Tis (almost) the season

It's like I don't want this year to end. I've tried and failed miserably to make it last longer by ignoring the days and dates. I looked at my phone calendar this morning and was shocked that it is already the 18th.

At the beginning of this month, I swore I would make the last month of the year really count. This meant that I would work hard and end the year on a high note. After the first week, all of that went down the drain and with it, I went into a downward spiral of lackluster energy.

I spent a whole week watching videos online, whole chunks of the day just went down the drain hole that is the internet. A few mismanaged days and a whole week was lost. I managed to pull myself out of the hole and attended to some family commitments on the next weekend and had the whole shebang over for a lunch which I enjoyed making, but didn't enjoy eating!

Classes at the studio have been slow. And today I told myself that mentally I had checked out for the whole year. I hope to do my customary year end post which serves as a reminder for all that I have done, what I missed and what I look forward to in the new year.

I've spent long days reading, sleeping, really giving my attention to my cooking, cleaning the house, watching over Sage and cuddling with him. To me this is enough and I am not going to shame myself with regret at having wasted a couple of weeks. As the festive season kicks in, I haven't even put up the Christmas tree yet, will remedy that tomorrow.

Amma was to spend christmas with me this year for a change, but she's had a bout of ill health that's left her drained and so she's decided not to come over. It will be just us for Christmas now as always. I'm hoping to make it small and meaningful. 

Of this and that, but mostly K

Its been a while. Yes, far too many posts have been typed and left to die a slow death in the drafts folder. Far too many posts remain still in my head. I just popped in to say hello and that all is well.

The previously mentioned house help lasted all of 10 days and I was back to sweeping and swabbing. I got another lady to help in a few days and although she is as slow as a snail, she is sincere. That I can live with.

October with the exception of Diwali was a rather slow month for me in terms of my activity at the Studio. Classes happened, but not always with the energy that I like to infuse. I kept at it, because once I have people and they surround me and I am in my teacher's mode, something magical happens to me. I forget the bad mood, the aches and pains and tiredness, the angst with everyone in the universe and hunger even sometimes. I only want to give my all to that batch of eager beavers who are waiting for me to teach them.

On one of our long drives one night about a month ago, with Sage sitting in the backseat with the window open, K said something so different from what I am used to listening that I stopped in my tracks. He said, "you have something I envy. Diligence and a sense of responsibility and commitment which I don't have. Your passion is backed up by solid hard work. The money you earn comes because you work with your hands, each pie of it." In the 19 years that we have been together, this is the first time he has said something like this to me. When you have known someone for more than half your life, it is difficult I guess, to make observations which seem well thought out. One tends to generally go with the everyday flow of things, characteristics they have are slightly blurry from the near-ness. And mostly we focus on the niggling irritants much more than we need to. 

K also told me that if it were him, he would have thrown in the towel and said Fuck it after the third month. And here I was, years later still going at it. He told me that I put the work ahead of me and not my ego and that no matter what, I get up, get dressed and show up for work.

It is not that what he said sounded like praise to me and hence I liked what he spoke. If anything, I value K's opinion on most things, he does not offer a knee jerk reaction to anything.

So at a time when I was really pondering over the wisdom of the added burden of the studio, this came like a nice testament of what I was trying to do. I was energised and felt good again about my decisions.

Sometimes, it is nice to have a vote of confidence from people who's opinion counts. I have a lot of well wishers, those who regularly give me a few shots of confidence, who I call when I am down in the dumps, need to bitch with or just plain whine about my life. This was different.

When you spend so  many years together, there are almost no secrets. You are stripped naked, inside and out. One can second guess every move, every intent, call a bluff from 500 miles and press where it hurts the most. Most of the times, we use these secrets because there is nothing else to use. This day was different. I was grateful not just for the encouragement and praise, but for the fact that time had not dulled his perspective. He was still honest with me, only thing being I liked what spewed out of this honesty.

Changes are good....

... well almost.... It has been 8 days since I sacked my house help. Repeated disregard for my time, general ungratefulness and the last straw was to send an assistant to do my work for weeks on end without even consulting me. All because she found other work and didn't think the work she had at my house was important enough. So one day, when I had really questioned myself with why I was putting up with this level of disregard, I paid her her dues and asked her to leave. 

If she was shocked, she didn't show it. I think she knew it was coming and silently left the house (another testament of how little she valued her work with me currently). K asked me to give her a piece of my mind, but I didn't want to engage with a person so disrespectful. 

I had just suffered severe scalding on my right leg with boiled milk. I had blisters all over and it was very painful to say the least. In the middle of that, I agree it was not the wisest thing to do, sack your househelp. But when one is seriously pissed, logic hardly works. 

Anyway. It has been a week of hectic activity to say the least. I have continued my daily chores with the addition of sweeping, swabbing an apartment where lives a very hairy dog, and doing the dishes, sometimes three times a day. Its not that the work is a lot, it just needs a routine to get used to. The advantage for me is, thanks to Sage I am an early riser. So by 9 AM on most days, I am done for the day. I finish cooking because K needs his dabba, put the washing machine on as soon as I come back from my walk. Washing the dishes and the other little chores of cleaning up the kitchen were the only additions. It was how dependent I was on help that pissed me off. 

With each day, as I scrubbed the vessels, I would seethe with anger towards myself for allowing myself to be taken for granted. I obviously cannot play the boss very well.

So after stubbornly refusing to allow the situation get the better of me, with the burns and blisters healing ever so slowly and my thoughts turning from determination to despair in a flash of a few minutes, I pulled myself up.

I have had an extremely slow last couple of months. I have had full days and weeks and K has been terribly busy. He works more, travels more and we have less arguments. I pointed out to him the other week that we haven't had our customary monthly argument that comes like a period. And he smiled. He told me he had noticed but was too afraid to jinx it that he didn't mention it.

Yesterday I got some help at home. Can't say I was unhappy to give up sweeping and swabbing. At half the price of the previously ungrateful employee. I also had a terrifically productive day, caught up with friends and spent time with the extended family. So changes are good. Sometimes it is the wait that makes you anxious.... sometimes it is the uncertainty. But all in good time

People....

K had a break up a couple of days ago. I told him it was a "friend break up" no different or less difficult than a romantic break up. He'd been uneasy about the frost that set upon his friendship with who he considered his intellectual peer and friend. There was a tragedy in the friend's life and then the frost set in, suddenly. The tragedy is something I still cannot acknowledge, this friend lost a parent who he was devoted to in a very very tragic way. Understandably there was shock and anger and perhaps a lot of guilt too. K rushed to his friend's side as soon as he found out and spent some time. After which, being someone who does not believe in rituals and symbolism, he checked in on his friend but didn't attend the ceremonies that followed. 

I thought they were similar in thought and mind. From where I see it (K's persepective ofcourse) they were friends for every reason and season. Heated debates over philosophy and politics, evenings spent discussing literature and their favourite authors, and staying up all night to watch movies they loved. For over a decade, this friendship was this way.

Life has a way of coming in between. There were weddings and domesticity, milestones, career changes, ups and tumultuous downs. But they never mattered, or so it seemed.  

A few weeks ago, K told me he noticed a listless silence from his friend. That a few attempts to connect after work or on the phone were being brushed aside. He paid a visit on my insistence one day only to be treated with utter coldness. We both put it down to the recent tragedy and that it was understandable that this friend was having a tough time dealing with. 

Then came the curveball. Odes of friendship and support written to the same people he claimed to despise started pouring out of this friend's social networking page. I kept telling K that his friend, despite saying he didn't care for K's absence at the funeral and ceremonies, was upset and that he should clear it out. A couple of texts and chats later, it was off. The deep friendship of over a decade, shared out of their mutual love for all things cerebral was stripped and buried. This friend made a few accusations that K was never available to him and wanted him selfishly, not realising that he was not speaking to him anymore. That it was a monologue since 4-5 years and not a dialogue. 

This has left K very puzzled. The same friend, a few months ago, claimed all forms of love and friendship, naming this friendship as the purest and most objective, whereas all the other people in his life have always wanted something - a contact, a favour or some other kind of help. 

To K I told him that he had always invested in the wrong people. That this particular friendship was more convenience (for the other guy) than anything else and the reason I am making this conclusion is that nothing else explains the yo yo-ing statements. 

This was a guy who was invested in as a friend. He was a part of our lives for over a decade. He ate in our house, stayed with us endlessly, romanced his girlfriend (now wife) in our house and all of this we did selflessly. Without asking for anything in return, because he was a friend, and because we loved him. 

There have been betrayals in the past. Maybe betrayal is too strong a word. Shall I say decisions made based on his convenience, favouring him and with no thought for K's well being. Each time I brought these up, K would simply brush them aside and say that I always doubted people and that this friend would never think that way. But it happened, again and again, until, a few years ago, when K was willing to give up his most successful venture to join hands with this friend to follow a dream. That's when I put my foot down for the first time and said no. I forced K to rethink and that pipe dream fell through. 

How convenient it is to live in a bubble where you are the victim. How nice when you insulate your existence with a blanket of lies. How perfectly suitable your talent for storytelling becomes to twist the tale where you are the martyr. I marvel at these instances. I get that K is not blameless. He is not a guy who will call you everyday to check if you are ok. But when you need him, he will be there. But to say the things that have been said to him, is pure calculation. 

He spent a day reminiscing their memories. We spoke late into the night and I knew he was trying to figure out where he went wrong, what he didn't do right, why he wasn't cautioned earlier. He hasn't done that for any other relationship. The next morning, he woke up and told me that he had buried it, it was over for him and that he would not be affected anymore. That he spoke about it only so that he could give it its due and then bury his memories. '

I smiled at him gently and said ok. I however took another couple of days to process this. I was angry at the lies and the tales of his now ex-friend, but I also realised that a weak man has nothing but stories to insulate and vindicate him, that these were the straws he was clutching at. One thing that I know about K is that he is a man without fear. He will call a spade a spade and be ready for the consequences of all his actions. It is surprising that the said friend, who is unafraid to speak on any topic has remained silent for all the years he felt the friendship had ceased to exist.

If indeed that was true, how did he manage to feign a freindship and affection for almost 4 years that he said he wasn't feeling the love or closeness? Did he not think that the two of them deserved to sort out these things rather than break up? It is baffling how people will turn around and accuse you of the things that have been contrary to what you have displayed. 

While K is going about his life like all of this never happened, I somehow am getting drawn back to the meetings and evening spent and conversations that happened and food that was shared. Either all of what is being said now is false, or what happened over the last decade is false. Or did a convenience just outlive itself and get misunderstood as friendship by K? Answers I may never find. But I guess people are like that....one only has their own conscience to live with. 

Lessons from IFBM

It's been over a week. Its in the past and it has been accomplished. I quite felt like Jesus Christ last week when the IFBM was finally over and I landed squat in the middle of loudly talking people inside an egg (An egg shaped lounger by the pool). I looked up to the setting sun over Bangalore and silently told myself "It is finished".

For better or worse, the project that I took up with a few others had been done, completed and seen through to the final goodbyes.

IFBM meant many things to me personally and rabidly to me as a blogger. Personally it was a challenge and I had fast-track lessons in multi tasking, project management, people skills and selling. There were other lessons too, but those are not as significant as these ones. The meet could not have come at a more busy time in my life. I had just launched the studio and with it came the ginormous anxiety of scheduling, planning, managing and conducting classes. K told me in not so uncertain terms that I was making a huge mistake. That I was taking on a project that would yield me nothing (monetarily) and yet suck out every ounce of my time and energy.

He was not wrong. But I was sure of what I was doing. I knew his warnings meant "don't come whining to me" and I didn't, almost entirely. The minute I would utter IFBM, he would give me the eye roll and I would stfu.

Amma had her operation at the end of June, and her prep and recovery took a lot out of me as well. She stayed independent and I got a lot of help from my MIL, but the anxiety and the post operative care were squarely on me and that drained me more than I wanted to admit. Sage could not have chosen a worse time to take his epilepsy up a few notches and while I know the poor bugger had no say in the matter, it came like a cluster and stayed there with days and nights of no sleep and added anxiety.

Personally I wanted to push myself and see where it would take out of me. I have seen a surge of energy and enthusiasm in me when the going gets tough and I was relying purely on adrenalin to see me through what intelligence, hard work and planning couldn't supply. I have never been this driven to prove a point, or make something work. I have always been the person to do a recce and abandon a project if it seemed too much work. The last year and a half have made me mentally stronger if nothing else. And I was determined to listen to everyone who mattered and had an opinion, but only follow my heart and do what I felt was right.

I've always shied away from sales. And IFBM pushed the envelope for me. From talking about the concept and articulating it to the people who formed the team, getting bloggers to participate and most importantly get brands and sponsors on board. I had a few moments of feeling like an insecure housewife with no exposure to the corporate world, I felt I would be called out for being silly and worse still - stupid. But that didn't stop me. Talking to potential participants, vendors, partners, brands and team mates, no issues - Bring it on.

I had a few very uncomfortable conversations (more on that later, in another post) all through the run up and even post IFBM. I had conversations that had me clutching at my heart while I had them, but I had them. I didn't let my personal threshold for comfort come between what needed to be done. I discovered that if I am sincere and honest, I can speak my mind and not care about the repercussions.

As a blogger, IFBM was important to me for the sole reason that I had this vision to create a platform that would not be dwarfed by any single or a collective of individual bloggers. Having been a blogger for over 7 years now, I still see myself as an outsider to food blogging for several reasons. I don't have an agenda for my blog. After all these years, that still rings true. Design, photographs, stats and PR clout still don't bother me. The blog is something I love writing, but it will never have a frenzied agenda. It has led me to several things, the most life changing being my studio, but it will never take over my life. I acknowledge the many beautiful and successful blogs, the ones that have been monetized and those that have crossed over to being other successful things like writers and consultants.

So when we conceptualised IFBM, I wanted it to be a platform for bloggers of all kinds to come and make their own, small, big, old, new, regular and not so, famous and the unknown. The platform has now been created and it was heartening to see the bonding amongst bloggers from across the country. They met as old friends. I met several people I have known and admired through their blogs. Some felt like long lost friends and with some I know I will definitely keep in touch.

Several times during the course of this event, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Doing something with a set of like minded people who display enthusiasm and energy is one thing. Circumventing fragile egos and self appointed experts who only want the spotlight is something else. Twice I considered pulling out. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had. For one, I believe I am not a quitter, for the second, this was a dream I had nurtured for so long and that alone made me want to honour it and not give up.

Becoming a solutions seeker was another important lesson learnt. Not allowing any situation or person to bog me down. And never ever talking down to myself.

At times when there was complete lack of clarity, I just listened to my heart. Some very important decisions were made as a leap of faith and they totally reiterated that taking those leaps were the best things to do. Aloft the hotel was chosen by one such leap and I am a richer person to have partnered with them. They made me realise what passion, focus and humility to accept any kind of work would result in. They humbled me with the trust and belief they put in the event I represented and made me aim for much more especially at times when there wasn't much support coming through from any other source.

The sessions turned out to be value giving and I was happy for that. As a trainer and as a person with a very low threshold for failure and high personal standards, I know that the content needs to be worked on for the next time. While there were a few things which went awry, most of the event went very well and as per schedule. The ecstasy on the faces of the participants was testimony to how much they enjoyed it.

In the end, all those fears were put to rest and we pulled off a spectacular event. The press coverage has been kind and I have had to turn off the notifications on FB to stay sane after a couple of days!

I have a mile long list of things that need fixing. I didn't bask in the afterglow for very long because there was just so much physical and mental debris to clear out. After holding myself in high energy and alertness over 4 days, I had a sudden overwhelming wave of fatigue hit me. In one stroke, my body felt like lead and I advanced my ticket to return home. I could not have trudged through another day without burying my face in the fur of my puppy. As I boarded the flight back home, after an argument with the airline for excess baggage (20 kilos!) and stone cold idlis, I realised, for better or worse, I had done it. I had stayed the course and managed to put the result of something much larger than myself before me. It was finished…. I was free to go back home and play with my puppy and sleep and eat like a normal human.

I came back home with a raging fever that lasted 1 full day. I realised how much physical and mental bandwidth this event had taken out of me. But I was very pleased, that it didn't scare me, that it didn't get the better of me and the results were there for everyone to see.

If there is one very important lesson I learnt from IFBM, it was never ever to lower my standards for anything or anyone. To always stay focused on what is important. There will be many things that come as irritants, acknowledge them, but don't allow them to hijack what you set out to achieve.

In another time and day, I could have never done this. I was grateful for the support of R. For the voice of reason and non stop ear to my rants, we formed a formidable pair and it was nice to see that passion in another person. I drew from her strenght as I hope she was able to draw from me. Valuable lessons learnt, but importantly meaningful relationships strengthened.