Skip to main content

Seeing Normal

Just watching Vasu do her thing in Pushpavalli is enough reason to stick with the show. It filled me with a great nostalgia for Bangalore of my childhood. Her creative use of English accented with Kannada made me crave oota Mrs S used to serve us kids if we showed up uninvited to her house on Sunday mornings.If you have spent any time in Karnataka you know a couple just like Nikhil's parents. The casting could not be more perfect. 

 Hyperbole runs through the whole show and will likely make many a desi woman stop to think about where in the Pushpavalli scale of crazy her own "normal" might fall. The contribution of our mothers in how we turn out, the mistakes we make and the men we let into our lives. Speaking of mothers, Pushpavalli's is a force of nature but completely believable. I have friends whose mothers are much like her, speaking in mysterious metaphors and playing crazy mind games to retain control of their girls. My own mother is very complex creature herself.

 The show made me think of cultural context of how a person may behave, the limits and filters that may apply in their lives. More importantly, when a person might descend into free-fall with no one watching or trying to stop it. Those among us who did not have a clear vision of their future at a young age or lacked the confidence to steer their destiny in the direction of their own choosing, could have felt like Pushpavalli - trying to balance the desperate need for validation of those who can never be pleased with an equally desperate need for freedom from those very same individuals.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more