No I don’t want to diet

I have been faced recently with the unenviable position of having to diet for a specific occasion. This occasion, which will remain nameless but involves vows between a man and a woman who I am related to (I’m only related to one of them, not both, it’s not one of those weddings)

Dieting for a specific occasion is different to the general, hmm-I-should-eat-healthily kinda thing. There is no messing around here. If you eat that piece of chocolate from the Guylian box, it WILL make a difference to your waistline, give you that extra whoopee cushion on your back on the big day. Make your cheeks stretch out that much further when you smile…or in terms of the southward cheek variety, when you try to fit into the tight pants. There is no room to be a half-arse here. It is hard core, lean, mean, gut-slicing business.

This is a tad difficult for me. I have always been the mincing kind of person who thinks they ought to eat healthier, who thinks they probably would look generally better if they were a stone lighter – but is not willing to cut out Pret A Manger mozzarella and tomato croissants as a means to achieving this end. I just don’t think I ever wanted it enough. Looking thin and sexy clearly is worth eating nothing but edamame beans and Ryvita crackers for some people and I have respect for their opinion but secretly feel smug and disdainful of their sterile, flavourless view of the world. Eating is a sensuous, sumptuous thing and so is a full bottom.

Having said all that, yes I am on a hardcore diet. Faced with the event where many, many faces will be on me, I have taken the plunge to become a streamlined version of myself. So far I am a little lighter as a result, yes I fit into clothes better I suppose. The facial cheeks – always my main nemesis since my passport photo where my face looks like I’ve been attached to a balloon pump and been energetically blown up – have calmed down a bit. They are still there though, as big cheeks are part of my genetic make-up.

My particular brand of last-minute, crash dieting means I am doing the protein-only thing. This basically zaps all the joy out of food like a Dyson and meal times become a desperate forage for all things non-carbohydrate – yes, I think carrots are ok but then again, hmm, there are some carbs, should I risk it? Hmm. Hmm. God! I can NOT BE THIS PERSON!!

I can’t back out now though, only a few more weeks left. But make no bones about it – oh yes, I’m allowed those – I’m hungry and cranky and I don’t intend to live like this. I might be slightly thinner but a major source of pleasure in my life has gone and been replaced with dried up husks masquerading as meals.

The reason I have always been ‘pleasantly plump’, as my mother puts it, is because food is a joy for me. The reason I’m now depriving myself of it is because of the curse we all live with. I care what other people think. I care what people will think of me when they see me at this event. And therein, my friends, lies le crux of le problemo.

I don’t think I’m going to stop caring about what people think in a hurry. My grandma has not perfected this, far from it, and she’s 82 so I figure it might take me a while. I like to think I’m on route to a cure. In the meantime while I await the miracle remedy, I will see this as a project and enjoy the feeling of empowerment of succeeding in it. It’s the only way I can keep going when I see another limp bowl of broccoli soup waiting for me for dinner.

I am going to enjoy this event and my cheeks will probably still be a little bit big, it’s me. As long as I accept this, the photos afterwards will, without a doubt, make me smile. I’ll be smiling while I eat a big fat piece of cake.

 

The art of the fine flirt

There are countless articles about how to become the most fantastic flirt in the kingdom of flirtdom and bat your eyelids and mirror actions until the night becomes a haze of heady lust and zinging signals.

So I’m not going to make this another one. Namely because I am in need of Freddy the Flirting Fountain of Knowledge to impart his (or her) wisdom to me.

My flirting technique has not so much evolved as mutated into separate phases; each is a unique and amorphous life form. Some are higher life forms than others but all are strange and slightly wrong in their own right. I went through a phase where I was the ballsy, brazen flirt who went out for what I wanted and goddamnit I got it. But that doesn’t really work because inevitably the guys that are attracted to this flirt want a woman who will carry on dominating them and bossing them around when really I wanted to play with their ears and read Jughead comics while eating vanilla ice cream in bed. (What?!)

Sometimes I go the complete opposite direction and do the total antithesis of flirting. Pay attention, if I really like you this is what I’ll do. I’ll start talking about my diet plan or the weird fungus that’s growing out of left toe for no real reason other than that my mind has convinced me that flirting with this particular man is so out of the question as he is so utterly unattainable that I should firmly instate him as a eunuch-like friend by telling him all the things that were wrong with my ex and the detailed reaction my body has to Senakot.

Recently my flirting has taken on a new life form. Faced with the latest victim/bachelor, I became The Giggling, Blushing Maiden Woman. I don’t know who this woman is, usually the one I’m sneering at from behind my black double espresso. It all started when I knocked over a rack of lollypops while talking to him in a shop (yes, really) and since then I’ve found myself, to my horror, tittering and looking down and even using my hand to cover my bashful smile in his presence. Unsurprisingly this particular tactic is most likely to provoke a favourable response in men.

But really none of this is my fault. It’s the men who are bringing out the bogus flirt in me – a quality flirt needs a quality man for inspiration, like a beautiful work of art and its admirable muse who made it happen. So until my muse comes, I’ll keep stumbling out inappropriate jokes about mothers, talking about my recent bout of athlete’s foot and twiddling my hair around my finger coyly. It worked for Minnie Mouse…the last one, I mean.

 

If you’re happy and you know it…

There’s a saying about happiness. It goes: Happiness is the man who was looking for his hat and found that it was on his head all along.

When I first heard it, it made my heart soften and go ‘aaah’ but then a sort of alarm took over. Because it was suddenly clear that the happiness I got out of hoping, praying, wishing things will be better in the future was in itself deep unhappiness.

The suggestion that happiness is in the here and now seems like a Mount Everest challenge to concentrate and find happiness in the present moment. Where is it? Is it here now? Then why is my heart squashed and crumpled with fear and anxiety – is there happiness in letting go of this? Can I really let go of all my ‘If only’s’ and wistful gazes away and embrace my warty, imperfect present happiness?

David Cameron et al are currently prancing about the idea of a Happiness Index  whereby Britain’s level of happiness is measured in some wooly way involving voluntary groups, reiterations of the words ‘Big Society’ and lots of clapping and meetings in church halls or whatever.

My efforts would certainly add a smile to Cameron’s red, elasticated face because I’ve been fulfilling his credo of becoming an upright citizen by volunteering and throwing myself into the harangue – I’ve signed myself up for various things of late, including the role of voluntary Development Ambassador which sounds great but I’m not entirely sure what it actually means. I think I’ve also signed up for some sort of assistant cake maker role, which could have been one of those spur-of-the-moment-when-slightly-inebriated decisions since the closest I’ve come to making a cake was when I accidentally left my trainers next to the radiator for two months. The reason I’m doing this malarkey is because I’m making an effort to become happier – the thing is it hasn’t quite worked yet.

I stunned myself when I asked that question and forced myself to be frank. Are you happy? I asked. ‘No” was the immediate and unfaltering answer. I didn’t even have to think about it. Frickin’ hell, I thought. This is worse than previously assumed. But hey, my brain reasons, you’ve had a rough time of it of late, it’s ok to be unhappy. Work isn’t great. My love life is like a drunk driver on the M25 taking random swerves, having near misses and periodically ramming into stationary objects with the airbag having long given up trying. I suppose since coming back from my travels in India, life in England feels like a long, stale fart – an anticlimax, an act of simply treading water.

Don’t we just love finding comfort and salvation in our unhappiness. It’s like a smelly blanket we wrap around ourselves, pretending to complain but really loving the scratchy feel against our skin, because it’s something. It’s there, it’s tangible and we can touch it. Unhappiness is always attainable. Happiness- well there’s the effort. There’s the change in the way of thinking, feeling, being.

I still don’t know how to answer the question about happiness. But I feel it inside me. I know it’s there because it is the delicious mischief of this world. As long as you can still smile at two pigeons having a little domestic on the pavement or at the evening sky that makes you stop in your tracks on the way home or how your sweet pancakes have somehow ended up tasting of anchovies, you can see the universe that is behind our small lives, that is not taking life as seriously as we are. And when you suddenly come right into tune with that energy, well then you are right in the music.

That’s when I know that it’s there all along. It is the invisible hat and it is resisting the wind, no matter how much of a hurricane my mind is conjuring up.

 

Girls not on top for India

There’s been a lot of talk lately about India and it’s worrying sex ratio with men significantly outnumbering women and reportedly the chance that there could be 20% more men to women in the next two decades. That is a pretty scary figure and yet more proof that India, while racing ahead in many other aspects, remains sadly lagging behind when it comes to the way men and women are viewed. That was apparent to me not only as a woman travelling alone in India but from meeting other women there and it isn’t limited to disturbing sex-selective abortions but is there, spread in everyday life like an invisible yet smelly film over everything.

Of course I’ll be the first to acknowledge that men and women are viewed differently in all countries and we are not living in a rosy utopia of equality in the UK. But what struck me when I told Indian women that I was travelling alone was their sheer incredulity that I had embarked upon this journey. More than one girl said, “Here in India we don’t do that kind of thing.” Well I’m Indian too. “No, you’re not”, they’d say back to me. The girls I spoke to were slightly admiring yet mainly determined that they would not undertake such a journey alone. And these were not wide-eyed village girls but cafe latte-sipping, working urbanites.

This isn’t an uncommon fear – travelling alone is daunting for anyone and certainly wasn’t always a cup of tea for me – but it was the resigned acknowledgement that that was the way things were that I remembered. It was the accepted ‘Things will not change when it comes to deciding what women can and can’t do’.

Yes Western women are just as shackled to these ideas, being dragged along by their high heeled shoes in an imbalanced, hysterical, beauty-clutching, marriage-obsessed world. But the more ingrained nature of family values on the young people of India leaves a certain mark which is less in British society. The closeness of families in India leaves less room for traditional ideals to slip through and get forgotten or neglected – the ideas stick and breathe in the everyday air and become a part of their fibres.

This can be a good or bad thing but it is just part of our being more (when I say ‘our’, I speak as an Indian living in Britain, also living in these tight-knit ideas) because family has always been a more inherent part of Indian culture. And it is a good AND a bad thing because it keeps us close but also keeps those old ideas stagnant, stale and ever-present, withstanding the passing mini whirlwinds of modern technology, career and education. There is nowhere for these old-fashioned, gender-skewed ideas to go so they remain and get passed on through generations.

So unless there is a throwing down of the old concepts and a dusting off of these moth-eaten rugs we will remain entrenched in what we can and can’t do. Being entrenched in that, along with all else that comes with being a woman these days, can keep those invisible barriers creeping up towards you until they are pressed up against your nose and you are gladly sitting on the other side.

 

 

Oh book club, where art thou?

A little while ago I decided I wanted to join a book club.

No I am not a blue cardigan wearing bespectacled member of the 80 plus age group. I am a regular-ish young girl and I like reading and then talking about books I’ve read in a semi-intelligent way involving food and lots of drinks. I had this image of myself surrounded by young trendy urbanites in a darkened pub with dog-eared copies of our books around us with splashes of martini rosso upon them, saying things like ‘This book marks the zeitgeist of today without being too conformist’. Failing that it would at least mean that when I finish a book and go ‘huh?’ I’d have other people to ‘huh’ with too.

So I set about trying to find a book club. Like pretty much everything these days, whether it’s dates, shoes or part-owning a farm animal, I thought this would be easily achieved through the internet. It appears I was wrong. After googling ‘Book club North London’ to no avail, I tried ‘Book clubs London’ or ‘how to join a book club’ and I found lots of suggestions of how to form one but no real existing ones.

Finally I found one with a list of book clubs in London – aha, I had hit the jackpot I thought. After skimming through the options – ‘Afro-carribean under 40 book club’, ‘Young, gay and Jewish book club’, ‘Lives under the Brent Cross bypass next to the kebab shop and outside the post box book club’, I found one I thought would be fairly welcoming to me. I banged off a suitably witty and bookish, affable email expressing my interest to join said book club and asking when the next meeting would be. Two weeks later. No reply.

Hmm, I thought. This book club lark is harder than I thought. So I moved on to option number two, which had sounded like the book club equivalent of Club Med – 18-31 book club, discuss books and then cop off with the fittie next to you afterwards. Could be kinda fun? One email to them – one email back from them saying they were full. Full?? Since when have book clubs become the equivalent of Movida? It’s a book club for crying out loud, I thought they’d be gnawing my arm off with delight that I’ve deigned them with my presence and haven’t yet integrated into the Kindle-clutching android masses. But no – apparently book clubs are harder to get into than Juilliard.

In desperation I tried one more and received a mass, generic reply that they clearly send to all prospective book club suitors saying their next meeting was in three months time and they’d add me to the waiting list.

I give up. There’s gotta be an easier way to do this. I’d set one up in my area but as I’m currently residing in a sleepy commuter town I probably would need to give up my rose-tinted vision of enlightening chats about Sartre’s sub texts and settle for dissecting the latest Catherine Cookson over some digestives. Then again maybe that’s the kind of presumptions and snobbery that has led to iron-fenced book clubs where members thumb their noses and make new would-be members go through bum-paddlings and periodic electric shocks while having to recite the first chapter of Dickens ‘Little Dorrit’ .

If anyone has a book club that I can join, can I please, please join? I promise I’ll be good, make cakes and not put forward Kerry Katona’s autobiography as a suggestion (Katie Price’s is clearly better). Otherwise I’ll have to just set one up myself and invite all my fellow rejects from the exclusive School of Book Clubs. 

 

Happy International Women’s Day

What is it about women’s relationship with women? Men just don’t have it. The way women are with women has always seemed more organic, infused in the blood and probably yes, more maternal or sisterly. There were times when I was with a man and aching to be with my female friends instead. While, to be fair, that was more of a reflection on the quality of the man that I was with, it also showed who I was myself more with.

Why don’t they have an International Men’s Day? ‘Because every day is international men’s day’ would be the standard answer but also because think of what the celebrations would involve. Now you know I am never one to generalise but I’m imagining troops of chunky legged, flushed men holding their drinks to the sky and giving each other hearty hugs with furtive gropes for some. So boys, let’s look at the women instead and – for a change – not through the gaze of a camera or the hazy pages of a magazine but what’s here and now.

We can look at all the inspiring women they are, and it’s great that there are so many – some of whom were listed in The Guardian today. But in doing that it’s easy to forget ourselves. The women who are political activists, controversial pop stars or CEOs of large companies are, without a doubt, to be congratulated for what they’re doing for other people. But we are all on an equal plane with them. While we are doing the dishes, working hard, managing our money, going on through painful times, we need to remember that.

When you think of an inspiring woman, it is so tempting to think  ’I COULD be one of them if I worked hard/met the right people/was more dedicated’. It’s easy to forget the alarmingly real truth. That is the beauty of it. You are now. It’s done, it just is.

Travelling in India for the last few months, there were times when it was tough to be a woman. Particularly when I was travelling alone, as Indian women don’t tend to do that.  I got quizzical stares and sometimes malevolent ones. Once, when I was with another British Indian friend, we had to block our hotel door with furniture as we were the only women in the whole hotel and had been getting weird phone calls and glares.

It was clear that while women in the cities there enjoy the modernity we do of  sipping lattes and chatting to boyfriends on their mobile phones, there were still deep-seated ideas of how a woman should behave that are the foundation and won’t shake. Then again, that’s not unique to India.

At the end of my trip I had to be a lot stronger, and strangely I think that would have been very different if I had been a western women visiting India. As a Non Resident Indian (NRI) woman in India, I had to face my own inner critic about things I had been ignorant about and learn so much about how things would be for me if I had grown up in my native country – the good and the bad.

I suppose for me, my identity has always been spliced – British or Indian. The two combine in a twisted DNA helix of who I am and yet they are separate. Whether that gives me a stronger solidarity in my identity as a woman, I don’t know but it is something I am happily proud to be a woman today.

So today is about all of us and celebrating not just our achievements but, so much more importantly, who we are and who we have become.

 

Back and bestomached

Oh irony, why must you always come and trump me with your skulky, stealthy three steps ahead of me. I am back and have suffered from severe stomach upset, I hate the phrase ‘delhi belly’, despite using it earlier, and I laughed at those who claimed it was inevitable to get it from India and yet here I am clutching my belly and whimpering into my kurta top. Yes, I am officially trumped, smart-arsed, whipped, befooled, you name it, my stomach couldn’t handle it. Actually I blame it on the flight food, who serves a chicken drumstick with nan bread on a long haul flight anyway?

Aside from jennifer’s issues, I feel alright being back in England, although that could be mainly because I haven’t actually left my house in the last week and therefore have remained in a protected cocoon ignoring the disasterous state of affairs in Britain and my neighbourhood (I noticed a new traffic light cross section on  the road down from mine, how can things change so drastically and catastrophically in three months). Home comforts have been nice, particularly as my last few days in India were mainly spent on night buses, one of which was a particular sadist’s delight as it was the most freezing bus I had ever been on in my life – the window wouldn’t close properly but I swear they had the AC on for some unbeknown ridiculous reason – while I wiped icicles off my nose, I also contended with an iron bar above my bunk which screwed unloose everytime we went over a bump – and seeing as there was nothing but bumps for 17 hours, I spent the entire journey in catatonic state of frozenness, bumping up and down and periodically being pummelled by an iron bar. Guantanamo Bay please don’t take note.

My trip on the whole however was really something I am proud of, that I achieved this on my own – something I had dreamt of doing for so long – and while it certainly wasn’t easy, it was one of the most rewarding, most meaningful things I’ve ever done. When my stomach returns to a normal state of equilibrium, I will continue in the same vein of adventure and leave my front door soon to buy some milk.