Dearest Reader,
Hope you’re well and enjoying the cheer of the season. I’m sure your holiday plans are getting ready to be gift wrapped and delivered at the door steps of your life. I on the other hand did get to see some dramatic flips in truest of literary sense recently. Like any bits and pieces of my life, it opened up a can of story telling.
It was a Friday noon and a very calm and otherwise insignificant day which turned nightmarish. My dearest mother in law, who is a brilliant cook and loves tinkering in the kitchen, did her morning rounds of doing so. And then BAAM! We don’t know how, whether she had a black out or she tripped… she fell face flat straight on the floor hurting her forehead badly. I’ve never seen so much blood coming out of someone’s body besides me. But then I’m a pro. Poor Ma, lied on a pool of blood, hurt and in pain. Goes without saying there was emergency rush to the nearest hospital. I will be ever grateful to the bunch of stable headed, compassionate and selflessly helping women in my Building of the Society I stay in. These women who rally around each other in crisis, celebrate happiness and take pride in each other’s success ensured, the in house medic came rushing in, the Society Ambulance was waiting ready and all the security staff carried the injured carefully and fast to the waiting ambulance so that we could head towards nearest hospital emergency.
But the story is not of the accidental fall but of human reaction to crisis. Around the situation, there were folks who almost fainted seeing so much blood, one started crying and sobbing, one was in so much panic that he almost froze and Mithai our 9 months old retriever thought that it’s his sole responsibility to lick my mother in law back to normalcy.
As I grew up in a family where crisis was normal, my father being and IPS officer honoured with Gallantry award by the President of our country, I find myself more often than not emotionally detached and clinically cold in such situations. It’s like I have an automatic reaction to crisis and it’s with surgical precision I tend to deal with it. So the crisis in my home was managed. My dearest mother in law all stitched up, cleaned, being monitored in the ICU and finally shifted to a ward for recovering to health. The associated running around to the hospital and police station all being taken care off before my husband took over charge.
I often wonder if folks find me insane that I can laugh in such situations making it light and funny and that I don’t crumble. But then there are many like me across the world where women handle more than the most masculine of men as expected in our common social parlance. My father brought me up as the eldest son of the family. I was taught what he probably would have taught if he had a boy. I was taught to be the Alpha as I was being prepared to fend my circle. And such an upbringing though had its advantages for those that I shield, has often than not backfired as far as I’m concerned. I have stopped embracing the woman in me since I was a kid.
I took pride in being tougher than the toughest. So I stand up for, I fight for and protect all those who are under my care. I take it personally if my tribe is not getting their due, not being appreciated, being disrespected or not having the comfort they need. For that, I’m often told that I’m emotional, I’m overtly protective, I defend unnecessarily and I am fierce when it comes to my own. It really doesn’t matter, if it’s the family I’m born in or the family I’m married to, my extended family, my helping hands, my team, my larger business unit, the place of my work, the community I’m a member of or my friends. I’m fierce when it comes to shielding them from the wrath of life. That doesn’t mean I have not reared enough tigress cubs. I have and am supremely proud of some of these people who were a part of my life and embraced this philosophy. It takes courage to be unselfish and do the thankless job of being a shield. And I have seen these folks turn into shields and protected me as much as I have protected them. If not anything else, as long as you are guided by sense of righteousness with compassion, you will turn out to be great human beings.
Saying it, I still search for the woman I wanted to be. How would it feel to depend, to be protected, to be cared for…not too sure. Never been there and didn’t get a chance to taste it. Maybe I’m too tuned to the role I have played and don’t know how to depend. Some lives are led like that of mine and you slowly forget the body you reside in as you have metamorphosed into some other beast. I had heard in one of the interviews I had watched years back - “a woman can afford to be a woman when she is with a man who’s man enough”. Else she generally tends to takeover. It’s that nurturing quality of a woman which pushes her to be Dashabhuja (10 handed Goddess Durga) where she kills her demons mercilessly as she nurtures her family single handedly.
I hope dear reader if you’re a woman, you have your man in your life who shields you…and in case you’re a man, then celebrate your woman. Each of you celebrate the balance of divine feminine and the masculine. That’s the natural flow of energy in this universe.
Always yours,
Pocket full of life







