pinkyturns30 – Pertinent Observations

13/13: kONamari

A popular story that Pinky tells people is about how I “maintained” our house while she was away doing her MBA. She talks about how I used to tell her that I had maintained the house “as it was”, and my “as it was” meant that I even left the dust where it was.

When Pinky returned for her term break, she was mostly horrified by what she saw, with the wardrobes full of dust, and parts of the house that can’t easily be seen hardly be clean. The house was anything but “Pinky clean” she said, and then spent a day or two bringing it back to the state where she had left it.

Since childhood, Pinky has had an obsession with tidying things up. She says she frequently threw her sister out of their shared room because the latter wouldn’t maintain the room to Pinky’s satisfaction. Pinky also got into trouble with her parents for throwing away stuff that wasn’t being used in one of her tidying attempts.

It wasn’t long before she brought this tidying obsession to our house. I remember this time when I’d returned from an outstation trip, and Pinky was so horrified to see the state of my house (this was before she had moved in) that she spent an entire Saturday cleaning it, only to be saddled with a bad cold at the end of it since the house had been so dirty.

If you’d seen my house any time during 2010, when I was living alone, and then again sometime in 2011, you would have noticed a massive difference. Of course we’d got lots of better furniture after we got married (that deserves a post of its own), but the importance difference was how tidy the house was now.

Everything had its own place now. The kitchen was logically organised. Wardrobes would be cleaned every couple of months after “inventory checks”, where clothes that weren’t being used would get discarded. You wouldn’t find anything lying around the house.

It wasn’t long before Pinky’s penchant for tidying got to me as well, and (I thought) I got obsessed with tidying as well. I started going mental every time I saw things not in their place, or lying around, and would tidy up stuff before I got to any work of my own. I stopped throwing things around in random places. I started making an effort to at least maintain the house the way Pinky had left it, though that turned out to be grossly inadequate when she was gone for a long period of time.

Sometime last year I’d gifted her a copy of Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy. The book was supposed to be revolutionary in terms of its prescriptions on tidying up houses. Pinky glanced through it once, and dismissed it all as “obvious stuff”. She obviously knows her tidying!

PS: The title is a pun on Marie Kondo’s technique, which is known as “konmari” and the Kannada word for a baby he-buffalo, which is normally used as an abuse towards children.

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

As I got to know Pinky, one thing I was surprised with was how much of a family person she was. From the little I knew her I expected her to be of the rebellious sort, but she harboured no such thoughts, and was (and is) really close to her family.

She’s a massively home person, likes to spend her weekends lazing at home, eating traditional South Indian food and watching TV. She had once told me (long before we met) that her dream Sunday consisted of watching a Kannada movie on TV while sitting with her mother-in-law tying flowers into a garland.

That, of course, would never come to be, as a month after I met her, my mother passed away. My mother never met Pinky, though I’d told her about Pinky just before she was going in to what was to be her final surgery. So it goes.

Over the course of time, Pinky has gotten really close with a large number of my relatives. While I’m slack at keeping in touch with them, and almost never call, she makes sure to call a couple of my aunts and one cousin every week, and compels me to call them as well. She makes sure that I go to all family gatherings, and also keep in touch with parts of my extended family I don’t normally keep in touch with.

Her connection with my extended family has grown to such an extent that several of my relatives have made her the main contact person in our family, while strictly speaking I’m related to them by one lesser degree (to use one of Pinky’s crazy phrases, she’s our family’s “responsible PIC”).

Last January was my grandfather’s 100th death anniversary, and it was Pinky’s idea that we organise a celebration on that account. The event was a massive success and everyone who attended (basically the remaining descendants of my grandfather’s parents) loved the idea of having this kind of a memorial. And after the event was over, it was Pinky who wrote the match report.

That is just one example of how Pinky has kept in touch with my side of the family, and makes sure that I keep in touch as well. If she were yet another rebellious types, I’m not sure how much contact I would’ve continued to keep with my family. and for this, I need to thank her immensely!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

Careful readers of this blog might remember that things weren’t going very well for me on the health front at the beginning of the decade. Increasing stress from a job that was in hindsight not all that stressful led me to seek help, and I’d gotten diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Soon a diagnosis for ADHD followed. This was immediately after I’d quit my (supposedly stressful) job and was trying to establish myself as a consultant.

As I’ve documented on this blog earlier, I came through this difficult phase of life fairly successfully. I managed to use the medication I was on as some kind of a “stimulus“, and then built upon my later success to pull myself out. I also made necessary changes to my lifestyle and working style to take advantage of my brain being supposedly wired differently.

What I’d failed to mention in that post about coming out of depression was the role that Pinky had played in helping me back then. The biggest impact on her was in terms of my erratic behaviour. The medication I was taking, while helping me get out of depression, was also altering my mood in ways I hadn’t imagined, and she increasingly became the target of a lot of my outbursts.

Moreover, she was also really young at the time, and having yet to see the quarter life crisis, found it hard to empathise with what I was going through. She started with the reaction that most relatives of people with mental health issues start off with – denial followed by accusation that I was using it as an excuse. It’s to her extreme credit that she soon came to understanding things from my perspective, and appreciating what she was going through.

After that, she was a constant pillar of support for me as I battled my depression and ADHD. She helped me talk over any fears I had (it turned out I had a lot of them, mostly irrational). She was nice to me when I wasn’t being nice to her. She put up with my outbursts and fights. She forgave my once frequent transgressions, and took my side in fights where she could’ve easily turned against me.

She even regularly accompanied me to the psychiatrist which was never a particularly pleasant experience for her, and stood by me as I made fairly important decisions about life and mind-altering substances. And finally, when in January 2013, I decided to get off the medication, she made sure she was accommodative in case my old behaviours took off again.

I’m still not “perfectly okay”, and possibly will never be. And there are transgressions and bad behaviour on my part from time to time. Pinky, while not condoning such behaviour, has remained patient with me, and constantly helped me improve myself. She has stayed positive through the process, and made extreme efforts to make sure that our relationship remains intact.

And for all this, I can never thank her enough. If I were the religious sort, I would’ve said that I could never thank her enough either in this life, or in our next seven lives!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

It was sometime in 2011 that we’d gone for a family function where Pinky had worn my mother’s jewellery. An uncle instantly recognised it commented that she’s wearing “old models”, and asking why I hadn’t gotten her any jewellery of her own.

Pinky had stayed quiet then, but about a year later when I was trying to build my own consulting practice (and living off the savings from the job I’d recently quit), demanded that I buy her a diamond necklace. Not really knowing what it might cost, I instantly agreed. It was after I had taken her to the shop and she liked something that I realised it was going to exhaust all my savings.

I had to redouble my business development efforts, and about a month after that got my first big consulting contract. Pinky later told me that the reason she had made me “invest” (whether buying jewellery is an investment or an expense is something we disagree on) then was to shake me off my comfort zone and get me out there to do real business.

Pinky has her own way of inspiring me to do more, and to do well in whatever job that I do. When I was on outstation consulting assignments, which meant leaving home at 4:30am to catch a flight, she would wake up an hour earlier to make sure I had hot water to shower in. As I got ready, she would get me coffee and even polish my shoes!

When I was writing the first draft of my book last year, which was a damn difficult process, she made sure we celebrated every little milestone. When I finished the very first draft she took me out for a fancy dinner to our favourite Japanese restaurant in Barcelona. This way, she made sure I remained motivated as I took the not-so-easy task of preparing the first draft.

She’s also not hesitated to use the stick. Every time during my consulting life when she’s felt I’m not doing enough work, she’s made sure to throw sufficient tantrums to make sure I don’t slack off. Each time she’s done that, I’ve found myself pursuing leads with renewed vigour, and managing to win some business or the other.

Pinky has also turned out to be a reliable career mentor. When I decided last month that I should look for full time roles as well, she helped me figure out how to go about the process (it was 8 years since I’d last applied for a full time job). She’s repeatedly sat down with me to review my business plans, and to guide me regarding the best course of action. When there have been consulting or job or partnering offers I’ve been unsure of, she’s dissected the problem in a way for the solution to become apparent to me.

There’s little more I could have asked for from a wife in terms of motivation!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

I have often cribbed on my blog in recent times that there is too much outrage out there, and there is too heightened a sense of political correctness nowadays. If you were to say something even remotely politically incorrect, the social media hordes will be upon you. This has implications in terms of public policy, in that a lot of people don’t say what they’re going to do, and they act (in terms of voting for Trump, for example) the whole world is surprised.

Anyway, leaving the larger world aside, I sometimes delight in the fact that Pinky and I first made our connection in the realms of political incorrectness. She has told me that when she first stumbled upon this blog (its predecessor, rather) in 2006, there were two posts that she liked.

The first one was a two-liner. I’m reproducing it in its entirety here.

noticed a funny thing at the loo in office today. a number of people tie their janavaaras (sacred thread) around their ears while peeing or crapping!!

The second was about what one looked for in a wife. It has all the ingredients to raise the heckles of politically correct social media hecklers nowadays.

It was a year and a half later that we reconnected (we’d initially connected after I’d written the above two posts). This time, a challenge that Pinky set me resulted in me reaching her blog. This is the post that I landed up at. Again has all the ingredients of generating outrage. Also check the comment that I’ve left there (that was my way of telling Pinky I’d “won” a challenge she’d set for me).

Anyway, a decade has gone by and we’re both older and wiser, so we wouldn’t talk about outright politically incorrect things. Yet, given the way we started off, I guess the sense we got is that nothing is taboo between us, and we can talk about just about anything. And that’s an awesome feeling to have because there is now no reason for us to hide anything from each other.

One thing marriage does to you is that you become each other’s closest confidantes. So if there is something that you think you cannot talk to your partner about, then it automatically means that you either keep that thing to yourself or look elsewhere to talk about it. Either way, it is a problem, and in attempts to cover up, the part of your lives that you don’t share with each other simply grows.

If nothing is taboo, on the other hand, it means that you can talk your way out of every disagreement, discuss about everything, and basically find a graceful solution to any fights. And life this way is so much better than a situation where you have to constantly be wary of offending the person you are closest to!

So in this sense again, I’m damn happy to have found Pinky, whom I can tell just about anything to. She might get occasionally pissed off (in case I’m cribbing about her, or someone else close to her), but we always end up having a conversation. And that makes both of us feel better, and each time we have this kind of a conversation, we come a little bit closer!

One downside of this approach, of course, is that if there are times when I put NED to some conversation, she thinks I’m being evasive, and the fact that I’m not being open ends up bringing friction! But then we know very well how to gracefully resolve fights!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

Back when I was single and looking, one of the criteria I had with respect to the potential partner was that she should be willing to indulge in what I would call as “arbit conversations”. Arbit conversations can be about any subject, and the only rule is that it need not make sense.

So you can reply to anything with anything. Digress like crazy. Crack stupid, and potentially offensive jokes. Talk nonsense. Complete nonsense all the time doesn’t add value, of course, but some amount of nonsense can make the parties laugh, and keep things happy.

My love for arbit conversations started with my favourite hobby from the time I started working. It initially began on Orkut where I’d occasionally leave nonsense scraps on friends’ walls, and they’d reply with more nonsense. Prior to that, of course there was the “.:Arbit:.” discussion group in IIMB, which was created with the explicit purpose of talking nonsense.

And then sometime in 2006-7, Google decided to add all Orkut friends to your GTalk list, and soon Orkut started getting spammed by “franship seekers”, and my favourite hobby became opening a number of conversation windows on GTalk and simply talk to people, irrespective of whether the conversations made sense.

When I told some friends that I was looking for someone “who can make arbit conversation”, I’d already started talking to Priyanka, and she was of course one of the people with whom I’d indulge in such conversations. So when I declared her as a “super common minimum program“, I already knew that she was capable of arbit conversations (in hindsight, I realise why she was a “super CMP”. I used to talk to her so much that I’d anchored my expectations of a potential wife based on what she was like. In that context, it’s obvious that she’d ace it).

What I didn’t know, and was delighted to find out later on that she can also be “Dabba”. Now, this doesn’t have a good synonym in English, so I continue to use the Kannada word. It’s hard to even describe what being Dabba entails, but both of us are Dabba and we love each other for it.

Being Dabba means you don’t take everything too seriously, and are willing to see the lighter side of things. Being Dabba means finding some random stuff funny, and laughing endlessly about it. Dabbaness can sometimes mean talking in a strange accent, or pronouncing words wrongly, on puropse.

Being Dabba also means that you are willing to tolerate some amount of shit, and not get disgusted by it (if we don’t train her properly, Berry might grow up being disgusted with our Dabbaness). Being Dabba also means occasionally acting far less polished than we’re capable of, just for a few laughts. And so forth – hope you’re getting the drift.

If you’re a Dabba person yourself, it’s hard to reconcile with someone who’s not as Dabba, since you might get disgusted and feel let down at times. In that sense, I feel incredibly lucky to be married to someone who I think is at least as Dabba as I am. There are random things that Pinky finds funny. We have many inside jokes, especially related to 1990s Kannada popular culture, that makes us burst out laughing at times. There are words we pronounce in a particular way, to the extent that we pronounce them that way even when we don’t intend to.

Both of us being Dabba allows Pinky and me to connect better to each other. There are so many subliminal things we “get” about each other that we wonder if we’ll be able to get along at all with someone else. And of course, another thing that we should keep in mind is that we’ve been training each other for the last 7-8 years, effectively merging our respective brands of Dabbaness!

That’s possibly a great way to describe a relationship – where you train each other on your respective Dabbaness, and over time become so similarly Dabba that you’d find it hard pressed to be Dabba-compatible with others!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about my biggest concern about hitting on Pinky – I always thought she was “too young”. Coming to think of it now, what I didn’t realise back then was that marrying someone much younger can actually help give you a “second youth”. In other words, Pinky makes me feel much younger!

It’s possibly because of the way it started. Pinky pinged me on Orkut with a link to her blog. She was barely nineteen then, and her posts back then looked like what a teenager would write. Bad spellings. Horrible capitalisation. Trying to sound cutesy. She even spelled her name as “Preanca”!

It was over a year later that we started talking regularly, but the image had been fixed – this was one cute kid who liked to chat to me, and I treated her thus. We used to speak about just about anything, from hugging techniques to bra fits (that one slightly creeped her out, I think).

When I entered the arranged marriage market, she became my go to person for discussing what was happening in the market. She loved it as well (showing early signs of becoming a Marriage Broker Auntie), and told me I was giving her the kind of insight her older cousins who had gone through the market had denied her.

At one point of time, she asked me if she could think of me as a “brother who is getting married” which kinda creeped me out, and I’d blown my top. Soon after she gave me my first cutesy nickname (and she continues to come up with new names every one month or so).

The net result of all this was that while she was 22, and employed, when I first met her, I still thought of her as a “cute kid”. I’d assigned to her the voice of a little girl, which is why I got positively surprised when I first spoke to her on the phone. And when I met her, I realised she was mature beyond her years, and it was an easy decision then to start hitting on her.

Soon after, though, I realised the joys of being with someone so young, one who hadn’t yet been through a quarter life crisis (though I had to live through yet another quarter life crisis when she inevitably went through one). Her thoughts were fresh, and unharmed by the harsh experiences of life. That made her positive, and fun-loving, and hanging out with her became a lot of fun.

She had habits and hobbies one would expect of someone in their early twenties, and I quite enjoyed partaking in them and feeling young again (though one activity she’s consistently refused to share with me is partying!). And of course, I also later realised that marrying a young woman meant that I could put off making babies to a bit later, and we had Berry when we thought we should have a kid, rather than getting spooked by a biological clock.

I still find Pinky cute. There are times when she makes that cute face that reminds me of the cute kid who I didn’t want to hit on! And she finds random things funny and laughs in a girlish manner, and reminds me once again of that “kid” I met in Gandhi Bazaar back in 2009!

I’m suddenly reminded of the day in March 2015 when we were walking down the middle of Avinguda Josep Taradellas in Barcelona, and we suddenly held hands and spontaneously start running. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me young, though my hair and waistline sometimes try to tell me otherwise!

PS: when I met her, I was 26 and she was 22. So we’ve never come close to violating the “N/2 + 7 rule“.

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

I still remember this childhood friend’s wedding in November 2009. Now, that particular wedding is memorable for several reasons, but I especially remember the reaction of some of my other school friends. “You surely have a girlfriend now”, was their refrain, for apparently they had never seen me so well dressed.

Pinky still makes fun of the way I looked on the day I met her. I was wearing a blue polo T-shirt over khaki cargoes. On one occasion when I bent down to tie my shoelaces, she saw my blue socks and couldn’t stop laughing that I had such poor fashion sense to wear them with my khaki pants and white sneakers. I’d told her that I’d worn those socks to match my T-shirt, to which she continued laughing further. A couple of months later, she’d started her efforts to “improve” the way I look.

Since early 2010, she’s been conducting regular “clothes audits” for me, where clothes that don’t look good on me are discarded or put away. She keeps track of the trends for me, so that I don’t end up looking like an old fogey. She’s occasionally critical, but largely encouraging, and never fails to tell me that I look good (when I look that way).

Back in the late 2000s, I had a penchant for wearing loose clothes, which made my then heavy frame look even heavier. I liked wearing colourful shirts (I once turned up at a friend’s wedding in a bright purple shirt), and loose fitting jeans (Lee Chicago being my favourite fit). I would seldom be seen with my shirt untucked (speaking of which, have you heard about this company that’s now supposed to be the hot thing in the startup world?).

Pinky changed all that. She taught me how a white shirt can be so versatile that I shouldn’t reserve it for official use. She made me understand how better fitting clothes can make me look so much better. She made me realise how I look so much younger without my spectacles (which I wore daily since I was 7 until 2010 when I started wearing contact lenses). She carefully selected perfumes and aftershaves for me. I stopped wearing sneakers wherever I went (like I used to). Perhaps the only thing in which she’s not been able to make an impact on is my receding hairline!

It’s over seven years since Pinky started her “project” to make me look good, and I continue to look up to her when it comes to fashion. I continually pester her to accompany me on my clothes shopping trips, often driving her insane. Recently she cried how she’s herself been unable to shop because all our such trips end up being hijacked by me, asking for her opinion on one thing or the other. I admit my fashion sense has improved, and I decide better on what clothes I want to wear. Yet, I constantly seek her approval!

PS: I’m writing this wearing a floral print shirt

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

3/13: Stockings

4/13: HM

5/13: Cookers

I still remember this huLi Pinky had made sometime in the early days of marriage. Having never lived by herself until then, she hadn’t bothered to learn to cook, and all that she knew about cooking came from watching her mother.

When we got married, given that her job demanded she leave home early, and mine demanded that I stay late into the evening, we formed an arrangement where I’d make breakfast and she made dinner.

I occasionally missed my part of the deal – waking up so late that food wouldn’t be ready by the time she had to leave. Sometimes, I’d make breakfast just in time for me to run to her bus stop and hand over her box, but there were times when I let her go to work hungry.

She never let me down, though. Even though she hadn’t had much experience cooking (though she had a medal for winning a university-wide cooking competition), she would make sure every evening that there was food by the time I came home. And on most days I would be extremely well fed, though occasionally, like that day when she made huLi with Mangalore Cucumber, I don’t have particularly great memories of 😛

She learnt quickly, though, and over time, has turned out to be a great cook (I like to argue that the time she spent living alone helped!). Now her repertoire is far more diverse (in the initial days she’d exclusively make South Indian food), and she continues to delight me with her cooking.

I especially remember this period in time when I had just started off as an independent consultant, and was mostly working from home. We had recently fired our cook, and she was so concerned that I was eating “random things” for lunch that she took it upon herself to make my lunch before she left for work.

She had to be at the bus stop at 7:15 in the morning, which meant waking up at 5:30 or so, just so that she could make lunch for me. And since I wasn’t eating much rice in those days (for health reasons), she had to make chapatis which would take extra time. I frequently told her that I’d whip up something for myself but she was insistent on feeding me. It was a “wifely duly”, she’d sometimes tell me.

Thinking about it, I should have never doubted that she’d always keep me well fed. Right from the early days, whenever we spoke or texted immediately after what might be considered as a “normal meal time”, her first question was if I’d eaten, and what I’d eaten. And after we got married, she’s taken it upon herself to make the best effort possible to ensure that I eat well.

And that continues to this day, even though it sometimes means cooking while simultaneously taking care of Berry. Like last evening I was meeting someone and got home fairly late. And despite Berry having been a bit cranky, Pinky had managed to make a wonderful, and innovative huLi! She later told me that she had to make the huLi with one hand, while holding Berry in the other!

I look forward to many more years of being fed thus!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

3/13: Stockings

4/13: HM

I’m married to an absolute crackpot. Pinky can go so mental at times that it’s not even funny. She takes the concept of absurdity to a whole new level at times. She sometimes behaves so weird that I start wondering what I’ve married. And then she asks, “did you imagine I’d turn out like this when you married me?”. And I always reply “well, you’ve always been this mental”.

Let me do this in bullet points – she’s so mental that it’s difficult to structure this post in any other way.

She’s not normally that religious (maybe she was, but I’ve kinda drawn her away from it), but on some days she puts up a serious face and says, “Karu, don’t you think we should pray to God? Why have we become like this?”
There are things that get “stuck” in her head that she keeps repeating. Some times it’s the names of people which are unusual (oh, have I told you that she and her sister maintain a database of funny names?). Other times, it’s random words or phrases. Her latest obsession is with “responsible PIC” (I have no clue what that means)
Normally she’s an incredibly levelheaded and logical person, but at times she loses all signs of logic, and makes absurd connections. Like she thinks I have a loud voice because I was born in December! Go figure.
It’s incredibly hard to predict what might upset her (going by the above point, she sometimes rationalises this by saying all women are like this). Things that should normally upset her she doesn’t get upset by (that’s actually deeply upsetting for me), and she gets upset with things you’d have no clue has the potential to upset someone. Then again, I guess this bit of madness doesn’t make her stand apart so much.
She has a habit of saying something random completely disconnected to the ongoing conversation. OK I must mention here that this is not something that I’m particularly worried about, since I love “arbit conversations”. More on that in another post.
She displays a wide range of ages in terms of the way she acts. Within a particular domain, she can talk like she belongs to different age groups. Sometimes she sounds like she’s a middle aged lady. Other times her reasoning and advice makes her sound like a teenager. In that sense, age is just a number for that (so I don’t know why I’m writing this post series for her birthday!)
For a while she wouldn’t open the door when I rang the doorbell – I had to speak a passphrase she had come up with, and until I said that she wouldn’t oblige me

And the list goes on and continues to grow by the day – I won’t give away too much more about her, but all I’ll say is that these quirks make her a massively fun person, and I love her for all this!

Uncle’s son’s shorts are stuck!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

3/13: Stockings