Happy New Year

Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.” —Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Wishing you all a very Happy, Peaceful, Prosperous, and Healthy New Year 2024!

Seasons Greeting Cards

Greetings cards used to be a “thing” in India, at least in my town a long time ago. Now it is very difficult to find a decent card for an occasion. This is fine as technology has taken over and lots of people wish others through WhatsApp, Facebook, X, and whatnot. We have been so used to sending cards (physical) to friends and family during Christmas in the UK, it was a nightmare for us to find the right cards last year. So this year I decided to rope in my good friend Ashwini @ Experiments with Card Making and convince her to use her extraordinary skills to create some customized greeting cards for us for this Christmas.

She was hesitant but curious but I wore her down with my pitch and finally, she agreed to do around 15 cards. She came back with some proposals based on some samples she had done over the years and we chose a few styles. The discussions started when I was ill and over at my sister’s place and we finalized the designs when I had started my medication and was back at mine (around July, or August). Finally, by the end of October, we received our cards. She has discussed her methodology in her blog post if you are interested in her process.

Here is the set of all the unique cards (a few of them had different colours, but I had already got them ready to be sent). She did an amazing job and we were very surprised by the top-notch quality of these cards with matching envelopes and such. They are not flimsy like the ones we usually get in the shops but are quite thick and sturdy.

It also feels nice to have customised cards to send to friends and family. And she priced them very reasonably too. I am only glad that I got to be her first customer and hope she takes in more customs :). She is very talented. She has a day job and she does this as her hobby but given the quality of the work you can see the effort that has gone into each and every single card produced. We are so happy with the end product and would highly recommend her to all!

Thank you, Ashwini, and hope this is the start of something new in your artistic endeavours.

What is the opposite of …

Thanksgiving?

For some reason, this has been playing in my mind recently and it started with thoughts on being apologetic and saying sorry. We (a little bit generous here…because Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated everywhere) have a day to give our thanks to all and one and I think (correct me if I am wrong) that we do have a day of atonement in the Jewish calendar (if I remember the holidays correctly from my days working in a predominantly Jewish school and from watching Marvellous Mrs Maisel). Why isn’t there a day to say sorry to people we have hurt and maybe mean it too. I will tell you where I am coming from. It all started with a video I stumbled upon (don’t ask me the source, I haven’t a clue). In the video, this lady was asking the presenter and I am paraphrasing here.

“Why is it important for a person who has hurt you to say sorry? why do you need the validation that what they did was wrong and for them to accept it in order for you to move on? Why is your peace dependent on someone saying sorry?”

This got me thinking…I have people in my family who never say sorry and that includes the kids in the family too. Some say “What is the point of saying sorry if you don’t mean it?” and some others say “Why should I say sorry? I did what I thought was the best”, some more are like “I am older so I don’t have to really say it” and others are like “meh!”. Honestly, I am a person who expects people to say sorry if they realize their mistake (either by self-reflection or if I convince them about it) and it is only because I always say sorry, irrespective of their age, if I made a mistake. In fact, once my niece told me that there wasn’t any need for me to say sorry to her as I was an elder and I was allowed to make mistakes. I had to correct her opinion on that.

Is it really wrong to expect people to realise their mistakes? And is it wrong to expect them to say sorry because that is the only way “I” would know if they realized their mistake without any dramatic and cliched statements or discussions? For me, it isn’t about my peace of mind but definitely, a validation that they know why and how they have hurt me and hopefully they won’t do it again. Not all mistakes can be made OK by that single word, but at least it is a good start isn’t it?

All these thoughts were going through my mind when I saw that video and that in turn made me question a day for feeling and expressing how sorry we are for the hurt we cause others should it be part of our day-to-day thing instead of allocating a day for it? I know Thanksgiving Day has a little bit of a religious element to it but in general, I think it is like the harvest festival that we have here in India thanking nature for all that it yields us (again… correct me if I am wrong here. I am avoiding searching for it lest I go into a rabbit hole of web pages).

If you have come this far, thank you for giving me your time and reading my random thoughts 🙂

Late but not lost

Finally…I managed to finish my travelogue of our visit to Udaipur in March. It’s been a while really but thanks to my photographs and my memory I am able to recall all that we did and didn’t do. If I had left it for longer I might have missed a few details.

Tips and Tricks for the Heat Wave

The world is in such chaos, especially with climate change. The amount of heat wave that is blazing through one part of the world whereas the other is grappling with floods.

Not so long ago we were struggling with a 40+ C heat wave in our place (South India) but now the max is 30 degrees and there is enough rain and breeze to keep us in a much better place now…may it continue for a few more months before winter (or the so-called) sets in.

You already know that I suffered the most during this time because I had to go out and about for work and then the disease took over (I am healing well, no new blisters, but the healing is slow and steady…I will take it as long as I don’t have any blisters to deal with). But at least I am able to give some tips from my side to grapple with the intense heat. If the 40-degree heat was only for a few hours it wouldn’t be that bad. It is the consistent heat throughout the day that is the killer. Mr M had grand visions of Indian Summer (the real one) until he experienced 40+ heat right from the get-go from 8 am to 7 pm. That is when you get dehydrated, get ill and such. Especially with the humidity. If this is the beginning of such heat waves and summers in the western hemisphere then here are a few tips and tricks from us folks who are seasoned to it (might have to exclude myself from that folks for a while now… I am relearning too).

I found a nice visual which might help rather than the text.

Here are a few more tips that we followed, if that helps.

The one way Mr M who is a seasoned Westerner survived the heat was to stay indoors, with the fan on in the room he was in and not do any physical activity which needs energy (browsing websites don’t count as physical activity). He did his yoga much earlier than usual (like about 6.30 am and later in the day around 6.30 pm, if need be).

We usually go out for our weekly lunch on Saturdays but during the summer we restricted it to home deliveries or going to Malls where you are in A/c. Every time we ventured out, we used to have the fruit juice that was available in the summer. For example, we get a lot of watermelons, mangoes, and grapes during the summer season. So we always used to have watermelon juice whenever we did go out. This helps with hydration. The one other good source of hydration is coconut water. Not the ones you get from the cartons, but fresh ones that are available easily, at least for us. Obviously one has to make do with what one gets. But hydration is essential. Also avoid coffee and spicy food during the day. Stick to simple plain food. Buttermilk is awesome for tackling the heat.

The only time we used the A/c was during the night. Because we sleep in our first-floor bedroom, the air there (thanks to the hot air rising) is hotter during the night and to ensure that we don’t get roasted in our sleep we ended up using the A/c. I was also taking three showers a day, one mandatorily before going to sleep.

Do not drink water with ice cubes in it. They don’t help quench the thirst. Keep drinking normal-temperature water.

If you have curtains (heavy light-blocking ones) then close them during the day. We do not have double-glazing windows in this country (India) so closing the windows also helps, but in the western parts because of the cold winter, there are double-glazing windows which I have felt detrimental when closed during summers. I kind of felt suffocated in the UK when I closed them during the heat. So I will leave it up to you to close or leave the windows open based on how it helps you. If you have table fans, they will help a lot. My mom always uses this extra fan during summer to keep herself cooler, especially at night. Ceiling fans only help so much and she doesn’t have A/c (can’t install them as she is in a rented place). Keep the lights off as much as you can and if you are in the kitchen and if you have a chimney fan, turn it on. We don’t have one but we leave the windows open and ensure to use the kitchen as less as possible during the day.

I can’t think of anything else at the moment other than the ones listed but hopefully, a few of these will come in handy. If people aren’t used to extreme heat then it is going to be painful to suddenly feel so much heat given that the body isn’t used to it and getting adjusted to it can be too much, especially during the first time. Whenever I complained about British summer in the UK people were surprised as I come from a tropical place but I kept telling them that that was the precise reason I hate the heat as I know it isn’t good for me 🙂 especially if it is a prolonged one. And it is just not the heat that people have to endure now. There will be so many side effects to it. The water bodies will dry up, if the crops depend on good weather they will suffer, groundwater getting dried up etc. etc. And if there aren’t enough water storage facilities or even plans for summers like the ones people are facing now then over a period of time drought will set in. Hopefully, the authorities will think about the future and not just the present and see what needs to be done if this heat wave becomes a norm where it usually isn’t. And then where there is intense heat, there will be heavy rains too. We need to be prepared for that too.

I think I should stop now otherwise I will end up ranting about how the authorities are causing chaos and wrecking havoc in our infrastructure in the place where I am… I will leave that for another day 🙂

Take care folks and stay hydrated.