Haven’t posted in a while so lots of
thoughts on various tangents are running through my mind. Hence please excuse
the randomness.
Parent-child
Have you noticed that as we grow older,
there’s a certain amount of role reversal that happens with our parents or
guardians? They take care of us all our lives, till we’re old enough to take
care of ourselves. And then suddenly, it’s us who start taking care of them;
watching them grow old, frail and generally losing control of their bodies and
minds--difficult, to put it mildly. But then we can’t really sit with our hands
in our heads, feeling sorry for them and ourselves—we have to get up and take
charge, and take care of them to our best capacity. The only problem is that
once these so-called adult parents reach that age, they regress mentally. As they
grow older, they become more stubborn and child-like, which makes the treatment
that much harder. So now, not only are you fighting against the illness, you
are literally fighting against them too!
I was too young when my granddad succumbed. Not too young to feel the pain of loss, which still gnaws at me till this very day, but too young to do anything about it or to have taken care of him. But he too, was a stubborn old man. I remember that exactly a year before he left, he had a massive heart attack and had to spend over a week in the hospital. Which also meant he had to spend over a week away from work (the man worked way past his age of retirement, all the way till the day he died). The day he was shifted from the ICU to a regular room, he made me give him my cellphone and teach him how to operate it so that he could call his office. I was stupid enough to give it to him, too. Of course, after that I was soundly given many earfuls of trauma from just about anyone and everyone. But that’s who he was. And I hated saying no to him.
Hospitals are the least fun places in the
world. With words like death, dead bodies, patients, diseases, doctors and many
more depressing ones being thrown around regularly, and the visible dents those roller beds make in the elevators, it’s a miracle that even visitors, doctors and admin staff don’t
faint or contract something.
Write or wrong?
I’ve been a writer for a fair number of
years and till date, I still question my skills as one. While freelancing, I
would regular pour over my pieces wondering whether they were good enough for
the publication I was sending them to—whether they would all hover over the
computer and laugh at some silly mistake I had made or at my amateur-esque
style. Don’t get me wrong; I know this is what I’m meant to do, and I
absolutely love it, but still, there are moments of self-doubt and deprecation. So when I receive articles, written by
writers who have apparently been writing for years, which are full of
grammatical, spelling and even tense errors and with no style so to speak, I am
amazed. Some writers don’t even give their piece a final read-through or a
spellcheck before sending it in. So you find random spelling errors,
punctuation that is all over the place and sentences that make no sense
whatsoever. Really?
I know many people think that the clean-up job is that of the editor’s, which is undoubtedly true. But the editor’s clean-up job is to spruce up the copy to complement the publication’s style sheet, not to correct basic, second grade language. Yes, I am simply venting out pure frustration. A request to any writer who may read this: before submitting your copy to anyone, whether you’re a freelancer or on payroll, do a basic spellcheck and a read-through, and check whether the sentences make sense. After your article is published, compare the final edited copy to your original one and see if you can learn from the mistakes, rather than make the same mistakes again, and thereby lose your job. Take pride in what you write, after all, your name goes on it, but don’t get smothered in unwarranted self-confidence. I mean all this in the nicest possible way.
I know many people think that the clean-up job is that of the editor’s, which is undoubtedly true. But the editor’s clean-up job is to spruce up the copy to complement the publication’s style sheet, not to correct basic, second grade language. Yes, I am simply venting out pure frustration. A request to any writer who may read this: before submitting your copy to anyone, whether you’re a freelancer or on payroll, do a basic spellcheck and a read-through, and check whether the sentences make sense. After your article is published, compare the final edited copy to your original one and see if you can learn from the mistakes, rather than make the same mistakes again, and thereby lose your job. Take pride in what you write, after all, your name goes on it, but don’t get smothered in unwarranted self-confidence. I mean all this in the nicest possible way.
Ash
RB
What is up with Aishwarya? And I mean what
is up with her size and what is up with the media going ballistic about it?
Yes, sounds ironic, double standard-ed and hypocritical, no? Every time I have
set eyes on Aishwarya in the last few months, I am amazed at how huge she’s
become. I mean I know many new moms and they look nothing like her. Yet, somewhere,
as a woman, I am also enraged at how much kachra
people have been throwing at her with regard to her weight. Dude she’s
(apparently and open to debate) happily married, blissfully happy as a new mom
and ok with being fat. Leave her alone, right?
And yet, when I saw her in that Elie Saab
at Cannes, where many have lauded her for being daring yet beautiful, I just
felt terrible and all I could think was, “How did that happen? How did she get
so huge?” I feel like a very bad person. Oh well, if you’re in the limelight,
you’ve got to get used to the criticism. She doesn’t seem to care, so meh.
