Oh-man Air (Oman Air)

So here I am all excited and packed up, set to spend Christmas with my folks after two long years. Never mind the Heathrow close-out, and that flights were operating at a reduced capacity, I was gleeful that mine was going to definitely fly. Out, out, out of this country drowning in snow and morbid tempers attributed to snow.

Hurrah!

The joys of flying, that too, on long haul flights with a 14 month old is nothing new. It's as easy as the Nile flowing into Mississauga. So with a car-seat and my hand baggage containing baby items, and my 10 kg bundle of joy, I attempted passing through immigration, security and customs. Of course, I wished dear OT was there. But he was at work. So it was just us, mommy and son, out in the big bad world of airline hostility (I mean, hospitality).

While I am sure that Steven Slater has not a single mean bone in him, what amazes me about the Airline industry is the blatant understanding that people can be shoved, pushed or even elbowed if they do not have an Abercrombie and Fitch look or better still if they fall into the 'I am nearing my expiration date on planet Earth' category. So what if it is a service oriented business. Any service is a service as long as we reach our destination in one piece. Thank God!

So here I am with my little one, crammed unfortunately into 'Cattle Class' as Mr. Shashi Tharoor would have said. And as the usual norm for a traveller with a toddler, I am seated in the first row in an aisle seat. This is so that I can easily reach out to the basinet provided for my baby who is too big for the basinet. I ask the stewardess to bring down my car-seat which I laboriously tagged along from home to Heathrow to the flight, all by myself, and which she had heartlessly placed in the overhead lockers. I had made a mental note that upon disembarking I would give her a short speech about snatching away a car-seat from a single parent. You don't know what you are doing; it's the Elixir of Life for weary hands.

She said she would do it as soon as she had finished serving an older gentleman. Fair enough. 30 mins passed, and then she came with the dinner trolley. She was intelligent enough to pull out my tray, place my dinner onto the tray and then brusquely leave. Well she had done the same for everyone else sitting near me. Why should she be any different to me? Why, because I had made a mistake of actually reproducing and bringing along my brood, silly me! My eyes must have been popping out of anxiety or whatever, the young man sitting next to me, quickly offered to put down my dinner tray onto the floor, right next to my left leg. I did not care anymore, go ahead dear one, place it anywhere, as long as my boy is fine. After another 20 mins the head stewardess came by, saw my food tray and asked if I needed help. Sure I do, I said. If I was going to try to put any of that food into my mouth, I needed to put my boy somewhere, and the car-seat would be a good place I suggested. She however had a different idea. She said it would be good to make him sit in the basinet, which has hung from the wall, around 3 feet above the floor. In my sane mind I knew it was not the right thing to do that, but then I was assured that a stewardess would stand by while I finish my dinner. I thought it might work. But lo behold, the moment I put my son into the basinet, like any frivolous 14 month old, he just put his leg out in an attempt to get out. So here he was 3 feet above the floor in a basinet which to him was a bath tub, with his leg hanging out. O my God. My heart almost came into my mouth. And by the way the stewardess who was supposed to guard my son had just bent down to do something to her shoes. I was now determined, if not adamant about eating my dinner. I just had to figure out how. I picked up my son, placed him on my lap, put the dinner tray on the floor and switched on Toy Story. Watching Toy Story for the fourth time seems so much fun now.

Around 50 minutes later, with my little fella breaking all hell loose and the kind people, especially the young man in the seat next to me, whose face said - I am never ever going to have children, wrinkling their noses in desperation, I walked into the stewardess' area at the back of the plane and handed over my son to the stewardess. Now normally I would have asked somebody near me to help, because my 5 ft 2" frame is a limitation in situations like these when one has to reach out to the skies (overhead lockers in this case). But the course of the evening had not been a normal one, so I had to resort to extreme measures. She looked shocked, then came along to my seat, pulled down the car-seat uttering the following ' I am doing you a favour by taking down the baggage for you. We normally do not do this'. Dear Lord.

I thought of a fitting reply, but then my maternal instincts took over and I let it go. I smiled at her and merely said 'Really, are you.

I placed my son in his car-seat, rocked it a few times before he fell asleep. Then ate dinner.

When the flight landed, I waited for everyone else to disembark, even the stewardesses, one of whom actually jumped over my hand baggage. So with my little fella on my arm, his car-seat flung around my hand-baggage I got down from the 'New Wings of Oman'. My seven hours of close-to-hell experience had ended.

Oh-man Air!

Flavours of India: Racism

Last evening, I was talking to this old friend. She is an Indian married to a extremely handsome and charming African-American. She was worried about her daughter's new school, where some of her classmates had problems about her ethnicity. Though both of us avoided mouthing that disgusting, troubling word, I knew exactly what she was talking about.


But wait a minute, racism is not just a disease in one part of the world, and it is not restrained to just one race of people. Oh yes, like the Six Hats training program at my first job, anyone can wear a Racist-hat any time. And in India we do it, in different ways. No surprises there. Our racist views and actions driven by them come cheap too, are you listening, you dollar-mongering world?

I remember a time when I was eight, and travelling in a bus when a frail, silver-bearded old man, with a white cap( indicating he was a Muslim) boarded the bus and no one offered him a seat. I could hear the word 'Mia' being said several times. I did not understand it back then, but later learnt that being a 'Mia' was a passport to being lynched in broad daylight, with the cops cheering. And by the way, it did happen.

We have different flavours of racism. The most easily recognisable, is the caste system, where a rag-picker and a bank-teller are people who, will never ever share a table. And the colour of your skin, your last name, the state you belong to, the religion you follow, and yes, the fact whether you are a meat-eater can all be stacked up against you, and dear Lord, you sure can be a victim of racism.

So if you are from the northern state of Bihar, you must have a lot of cattle at home and in your barn, if you are dark-skinned then you are a 'Madrasi', if you follow a non-vegetarian diet (eggs, not included) then you are a Brahmin, and if you are a non-vegetarian (eggs, included) then you must had had an inter-caste marriage. The list is endless.

Yes, India is a democratic country, you can live the way you want. But we still are very caught up in these flavours.

Paranoid and a mum

For the past five weeks my little one has had a combination of cold, severe chest congestion, fever and diarrhoea. In his numerous visits to the GP and my several, almost frantic calls to the Helath Service Direct Helpline, we have seen that the advice we are given is something that requires no medical prowess or the tough-medical school education. Sometimes the advice given, is as ridiculous as 'make him comfortable', or 'its a virus, but it will clear out on its own', or ' his body will eventually develop immunity to it' or 'it is common for all children these days'.


The general mentality here is that children cannot be referred to a paediatrician unless they have their spleens hanging out!


Last evening, adamant on getting a blood test done we took him to the GP, who though sympathetic and highly dramatic in his mannerisms, has asked on a couple of occasions of my educational background because I speak my mind on my son's condition. He suspects me to be a medical student who did not have enough passion to complete MBBS!! He very reluctantly wrote a prescription for a blood test but warned that there was nothing to be found in the blood, because on physical examination my son was perfectly ok! Wow!

He has now advised me to go for the blood test after two weeks. His argument is that  my son's case is not a solitary one, he says it's common for children who start nursery around this time of year, and for three months after they have started nursery to go through a 'coping with bacterium' or better still, 'building an immunity' phase. He further suggests the fact that my little one is up and about and partially recovers for a few days is a sign that his body is perfectly normal and he should definitely get better in some days.


While I completely appreciate his findings, as a mother, the devil's advocate in my mind is constantly nagging me with the question - What if the doctor is wrong? Just because every child who goes to nursery has similar pains, does that mean my son too has the same case? What if, it is not the case? For the moment, it's just a doctor's physical examination that indicates my son's so-called good health!! So what if, there are some serious underlying problems that are not been found? Am I being paraniod or just a mum?


My started his nursery a month ago. Since then he has attended nursery only for 12 days. The remaining days he was at home because the nursery does not accept children if they are a little 'unwell'. The word unwell means if his stools are a little loose, they call me and ask to collect him from the nursery. In the last two weeks, they have done this twice. Also they have a 24 to 48 hour policy, which means we cannot send him back for the next two days as well!

So in total we have paid two whole months' fees (which is approximately the amount that I will get if I sell my right kidney!) and we end up having to take care of him at home, taking time off from work. It makes me wonder if I should just become a homemaker, baking cup cakes?

Do we all deserve a second chance

Jon Venables has now become the epitome of the devil. This man now just needs a face and that should be enough for him to be easily buried alive or burnt at a stake or be bled to death. The media has once again done what it does best in the past, cornered an individual so brutally that his own mother would have wished that he had died in her womb. Agreed, that Venables had committed a crime that defies all innocence attributed to 10 year-olds. It was unthinkable, society could not come to terms with it. James Bulger's mother can never forgive him and nor can we. But should we even try to understand what led him to commit his most recent crime? Can a 10 year old, with a fresh identity be cleansed and purged of his sins and be actually made conducive to society again? Have we devised methods to clean the unclean spirit and give a person a new identity?

India - on a long road to real progress

A few years ago all that the world knew about India were basmati rice, snake charmers, kings and palaces and of course, the indomitable Ganges. Now you would wonder why I have chosen to name the Ganges thus, but is it a mere coincidence that a river which cleanses the Hindu soul of all blemishes is in dire need of a thorough sanitization drive?

Now, what else does India have to exhibit to the world outside? Of course, there is cricket, as there was cricket in 1983. Dhoni and his pack of daring, media savvy, young boys are what has transformed cricket from an Englishman’s game to a cult. A cult, which has every Indian from age 5 to 77 as its member.

Then of course, we have the array of Indian beauty queens and their impeccable answers about world peace and removing poverty from third world nations, who have won accolades for the country. We love our beautiful women, and now the world loves them too. Whatever they say really does not need to make sense, as long as they look good on the front cover of Vogue.

I am not using this space to write about India being the world’s back office hub. It’s a fact that we very well know and a lot of print space has been used up listing the benefits of outsourcing.

Two days ago, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ a movie about how luck and destiny play God to a poor ragtag kid from the Mumbai slums, won eight Oscars. It’s a feel good movie, especially in these recession-struck times when people getting laid off and factory units shutting down, are news bits that no more cause anxiety, just a sense of the I-knew-it-was-coming feeling.

India with its huge population stands to make a global impact. The country has produced eminent scientists, doctors, actors, musicians, sportspersons, journalists, writers and economists. But then, this educated class form just a miniscule of the Indian people. The real India dwells in villages, where electricity and water are still rationed commodities, where education is meant only for boys and dowry is a must for girls, where women are given a little more value than cattle. Yes, the country has progressed, but that progress means nothing to Meera, who like her mother did, walks 12 miles daily to fetch water for her family. And needless to say, there are many such Meeras in India even today.

Who will take up their cause?

Scary times these

Yesterday while waiting in the foyer for Ron before the 6.30 pm Mass, a young man walked up to me and said "I am hungry and helpless, need small change help". I was taken aback to hear such heart-wrenching words and pulled out some change to give him. But before I could hand him anything, Andrew our lead choir singer walked past and shooed the man away. I was not amused.
Later Andrew explained that this young man had been a regular church member and he had lost his job some months. He had since then appeared every day, a few minutes before Mass asking for alms. He was a Polish immigrant, he had a family of five to feed back home. His job as a construction worker had been just enough, but he now had absolutely nothing left.
He had tried to snatch a lady's purse a few days ago, and the kind woman having known his present state, had given him a few pounds and not contacted the authorities.
I think this story is similar to that of many people who have come to UK searching for a better livelihood, and have been stabbed hard by the recession. It has changed many into beggars, hapless puppets, crooks, people living with very less dignity or pride.

Technical Writing in a new place

Technical writing is a niche area. And a technical writer is a commodity for only companies whose budgets are all swelled up with last quarter's excess revenue. Therefore getting a job, that is of interest to you might take a while, especially if this is your first time in the region.
Here are a few tips on how to get a job if you are in a small city.

1. Visit the most intellectual places like universities, libraries and schools, where they might need someone to write and train people.
2. Another good shot would be to network as much as possible. You also stand a chance to make good friends that way.
3. Blog a lot about the place and include information about local places of interest.

Good luck!