THE DIARY OF A HOUSEWIFE

Thank you Khurana sir for the lovely title and Pa for your valuable inputs. Seeing “Jhaiji”, my maternal grandma lying on a hospital bed semi-comatose with no consciousness of life around her, my heart sank and I had a gut-wrenching feeling of what I was about to lose again and had already lost when “Mummy”, as we called my paternal grandma, passed away over a decade ago. I was lucky to have had grandparents for all of my 37 years, but right now, with Jhaiji being in such a critical condition, there are some hitherto unidentified feelings I am beginning to discover. Remembering her lying on that hospital bed with so many sick people around her with all sorts of tubes attached to her body, only one thought comes to mind…if she knew what they were doing to her in that hospital she would have been very cross with us all. She had a fetish for cleanliness and was one of the smartest grandmothers I have ever seen; wearing the best cotton sarees she could buy - she called them “dhotis” - ...

As a newly married girl all of 21 years, I suddenly realised there were many things I had forgotten to experience and explore. So, there I was auditioning to join a theatre group. I was selected though not for my dubious acting skills...the theatre group manager was so impressed by the fact that a married woman was willing to step out of the house and encounter unexplored territory that the moment he set eyes upon my resume he knew he was going to ask me to be a member of his group. I had the happiest moments of my life doing theatre and I felt the need to share with you all my experiences little by little ...piece by piece.   It was many years ago that I had seen a production of a well known play performed by a theatre group. And then there I was a part of the group some years later. Every day that I was there it brought back memories of the theatre I did as a girl. The fun, the togetherness, the gossip, the funny comments, the nastiness, the tension, the butterflies, the be...

Something I feel very strongly  about   and felt the need to share with you all...something disturbing, very basic but seen only rarely.                            Question: Do you think there is intelligent life on other planets? Answer: I don’t think there is intelligent life on ‘this’ planet. This dialogue on a TV show I was watching recently put my grey cells into a spiral and I am still trying to find my way out of it. What’s wrong with the human species is what comes to the mind again and again. Didn’t God give us a larger and superior brain than all our other co-inhabitants on earth for a reason?  Over the years the reason has been long forgotten by the best of our species, lost among the rigours of life, the daily wrangling, and the antagonism, bereft of even an iota of the so called humanity that makes us so different from others who have the privilege of sharing earth with us. Ben Okri, of...