrable, in the beginning I thought India was great about it, but that was because I wasn’t too used to the concept of having someone assist you in a department store when you are looking for something specific, or when you have some questions about an item.
Truth is in certain places having to deal with more than one sale assistant offering to help you is a bit taxing, some store got it right, some really need to just revise their game, and the topper of the worst, most invasive customer assistance is Shopper’s Stop, the just don’t seem to understand the difference between offering help, and harassing people, and I’ve been to enough of their outlets across the country to know that it’s a general management issue rather than a localised problem.
On any given day I actually dread going there, because the instant you walk in you have the entire staff (and in man place there is more staff than actual customer inside the store) having all eyes on you at all time, eagerly watching for a sign of you slowing down, or a deviation in your stare which could possibly indicate an interest in a particular section of the store. Once they assumed that you are indeed going to step off the main path into let’s say the bag section, the staff designated to the aforementioned section will all jump on you like hungry vulture with a “May I help you ma’am” never mind that you have only the tip of your flip flops in the section, that you haven’t even got a chance to see what was there and get a first idea for yourself, the  staff eager to please is on the prowl and assaulting you wanting to know right away if indeed you need help. I usually reply by a “No thank you I just want to look around first”. In other stores, that usually result with the sale assistant melting in the background waiting politely for you to summon their help should you need it. In Shopper’s Stop that mean the sale assistant (or possibly 2 or 3 of them) will walk 2 feet behind you, breathing down your neck shadowing your every step, on the prowl waiting for the first chance to prove their worth should you just lift a price tag. The second you lift a bag or tag, they launch into a description of the bag which you never asked for in the first place, and if you put it back on the shelf annoyed by the clearly unwanted distraction they will go fetch whatever they feel  is right and push it on you, by then I just say it more firmly that NO I don’t need their help, that I’m just looking, but that THANKS for the offer but should I need help I am a big girl and can ask for it, and it results in them saying “Yes ma’am” and continuing the shadowing game. Once I had to actually yell at them to just stop following me around, and when they refused to comply I just left the store in irritation…too bad they missed one sale!
Yesterday DH and I visited one of their new outlet because we had points to redeem on a credit card and DH needed some office trousers and shirt, I left him at it as he got assaulted by 3 eager sale assistant who upon learning he was looking for formal pants emptied the whole section in his size and decided to head to the kiddie section to see what was on sale. Needless that I didn’t buy anything, didn’t spend more than 5 minutes in the section, as the same old scenario unfolded, a lady shadowed my every steps, 2 feet behind me, not even offering my help yet, but making me feel extremely uncomfortable having a total stranger in my personal space, so I spinned over and looked at her straight in the eyes, and I guess sheer instinct told her to back off…ONE FOOT! yes she continued shadowing me 3 feet behind me, at the edge of what psychologists would describe at the edge of a person’s intimate space, the second I touched…yes touched a pair of check pattern shorts two more assistants hovered dangerously near to me, having me feeling literally cornered like a pray who lost the chase against a predator. I ducked away and out of the area before any of them got the chance to offer a “May I help you” simply because at this point I felt violated and knew I would just bark at them and left the place. I have no idea if there was any good deal in kids clothes, I didn’t even feel checking if there was anything worthy in the women’s section simply because I wanted my personal bubble back.
Yes Shopper’s Stop is the one shop that gets it all wrong, by first not teaching their employees that you don’t push yourself on potential customers, that there is indeed such a thing as a private sphere one should never invade as a sale assistant, and that it is simply rude to not let people shop in peace. The secondly of all the shops I’ve ever been in India the Shopper’s Stop chain is the one that is the most overly staffed ever. Yesterday I looked around in the men’s section and out of about 10 people I saw passing around me only 2 were customers, all the others were sales assistant, half of them probably bored out of their mind and just jumping on the first person not carrying a name tag just to feel they are doing something of their day.

The two stores that get what non-invasive assistance are Lifestyle and Westside, Lifestyle staff let you first roam around a section alone, then offer help, which upon you declining it has them retreat a little, but upon seeing you trying to find a specific size in a pile will prompt them to ask you quietly which size you are looking for before you get to ask if it is available, and that is about it. Westside’s staff is the least invasive of all, and on occasions I had to just roam around until I found someone to ask for a specific question in pretty much the same fashion as back home, the only difference being that in Westside the sale assistant is looking eager to help on request, not bothered by a pesky customer the way they make you feel in Geneva.

Where things become really sketchy in all stores though is when you are taking them on their offer to help immediately asking for a very specific type of clothes such as “Kid’s short” and you have them bring you everything BUT shorts simply because they don’t want to tell you upfront that they don’t have anything like that at the moment in store, or when you ask for short sleeves simple kurti in non flashy colours and you are offered to look only at long sleeved items in neon pink/green/blue with lots of sequins and frills instead, but that is a whole different story. 

Back in 2008 while I was visiting Switzerland for a 2 months I blogged about one of the biggest grocery shopping icon in my home country : the sturdy paper bag, a bag people could buy for 30 cents at the supermarket check out counter if they forgot their own, a bag significantly sturdier than the thin small plastic bags they offered for free, and a bag that once worn out and torn would find it’s way in recycled paper. The paper bag is no more.

My cousin confirmed it to me last November when she came to visit me and I announced that India finally started doing something against the plastic bag menace by charging customers that wanted one in an effort to encourage customers to bring their own, and shops to find better alternative (which few have even started exploring), this is when my cousin told me that Switzerland has put a ban on the humble paper bag, so now people have or to bring their own to the supermarket, or purchase the latest avatar in eco friendly grocery carrier: a sturdier, bigger bag made of recycled pet bottles like this one:

The concept isn’t new, IKEA was having similar bigger bags for sale in their store, and since my cousin works for IKEA I asked her if she could send some along with my mom in January, she forgot, but my mom brought me some of these new supermarket bags, one of them was from a smaller chain, and made of red thick nylon, but the two biggest were as above, the bag state it has been made from two recycled pet bottle. They aren’t exactly the type you can carry in your purse and use for other shopping as once folded they take space, but oh boy they are the best thing ever to go grocery shopping, until then we used small canvas bags that inevitably would hold too few items, or bigger plastic bags that would break after 4-5 intensive uses to carry groceries and kill our fingers in the process lifting them, as too date no one in the bagging crew at our local supermarket seem to understand that you should use the canvas tote to put the juice and soy milk cartons, and use the plastic bags to store the veggies. Now we have a fleet of all sturdy tote and because these have a rectangle flat bottom they are easier to load for the bagging staff, and far easier to lift for us thanks to their wide and long handles.

Now on the whole law about charging people for plastic bags in India, as I said a few months back it is the best thing that ever happened, I wished though that the security staff in some supermarket would update their policy about checking these at the entrance, if you are shopping solo with a small kids retrieving them is a bit tougher, and I would like to see more supermarket jump onto the occasion to sell reusable totes like the one above, Star bazaar does it, I think I saw a few Reliance totes as well, my local supermarket sells some but so tiny they are of no use, and I’m yet to see Big Bazaar do it. In the garment retail store, so far I’ve only seen Westside sell them. I’ve seen a lot of people crib about being charged for bags on the shoppers stop Facebook page, but I don’t really get why they fuss, I find it very easy to fold a few big size lifestyle type plastic bags hold them folded with an elastic band at the bottom of my purse ready to use for any impulse shopping trip, the staff in department stores don’t bat an eyelid at putting Lifestyle merchandise in a  crossword bag. And on occasion DH and I went shopping together we would just walk out of the store with the stuff in our hand and dump it in the car in the parking lot, if we really need a bag and have none, then be it, we pay for it. Charging for them is actually a good way to remind people about their value and push them to reuse them later.

For some reasons, blogger decided to change some settings in how the URL of blogs are displayed depending where you live, with the result that all blogger blogs viewed from India have their URL automatically changing from blogger.com to blogger.in.
I wouldn’t care if it was not totally messing up my diqus comment platfrom, the change in URl is apparently making viewers in Idnia unable to see that any comments have been posted via disqus on the comment count meter, but if you click on the  “zero comment” it shows you all the disqus comments, it being because for some reason disqus doesn’t communicate with the .in version of the site but the .com one. I tried to change the settings but nothing worked. And because I don’t think it is fair that my Indian based readers don’t get to see the blog along with the comment meter I chose to disable disqus and go back to the regular comment platform offered by blogger, as imperfect as it is, I feel much better being able to see how many comments a certain post gets.
The downside of this move however is that now that I disabled disqus all the comments psted via that platform are efficiently lost and won’t be visible on the blog. if you commented recently and your comment is gone, I apologize, feel free to comment again though, the new ones will be saved on the blogger account. I just will disable anonymous comments, like I did before switching to disqus, and of course I still have veto on what get to stay on the blog, be rude and you’ll get yours deleted, be nice and I will interact with you via comments, I like interacting with you guys.

Again kindly bear with the change and sorry for the vanished disqus comments.