Emotional Solitude...!!!

I feel terribly misunderstood and emotionally isolated. Nobody understands me for the individual that I am. I hate to be treated or even considered as the mere vegetable type who simply live and eat and sleep. I am different. I feel happy when I am learning something or researching, or following my interests with fiery passion. I am an artist who loves to create and takes singular pride in his creation. I like doing every big or little job with perfection no matter if it costs me no sleep and rest and plenty of strain. Nothing but the perfect and the best from me satisfies me; and anything which prevents me from giving my whole self, time, energy and all to my piece of art irritates me. 

It is surprising how I find each and every work in commonplace life as a canvas where I can make my own creation.  whether it is a new dish, or dressing up my baby, or writing in my blog or teaching the nursery class, taking pictures or studying an individual or finding my way according to a map... they all are like a piece of art to me. Ideally, I wish, I could follow my artistic and scholarly pursuits without any interruption and disturbance but active family life hinders all of it...and then I feel like someone who is getting parched with thirst with the glass of water just within his reach yet he cannot drink it because his hands are tied..!

House-Wifing Sucks...!!!

Before I got married, I was working. That occupied me nearly the whole day but still I was mistress of my own life and of my own time.My job was not without problems, tensions and frequent storms and gales. It didn't pay me riches and tired me out completely and yet I could find time to do all those things which I absolutely love doing. I wasn't rich yet my salary was sufficient not just to meet my needs but to keep me perfectly happy and satisfied, so much so that I twice declined promotion opportunities as I didn't wish to barter my precious time with a bigger salary package.

It seems incredible now how house-wifing is changing my life. I have a loving, caring husband and a cute little toddler. I am financially comfortably well off and don't work. I am a house wife..a stay at home mom and just that. House wife is just a decent synonym for  an unpaid, unappreciated but indispensable, full time servant. 

Not being any exception to this, my family life keeps me busy round the clock. I am all the time either cooking or washing dishes, laundering, cleaning or feeding and cleaning or attending to my child. I strive to steal a few moments just for myself and my interests but that is possible only when S is out, H is asleep and I do not have any other task of imminent importance. I love sleeping but again I can only sleep when S is out and H is asleep. I love reading books but neither there's time nor S and H would let me do that if I had any. S begins feeling lonely and H thinking its a new thing to play with, starts snatching the book. The last book I had read was two and a half year ago when H was not yet born.I love writing but this is coming to a stop too. The moment I pick up my pen, writing book or laptop some house chores or S or H start demanding my presence and I have to tuck away my thoughts or tasks for a more convenient time - which comes after several weeks or months ! My personal and physical grooming has been worst hit. Currently, a year has elapsed since I got a hair cut and my eye brows trimmed; this sounds almost unearthly !!! 

I stay at home the entire day doing house chores, go out for grocery shopping every week and sometimes visit Ss friends or colleagues and of course my language school and this is another irony. Before marriage, I had my colleagues and sundry friends to talk to. Post marriage, I have nobody. S keeps busy in watching matches and films and delights in talking only with his friends and I don't consider his colleagues's wives as my friends. In any case, I never was one to make a swarm of friends; I had always enjoyed following my hobbies and interests much more than anything but now unfortunately I can't even do that. 

I am inclined to think, this is the worst and most thankless job in the world. A house wife works interminably from morning to night and her man wonders what could she possibly have done to make her this tired. He as well as all the family members think its something funny to throw rubbish, empty chips packets on the carpet and slide empty tea cup below the sofa which your baby picks up and breaks or smears its dirty residue on the freshly vacuumed carpet. Leaving wet towels on living room sofa, dirty shoes in the bedroom are just 2-3 instances out of at least a million. I remember, once S had left wet towels on bed before going off on a month long vacation. Well, the bed cover, mattress and pillows were horribly destroyed by black stinking, fluffy mould. Just a few days back, he allowed H to play with wax candles while he was immersed in watching cricket match right beside him. H happily crumbled the wax and made a fine powder of it, then started rolling himself on it This covered his hair, face, nails, clothes, sweater and socks with wax;  where ever he sat even for a moment transferred it and it even got firmly stuck on the wooden flooring throughout the house. You can't even imagine what hell I went through in cleaning this sticky and powdery wax from all of these places. I immediately had to put H in a bath and shampoo, take off dirty bed covers, pillow covers  and H's clothes in the machine, put on new covers, and clean the floor but the wax had so badly stuck that I had to scrape it off  using a kitchen knife on my all fours. Taking away the candles from H would have taken only half a minute - it took me 3 hours to clean the mess !

This housewifing stuff is taking a huge toll from me inside and out. The endless cooking and cleaning and other chores from morning till midnight exhausts me leaving no time and stamina for exercise. My physical personality is fast changing from a smart, trim and prim, attractive girl to the dangerous specie of behanji, bhabhiji type who have ceased growing mentally but rapidly grow physically, who are great kitchen dragons, eternally cooking and washing, for whom buying tomatoes for curry is more important than lipstick and eye liner, for whom receiving a  new serving spoon or floor brush as gift is more thrilling than a new bracelet or a skirt, whose sole feat lies in producing perfect dinners and sparkling wash room mirrors, who guard their fabric stain removing secrets more possessively than their email passwords.... 

Oh I can go on and on with bated breath. I am afraid to look in a mirror and absolutely hate myself for meticulously remembering what to buy this weekend in grocery store. I am scared, having forced to use only 2 percent of my intelligence will rust down my brains like an unused knife. Wait a minute, I think, I am already smelling rust in there...

Oh well, I love my family well enough but being a house wife is a bit too costly and is becoming costlier still since I gave birth to H. The demands on my time have increased so much that I can't help feeling frustrated and miserable. I can work hard and live without a lot of luxury and comfort but I can't live without my interests and pursuits.Give me a book, a writing pad, a pen, an internet and I am the happiest person on earth.

Well, didn't I say '' A Scholar at Heart'' ? 

S's mother was a long suffering house wife. She had worked harder and endured unimaginable eccentricities of  her husband more than any  can imagine. When her daughters and relatives criticised her for suffering almost without complaint and happily, she replied,'' Oh well, after all, people who work in offices have to endure their boss. I am after all enduring only my husband. What's wrong if I consider him as my boss and my home as my office? Isn't it the same thing ?''

A great reply no doubt but one I would never want to follow....!

My German Class

My German class is so interesting.
It had 14 members initially but 2-3 people dropped off in the middle so now we are just 11 in the whole class.

The first one is Beh-jad from Iraq.
She didn’t tell us her age but she is roughly 40 yrs or more. She looks so severe and heavy masculine featured almost like a Babur or Humayun type female with  a big, heavy square face, very severe features, hair pulled so tightly back from the forehead that you can actually see their roots and forever a stern expression that well scares you out. She is polite enough and applies well at studies but definitely she is not one to pick a fight with. She seems well capable of beating the life out of you with her expression alone.
Just too often, she appears to be cursing the teacher for making her do exercises and etc.
I often steal looks at her and want very much to draw her face.

Marieta from Kosovo
She is one pretty, sexy lass with a sexy figure and an attractive face even though her features are not good at all. She is also very sweet and simple natured. Funny thing is she has a German husband for more than 3-4 years but still knows no German at all. I delight watching her taking an extensive body stretch with a long yawn after every exercise and it’s a record : whenever she is addressed by the teacher she starts violently and then in vain tries to locate where the class was reading the so and so passage from until the teacher beseeches,” Merita, bitte”
Its so hilariously funny…!

Next is Aziza from Kosovo. A youngish strictly burka clad pregnant woman who I never knew was pregnant because she wore such huge gents shirts. Can you imagine a woman of size 36 wearing gents clothes size xxxl..?
I used to think she must be sort of poor types to wear clothes of her husband. Nothing interesting about her except just the dress part. She remains quiet until spoken to by the teacher, has no friends or if she has, she doesn’t speak to them and does okay at studies. It makes absolutely no difference to class whether she is present or absent.
Anyways, she didn’t appear in her test as she is in the final stages of her pregnancy. Good luck to her.

Waheeda from Afganistan.
She was an Indian looking type female who knew a tiny bit of Hindi courtesy watching Indian Cinema. She was also pregnant so she dropped out.

Lendita form Kosovo.
She is a smart woman of more than 40 years. Looks great, speaks great, has a very attractive powerful sort of voice that makes you want to look again to see who is speaking. She is a very good student too. I have seen her taking much pains at making daily notes. Earlier she wasn’t interested in talking to me but when she realized that I solved the exercises quickly and correctly she started befriending me. Now she and I sit together. During lessons and even during tests she likes peeping in my book and make corrections in her own answers. During class exercises and conversation drills, simulations and roll playing we like talking to each other almost always giving the best, funniest or most interesting examples.

Mehtab G.
 A smart, well dressed, perfectly capable of looking after herself, worldly looking woman who can speak nothing but Turkish. Although staying in Germany since 9 consistent years and then spending another 7 months in Deutsch SprachSchule in addition to working too, she has been painfully unable to learn anything beyond “Wie heissen sie?” Even this question at times cannot be framed in the right manner.  It has not yet been established whether her inability ensues from willful ignorance or some genetic cause. However, she rarely  does her Hausaufgaben, rarely responds correctly and really never applies her mind or attention in class towards studies. On top of it, she wears such an accursed, impatient, irritated plaguey expression on her face that clearly seem to be telling what choicest of abuses she is mentally hurling at the teacher for making her suffer and appears to want to murder in cold blood all those students who actively participate in class.
Whenever she is asked any question by the teacher, she immidietly askes Fatma, another turkish woman, what the teacher has asked, then she gets the answer from Fatma in German and merely repeats it.
In yesterday’s test, when the teacher asked her to make a sentence on 'cycle' in German , she said her cycle has gone for a walk…and we all had to keep looking normal even after this.
As a teacher, I think such a pupil can be quite sickening!

Thido comes from Vietnam.
She is normal looking girl in all respects but wait until you hear her speak. She hideously pronounces ‘S’ as ‘F’ and ‘T’ so schreiben becomes treiben or freiben, zur as shooor, heissen becomes heiten, and so on. to add more to my enjoyment and the teacher’s woes, she speaks faster than the metro train, so it is practically impossible to understand her. Her speech sounds more like bud boot bud boot of water furiously boiling than any normal human language.
Today the teacher asked us to make any sentence using 'because' in German; well, Thido made the sentence, 'I cannot speak good German because German is a bad language !'
The teacher looked so offended !

Chancel from Turky comes next.
She is in early 40, sensible, normal in every aspect, student type who works to learn something but neither too much of it nor too little.

Fatma is from Turkey too.
She is sincere and feels intimidated that there are so many difficult things to learn and master in German.  She has a beautiful little baby daughter whom she loves breastfeeding in full public glare ( at least in the school) with her breast fully exposed to onlookers and which she sometimes even forgets to tuck back in after having finished the feedings. This helped H to discover that there is something women have there which babies rather like !
But apart from that she is really a nice girl. And she does not like Mehtab at all her usual sentence being” 9 years in Germany and still can’t learn heisse heisst?” She also praises me a lot for my ability to learn quickly and retain it.
Alia. She is also from Turkey.
She is a shy, sweet looking youngish girl but has 3 children. She dresses very nicely.  God only knows how she manages to apply so much of make up with 3 children at home. She too strives hard to learn but has her limits. She pronounces very solemnly ‘vater’ as ‘faataah’, ‘mutter’ as ‘motaah, ‘schwester’ as ‘shwetaa’  and ‘haben’ as ‘hhaaaben’ which I rather enjoy imitating at home.

Hurriye from Turkey again. Seems like whole of Turkey has immigrated in Deutschland !
She is pretty looking girl who likes to dress fashionably and speaks good German, learns good enough, solves pretty well all the exercises and has a good lively sense of humor. A nice girl.

Amira from Iraq.
A typical veil wearing muslim women with kohl lined eyes and sharp features and also sharp in behavior. She easily fights or argues, speaks German a lot even though if it is wrong in Grammar, strives really hard to do well in class. The funny part is she speaks German quite easily but reading gives her the jitters. She may have been saying  a word correctly but on seeing it written can’t make out what it is. So her reading goes like,” sc..sch..scr…schr…schra…schri…bane !!!
And she is one great gossip. For every sentence a teacher speaks, Amira has at least 2 stories to tell.
An interesting character.

Drenusha is from Kosovo and she is ok types, not very regular student so she isn’t one of the interesting characters one loves to hear or talk about.The only interesting thing I know about her is that her children eat hot dogs daily...in breakfast...!

My German Teacher

My German teacher is really very nice. She is a wonderful teacher.

At fifty six years of age, she is  neither young nor beautiful but tremendously smart and always equally smartly dressed. She is very cheerful natured, concerned, sympathetic, encouraging and is also physically very active and energetic. She takes such pains to make us understand, remembers to appreciate us for our every effort no matter how little it is, strives hard to instill correct pronunciation and above all this she is very affectionate towards all of us.

I love the way she professionaly dresses in trousers, jeans,  shirts and coats and a silk scarf tucked in the neck with a dignified pearl or metal necklace visible discreetly. I wish I could also wear a scarf like she does. It becomes so much on her !

I don’t know how is it, but I have a sort of habit of respecting and loving my teachers blindly, in fact I almost hero worship them just for no reason but that they are my teacher! I started admiring her since the very first day and even told her that I thought she was a great teacher.

I can’t help comparing her with my Dutch teacher Sofie in Belgium. She was a complete antithesis to Martina, my German teacher; she was least bothered about her students, never explained deep and far, was never sympathetic and never appreciated. She had no bonding with the students at all. I rather like blaming my bad Dutch all on to her.

I feel I am so lucky to have Martina.

Learning Dutch...!!!

I had always wanted to learn French and German due to some inner fascination for England, France and Germany ( next comes Italy and Spain !)
I lived in Bangalore for about two and half years and another two years in Pune but the idea of learning Kannada or Marathi was plainly revolting; Kannada is too harsh sounding and tribal lingo type while Marathi sounds like rustics. A language that does not sound attractive, pleasing and polite to one's ears is certainly not worth taking any trouble to learn.
The first opportunity of learning another language came to me when I went to Belgium. Belgium is a small country with large number of people speaking French too. To prevent their native language Dutch from disappearing altogether the Government there is pretty firm on making every immigrant or foreigner learn Dutch entirely free of cost.
I took an avid interest in learning and found Dutch to be very soft sort of language in terms of sound. Many words sound like English gone sour like lemons like North- nord, south- sud, doctor- tochter, short-korts, market-markt. I have discovered I am a sort of born student; I love my class, love my teacher, and simply love anything about studying. My teacher was Sofie, a somewhat pretty girl in her thirties or maybe late twenties and as heavily pregnant as if carrying sextuplets.We were around 15-18 students in the class and I happily remember most of them. Mel from USA, Deborah and Suewellyn from Brazil, Fabiola from Spain, Mustafa and Mohammad, Ahmed from Egypt, Marcie from Iran and then five Indians Savita, Preeti, Silky, Swati, and myself. Savita was doing the first module a second time having dropped off the first time before completion. It was always funny to watch her painful struggles at pronouncing the simple word ' het '. She would pronounce it anywhere from 'hat', ' hut', ' hart',' hurt' or ' hit' except just the right one. I had to seriously remember all these funny pronunciations in order to be able to replicate them in front of S to tell him what fun I had in class. The other Indian gals blandly showed up insolently late for every class and thought it was ok to make fun of the teacher and the outlandish words; so while these were not serious enough, there was Deborah who was far too serious to be comfortable. She was super good, always right, always gave right answers, solved all the exercises and was never wrong and was always studying. She consequently gave the impression that her whole objective of taking birth was to learn Dutch.
The most memorable and nicest one of the whole lot was Marcie, a sweet, shy, scared, reticent, unsure type of girl from Iran who didn't know much English either, just her native Persian.So she carried three dictionaries: Persian to English, Persian to Dutch and Dutch to Persian in addition, her husband translated her entire lessons in Persian.

Despite a mysterious  reverence and love for all my teachers, I will have to admit Sofie was a 'slecht lerares' or 'bad teacher'. That she was too preoccupied because of  her pregnant state or had always been like that naturally  I really cannot tell but she rarely took interest in class. She made lessons dull and boring and never helped students to grasp or learn. So the outcome was, our classes were mercilessly unending and Sofie's speech entirely incomprehensible. When the class ended everyday, instead of feeling relieved, I used to feel grossly depressed and tense that I was understanding or learning nothing.

Incredibly though, I passed off my first module successfully but had to opt out of the second module due to my own pregnancy. Learning Dutch not only became a memorable experience in itself,  it also proved to be highly beneficial to me later on, not only in day to day routine life in Belgium and Netherlands but also in Germany !
Knowledge never goes waste. True

Some Overbearing Women..!!

Women are everything that spells love, care, sympathy, nurture and affection but not all women fit this category. There is a particular specie which is in fact quite to the contrary. I have noticed that particularly overbearing wives are the worst of them all; their behavior is pathetic towards their husbands; they despise, insult, humiliate and control their husband as a military commander with a whiplash in hand.

I know of several women in my acquaintance whose husbands I feel deeply sad for. I wonder how those men can allow themselves to be treated thus.

My student's father who was a millioner businessman had a vicious wife. She scolded him like a street dog in front of all domestic servants and was so overbearing that if anyone of the office staff forgot to wish her she demanded her husband to immidietly fire the employee; furthermore, she would not allow him to hire any female employee, not even for the post of a receptionist and actually got a man installed in the office to keep watch on him like a detective.

My music teacher is an exceptional singer and an instrumentalist and we all students had so much loved his music but his wife hates the same and has banned him from singing or playing any music at home or accept any home tuitions for music. Tragically, he had to give away or sell his many beloved musical instruments which he had at one time spent a fortune in collecting. He dolefully says now, " Before my marriage I was Asim. After my marriage to Rekha I have become Rekha. Asim has died somewhere within me."
An uncle of mine is an artist and you should see how his wife hates his art or everything related to it. Many a times his tools are thrown in the trash bin.
A distant cousin of mine has a wife who he is terribly afraid of; so whatever he does he never tells her for fear of getting scolded. On the other hand the wife strives hard to know what he does by following the back staircase method. Must be a cat and dog situation all the time !!
A friend of mine had strictly forbidden her husband to talk or make/recieve calls from his female students or even in social gatherings. If she even by chance saw him talking to any girl she would turn real ugly with rage. Once a girl just happened to praise her husband's shirt and you know what, on returning back she took a pair of scissors and cut the shirt in 1000 pieces. On another occasion, he randomly praised the sandwich a girl had offered him and then that poor fellow had to eat ONLY sandwiches in all the meals of a day for a whole week. Another acquaintance of mine happens to be a beautiful woman and has a very nice husband but she thouroughly dislikes him and his ideals and principles, insults him in front of visitors or friends and behind his back as well. She thinks she deserved a better husband, he is unfit for her and is just good for nothing.
The latest and perhaps the most disgusting instance is of a wife who continually scolds her husband so much that he looks like a scared mouse all the time. She scolds him or speaks insultingly about him all the time and in front of everyone. Just a single frown on her face is enough to send him into a titzy and immidiately mend his mistake. Poor poor fellow...
There are numerous such examples.

It is disgusting how some women derive pleasure or satisfaction ( maybe neither because it is their normal behavior ? ) in making their counterpart miserable. No, I am not looking at just one part of the picture, nor am I an orthodox who thinks a wife is a slave of her husband. The examples which I have mentioned are the ones whose faimlies I am well aquainted with and I can say with perfect confidence that the wife's unreasonable attitude is the main culprit and yes, they are not the usual tit bits of a happy couple fighting.

I personally feel a woman must never marry a man whom she cannot respect. Respect in a conjugal relationship is about as important as love.

I Do Not Like Women...!

I have somehow never been able to get along well with women and girls in my acquaintance. I find their company tiresome and painfully boring. Women are so different from men and I, frankly speaking, do not like the stuff they are largely made of.

Very few women in this world are capable of talking ( or even responding ) intelligently; The rest all talk shallow and have dangerously limited topics to talk about apart from their all time hot favourite of  in-laws, children and cooking. Their company is shockingly scarce in intelligence, humor and wisdom. They crack silly jokes that actually make me want to weep and then after cracking it, it is typical of them to laugh and expect you to laugh as if it were the best joke of the world. They discuss film stars as a first hand critic and often handle domestic affairs as a biker would an aeroplane.
Why has God given them such a great stamina for talking..; is it to let men have some peace ?

In my school days I wasn't a studious kid who keeps studying 48 hours a day and scores 20 out of 10 in every freak exam but I loved reading and had so many interesting things to do that I had simply no time for time pass friendships. In any case I could not pass time happily with any one below my mental level. It stayed this way even when I started doing a job. I was a teacher and preffered spending my time with lovely innocent 4 year olds rather than with fellow teachers who merely gossiped about the dress they wore and the jewellaries they had. (Excuse me, I was never accused of being haughty or vain, only a bit quiet and hard working. I was polite enough to let them do what they pleased and continued doing what pleased me, OK?)
Now I am married and the situation is somewhat tricky; you see, S is a very warm hearted and friendly man. He has lots of friends from childhood, college and office. Naturally we keep meeting them frequently. According to popular custom in India all the ladies stay together in a different group while all the gents stay together in their seperate group; they even dine seperately. So while S enjoys his time with his friend, I have to ecstaticaly enjoy the company of the wife.
Some of them are truely an ordeal for me...!
Most of them want me to join the 'kitty party' or go on shopping expeditions together. (How I hate this word..! I have never done this rotten stuff and never will do so as long as I am alive. I have discovered often these are just clever strategies for women to show off their status and talk shit in the most innocent and humble manner.) One of them wanted me to show her my lingerie collection and to tell her in detail all that happened on my first night ( she is perfectly decent and straight) while another has only one topic on her mind to discuss with me and that is sex; if I didn't discuss( and now I don't discuss) she used to become rather offended.
Some of them are even secretly hostile to me due to a another variety of reasons but they act as if they are my bestest friend in front of S and as soon as his back is turned you could litrally see them spitting venom ( honeyed of course !)

Suffering company of unwanted women is not restricted to friend's wives alone; it extends further to neighbours also. About a year ago, I used to live in a multi storey building where 15 - 20 Indians lived and were very friendly towards each other. Look, I have full respect, yes, full respect for close cummunity feeling, friendly visits and friendliness but it sort of crossed the limit of comfort for me when I started getting pack of 4-6 girls peeling at my door bell, or ringing and pinging me to accompney them to a fair, shopping or park or cooking together. As it is, the mandatory weekly get - together of all the Indian wives in the building was a total horror to me.
I finally escaped them whem we left that country. Some of them are still living there and sometimes I get a wicked feeling to reveal to them what I secretly thought about their Get Togetheres but I have restrained myself well enough.

Ah well, to each his own !
I understand full well they all have as much right of behaving and acting or believing as they do as I have of mine - none is wrong - it is just the the point of view and personal inclination, likes and dislikes that make something  appear wrong or right.