NRI Maami

Gone are the days when one thought long and hard before clicking. Consider the effort of waiting for a full roll to run, carrying it to the photo studio, picking up a receipt, keeping it safely, remembering to pick it up after a few days, and then anxiously checking out how that shot turned out, only to find that someone had their eyes closed.

Having grown up in urban settings, when we first moved to a god-forsaken, off-the-highway, factory colony to live, any trip to civilization took us through roads flanked by vast expanses of green. I would be promptly wowed. “Appa… stop stop.. please.. orae oru photo.. please please” I would scream. Appa would sigh and pull the ambassador to a stop on the side of the road. My brother would eagerly peep out to see what had caught my attention. I would hop out and click a picture of a paddy field. Amma would say “Indha pachaya evlo tharavai dee photo eduppae?”.  “Po ma.. evlo greeenaa irukku paaru” would be my explanation to that. In hindsight, my amma was right. They all turned out the same. Appa’s photographic aspirations were entirely different. When I asked him to click pictures of a beautiful waterfall, he would ask me to get into the picture too. He would never waste a photograph on something that did not have a human being in it. So, the result would be a photograph that would be circulated among my friends as.. “Can you see behind me.. there.. behind my brother.. that white thing.. that was a beeeeeeeeutiful waterfall you know…”.

For many years our luck with cameras was extremely bad. When I was at my photogenic best, at age 2, apparently my parents had a camera that either had no flash or a poor one. If I did something cute, amma would instantly transport me to the balcony outside and click black and white pictures of me. That would explain why all my ‘toddlerhood’ pictures have the same backdrop. Then we had what was called a hot-shots camera, which seemed to have served a fair term, until one find day, it decided to add it’s own watermark, a black band along the side. A few cameras came and went, we invariably found that when we needed one most, somehow we were left in the lurch. One camera conked off on our last trip as a family. My father then went looking high and low for a studio in a city new to us, purchased a camera in 15 minutes and rushed back to the tourist bus before we took off. My worst camera disaster occurred in my efforts to acquire a digital camera. Shortly after we were married, my husband and I living in a foreign country, thought we could use a digital camera, so that I could send home pictures of everything from the couch to the bathroom rug. Just as we were contemplating this, a lady stopped us on the road and told us we had won a digital camera. All we had to do is take a cab to her office few blocks away, sit through a presentation at the end of which we would receive our free gift. We thought the timing was uncanny. We couldn’t believe our luck. We endured the most boring and wasted 3 hours of our life trying to be sold a useless holiday timeshare. We were finally handed a digital camera that I would now gladly give to my 2 year old as a toy. That useless!!!

Everybody now has a digital camera. A person I know carries it in her car, and when stuck in traffic, photographs snow falling on her windshield. It makes anyone feel like a professional photographer. People read reviews on everything from amazon to CNET, evaluate shutter speeds, zoom, smaller size, bigger screen, media support etc.. etc.. Compare other people’s cameras with theirs. Ask the most knowledgeable questions… All this to take pictures of people at parties, kids at home with beaming smiles and parents at the Niagara falls. Romba over pa!

I don’t recollect when I first observed Valentine’s day. Perhaps a few went by when I was in college, wondering if perhaps some miracle might drop an archies card my way signed by ‘???’ or ‘you know who’ or ‘your special someone’. Of course none of that ever happened.  My last year in college, the 28 girls in my class decided to turn some attention on ourselves by all wearing identical pink sarees. The only effect was that we got a second look wherever we went that day.

Then I was engaged to my husband and married to him before a valentine’s day came along. On our first valentine’s day, I took the trouble to buy the typical archies card, stayed up until 12 that night and presented it to him as a surprise. He retorted - ” I don’t believe in this valentine’s day and all…. anyway thank you”. Of course, he saved himself that day by quickly following with ‘For me everyday is valentine’s day’, but all my aspirations for valentines day for the rest of my life, ended right then.

However, there are those couples who still do special things on special occassions. Suprise each other on Valentine’s day. Some help the economy by going out and paying exorbitant prices for a box of chocolates or a stuffed monkey holding a big red heart. We on the other hand, do our valentines day shopping on Feb 15, help the stores by buying the chocolates on clearance and enjoying them for a few weeks after. We also buy the monkey, cut loose the heart from the monkey’s hands, and get it to hang from the ceiling fan in my daughter’s jungle themed room.

I suppose many years later, when I am deaf and hopefully my husband is fussing over me like a dog after a bone, we will finally decide to use a valentine’s card with good reason.

Life outside blogosphere has been busy over the past few weeks. I’ve been so preoccupied, that I have only managed to briefly glance at my favorite blogs, and not even look at  my blog stats (which I usually watch almost every couple of hours every day). To say the least, the winter and my daughter have been taking much of my time and energy.

The winter has caused me to spend way too much time on the road, at speeds that may have made crawling a faster alternative. The result of which is me coming home too tired and impatient to deal with ‘terrible twos’. On the other hand, my toddler’s manages to consume my time, by either totally testing my patience or amusing me beyond words.

One of her most recent hobbies has been singing her favorite nursery rhymes and Barney songs. One of those songs is called ‘I love you.. You love me’. My daughter totally loves that song and makes a very sincere attempt to sing it. She manages the first 2 phrases quite decipherably, beyond that it’s a lot of toddler gibberish which only we could comprehend.

She has been singing so often, that I began wondering how much ‘I love you’ is used in this country and conspicuously how less it is used in India.

In India, it is not used in any other context but that of romantic involvement. So much so, the word ‘love’ rarely has any other meanings in India. The 14 year old boy living down the road would rush to the 12 year old girl, thrust a rose in her hand, say ‘I love you’ and fled the scene as if he had just performed a bank heist. Of course one hears it most often when used by modern day heroes - they can go from the very lengthy romantic proposal to a simple ‘I louw you’. Of course, I would never in  my life every imagine telling my father or mother ‘I love you appa’ or ‘I love you amma’. It’s not that I don’t love them, but surely explicitly saying so would make everyone feel so uncomfortable.

On the other hand, here in the US, no occassion is missed when a parent does not tell their child how much they love them, or vice-versa. Same among siblings. I sometimes wonder, by the way that they do it so ‘matter-of-factedly’ whether they actually mean what they are saying, or still worse even realize they said it.

If valentine’s day was loathed by my father amid my protests that a valentine could be anybody not necessarily a lover, I on the other hand have offered to supply chips for my toddler’s valentines day party at her day care.