Kiran Manral's Blog, page 34
January 19, 2016
A guest post for Kidsstoppress on parenting and social media
Is Social Media Making You A More Stressed Out Parent?
Kiran Manral was a journalist before she moved out to set up a content supply company during the first dot com boom. An erstwhile blogger, both her blogs were considered amongst India’s top blogs and she was a Tehelka blogger columnist on gender issues.
Kiran Manral
Right off the bat, let me confess that I used to blog about my son. And I did so for over ten years, and that the above mentioned blog went on to become terribly popular, got listed among the leading parenting blogs in India and is now a book. Having got that disclaimer, and therefore any pretence of having a moral right to speak against social media from any soapbox out of the way, I can now talk about parenting in the age of social media.
When I got onto social media over a decade ago, it wasn’t as all pervasive as it is today. Sure there was Facebook, and there were blogs, and Twitter was but a gleam in its inventor’s eyes. Of Instagram and Pinterest and such like, we couldn’t even imagine, because we still had to click pictures via a camera, although we had morphed from film to digital, and could transfer pics via complicated processes of hooking up the camera to the computer via wires that were put on earth to tangle up into a knot of Gordian levels of complicatedness.
The easier things have become, the tougher it has become to keep up. Competitive parenting, I am told, is a real term today. I see it all around me. I see it at the school gate, at the pool side when my son was training competitively as a swimmer, I see it on social media. And it is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to India. In fact, competitive parenting is on the rise across the world, and social media has exacerbated the situation.
Read the rest of the post here
January 14, 2016
Do Your Homework
The offspring, like most offsprings do I suppose, changes his game plan for the future every couple of weeks. He’s been through liftman, postman, security guard and police man in the distant past when these jobs seemed of vital importance to him. In the recent past he has shifted his aspirations to astronaut (post Interstellar), dancer (post ABCD2) and spy.
An interesting encounter with a palmist had the prescient one tell him he would go abroad to study, and I rolled my eyes given that any studying that currently happens needs a stool and a whip to get done. But nonetheless, I realise that he is growing, college is but a few years away and further studies not so far away in the distant future that I can afford to twiddle my fingers and not be salting away surplus cash into the piggy bank to pay for his higher education, whatever he may choose to do. I’ve seen people around me break fixed assets, sell property and jewellery in order to fund their children’s higher education. I know that my mother did her very best to give me the best education she could, as a single parent with a limited income, and though times weren’t that expensive at that point, I did opt for a standard course of education knowing that there was no way she would be able to afford sending me abroad for higher education, even though I would have made the cut re admissions into a course of my choice.
It terrifies me at times to realise that the cost of higher education in these times is something that one needs to plan for, and if your child plans to study abroad, the amount you need to put aside is not something to be scoffed at.
Every time I now tell the child he needs to study, I am uncomfortably aware of the need to begin saving for his future studies. The moral authority with which I tell him to study gets negated when I don’t plan for the potential expense that his future education swings over my head like the proverbial Damocles sword.
If I tell him to “Do Your Homework,” I need to do mine too, in order to plan for his future, and to fulfil his aspirations. This means starting to save, and starting to plan what needs to invested. I think, as parents, we all have a responsibility to #DoYourHomework. After all our children’s aspirations depend upon it.
Link: http://www.homework.axismf.com .
(This is a sponsored post)
January 12, 2016
My iDiva Column this week: 10 Practical Lessons for Every Introvert to Survive in an Extroverted World
Kiran Manral
12 Jan 2016
I have always struggled with the need to, as T S Eliot put it so succinctly, ‘put on a face to meet the faces I would be meeting’. I would be more than pleased to be let alone, to not be ferreted out from underneath the tablecloth at a dinner party, then surgically separated from the book that would inevitably be in my hand, and be compelled to be polite and social, and answer questions from people I barely knew and had no interest in getting to know better. Give me someone I found interesting and I was all too keen to spend hours getting to know all their childhood separation anxiety issues and how they broke up with their imaginary friend, but put me in one of those where there were many people, lots of tinkling conversation and people holding other people in thrall and you had me in fight or flee panic.
Things didn’t change much as I grew up, but I did get more adept in the art of being ‘social’ when I needed to, although I would emerge from the experience quite drained and needing a lot of alone time just to recharge myself. I grew up thinking I was an aberration, but now I realise I am not alone, that many people, like me, prefer being by themselves than being with company. I have also accepted that I need to be fiercely possessive of my alone time, and make exceptions discerningly. But if you, like me, are one of those who prefer solitude or one-on-one time with a friend over meeting many people or being constantly out there in the midst of the action, this is what might help you stay unruffled.
1. You can leave an event when you want to. You are an adult now and you get to call when it is quite enough for you. You can also do the ‘show face’ thing to must-attend events where you really go to express solidarity and not feel guilty about it.
Read the rest of the article here
January 3, 2016
Karmic Kids gets mentioned in the top 5 books on parenting by Indian authors in The Sunday Guardian
By KORAL DASGUPTA
In 2015, books on parenting were given plenty of shelf space in India. Koral Dasgupta rediscovers five of the best books on parenting by Indian authors, and lists the lessons learnt.
“If you are bored of all the “gyan” and want to breathe free, and yet feel drawn to the same parenting chaos endlessly and suffocatingly, it’s time for you to lap up Kiran Manral’s Karmic Kids, which by her own admission is an account of “laid back parenting.” The book is an intelligent and hilarious take on parenting blues and advocates one simple thought to all super-moms and super-dads. Take it easy! There are many sticky moments in life when things assume too much importance because of peer pressure or the self-dictated benchmarks you have burdened yourself with! Manral picks those up, year by year till the kids turn ten, and addresses them with humour. From your body and mind, to those of others in the family, the helps, the baby blues, growing demands for theme parties you are clueless about, and many other issues crop up and settle themselves in the printed pages. As you read the book you would probably laugh at yourself thinking of those moments when simple or silly ambitions that you had set with yourself or with the baby managed to unnerve you considerably and you behaved as if you are someone else. Karmic Kids will stand by you and support those moments. It will assure you that everything is fair in love, war and parenting!”
http://www.sundayguardianlive.com/lifestyle/2414-books-give-you-lowdown-good-parenting
January 1, 2016
My column for iDiva this week: 10 New Year Resolutions you should be making
Every year, when December 31 rolls by, I tell myself, with the ennui that the passing of each year brings, that making New Year Resolutions is passé, and what do I really accomplish by them apart from the certainty that I would break them and was it really worth the ink on paper it took to put them down. This year was about the same. I decided to do away with making resolutions altogether, and then, when I sat down to contemplate on how the year had passed I realised what resolutions for the New Year really meant. They are the hope that the coming year would be better that the previous one, they signify a desire to take charge of ourselves and our circumstances and improve them, and most importantly, resolutions are always an indication of our realisation that we acknowledged what is troubling us about our lives right now. And this acknowledgement is always half the battle won.
Here, then, are 10 New Year Resolutions you should be making.
1. Be judicious of the time you spend on social media. Sure it may seem like Wonderland out there, with so many followers hanging on for your every update, fascinating, famous people you can interact with, the heady euphoria of the pinging of likes on a single status update or a post on Instagram, the rough and tumble of a Twitter argument, the headiness of getting a reply from a celebrity, the joy of seeing a post on a blog go viral, but be aware that real life is out there, offline. You have one life, it is not meant to be lived out on instagram.
2. Get healthy. This doesn’t necessarily mean to lose weight or diet yourself down to what you think is your ideal size, but rather to get fit enough to be at your physical peak. Eat well, and healthy, be conscious about what you put into your body, be judicious about the things you abuse your body with-cigarettes, junk food, alcohol or worse. Know that you have one body to last you a lifetime, and what you feed it and how you treat it is how it will stand up through the long march of time. Work at getting fit, work out if you have to. You are in the prime of life right now, and your body should be at its peak fitness levels. Write down your health and fitness goals and work towards them over the year.
Read the rest of the article here
December 31, 2015
All Aboard at No 2 in Butterfly & The Bee’s Top Ten of 2015
Butterfly & The Bee‘s TOP TEN 2015
Books by Indian Authors …we read this year
Recommendations by Lively Glee Lit Worms
December 29, 2015
In which both my books get mentioned in a year end round up….
“…
Fiction would include William Boyd’s panoramic and enthralling “Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay”, Kunal Basu’s searing “Kalkatta”, Kiran Manral’s frothy but subtly different romance “All Aboard”, Anuja Chandramouli’s refreshingly new take on primordial Hindu goddesses in “Shakti: The Feminine Divine”, Pakistani Omar Shahid Hamid’s jihadi noir “The Spinner’s Tale”, for a chilling portrayal of a terrorist mindset and Bangladeshi Saad Z. Hossein’s inventive black farce “Escape from Baghdad – A Novel”.
Two Indian writers who needed to be singled out were the subversively witty Kiran Manral, whose comedy of manners of globetrotting Indians was followed by an endearing account of motherhood in “Karmic Kids: The Story of Parenting Nobody Told You!”, and the versatile Sharath Komarraju, who produced a sexual abuse whodunnit, a Mughal murder mystery starring Birbal and the second volume of his Mahabharata retelling through the Kuru women’s eyes….”
Read the original here
The liberation of being a woman of a certain, ermm, invisibility
It first hit me a couple of years ago when I was at a store, waiting patiently for my turn to be served. And well, my turn never came. Others kept barging in, getting the attention of the sales staff, getting what they wanted. While I waited, until I quietly had had quite enough of waiting, turned around, walked out unnoticed, unstopped and realised it had finally happened. I had become that dreaded creature, the invisible woman.
I had seen the signs over the past few years. Heads no longer turned when I walked past, even when I was dressed to the teeth. People did not stop conversations to accommodate me when I approached their little groups at parties but carried on, regardless. I found myself stopping short of doing cartwheels and headstands in restaurants to get a waiter’s attention.
It is kind of deflating to the ego. You know that there was a time when you put half the time into getting ready and could guarantee heads on rotor blades as you passed. The compliments are now few and far between. You have folks walking right past you without even registering you exist. In the rush for elevators, you are jostled aside when previously you would be courteously given right of way.
What has changed, you ask yourself? In your head, you are still the same, give or take a few wrinkles and some grey hair. But something has definitely changed for the world around. Circa one’s mid forties, it is like a giant switch gets switched off and a woman morphs into some sort of translucency that makes her there but not quite there. The mirror isn’t so kind either. The midriff develops a mind of its own and that stubborn bulge which normally took a couple of weeks of sensible eating and working out to whittle back into normalcy, stays put, with squatter rights, ration card and aadhar card. The hair that you took for granted and abused in persistent unspeakable manner by perming, colouring, tonging and other abominations, gives you a cheeky middle finger and begins dropping right from your crown into the abyss of forgotten youth, leaving you with a scalp that shines through no matter what you do. The wrinkles refuse to fade after you stop smiling. The neck is stretched, the skin grows reptilian. You age. You become invisible.
Let me not pretend it does not affect one, it does. It does very violent things to the self esteem, bordering on first degree torture. But once you cross that dark zone and emerge blinking, into the bright light of realisation, you know that there are many pros to being invisible.
It liberates you in some ways. There is a sense of freedom to be able to go anywhere and know that no eyes are on you. Sometimes you can walk right past people and they won’t even register your presence, which is wonderful when you want to make a quick exit or avoid some dementors who are capable of tap dancing on your last standing nerve. You can go out in track pants and a faded tee and not give a damn because you know that the blot you present on the public landscape is going to be an offense to no one but yourself. You can listen in to conversations because most people don’t even realise you are around, and speak unhindered. For a writer, perennially in search of interesting back stories for potential characters, this is a gold mine. I can walk down a street and know that no cat calls are going to come my way, no one is going to trail me on a motorcycle muttering obscenities and no one is going to stalk me till I reach home. I can travel at odd hours without worrying too much because I’ve got that older woman’s grim determined “Just you mess with me” expression that deters even the roadside eunuchs at traffic signals from being persistent. I can step out at any time and not worry that my appearance is going to be dissected by other women around me, because, well, they aren’t really looking at me, are they?
Most reports say that when a woman hits her mid-forties she starts becoming invisible. I’m bang on target. I assume it gets worse as the years creep up on me. I’m ready and waiting. Being fly on the wall is always much more fun than being in the thick of conversation to me. And yes, I realise this is the perfect age for me to actually seriously contemplate my lifelong ambition of being a spy. I have my own invisibility cloak now.
December 28, 2015
For the Open Road Review: 10 Tips to Survive A Holiday Romance
By Kiran Manral –
December 28, 2015
Holiday romances are common. But be warned; according to statistics, only one out of ten holiday romances develop into a successful long-term relationship.
Here are 10 tips on how to deal with a holiday romance:
Understand the difference between love and lust: It might be love, but more often than not, it might be just lust. Don’t confuse the two. Accept it for what it is. If a person is moving too fast for you, and it makes you uncomfortable in any way, don’t hesitate to back off. And if this person is talking about marriage, or living together, or future getting-together-again-ideas, be wary.
Read the rest of the article here.
December 25, 2015
A review of Karmic Kids in Business Standard
“Stories of motherhood are in essence the stories of humanity itself, but most of them are not recorded – the ups and downs, the bonding and the battles, the frustrations and the fears, the hopes and happiness, and the tenderness and temper tantrums (latter not restricted to kids.. sorry, mothers!)
Unfortunately only a few happen to be shared outside family, and among these, most deal with celebrity moms or kids. Among the exceptions, and an outstanding one, was Erma Bombeck, and Kiran Manral, the author of this rib-tickling but endearing account of the roller-coaster ride in delivering and nurturing a new life, is a worthy successor.
A prolific and popular blogger and author of three witty, readable books, Manral proves her credentials with her first non-fiction work, growing out of her blog posts, spanning moments after childbirth to her most spirited boy’s tenth year.
She strikes up a fondly irreverent tenor right from the beginning, referring to her son as “The Brat”, but her real – and composite – sentiments are evident in the dedication – to “the sprog of my womb, sparkle in my eye, the tenor in my yell, the grey in my hair, and the beat of my heart”.
The first glimpse of her newborn actually becomes an attempt to see the “little mewling ball of flesh” – with the “first moments of the mother-child bonding were marred by the fact that I couldn’t see too clearly” (her spectacles were with a solicitous mother who had promptly kept them away). Consequently, “my first view of the offspring was that of a red blur that looked somewhat like a newborn kitten or puppy..”, confessing “maternal love did not well immediately in the maternal breast”.
And that was even before he began bawling!
Manral takes us down the years, in her same inimitably witty style, chronicling various milestones of not only her son, but also in her own life and role as mother.”
Read the original here
