“Keep on walking that road and I’ll follow, keep on calling my name I’ll be there
And if a mirror should break, it’s easy to take, cause deep down I know that you care
Well I’m not superstitious” – Europe

No I’m not superstitious in the least bit. Unless you count the fact that I always seem to put my socks on my left foot first and then the right foot all the time – it’s an unconscious thing but when I remember I change it! I can’t remember having superstitions as a child but it’s hard to remain without one in India. This land makes the superstitious people in the rest of the world hang their head in shame. We have superstitions about superstitions. And our elders did their best to encourage it! They feed you this shit and hope you carried it forward to the next generation. And if you didn’t, they’d step in and take over! I guess it goes hand in hand with being religious and overly religious people tend to have more superstitions. It’s like shit & urine, they just go well together.

My elders tried to make me & my cousins superstitious – “if you swing your legs, bad things happen to your uncles!” It didn’t work with me! If I happened to be pissed off with one or more of my uncles, I’d swing my legs like crazy! “Don’t open an umbrella inside the house, don’t whistle inside the house! Oh and the specially fucked up one – looking an idol or picture of God as soon as you open your eyes in the morning will bring good luck for that day – they didn’t bank on me being an atheist and rejecting that crap idea as soon as I turned 13! Accepting or giving things with the left hand – is it because we clean our asses with our left hand after we poop? Cause I always make sure to wash my hands thoroughly with a lot of soap or sanitizer! Oh – calling out someone by their name just as they are leaving the house! I had a member of my team at my previous office who would come back into the office, sit down, drink a little water and only then leave again if you called out her name as she was leaving the office! I am not kidding. Imagine how much fun I had calling her name multiple times in an evening just when she wants to leave for her home!

Oh yeah – a new bride walking into her husband’s house for the first time after marriage should step in with her right leg first! Cutting nails, hair-cutting, shaving or stitching cloth after sun set is a bad practice! I could on and on! If a black cat cross your path, it’s because it’s trying to get to the other side!! Nothing else. Oh I remember an uncle of mine getting eggs pelted at him and then having to do a few poojas to ward off the “evil effects”. A shower and shampoo would have done the trick in no time!

Anways, now that I am done with this post, let me jump up from my seat, turn around 3 times and yell “agogodadamamatata” as I do it, while the post is being published. Brings good luck :)

Did I fall from the frying pan into the fire? They say history repeats itself. And I feel that I am one of those unfortunate sad saps that just had a deja vu of the worse kind. I had thought that I was past this situation but I find myself smack right in it again and it stings like a hard, open handed slap, from the rough hands of an ogre. I have no one to blame and this time I can’t even blame myself. Everything seemed to be going right and “this was a much more reputed place to be in and this kind of a situation will never arise here” – is what I naively thought to myself. Little did I know. I got a very small warning sign back in the first week of November, a much bigger one in December – which led me to think that things weren’t going right and watch out – but I still looked around me and said that these were just abberations, anomalies at best and that there wasn’t anything to be that worried about.

I was wrong! I find myself in a very similar situation that I found myself to be in just a year and 2 months ago. Sure there are differences here but it’s like a different, extended version of a song which musically may sound quite different from the original but yes the lyrics are the same and the song still is bitter-sweet and melancholic. Money is always a tough topic and it’s awkward and makes you feel uncomfortable even thinking about it or discussing it. I find myself in such a situation, which I thought was well behind me.  January 2013 is 2011 October all over again, back with a bang and a ticket tape parade to boot. I find myself asking the same question that Bruce Willis’c character John McLean asked in the sequel to Die Hard, Die Hard 2 – “how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

I hate this, I hate my situation, I hate the helplessness, I hate my life.

Write a 500-word prequel to the story of your life:

My parents got married in 1968 in the traditional arranged marriage style that was predominant during those years (and is still the preferred way for most Indian families). My mom is from Mattancherry (which is old Cochin) and my dad is from Irinjalakoda, a small town in the neighbouring district of Thrissur. After both families agreed and my dad & mom met and agreed to the wedding, they got married and soon my mom would join my dad in Kuwait city, Kuwait where he had been living & working for the past 7-8 years. When they got got married my dad was 29 and my mom was 19, a 10 year gap which was quite common in those days. My dad was working in the National bank of Kuwait and my mom was a housewife. They lived in a small 2 bedroom apartment in a 4 story building in the neighbourhood of Darwaza – 1 living room, 1 bathroom, 1 bedroom, 1 bedroom/dining room & tiny kitchen. They started their family life and would spend some of the evenings with the other young families, most of the same state as ours, living in the same building.

They became part of the community, a Kerala community of expats living & working in the tiny Arabian Gulf country of Kuwait, trying to make money and save and send some home to their families. With they rest they lived a quiet & peaceful life, not really having much of anything else. My mom’s older brother had also migrated to Kuwait and he & his wife lived just a few minutes away. My mom became pregnant and just as she was about to complete 6 months of pregnancy, she moved back to India, and to her parent’s home to have her first child born in the same town as her family (as is the tradition amongst Hindu famileis). My parent’s first child, my sister Sherine was born on May 8th, 1970 in Mattancherry. My dad had had taken leave from his job to be there for my sister’s birth. After a few months, my mother took my sister and rejoined my dad back in Kuwait and the young family started to settle down. Sherine was one of the first generation of Indian expat babies to grow up in our building. The other kids in the building were her close friends and they would all go to the same kindergarten and to the same school. The family of 3 spent evenings in front of the tv watching cartoons until young Sherine slept and then my parents would watch Hindi & Malayalam movies on VHS, reminiscing of the land they had left behind to work & living for a few years in Kuwait.

Weekend evenings were spent outside with my uncle & aunt, who doted on my sister. The 5 of them would go for movies, go to the beach, have lunch or restaurant at one of the restaurants in the city or go for long drives in my uncle’s car. 6 years passed and my mom was pregnant with my parents’ second child – and that’s where the story takes the turn, people! Cause that’s where I come in :)

Working from home – do most people prefer this arrangement? In a lot of jobs you find the employees given the option and opting for the choice to work from their homes either all the time or a few days in a month. And by these I mean normal jobs which are done in an office and then later given the option to work from home. With a telephone/cellphone connection, a desktop or laptop & a reasonably fast internet connection being the only criteria that you need to do the work from home.

Among my friends, relatives and online friends – I know of about 10 people who work from home all the time and around 8 who work from home a few days a month. Like my cousin who lives in Aluva and who has worked from his house from 2008 onwards – his employers are in the US and they don’t have offices in India. All their Indian based employees work from home, converse through internet chat, Skype, G-chat, their own online chat option and occasionally on the phone. He has a wife, a young daughter & his mom living in the same house. Plus recently he also got a Rottweiler puppy (about 1.5 years old) – total distraction! But he has set a nice comfortable routine which works out well for him and daughter, wife & mom get plenty of quality time. Oh puppy does too! Whereas I have a friend from my school days and he says it didn’t work out once he & his wife had kids. They already had two dogs who demand attention all the time, meaning he got distracted way too much. He now works in an office.

Now on the other end, I have a close friend who works for a huge MNC and they have given her, and several other employees depending on their profile, the option to work from home 2 out of 5 days a week. In fact they even encourage this behaviour! I think rather than working all the time from home, I would like this option that my friend has. It seems like the best compromise. I personally would miss the banter, the jokes, the coffee breaks, the long lunches and leaving the office in groups. I wouldn’t mind working from home on occasion, maybe on certain days if the option is provided but not always.