An Incredible Year with Pluto!

‘Being a mother’ in our culture is broadly synonymous with delivering a baby or adopting one. It is also denoted by socializing the child into one’s culture, loving him/her unconditionally and providing him with the best of everything. What we often miss to understand is that ‘motherhood’ is associated with any act of compassion and love. It could be towards anyone. For me, it is towards my little bundle of joy, Pluto.

I discovered my strong maternal instincts when I got home Pluto. His entry into my life and heart is completely credited to my husband. When we decided to take our relationship to the next level, I expressed my desire to have a dog at home. It was like an untouched chord that stuck both of us. Interestingly, both of us were dog lovers and always wanted to have a dog. To our utter dismay, both our families never permitted us to have one. The childhood desire to have a dog now turned into a much thought over responsibility to become pet parents even before marriage. Eventually, we took the call of getting home Pluto (who was just 25 days old).

Pluto stayed with me at my home. My mother who was really scared of dogs allowed him to stay with us as she knew that I will be getting married in a few months and will be taking him along. At that time, she had no idea about the magic of dogs! She never imagined that after a few months she will be completely in awe of him and in fact would miss him more than me. My younger brother grew really fond of Pluto and he was the one who took care of him in my absence pertaining to work commitments. He lovingly calls Pluto “Bad Boy”.

My experience of raising Pluto has been the most rewarding one so far. I apprehended that a puppy just like an infant, demands too much of care during his growing days. You have to be on your toes 24*7. The little sacrifices you make for him, the time that you devote towards him, the way you feed him etc. makes you grow fond of him with each passing day. If that’s still not enough, just watch him and you will instantly fall in love with the overwhelming cuteness!

There will be days when he will be so mischievous that it will be nerve wrecking. You would want to scold him badly but let me tell you the moment you will do so, he will act out such an adorable puppy face that it will induce terrible guilt for reprimanding him. The cherry on cake would be that after a while he will come up with something even more notorious. Basically, after a while your emotions will get confused over him and exhaust!

For Pluto it was chewing on our new sofas. Oh gosh! Hell was broken loose in our home that day. My mother was almost throwing Pluto and me out of her home. It took me and my brother days to calm her down and get the sofas mended. I can’t stop laughing when I think about that phase! However, as a pet parent it wouldn’t matter to you how much he spoils your furniture, wires, footwear etc., what matters is the truck loads of irresistible cuteness that he will spread in your life. Our entire life started revolving around him.

My husband is the most incredible dog father one can ever be. He never missed any of Pluto’s appointments with his vet. He used to take Pluto to his residence on weekends to enjoy their boys’ time which mainly consisted of Pluto’s bathing and sleeping (pun intended)!

Over the next few months, my brother and I over pampered Pluto. When Pluto turned 6 months old, we realized the need to discipline his ‘rowdy’ behaviour. This brings me to another episode (worth a mention) which happened, when Pluto literally scared away his trainer. On the fifth day, his trainer labelled him a ‘terrorist’ and called it quits! This was 2 months before our wedding. My husband then stepped in and took the responsibility of discipling him. He is the only person Pluto is scared of! Thankfully, Pluto is now a well behaved dog (with pangs of uncontrollable urge to chew on socks and shoes).

We had a special photo shoot arranged with Pluto during our wedding. How could he miss to be a part of our wedding!!

Actually, it was only after marriage that our best phase with Pluto began. It is really heartening to watch my husband and Pluto play every morning and evening. Sometimes when I am silently watching them, I wonder what if I wouldn’t have asked him to get us a dog. We would have been so incomplete without him. His presence in our lives is phenomenal. He binds us together with love and adorability. I don’t think we will ever love our child more than we love Pluto. For us he is our first baby!

 Today he completes one year in this extraordinary world which is so full of love and joy!

My 'Other' side

In the lanes of solitude 

Which i always desired to visit 

Rests a beast 

Which is my alter image.

Calling me from the darkness

She seems powerfully absorbent.

Threatened to the core

I had always restrained my feet

I feared what stepping inside would mean

Unveiling my pandora box, which lies unseen

From far beyond the horizons, 

I behold the silhouettes of my strength

Gathering courage I dared to look within

Darkness made way for incandescence

Irresistible pulchritude won over my senses 

I see my 'beast' dancing in glory 

Rejoicing my alternate reality

The lesson I learnt

Was simple and profound

How can I be alone

When the universe pulsates along

~A.B. 

My Conversation with Love

 I was extremely shocked and disturbed when all of a sudden my facebook newsfeed was flooded with the news items pertaining to the alleged suicide of Pratyusha Banerjee. Admittedly, I have watched her TV serial Balika Vadhu with my mother and grandmother with fake reverence. Though my interest in her TV soap was obligatory, my admiration for her effortless augmentation to fame and glory at a tender age of 17 was genuine. With all fingers insinuating at her boyfriend's crucial role in her suicide, I was pondering over the things that go wrong with today’s love.

Blame it on media for the inappropriate portrayal of role models or on the unbridgeable gaps between parents and children, the understanding of the profound terms like love and happiness are horribly flawed. The connotation of happiness has been faultily rooted in the relatively fragile minds of the adolescents. If you ask them what it takes to make a happy person? Most of them will recommend only three ingredients: money, fame, and love (Read sex!).

Being a happily married girl with all the reasons to be content with my affectionate husband, I was stealthily expressing my grief over the lost meaning of love in today’s generation. While I was pondering over my thoughts, something strange happened! Love appeared before me. Yes, you read it right. I engaged in a meaningful and enriching dialogue with love. I am presenting a few excerpts from my conversations with Love in the form of an open letter from Love.

Dear Reader,

 I am sure till now you must have experienced me in various shades and hues. I take this as an opportunity to express how I experience myself from your hearts. I am sharing below my feelings regarding how I am being perceived in today’s world. 

 Of course I love you Darling!

 “Hey wait! Love.. umm what?” ……. “Oh! You mean sex”

 Contrary to the earlier notion about me which denoted unflinching commitment and devotion, nowadays you often find me wrapped in a pack of condoms. In the 21^st century I am condensed to conditions and convenience. People stick to each other for all reasons other than me! Reasons over! I am over! I am just a mutually agreed upon “Terms & Conditions” which nobody really bothers to read (abide). I am the most accused when it comes to incompatibilities, heartbreaks and choices gone wrong!

Of course I love you till I am successful! 

 In the race between career and I, career wins! Look at all the tragic suicides of the most famous and beautiful women, you will realize that no man ever chose me over his career. When someone decides to end their life, is it logical to curse me? I am not responsible for your “close to perfect, fairy tale-ish” notions of love. Better go and blame the so called popular romantic films for promoting the truncated worth of women in a man’s life. Remember the dialogue from a popular Hindi film 'Life mein teen cheezon ke peeche kabhi mat bhagna.. bus, train aur chokri. Ek jati hai doosri aati hai'?? Don’t grieve that your man treated you like a tissue paper, instead please think that why did you allow him to do so in the name of love?

 Of course I love you till I find someone else

 Your fleeting feelings of lust appear to be pure and pious by bearing my tag. You swear on me to get her body and when your interest in her weakens, you stop treating her with what she deserves. You tell her that my presence is no more there in your relationship! Ask yourself, when was I present in your heart anyway? When your parallel hunt for another body (of course in the guise of my name!) is accomplished, you don’t hesitate to present me as a reason for breaking your girl’s heart. You convince the next girl on my pretext and serves your craving for variety which has sneaked into your bones and blood. For you, I am variety! 

 Of course I am dying, sooner than you think

 Considering the handful of people who still believe in me, I wish I could live longer. All I can see is my impending death by “lovers” who have given various meanings to my existence without realizing what I really am. I don’t signify mindless and misfortunate deaths, I signify living for each other, with each other. I don’t connote a vulgarized culture swearing by me with bottles of alcohol down their throats. I am also not depicted in expensive gifts and luxurious travels and lifestyles, I survive in the heart of that person who has the fervent ability to love the wo/man for a lifetime. I acknowledge that my traditional self is considered to be unreasonable and unfeasible by today’s young lovers. However, I still miss my old self where I existed in the hearts and spirits of the people, where I was regarded genuine and where my existence in someone’s life really meant the world to them! The current trends of my presence only point towards my doomed future where I will be vehemently murdered for allegedly causing “failure in relationships and marriages”.

 Sincerely,

Love

What does ‘sexygoddess@15’ say about you?

You are facing login issues with your net banking and you visit your bank to sort the issue. An IT guy sitting in your bank asks for your password,

Sir, please give me your password so that I can fix your login issues.

With lot of hesitation in your mind and a blush on your face you utter, ‘it’s sexygoddess@15’.

He entered the password, and with a smirk said, ‘oooh! Nice choice Sir’.

You feel utterly embarrassed and try in desperation to justify your choice. Other people surrounding his desk look at you and chuckle. You try to divert the attention of the IT guy and the onlookers by asking some other random question but that completely goes in vain. What just happened? The people who got to know your password drew an inference about your personality. To say the least, they just imagined your sexual fetishes!

Have you ever wondered that in today’s time, when we are laden with the need (or want) to have so many social accounts, what make us choose our passwords? Can a simple password suggest some aspects of our personality? Psychological researches suggest that it can predict a lot about your memorization strategies, visual and finger patterns, affinity towards people or events etc.

Usually when we choose a password we attempt to keep something which can be readily recalled by us when needed. For most of us it is a phrase or a number (or a combination of both) which, consciously or unconsciously, holds deep significance in our lives. Immediately after my grandmother passed away, most of my passwords were changed to ‘iloveunani’. A few weeks later I further changed it to ‘imissyounani’. It also suggests that password creation is a process which evolves with change in time and circumstances. We choose the password that best describes our current situations, belongingness to a particular person or date or event, or our likings and interests. A lady who aims to shed her extra kilos may keep her password as ‘Iamfat’ and once she has achieved her goal may change it to ‘fromfattofit’.

Nowadays when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat are ruling our minds and lives, passwords are a key to the whole social and psychological domain of its user. Password selection is a highly personalized and insightful process. Our brain generates passwords which can be easily memorized and retrieved. To save the effort of learning a new code, the brain chooses an available memory (which is usually semantic in nature) as our password. A Leonardo DiCaprio fan may have his password as “29^th February 2016” which was a historical day in his life. However, a few of us may even design a password on the basis of the patterns of alphabets and numbers on keyboard. Such users rely on their procedural memory, which could be called as digital memory, like qwerty123, or the numbers that fall in a straight line on a phone keypad like 2580, or straight or a diagonal finger pattern.

Passwords are not only the passwords to our social media/bank/or any other type of accounts but they are also a password to our psyche. If your ex’s name or birthday is still your password, then strings with past are still attached. On being confronted, you may even deny this because for you it was just an easy memory but at a subconscious level, those memories are selected which have a high emotional value in your life. If your password is the name, birthday, or any other detail about your spouse, children, parents, friends, pets etc., it can be predicted that you have a strong inclination towards that particular loved one. A man described that he keeps altering his parents’ anniversary and their birthdays as his passwords but has never created any other password apart from these significant dates. Some people’s passwords show significant religious/political orientations as well. A Tibetan friend of mine once told me that all her passwords start with ‘OmManiPadmeHun’ (which holds a great spiritual value in their culture) with a combination of some numerals. A website quotes a crazy Bollywood fan having his password as ‘MogamboKhushHua’. Interesting, isn’t it?

For convenience purposes, earlier most people liked to keep a ‘short, sweet and simple’ password. However, with the accelerating rates of cybercrime, it becomes imperative to choose a complex password which is difficult to crack. The following are some common DOs and DONTs for password selection:

DOs

• ·         Use a combination of names/birthdates/events in both upper and lower case.
• ·         It would be even better if you can use a combination of word/phrase along with numerals and symbols as it becomes more complex to be guessed.
• ·         Keep changing your passwords every month (Lazy people like me can exercise the liberty of same password for a month or two extra!)  
• ·         IF changing your password seems like an intellectually tiresome job, you may probably not change your entire password. You can decide to change just the phrase or just the numeral/symbol.  It is a good idea for people who don’t generally keep a record of their passwords.

DON’Ts

• ·      Don’t use phrases which you keep saying all the time. If some girl keeps telling her friends ‘Main apni favorite hoon’, that is definitely a ‘NO’ for her as a password. You would know exactly what I mean if you have watched Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol starrer Ajnabee (The Bollywood inside me keeps coming out from time to time!)
• ·         Do not share your passwords with people whom you can’t trust with your security and privacy.
• ·     Don’t store the list of your passwords in plain text on your PC. It is advisable to use some password storage software or create a list of websites along with the user name and write a hint for each one which is meaningful just for you.

Reading up this piece of writing would remain incomplete if you don’t try out the following:

DIY: Make a list of your passwords (Don’t forget to delete them or store them in a safe place once you’re done!). Identify the patterns in all the passwords. It will give you an insight into your thought patterns. Watch out for a repetitive object, be it a person, date or an event, in all the passwords. If you happen to identify any pattern which you were previously not aware of, then you have just successfully accessed your subconscious mind!

You must also think whether the object of your password(s) is known to other people in your network. If yes, then be sure to use only the confidential information which is not publically known. Otherwise, it may put your digital security at risk.

So next time, keep all these things in mind before creating your own personalized password. It is an entire whirlpool of emotions at the base of choosing our passwords. Whatever password we may choose, it reflects our thought processes, our inclinations and affinities, and emotional value systems. Therefore, be thoughtful about your passwords.

Breaking boundaries: A Humanistic Perspective

The entire idea of creating boundaries is very notorious. It is just to create social exclusion on the basis of race, religion, caste, sex etc. We are all humans and in most communities of the world the earth is considered as our nurturing mother. Being the egotistical children of earth, we believe that it is our right to draw boundaries on her bosom, thus setting areas for our movements and interactions. The parameters of differences set by us are so large in numbers that it seems very difficult to identify with people from across boundaries. Sometimes, I wonder what good do we extract in marking territories? 

Take a moment and think of a world with no boundaries. No maps. No LOCS/borders to be guarded. No greed to colonise other lands. What if we suddenly wake up to a world like this? Where you can go freely to any part on the earth without having to go through the hassles of visa and long security checks. A world where everyone is welcomed with smile on lips and warmth in hearts. A world where there is no 'us v/s them'. A world where we are not Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese etc. but we are all simply 'Earthians'. 

As much as this may seem logically impractical; the least that could be done is to prevent the minds of people from getting polluted with the ideas of social exclusivity. In our world, being born in a particular religion, caste, country, with a skin complexion, sex etc. puts certain people at a superior and privileged status. If at all any ideology needs to be considered, why can't it be of social inclusiveness? Irrespective of any social demographic or physical difference, why can't everyone be viewed with a lens of love and respect? 

Stop propagating nationalism in the name of mindless politics. True nationalism is to understand our rich heritage and spread some knowledge among the fellow countrymen. Perhaps the so called 'nationalists' wouldn't know (or don't want to realize) that India, since centuries, believe in 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' which is described in Maha Upanishad meaning the world is one large family. 

Don't we all experience differences of opinions in our families? But do we tag our family members with different perspectives as anti family? No. Then why do we don't bother to think even twice before labelling fellow countrymen with different opinions as anti-nationals? Heights of unfairness! There are thousands of anti-nationals (and anti humans) not only in our country but in the entire world under the garb of nationalists and peace makers. But do we even use our minds to identify them? I am not saying that anti nationals shouldn't be punished or publicly brought out. My point is that lot of thinking and mindfulness should go into the process before labelling people as anti nationals so that any person with simply a different opinion from ours shouldn't be forcefully put in the category of 'anti nationals'. 

If having this set of beliefs qualify me as an anti national, then let it be. We don't need to prove our love for our country to anyone. I would like to specially mention here that I strongly condemn terrorism or any anti human activity but fighting in the name of assumed patriotism is not what i can ever support. It is a waste of time and resources. Patriotism is something highly intrinsic which needs no words to express. It is well reflected in actions. The world needs so much of action oriented people and responsible media but getting involved in such controversial issues deplete our time, energy and resources. 

I am a proud Indian but before that i am a human because that's what i am born as. It doesn't matter what race, colour, religion, country, sex you are born into as long as you can remain grounded to your basic biology i.e. being born as a human. 

The rule to live should be simple: Don't let your country down and don't pull other countries down. Love and respect all. Appreciate Diversity not only in culture but also in thinking. Spread Love. Because that's what we all need.