Not Busy

A woman in a  business suit walking briskly and checking emails on her phone while crossing the busy intersection, a young mother frantically maneuvering  a double stroller with her two children at the curb while talking loudly on a phone, and a well-dressed man with an expensive garment carrier running to catch the only available yellow cab; it’s 8:30 am on a Monday and welcome to the land of busy.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about “busyness” and “busy” people.  I talked about the “busy” culture and how everyone is somehow always busy. Fast forward a few years and  it is even worse now.  I have to admit, there are times when I feel that I should be “busier”, catching up to the hamster wheel of time that keeps turning.  I've had momentary guilt when I get texts from friends saying how busy they are when I don’t feel as “busy”.

New York City is the superstar of busy culture; everyone is caught between work, going to work, coming from work, dance classes, piano lessons, painting classes, watching games, going to concerts, dinner, or events; a sea of people caught in an invisible trap.  Mothers are some of the busiest people in the city, shuttling children back and forth between sports and music classes, some of them after coming back from a long and hectic day at work.

There are some people who cannot help but be busy because their lives demand it. For example, a single mother working two jobs to support and take care of her children or a man who has to take care of his elderly parents while working. Then, there are others, who choose to be busy.

There are a few reasons why we are continuously living in the culture of busyness.  Humans are naturally inclined to copy others in terms of how we spend our time and money.  If you want to emulate others, you have to catch up with them and in some cases, show off. If a friend’s child is taking a piano class from a master instructor, another mother may feel that she is depriving her child of that special instruction, if she doesn’t provide the same for her child. Even though she might be pressed for time, she would somehow find a way to fit that into her already busy schedule of running errands on a weekend or cooking.  Single people living in the city are also victims of this.  A friend who enrolls in a Bikram yoga class on a Wednesday evening will persuade another friend to take that class. The already swamped friend influenced by her friend might take that class even though she already works  more than 60 hours per week at her job. What used to be luxuries in the past have now started to become necessities.

Consider the life of an average person living in New York City.  That person probably spends about an hour to two hours a day commuting to and from work.  That equates to about 10 hours a week spent on commuting alone.  Most of my friends work more than 40 hours a week at their jobs. Let’s say that the average person works 45 hours a week and commutes for about 10 hours – that translates to 55 hours spent going to and coming back from work. If you are a banker, doctor, or a lawyer, you can add at least (note, I said “at least”) another 20 hours to that. That translates to 75 hours a week. This doesn’t include time spent answering work related emails and other business related tasks. 

Efficiency is not talked about much at work or in school. The 9-5 workday (in most cases, is much more) is part of the reason why efficiency is in peril.  A person who can complete his or her work in half the time will either wait for others to complete their work or may take on additional tasks during the day.  However, if there were no set work hours, the efficient person could get a lot more done in a shorter period of time.  That person might not “feel” as busy since he or she has more time to get involved in other activities. 

Ideally, time management should be a required course in every college or high school.  People who manage time well and efficiently can still find time to do things they enjoy.  Workdays can become more flexible to let people with families and other commitments juggle their time better.  Also, people can start saying no to commitments that can make them “busy” without feeling guilty.  It will create a world that is a bit slower, giving people time to reflect and actually breathe. Maybe that woman in  a business suit can listen to music while walking to work or that young mother can actually take a nice stroll with her children in the stroller.

How to talk to women

Neon pink dresses, white lace tops, green colored pants, a shiny new cherry lip gloss, a new shade of orange lipstick, or matching dangling earrings- what shall I buy? shop shop shop.  I went to a store today to see if I could find a new bright blazer fit for work in the summer but couldn’t find it there, so I left without buying anything.  People say that I shop with a purpose, or that I “shop like a man”. I am one of the few almost extinct species of women who actually dislike shopping. 

Today, I came across the following article from a blog posted by friends on facebook, “How to talk to little girls”. http://girlsinreallife.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/latina-fatale-how-to-talk-to-little-girls/

It talks about the pressure that young girls face in our society to look pretty or beautiful.  It also goes through a dialogue between the author and a young girl about books instead of looks. 

As a young professional female living in NYC, I have been part of several conversations about the right makeup, the right skin product, hair salon, manicures, pedicures, the right summer sandals, the best spring nail color, or the right highlights. Sometimes I engage in these conversations willingly and at other times I feel like a forced participant.  I have recently taken note of the number of conversations with women that deal with looks, clothes, or shopping.  The conversations have gotten to a point where I have blaringly declared that I despise shopping to the shock and awe of others.  How could someone living in the shopping and fashion capital of the world dislike the very activity that supports its culture?

We are told that no matter how we look, we will never be “perfect”. We will never be like the airbrushed images glaring at us from fashion magazines or the scantily clad women displayed in the storefronts.  It is a culture built upon looks, from TV shows to the corporate offices.

 Since I am a thin person, I have not been told that I need to change my weight; I am a mere 105 lbs for my 5’3” frame.  I should technically be considered underweight. Since size 0 is apparently considered a “good” standard to achieve for model thin looks in the west, the “comments” and “feedback” I receive have shifted to other areas of my appearance: have I tried hair relaxers, have I tried waxing my face, have I tried dermabrasion, have I tried getting more frequent manicures, or have I tried getting a new haircut? The list goes on and on. 

For any woman who thinks she is fine and confident with the way she looks, it is not her who determines her worth; society somehow attempts to undermine that by saying that she could be better looking or “perfect”.  No woman is perfect on the outside and we should never try to attain that mirage of “perfection”.  Otherwise, we will be a flawed creature forever in our eyes trying to achieve a visual perfection that never exists.

The Cats of Istanbul

Two weeks ago, I was in Istanbul. On my first day, while stepping out of the hotel in old-fashioned and hilly Sultanahmet, a colorful and friendly cat greeted me. Not too long after my brief encounter with this cat, I saw a swarm of them including kittens, gravitating next to dried up leftover fish nearby. An older pensive gentleman with a gray beard wearing a gray jacket was frying fish in a large pan outside a store with two men slowly sipping hot tea or çay next to him. 


I have never considered myself a cat person. I always found them to be a bit recluse and perhaps a bit sly whereas dogs always seemed warm and friendly. While visiting the historic Hagia Sophia, an impressive structure steeped with history, where two religions found their home, a place that's been ravaged, rebuilt, and adored, and a site that no tourist would miss, a beige cat found her way near me. She slowly started to claw at my bag with her paws. She was friendly and comfortable in her surroundings posing with tourists and strutting around the archaic floors as if she owned the majestic place whose floors have endured hundreds of years of footsteps. Little did I know that she is one of the few cats who call the Hagia Sophia their home. Cats sitting next to mosques as if they were guarding them, cats watching earnestly from graveyards, cats following people, cats eating scraps, purring cats, sleeping cats, lazy cats, and small kittens bravely meandering around cars; they were everywhere.


My last day in Istanbul was a bit sad and surreal because of thoughts of leaving the city the next morning. While walking by an old bookstore outside Istanbul University, I saw a few cats sleeping while others were gently scratching the books and other items placed on a bench. Among them was a cute naughty little kitten that kept on jumping to catch a pair of socks but kept falling each time. 

We stopped by an old mosque or camii near the historic aqueduct walls. I saw an old man performing wudhu inside the verdant courtyard. Outside the courtyard, next to an eerie graveyard, was a sleepy and lazy fat cat. He was by himself and there he lay as if he owned the camii. He peeked gently with one eye, stretched, yawned, and went back to sleep smug and comfortable as if he owned the city.

Instagram

Many of you already know that I am an instagram addict. I love photography, art, and technology. They also introduced Instagram websites. Here is a link to mine:
http://instagram.com/nmathari

My grandmother's smile

I rushed into the room while my luggage was still in the car. “Your grandmother is waiting for you”, my aunt said.  It was last December, and I had just arrived from the airport after having traveled more than 8000 miles from New York City to this coastal city of Calicut in northern Kerala in India to see her. She was sick and bedridden for some time. Seeing me entering the room, she gave a big wide smile and kept looking at me. I hadn’t seen her for more than four years.  There was a glow around her and that wide smile was almost angelic; it is now etched into my mind forever. “We haven’t seen this smile for months”, my aunt added.  Apparently she had not smiled for days and weeks.

A few days after my arrival, on a pleasant tropical Christmas day, we were in the car taking her back to the ancestral home.  An Indian Santa Claus in a ridiculous costume was crossing the street in the furious traffic and he was drunk. I started laughing when I saw him and my grandmother also basked in the humor along with me, even though she was very weak.  Others in the car also joined us mostly because of the joy in seeing my grandmother laugh.

Last week, on Wednesday around noon, I was in downtown New York City near Battery Park working on my laptop when I had a sudden feeling of uneasiness.  Something felt not right and I immediately called my mom who lives in Michigan.  “What made you to call me from work, do you have ESP or something?”, she asked. She said she had been feeling uneasy that whole day since grandmother was not well and was trying to decide when to go to India to see her again. “Should I go in September?”, she asked me. I felt a rush of energy and emotion and I blurted out, “No, you better go now”.  “You mean I should book tickets for this week?”. “Yes, immediately and as soon as you can. Go on Friday if you can.”, I said. 

This Wednesday closer to midnight I was in bed getting ready to sleep and randomly browsing the internet on my iPad when my dad called me.  My grandmother had passed away peacefully while my mom was by her bed side.  I don’t know what force or energy had forced me to convince my mom to go to India, but she was able to spend almost three days with her mother and take care of her in the hospital with her siblings. 

My grandmother Safiya was born to a Muslim business family in the late 1930’s and married off to my grandfather around the age of 15 (my grandfather was about 19).  She gave birth to 10 children and by the time she was 30 years old, she already had a large family and enormous responsibilities.  I remember visiting her on vacation when I was a child and she would be the first one to wake up to make sure that breakfast was warm and ready and hot chai was on its way.  Food was the focal point for social interactions in her household with chicken biryani prepared on special occasions. The aroma of the spices would fill the air and my mouth would water and as a child who didn’t grow up there, I would try to make use of my minimal vacation time by eating and playing at the house as much as I could. I enjoyed the role of being the first girl grandchild of the family for a long time.    

    

 My dad’s mother also has a similar story.  I was a teenager when I last saw her and I still remember my last words to her that hot April afternoon, “see you again”.  She was a strong and determined woman who also gave whatever she could to the world, whether it was passing out “foreign” candy we brought with us to the neighborhood children or giving a little more extra to someone in need.  Both of my grandmothers were only teenagers when they were pushed into responsibilities.  Their lives were charted out for them instead of being able to plan their own futures.

They didn’t have time to think about what their passions in life were.  They didn’t think about what to wear to the next event or what new restaurant to try.  They didn’t think about makeup or shows or books or travel or shoes, for that matter.  I can’t even compare my life living in New York City to that of my grandmothers since they both put me to shame in how much they had compromised, accomplished, and sacrificed for their families. 

Thoughts on humility

A sideways glance, a sigh, no eye contact – yes, I have seen that before. It’s the yuppie who has just entered the cosmopolitan world of money and power – a world that is new and enticing, where he thinks he can conquer the world and conquer it all.

Humility is seen as a virtue by many peoples and cultures and placed in high regard, especially by Asian cultures.  Recently, I was in a few situations where I started thinking about humility and how people practice it.  In New York City, where everything is dense, people, streets, emotions, drama and life, I have found that certain individuals trade humility for pretentiousness.  In a city where the first questions someone asks are what you do and where you live, the pressure to conform has taken away the humility from many individuals. 

Success in America is also not always associated with humble people. If you are humble, you may not be able to toot your own horn. That in turn can result in less interviews for a job seeker, or less publicity for a new author.  However, there is a balance that people can learn, and that is the fine line between confidence and arrogance.

If you talk to very successful people, you may notice that the most successful people are not the most arrogant.  I have always wondered why the middle managers of success are the ones who are the most arrogant. Is it the fact that the very successful have nothing to prove since everyone knows they are already successful?

In the path to success, we all encounter many people who help us along the way, from our parents to our teachers, from the person who gives us our morning coffee to the person who operates the subway train, to the person who keeps the office clean.  They all share our path to success. It is up to us to make sure that when we get there, we acknowledge that every one of them played a role in our success.  It is up to us to avoid falling into the pit of arrogance.

  

A Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving for me is usually spent at my parents’ house in Michigan with a warm fire and sumptuous dinner that consists of a mixture of Indian and American dishes. This year, I decided to stay in New York City to skip the strenuous holiday travel after exhaustion from my recent apartment move and an anticipated trip oversees coming up in December.

Yesterday, I took a walk in the brisk morning to go to the Macy’s parade. I was hoping to catch a bus, but the sun was shining and the beauty and quietness of it all made me skip taking the bus. It was a little eerie to see New York City so quiet, when the excitement and madness makes way to calmness. However, it wasn’t long before I could hear people at distance and I knew that I was getting close to the parade. Then, I saw people with strollers, grandmothers, couples, tourists, and locals eagerly walking in that direction.

As I continued walking, I saw a person crouched up on the side of the street with a few bags wearing a hooded old sweater. As many of you know, it is not an uncommon sight in the city to see a homeless person, and I don’t always stop. This time, something in me made me stop and go back. I couldn’t tell if the person was a man or woman since all I could see was a small part of the face; I felt I had to give something. The person looked up surprised as if awoken from a deep sleep, and it made me a bit sad.

At the parade, I saw the floats of Ronald McDonald, Snoopy, and Spiderman; people were screaming and laughing, little kids were perched up on their father’s shoulders, and tourists were looking at the floats in awe taking pictures of everything in sight (probably their first American Thanksgiving). My festive mood was tampered with the thought of the crouched up person in the street. It was a reminder to me that there are people who spend their Thanksgiving without a home, a family, or a smiling child next to them. It was a reminder to me to be thankful for my family, friends, and my home.