Preeti Shenoy's blog.

When I was moving to the UK from Pune, India, one of the things that saddened me the most was giving away my collection of  about forty potted plants which had moved with me every place I moved. These plants were the plants I had lovingly grown, after I got married. Each plant had a story and each had been chosen with care and carefully tended to. Satish knows my love of plants and nature (and animals) and whenever I went out of town, he would never forget to water them. We had moved and lived in about nine houses in a span of  eleven years and yet each place we moved, the plants would arrive behind us like Bo beep's sheeps, sometimes wilted (as it would take three days in a truck at times) and they always survived.Sadly, they would never survive an International move and also there is a ban on bringing plants and other stuff into the United Kingdom. So we left them behind. When I relocated to UK, all I inherited  as a 'garden' was a sad looking patch of earth with a lot

Funny how time changes things so much. Thirteen years ago on this day, I became a mother. It was my first born and I was as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I did not know how to hold my new born son and I had to call my mum or my aunt to even lift him. I was so afraid of not supporting his neck right (new born babies cannot hold up their neck and need to be supported and carried in a particular way) and he seemed so tiny (even though he weighed a healthy 3.25 kgs) and I was so scared of hurting him. Funny, how within a week I was able to even manage giving him a bath and how I learnt to even manage the cord stump.  And then his first year. Oh how delightful it was! He was such a sweet, gorgeous baby. He started sleeping through the night at three months.I began reading books to him when he was three months old. He was such a joy and truly no trouble at all, that I even travelled without my husband, to Darjeeling and Gangtok  when he was just five

Most people who don't have children, have a  fairly stable routine and  days of work (unless of course you happen to be the official photographer for Kingfisher Calendar or a flight attendant or Rakhee Sawant,  in which case I doubt you would be reading this blog :-)). But people who have children--oh, they will agree with me, when I say  that each day there is a new drama which unfolds. You really don't need reality TV (move over Pamela Anderson)  when you have kids. There is enough entertainment provided on a daily basis, except that sometimes you are an active participant  (at times unwittingly the clown) in this reality show and you don't even realise it till you put your feet up at the end of the day. But a lot of times it also seems  like we are transported back to our childhood, through our children. The kids these days might be natives to Internet, might have had far more exposure than we did at their ages and might be tech-savvy little geniuses but the fact is

The other day the newspaper carried an article which showed three young guys from the city who had developed a Facebook application for wishing your friends on their birthdays. It wasn't an application that merely reminds you when a birthday is upcoming (I have no grouses against that) but this was an application which would do the actual wishing for you at midnight, while you slept or watched a movie or had sex or do whatever you do at midnight. It could personalise the wish as much as you wanted ( or as little as you wanted) and it would post a message on your friend's wall at midnight as though you had written it yourself , and your friend would be no wiser. You merely had to enter all the dates of your friends birthdays one time. The article said that this way, you would never have to keep track of any birthdays or take the actual effort to wish a friend or even  forget to wish a friend and your friend would be happy and moved that you  really took the trouble to wish hi

Every single day I get a new word in my inbox from dictionary.com . Sometimes they are words I know, sometimes they are new.If it is a new word, I usually try and understand the context in which it is to be used and I look at the way it is pronounced too. An interesting word I got yesterday was the word 'Ullage'. It set me thinking. Right now I have relocated from UK to India, and we have moved into a lovely home, which is at the moment, completely bare.  There are no tables, no chairs, no microwave, no TV, no kitchen utensils and worst of all, no writing desk, books, the kids toys or my art stuff which is all bobbing in a ship, in a container in the Pacific Ocean or perhaps it has reached Indian Ocean--who knows! They tell us it will finally arrive by month end. (am keeping my fingers crossed). I am cooking with a few borrowed pans and plates. We sit on the bare floor and eat our meals. Getting stuff organised in India, I am discovering is a long, lengthy and extremely frus

Moving homes is hard. Moving home from one country to another, it is even harder. But I think the hardest is to be without a home which is what my current situation is.  We reached India on 19th October, exhausted after travelling for more than 24 hours,(it is such a long long long way) bone weary,  jet-lagged and wanting to run back to a comfortable place called home. Except, there was no home. The last of our belongings had been boxed and shipped, our lives neatly packed into cartons, labelled and despatched with cool crisp efficiency of an International relocation agency. It took me more than ten days to get my body clock set to Indian Time. Was I glad to back in India? I really had no time to notice as there were and still are a million things to be done. Right now we have been put up in a company guest house and we're trying to set up things from here. We have managed to find an excellent school for the children (they got chosen into four schools which was a pleasant s