Letting it go

When is a good time to accept that your child is very far from being that little blob of mass with an alien face who needed every minute of your time but more of a grown up individual with a mind of his own? And if anything he needs from you, it is to stop breathing down his neck about every single thing. About TV, about food, about sleep, about studies, about time to leave home, about time to return home, the language…. oh the list is too long.

While RRJ takes  my (our) nagging quite sportingly and continues to be our good friend, I am a little tired of myself being this person who is not able to respect the notion of independence that RRJ seems to be developing at a rapid rate.

About ten days back during his exam week, RRS was traveling, that particular day it was already dark outside, time was well past seven, RRJ was nowhere to be seen and I was wandering in the street telling myself, "he has had it." After a few minutes I decided to check his friend's home in the next block. There I got to know he didn't come back with them. Walking back towards home I saw two thin legs and yellow bat walking up the stairs. I decided to wait and see what would mr. grown up do when he finds the house empty. I heard him opening the bolted door, "hello……. hello, Amma?" then there was silence. Trring… my cell phone rang in my hand, I had no choice but to pick up. "I am back. Where are you?" The guts! Where am I? Anyway as I walked up the stairs with each step I regained my cool and in the most mild manner possible told him that it was too late and I was worried and perhaps in the next hour he should bathe, eat and study for the exam next day. He didn't argue that there was no need to take bath or study. Later in the night while going through the grammar book I learnt a few things, like colours are actually adjectives and not nouns! And in the last page of the book I learnt a few more things:

D. Write five sentences about your mother.

1. my mother will cook nicely
2. my mother tells me the right things when I have fever
3. my mother tells me the right things when I have my exams
4. my mother works in IIT Madras
5. my mother is a 'nise' mother.

I was just so happy to read those sentences. Each of those, I know exactly what he means by them. Collectively, don't they seem to be talking about a sensible, calm and collected person. Perhaps from some angle I do appear like that. Or perhaps my son is indeed so grown up that he knows where what not to write.

Cross-shabds

1 across
Didi had two points to make to the ousted minister (6)

1 down
Stumbling a grid with help is what she (maybe he) does (8)

Non-dairy icecream

In my quest for recipes which are non-dairy, easy to make and great to taste, I never thought I will come across one for an ice-cream. And yet in an email from my father was a link to just that. Diced overripe bananas. Frozen. And finally zipped in a blender. As simple as that and it is absolutely unbelievable how overripe banana which used to be considered good only for baking or binning transforms in to this very ice-creamy avatar. We have been having it almost everyday and RRJ's favourite is the one flavoured with fresh strawberries (well, we freeze them prior to blending).

Life ka formula

I had a bit of a jolt last month when I had to visit the doctor after a week long dull headache. Thankfully the doctors didn't find anything serious but the fact that they thought that it was a stress headache and prescribed some stress-medication has caused much anguish and perhaps even more stress ever since. Who me? And that too now? I feel so sane, so content and so insanely happy, surely the internal stress meter had it got all wrong or perhaps not.

Just today, the theme of discussion in the class was fatigue in metals and how people over the years have tried to characterise it by identifying the key parameters and coming up with expressions which describe the experiments reasonably well. The key parameters were words we use in day-to-day life, like stress, strain, fatigue, endurance limit, life etc. etc.  As it was about time to wrap up the class I thought it was about time I did a dimensional analysis of life and arrive at the formula for stress in life that would be simple enough and yet captures the essential features of the phenomenon. So right after the class, on a sheet of paper some serious rocket science was done to identify the key parameters that affect the stress level, and I came up with these:

1. f: the fraction of ideal that meets one's approval. So if there is an ideal ice-cream. If one is happy with something that is just 10% of the ideal, f=0.1. If it takes only the ideal to satisfy, f=1.0. I feel as a kid one's f is usually low, and rapidly increases with age.
2. n: number of people one feel responsible for. It includes every one for whom one feels one can do something to improve their situation, be it immediate family, team members at workplace, or the person living in some part of the world who is dying of starvation while you are throwing away some food to empty the fridge.
3. m: the number of people who appreciate your efforts in general.
4. p: the level of details that your plans have in a scale of 0 to 10. The more you want to control the more you feel stressed.

 After some more rocket science, the final expression was narrowed down to

The more picky you are (high f), the more people you feel responsible for (high n), the more you want to control (high p) all lead to higher stress. And after all that if no one appreciates your efforts, no matter what you do the stress tends to infinity!  Ouch!

So does my formula work for you? What are your controlling parameters? Tell me and become part of m!