Category: My life

Posted in My life

Wearing Jerome’s Shoes

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Here is an excerpt from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. While this book is always on my mind, it came to me today because of the happenings in the past three weekends, and in fact, the past five years of my life.

“And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school-life for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give our
parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn’t catch so much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened us up ; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we
could think of seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of
disorders, which lasted till the term recommenced ; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to
the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.”

I have low immunity and get viral fever whenever season changes, but only on weekends and, then, become completely well on Mondays and ready to work. Nearly 80 percent of my sick leave lapse unused every year while so many weekends are killed. My super manager had once joked that our team has a habit of falling ill only when there is no work. It comes back to me ever so often.

For the first time in past five years, I am out of office for illness for more than a couple of hours (five days already and would need another tomorrow). It feels weird in extreme to not open my laptop for five days in a row, as if I’ve lost a limb.

Thank goodness for the WordPress app on my phone to keep me engaged. Else, I would have gone crazy with boredom.

Posted in Blogging, Fiction, My life, Nature stories, Poetry, Twisted fairytales

1st Re-birthday Celebration

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Stats: 1 year, 300+ Posts, 5600+ Views, 186 Followers

WOOHOOOOOO!!!

Fish in the Trees is my alter ego. It stands for my unique position as a true Gemini. (Ever saw that horoscope picture with two people looking in different directions? That’s me.) I have always been looking in two directions or more–trying to see both sides of the coin, skewing my perspective like a fish-eye lens. I have a traditional small-town upbringing, but am plagued with question-itis (the habit of asking pain-in-the-ass questions) and conform-o-phobia (the fear of conforming with status quo). My blog follows suit.

It makes both of us forever misfits, like a shellfish in the trees.

Fish in the trees only had five posts till mid-last year, all of which I deleted. On the night of 15th June last year, I decided to rebirth this site and moved in stuff from my earlier site Fly on the Wall (that no one read). Since then, I have written every week, twice a week, daily… Yup! I’m that crazy!

Now after one year, here are 10 posts that I am proud of…okay 18…It is rather difficult to pick your favourite child, and I have over 300.

Enjoy!

Posted in My life

Too Pink

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Awoke in a world too Pink–

an Alice in Wonderland

kind-of dream…

a world I’d never fit in,

that doesn’t let me grow,

or have a voice,

forced on me

by the virtue of my gender–

the one I had no choice in.

Scared in extreme, I wake up,

still trapped

in a world too Pink…

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Posted in My life

My Personal Black Day

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I am rather ashamed of myself for this incident because, all my life, I had believed I wasn’t a racist. It shows me the mirror.

Bangalore, nearly evening…

I and my roommate had been shopping for several hours and I was fretting to return home. I was new to Bangalore, didn’t remember the roads, didn’t know the language, and had already lost my way once at night. My roommate knew the way, but we hadn’t been friends long, so I had a difficulty trusting her night-navigation skills.

As we boarded the autorickshaw, she asked me if it was okay if we visited a friend close by for a couple of minutes. She had something she wanted to handover. I said it was fine.

So we went to his rented flat in a posh locality. I was fine until he opened the door. Black.

I was suddenly on guard. I wasn’t able to place the sharp smell that came from the flat (a bachelors’ pad), I wondered if it was drugs. I can’t even give an excuse of huge built or towering personality. He was merely 5’8″, welcoming and cordial. My fear was only based on the colour and smell, which I later found out was the smell of sweat (bachelors’ pad, after all).

Even though I knew he was a highly qualified software engineer and a close friend of my roomy, I was scared. I held my breath until we were out. Those two minutes were the longest in my life. I knew that all those present there realised my discomfort since he didn’t stop us for chit-chat. I didn’t do anything, but still made him feel unwelcome.

I later tried to rationalise my reaction by saying it was being in a new place among strangers…but I had been in a similar situation before, but the guys were all Indians and we had a lot of laughs that day.

There are no two ways about it. I was prejudiced against a Black man even before he looked at me.

I met him later again in a GoCarting area. This time, I was genuinely happy to have received a second chance. Surprising my family, I went ahead and talked to him about everything under the sun. I still wish I had done it the first day, which still remains the black day of my life.

Posted in My life

Your Art Inspires Mine: Making Software Training Bearable

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

As Instructional Designers, we create online courses for adult learners. Recently, I and another colleague were training around 12 colleagues on an authoring software that we use create these products. We were worried about the mental barriers of virtual training, the monotony of software training and the difficulty our colleagues would face in remembering the huge number of functionalities.

So, we decided to go crazy. To show them the various capabilities of the software, we used a dragon activity that Ellen Forkin had shared for free on her blog Ellen’s Wonderfuss Fairies for kids to doodle on.

We showed them how to insert icons and images of food in it’s stomach and then add labels and various functionalities to the page. It earned quite a few giggles from our ‘class’. Since, we are all 30-50 years old, I would call that quite a feat. More importantly, it helped them remember.

Next day, as a refresher of the functionalities taught the previous day, I quickly built a story using a troll hair activity, again by Ellen Forkin. It had the same functionalities and some new ones to get my ‘students’ excited and ready to learn. Some may think it unprofessional to use cartoons for adult learners but it worked for us.

Here is the story and a couple of screenshots. Together with the animation, narration and various functionalities, it came out as entertaining, if nothing more.

Now, a farmhouse, complete with animals and a farmhand, sat atop his bald head.

The old couple was horrified–it’s not everyday that you see the earth move beneath your feet. The young farmhand was rather amused–it’s not everyday that you see the earth move beneath your feet. The cow and sheep were wide-eyed and stopped mooing and baaing for an entire minute. The rooster, however, loved the higher perch and began cock-a-doodle-doo-ing right away.

But the gentle troll that he was, Munchkins put them down, smiled and walked away.

Thank you, Ellen, for waking my student’s inner child, which made the training a resounding success. Your art inspired mine.

For the love of cartooning and Norse mythology, and a good laugh, visit Ellen’s site: https://ellenswonderfussfaeries.wordpress.com/

Posted in My life

Fasting: A Fish-eye Perspective

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Disclaimer: As a converted Muslim, my experiences with Islam are rather new. My newly found love, faith and peace of heart, I cherish. Still, my perspective is a bit out of place, like a shellfish in the trees.

Ramadan is the month of praying and fasting for Muslims. We observe fasts for a lunar month where we abstain from food and water starting an hour before sunrise till after sunset (12-17 hours). It is meant to help us connect with the Almighty, and also, to heal our body from the damage done by the daily assault of cooked food.

Ideally: After a day of fasting:

  1. When I’d break my fast with dates and 2 glasses of water, it’d cleanse my system and heal it.
  2. After I had offered prayers, I’d eat very light food, and my body would concentrate its efforts at healing me, rather than digesting fried chicken.
  3. Healing would continue all night, so that by the end of the month, the vehicle of my soul is a newly-polished limousine rather than the cluttered, rusty truck I had made it through the year.

Reality: After a day of fasting:

  1. When I break my fast with processed dates and lemon sherbet, both of which contain refined sugar (that in turn contains fluoride), my system absorbs the chemicals at lightening speed. My rusty old truck is now purring with excitement.
  2. Then I eat fruit salad, that also contains refined sugar, refined sea-salt (sodium), and fruits (grown using chemicals to ripen them overnight to cover the demand during Ramadan). The rust now turns a darker shade of red.
  3. Then I continue eating fried potatoes and onion pakodas, fried chickpea… Combined with digestive sauce containing refined sea-salt, the food spikes the purring of my (heart) engine to a racing-car level.
  4. I have to pray, so I try to stop, but hey, who will eat the lamb chops?
  5. And wasting biryani is a sacrilege I shall never be blamed of…and the vehicle of my soul, already cluttered, has no space for my soul to sit in.
  6. I’m thirsty after the day-long fast but I can’t make the space for two glasses of water. So, I settle for a cup of brown tea with refined sugar and a spot of milk–acidic but heavenly.
  7. Now, my engine has collapsed. Acceleration of any kind leaves me dizzy. Like a zombie, the vehicle of my soul drags along during the prayers, whirring complains of how the ‘lack of food’ has left me weak at knees.
  8. By the end of the month, I am a bigger, rustier truck with a failing engine and full to brim with the clutter I have collected during the food orgy I lovingly call ‘fasting’. My soul opens the door to fit itself in, and hangs in there with the help of more medicines than usual, throwing up every now and then because of the stuffiness, and reminds itself to go slow next year.

If only, I’d remember.

Posted in My life, Poetry

Echo

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Love was when I dragged you

to the college library

to finish your assignments;

when I forced you

to sit with me in the front

rather than with backbenchers

so you would study;

when I forced you

to attend college

on mass-bunk days;

when I gave you

quick lessons before exams

and kept raising the bar

until you could do no more.

What we have

in marriage today

is an echo of that love,

where you take

my place,

and I take yours.

Posted in My life

The Why of the Angel

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I was eight then. My mother had the dinner ready but, at around seven PM, my father suggested to eat at our favorite restaurant. I and my brother weren’t the kind to let the opportunity slide. So, we jumped around drowning away our mother’s protests about wasting home-cooked food.

Soon, we got ready and jumped on the scooter. (Yup! Two adults and two semi-grown non-adults on a scooter–that’s how the India traveled then and still does.) A few kilometres away, on a lonely dark road, we saw a car approaching. My father moved the scooter to the side of the road to give it path.

And the world went black.

I began crying with pain and fear. I could hear the voices of my family but we weren’t able to see anything. In a world devoid of mobile phones, we had no source of light. So, we had no idea of what was happening. The road was deserted at night, so no one could have heard or helped us.

But someone did. All of a sudden, we could see faint light above us. Everything after that is blurred in my memory. I remember that someone pulled us all out of the deep hole in the road and drove us all to the hospital in his car. If he hadn’t helped us in that moment, we, blinded by the darkness, could have fallen inside the sewage opening directly beneath us, and drowned.

We never heard from him again.

I don’t remember his face, but I have always remembered him as a hero. I had often thought of him as an angel helping us–only I never knew what we had done to deserve that help.

Many years later, my father, now retired from service, met someone at the railway station. The deep respect in this stranger’s voice belied the fact that he was a high-ranking officer talking to a retired person. While he chatted with my father, I asked mom who he was. She told me a story I had never heard before.

When I was five, my father had found this man on a lonely road. He was gravely wounded and bloodied from a road accident. Other vehicles had driven on, afraid of robbers or the possible blame of causing the said accident. But my father had driven him to the hospital before it was too late for him.

It was three years before our own accident.

Then, I knew why the angel chose to help us. Little acts of kindness go a long way…both ways.

Posted in My life

The 3 Dollar Playschool

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

My daughter turned three this month. Amidst the Corona Virus scare, we were not able to celebrate. We also had to postpone her admission to playschool. Still, I wanted to make the day special for her.

Then my mind drifted to the Playhouse I build last year for 1.5 USD. The flowers were now peeling off and the color yellow had become mellow. My family was planning to discard it. I thought better and gave my child a Playschool and something to occupy her time.

It cost three dollars (around 200 Rs). I pasted 16 pieces of card sheets, glue, and cello tape. Then, wrote English-Hindi alphabets and numbers on the inner sides. Tadaaaaaaaaa! The school was ready.

For decoration, I hired professional help–my daughter. I gave her colors and a free reign. She is still having a gala time ‘decorating’ it!

Here is the result.

I drew the animals, she coloured.

.

She drew the animals, we coloured.

The best part is that within a month, my daughter learnt how to write English alphabets just because of the excitement and the sense of importance. The ‘play-school’ walls are full of animal names my daughter has written and we are progressing to numbers next.

And I have a wonderful artifact that will be auctioned for 1000 dollars someday! (Well, a mother can hope!)