Apgar Scores or A Baby’s Best Friend
I first learned about the Apgar Score when I studied to become a midwife. (That was over 25 years ago and for my class project, I got pregnant with Anand and delivered him halfway through the course.) APGAR stands for: Activity Pulse Grimace Appearance Respiration and is, in my humble opinion, a clumsy acronym for […]
Domestic Comforts Part 2
Every few years, the furniture in our house seems to cry out for renewal. This year, the windows did too. I started out just planning to replace the living room curtains (I had always disliked them). But one thing led to another and we ended up reupholstering the living room sofa and one chair as […]
Domestic Comforts
We have lived in our own house for nearly three years now, but I still walk around it sometimes in a daze of delight, unable to believe that this beautiful place really belongs to us. I love everything about it, from the garden to the verandah to the living room to the desk in our […]
Whimsy
Dad is such a funny man, such a delight to have in our home. This morning, I served the first watermelon of the season. It was bright red and very sweet and we both loved it. I always swallow the seeds, but I noticed that Dad was carefully removing each one before taking a bite. […]
Water Wars
On Friday I attended a two-day conference at Muskaan, a wonderful organization in Delhi for adults with mental handicap. As I was a speaker, I was put up in the building itself. I arrived late at night and went straight to bed. When I got up the next morning, I was surprised to discover that […]
Simple Kindness
This morning at breakfast, Dad told me about an incident from his childhood. He grew up in the Great Depression and his family was very poor. One day, it seemed every child in the neighborhood had a bolo bat and ball (a wooden paddle with a ball attached to it by an elastic). “Nyeh, nyeh,” […]
Happy Sree
Those pesky farewells! It seems everytime we turn around, there’s another wonderful staff member leaving (marriages, babies, husbands getting transferred). It is never easy to say goodbye. Particularly when the staff member is as much of a treasure as our Sree. This is a special educator for the pantheon. Talk about gifted! She is the […]
And finally: Republic Day IV
The future of the country is in the children. And their parents. Here’s Sree, giving us a sneak preview of one of our youngest new citizens, and a very lucky child indeed, with Sree and Manoj as her/his parents. No matter how dark things seem, no matter how many times we hear of an atrocity […]
Republic Day III: Special Mention
Given the current climate of distrust and fear in the country, Rizwan’s prose poem, which he adapted from an ancient Persian poem, was particularly apt. “Hindu, Muslim: what difference does a bomb know?” was the haunting refrain.
Republic Day II
The presentations were many and varied. Skits, dances, songs and one original poem set to music – it was a wonderful compilation of talent and patriotism. Here are some of the EIC team, enacting a series of jokes: Then we had the training centre with a funny and most impressive little skit on the power […]