Be Happy, Along with Me!

5 Things to do to ‘keep your home happy and healthy during this monsoon’ “Hutchoooooo!!”. The sound of the first sneeze for the season. Monsoon has not even set it yet. But there you go, the first sneeze. Infection alert! A running nose is not something you would even remotely wish to deal with in life, once monsoons begin. Leave alone your family members having to go through it and if you are the one who would have to take care of them. Monsoons are welcoming but most of the times, the women of the house dread the onset of monsoons. The entire family becomes vulnerable to infections, low immunity, mood-swings and what not!  To keep you tension free this monsoon, here are 5 tips you can follow to stay happy and healthy as a family through the season. Keep protective gear handy: Monsoons are unpredictable. It might rain through the night, stop raining in the morning and it will start pouring the same evening. So, ensure that everyone in the house who has ...

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/female-infosys-employee-hacked-to-death-in-chennai-2874289/ This news has been haunting me since I read about it on Friday afternoon. Yes, Swathi's soul must rest in peace but what we must not put to rest is our efforts towards improving safety for not just women but generally for everyone around us. I am a parent too. I have been deeply disturbed like anyone else. I can't imagine her parents' and family's distress. Nobody deserves such an end and this being that of a soul so young and brimming with dreams for the future, is deeply disturbing. Still, we all know that this is one of the few cases that is out in the public, Everyday, behind closed doors, there are numerous crimes happening that don't get highlighted in the media. A society without crimes is purely utopia. But, we can help in controlling/preventing a lot from happening. I have been thinking continuously as to how I can be a part of the sy...

Talk to any parent today. Perhaps the hardest challenge for them is to keep their toddler/preschooler busy while they complete the most important household chores in the morning. Keeping a 2 year old glued to his/her place is probably the only activity in the world that needs a lot of creativity. This is a situation faced by mothers or primary caregivers in the house (when the mother is a working mum) in most families.  Sometimes, we need to find an activity that will engage them steadily for at least an hour so that we can continue our kitchen work at a stretch without much worries. Can a bucket of building blocks do that trick? No. Can a game of blowing bubbles from soap water help out? Not really. You need someone along to play this one. Can an episode on lions on tigers on television achieve the target? Not always.  Just like any other working mother who tries to crack this challenge at some point of time, I was breaking my head too. After all, I had to find a so...

Dear World, Today, May 8, is Mothers' Day. #MothersDay is trending on Twitter,Facebook and so is the content everywhere, praising mothers to glory. As usual, I had been receiving a lot of forward messages and heartfelt wishes for being a mother, performing the 'holiest' role in the entire Universe. But, I would like to write to you, the World, on what I feel when I see that you love to 'define' mothers in so many ways. When I opened today's newspapers to read, a thought dawned upon me. Almost the entire supplement of the newspaper was filled with articles focussing on 'the mother'. Beginning from celebrities who spoke about how their mothers were their inspiration, how they would share anything under the sun with their mothers, how their mothers had sacrificed all their passion to just take care of them and their family to how 'mothers' were an inspiration to successful entrepreneurs. And then there was this article which was defining th...

Book Review : A sip of love and a sip of coffee Author: Ganga Bharani Released in : May 2016 Genre: English Romance I can't live without coffee. And can someone live without love? No. Neither can I. Honestly, this is my first time in writing a book review and I am so happy to review my friend's (I think I can take the liberty to call her my soulmate) book : A sip of love and a sip of coffee. I still remember, about 10 years ago, how his presence would create butterflies in my stomach. After all, we were in our teens. I don't know if I created the same feeling in him too but I was least bothered. A great friend, someone I would turn to most of the time be it happiness or distress. We were too close friends that time. I am not sure if I would call that friendship or crush or infatuation or love. We had too many terms to even try and understand them. But, even without understanding all that, didn't we all have this one (more than one) high school sweethear...

A few days back, I was driving along the Mahalingapuram road (Chennai) which I guess has the most number of watermelon sellers during summer time. I am extremely fond of watermelons. I can even eat a watermelon entirely by myself at one go. I am crazy about this particular fruit. How would I not stop to have a break and relish this fruit after spending a scorching summer day in Chennai? I stopped my vehicle. And through out my experience and observation, I noticed that these small time vendors have a lot to tell our product entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to start a business. Point 1: The Welcome 'Vaanga akka, vaanga" (Come, sister, Come!) She has been standing under a tree's shade right from the morning. She just has a make-shift stool made out of an old vegetable storage wooden box. But every time she spots a potential customer, her face brightens up and she welcomes them with a smile. What a contrast to some of those sales staff spending their day inside an air...

For almost all of us every morning dawns with a thought: Will I be happy today? What happens if we consciously tweak that thought a little bit? Change the question: What am I going to do today to make myself happy? One way which I have discovered that keeps me happy is 'to create'. Be it creating a nice dish to eat, creating a piece of art for my daughter or creating a piece of writing straight from my heart. I did one of this recently and I have been having exciting moments since then. I would like to register these moments on my blog through this post. I recently wrote an article for Women's Web online magazine about 5 reasons why employers should hire mothers. I published the same post on LinkedIn with a backlink to the original article. I have been receiving a great response for this article..Right from 1100+ views, 13 shares, 22 comments, this has been an extraordinary achievement to me personally. I won't compare myself to anybody else. This came straight ...

From the title, you just thought that I am going to give you an interesting recipe for making a fabulous dish. Not actually. Not really. With a toddler at home, often these 'quick ideas' are to make the toddler who is running around madly to gulp down some food and then continue jumping and somer-saulting. I discovered one such idea today morning instantly. Yes, you know, a mother's brain is really good at thinking up such ideas. Without bragging much about motherhood, let me put out the idea which I am sure will help a lot of mothers during meal-time. When my daughter wouldn't just stay in one place and I found it really difficult to feed her those little dosas today morning, I thought 'let me engage her in a hide n seek game of things'. Here are the game instructions to make it more readable for you: 1. You have to tell the toddler that you will be calling out names of things that are present in the house 2. He/She has to take one mouthful of food and ...

I have become a huge fan of motivational quotes in the recent past. I even opened up this page on Facebook called 'My Everyday Tonic' because a lot of people liked the quotes I shared on my personal profile.   For a while, the quotes were kind of my emotional outlet. Gradually from expressive quotes I moved on to endorse purely positive quotes and share them. As I kept reading a lot of such phrases and quotes, I could actually churn my own quotes to boost my spirits up. Writing them gave me a liberating feeling and reading them, I believe, helps a lot of my friends emotionally.  Here are 13 quotes I wrote myself, that moved my life from an empty space to a #BeAlive phase. These quotes literally help me stay alive. I need to keep reading them time and again to remind myself of the purpose of life. I hope it will help you too as you read through. Feel free to share them in your circles, and don't forget to use the hashtag #BeAlive Keep running especially ...

My daughter Dhwani turned two this week. I always like to make events memorable for people, giving them something personalized and hand-made is a feel-good factor. For this birthday, we had a small get-together at home with relatives. I made a customized origami doll as return-gifts. This is also a creative home activity for toddlers aged 4 - 7. DIY Doll as return gift:  ‪#‎ Instructions‬   ‪#‎ DIY‬   ‪#‎ Returngift‬   ‪#‎ Birthday‬ Requirements: 1) Origami square craft paper (You will get it in stationery shops), 2) Ice-cream sticks 3) Foam sheet(You will get it in A4 size in huge stationery shops, some of them also come with glitter stuck all over on one side and plain on other side) 4) Fevicol Tube 5) CD Marker - Black 6) Cellotape - Transparent 7) Scissors/ Paper cutter knice to cut out foam sheet Step 1: This link on Youtube will tell you how to make a simple origami dress:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp3Aehoo-wI   . You can make...

'Should I be giving her a banana at 10 AM or some ragi porridge?' 'Will she feel hungry after 2 hours for lunch if I feed her ragi porridge now?' 'Is it okay to bribe her into this so she eats her dinner?' 'Oh! I feel so guilty letting her watch rhymes on Youtube!' For me, the doubt of whether I fit quite right 'as a mother' dawned the moment I entered motherhood. My initial days of motherhood were filled with an overhaul of mixed emotions. A sprinkle of joy, a dash of doubtfulness, and waves of emotions that I wasn't confident to handle. There were so many days when I strongly felt that 'I don't quite fit right into the role of a mother'. I was 24 years old when I became a mother. So, there was this constant fight with the devil mind which kept telling me that I should have had a baby few years later. Especially, when you see your college seniors staying single till 27 and 28, without thinking about what to cook for ...

I know a lot of voracious readers. Take for instance, my husband. He reads a new book every week, he reads two books in parallel sometimes. A total non-sync with me! Give me any book, short story or non-fiction or novel or anything, I can't read more than 5 pages at a stretch. The irony is I have owned a ridiculous collection of books and encyclopaedias since my school days. But I always stuck to reading comics like Tinkle and Archies. Why can't I read? Do I lack the concentration to read through a story? Don't I have the patience to understand line by line and delve into a book's world? Low attention span? Recently, one of my college seniors posted a status update on similar lines. Just like me, he can never hook himself to a book and hence not use books as references in everyday conversations. I have the same problem. Hi-5! So, have people like us missed out on something in life? Right when I was feeling bad about my ignorance about books and reading, I started r...