Rains

It's a Saturday morning. Despite many precautions, I am down with severe throat infection and viral. Vasudha and Ananya have gone to school and it is raining outside. Looks like the first decent rain of this Monsoon. Earth is thirsty...the reserved water has all evaporated. To sustain it need fresh reserves and this rain is vital. I have been quite irregular with my writing. Every time I resolve to be regular, I don't know what goes wrong. Last when I wrote, I thing Ananya was 16 months old. She is now 22 months...growing faster than our belief. In another 2 months she will be 2 years. Time flies...

A lot happened in the past 6 odd months. I got an unprecedented appraisal from all my superiors. I felt really great. It came with extra responsibility but perhaps this is the time when you can sweat and gain. Finally, Vasudha also got what she deserved...after almost two years of talks, finally she joined Vidya Sanskar as Vice Principal and left Pathways once again. Pathways was a great workplace. She had spent 6 years there. She is quite liking her new job but has been keeping very occupied ever since she joined.

Ananya has started speaking well. She has picked up fast and can construct short sentences. She surprises us all with new words - both English and Hindi. I want her to respect Hindi...there is a growing tendency of hating our mother tongue. Children suffer from inferiority complex if they can't speak/write good english. To me, there isn't anything wrong in learning, grasping and mastering any language but one must know its national language. I know I live in a country where there are 20+ languages and I respect them all still I feel we must honour our national language as most of the developed nations in the Europe do.

We have shifted our base too. After a very long stay in Gurgaon 2003 (March) -2010 (June) with one year in Bangalore, we have shifted to Noida, yet another sub-urban region of New Delhi. The habitat is good. I must acknowledge that it is far superior than the ones we lived in Gurgaon but UP is quite a backward state and this place, despite being ahead of others, is no exception. Anyway, after a long time, I got a home closer to my work place. I take just 15 minutes to reach office now as opposed to a couple of hours earlier. The last time I saw this was when we lived in Navi Mumbai back in 2003. But it is far for Vasudha now. She travels at least for an hour if not more.

Life is still not very normal. Both of us are still not able to give time to ourselves. Ananya takes away the most of it. But I think it is the part of the life. I have to start writing my Ph.D but so far there has been no headway. I have started collecting some books but that's about it. I think one needs to be quite disciplined to make all these things happen together. I am not able to make it happen so far....Hopefully I will get some free time to start the work. Once the momentum is there, it will be easy.