I seem to have skipped a few entries here, things have been pretty hectic around here for a while and this blog kept getting procrastinated. It’s the holiday season in this part of the world and two of the main religions, Hinduism and Islam have both had the year’s biggest festivals going on. The holy month of Ramadan is just wrapping up and the Diwali season is just starting up. Busy, busy, busy. For many of the people here, both festivals are times of celebrations. Both religious groups often join in each others celebrations and participate in the festivities.
Though my work isn’t really affected by either of these festivals, it does create a management nightmare with one group or the other taking a few days off to finish off the festival chores. This leaves the remaining group to take up the slack. Many times both groups take off together and the work comes to a standstill. I suppose its like this for the rest of the country as well. But the actual workload is less at these times because designing and printing are really not at the forefront of most people’s agenda for the holidays. So it does tend to balance itself out provided a little planning precedes the season.
The personal front has been pretty busy as well. My sister had another beautiful baby boy last week and my mother has gone to Jersey to help her out. The Americans get hardly any time off for deliveries. They get six weeks off for maternity leave but the day care centers only accept babies who are over 8-10 weeks old. I can’t figure out what they expect the mother to do for the remaining 2-4 weeks especially for families where both partners are working as in the case of my sister. India is far better in that respect. We don’t need to harp about family values, we practice them.
In addition, the exam dates for Eva have been declared and so my wife is busy preparing probable test questions from her syllabus. The course is exhausting and to think that Eva is just in fourth standard. Poor girl. We overwork our kids with studies but I suppose that being a third world country we have to try that much harder to keep up with the world. And from the 22nd of this month to the 8th of next, she’ll be busy with her third terminals. My job is to type out the dummy question papers Swati prepares and then give Eva practice tests so that she is confident enough when the actual paper comes. Most parents I know work along similar lines.
This is also the season of cockroaches. These small half inch beasts invade every household as the temperatures outside start dropping. Since we live on the ground floor, our house is especially susceptible to these critters. And they love to party at night. With small kids in the house, getting rid of these roaches is a priority war. I’m just not comfortable with pesticides in the house but there does not seem to be a choice about it. To get a speedy resolution of the problem, chemicals seem to be the only answer. The sprays take about a week of repeated applications and then, hopefully, freedom for another year. I suppose since they are all domestic insecticides they should be safer than the industrial stuff if we were to get the house fumigated. And the results would be the same. Its just during this season that we get the roaches. The rest of the year goes by pretty peacefully without them.
Leave a Reply