Thursday, July 7, 2011

Losing a loved one, prematurely.

Heavy title, huh?! Phew! I know! I have met many people who have prematurely lost a loved one. A dear friend lost her father, the guy I see in the mirror lost her mother, etc, etc. Losing someone you love is never easy, more so, when the person dies prematurely.

Define prematurely, a skeptic might ask. Well, that skeptic will most definitely be a person who has gotten hit, and gotten hit very hard on many occasions in life, I can assure you of that. As someone who can get into analysisng such kind of scenarios is, by popular vote, either a heartless bastard, or a mad imbecile.

I fall into the later category, and I HAVE gotten hit very hard in life, on many occasions. As this article is not titled "Biography of Kartik" ( which NOONE would ever read anyway!), I will abstain from going there.

Coming to the point, I do have a definition of premature death. Someone you love AND need dying before your need for it hasn't been eclipsed by something or someone else you need more.

Dying has always been a sensitive topic for me. I lost my mum and probably a friend who understood me most in the same year. While mums have the privilege of holding their new born in their arms, I have had the misfortune of holding my mum  in my arms while her life escaped her. Believe me, that's not an easy thought to get out of one's head. Losing a friend on top of that, and in the same year kinda de-sensitised me towards death and the hype surrounding.

EVERYBODY dies. No? And life does not stop. For anyone. It may be your father, your sister, or the Prime Minister. Or maybe, your favorite star even. Death happens. And life goes on.
A dear, sweetheart of a colleague lost a love bird, and she was devastated. While I tried to console her and tell her that this was inevitable, I found my eyes welling up.  I could feel her pain, and the pain of losing loved ones came gushing back. It scared me to commit to anything, lest I feel tha magnitude of pain again. But I realised, and quite quickly, that I am the man, or the person I am not because of the easyships, I faced, but because of the hardships I faced and conquered. Guess that;s life, eh?!

As some uber wise soul said, life is not fair. But then, it's not fair for everyone. That kinda makes it fair, right?

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Want Change? Get Puppy!

Change, they say, is the only constant in life. Well, I do agree, but the changes that Cocaine, our newly adopted pet has brought to our lives has been sudden and comprehensive.


  • A portion of our hall had messed up flooring; the spartex tiles were broken and we used to keep the sofa on it to hide the hole in our hall. All was hunky dory and none of us could accumulate the resolve to repair it until Coco came romping into our lives. He started eating the cement and other not to be eaten things from there, and that couldn't do, no siree. Promptly, new tiles were arranged for, masons called to fit them, and voila! The hole in our hall is history!
  • Our dustbin was perennially  overflowing. We are three musketeers; Dayanand, Anant and Kartik. With no woman in the house, except for a god-sent maid, we keep pushing the chores onto each other. Make no mistake, it's no bachelor den, but yes, the house misses the touch of a woman. Again, with Coco in the picture and the prospect of him ingesting garbage was an impossible one, and now the dustbin has been shifted outside the apartments and the garbage is picked up regularly 
  • Cocaine has brought the family closer. While we were tight, the bond that is developing now is even tighter. I used to call my to be sis-in-law once a week, or when I had some work, but now, I call her everyday to ask about what the pup is doing, and what's up with her. 
While raising a pet dog can be a haranguing experience at times- when he pees all over the house, yelps the whole night, feels like biting your nose at 03:00 am, scares you to death by breathing or dreaming funny, or when he builds a lot of guilt in you for being 6 and a half seconds late in giving him his food by looking at you through those lovely, innocent eyes- it is one of the most rewarding one of my life too. 

Love you Coco. 

Friday, July 1, 2011

Puppy Potty Training (PPT)

We love acronyms. Short-forms. Every industry, each domain, and most friend circles have their own abbreviations. EOD. TBD. BFSL. Yeah, writing ' by the days end', 'end of day', today evening' takes considerable more effort than EOD. And EOD's cooler, shows you 'in-depth' knowledge of the domain, so why not?!

Well, coming back to the point, most of my articles of late have been centered around the new pup in our life named Cocaine. How he got that name is a very short story. Anant, my kid cub, kept it. For anyone who does not know, Cocaine is a drug-the bad types. And it's addictive. Anant loves mammals, the barking ones more-so than the Homo Sapiens, and had this justification- Cocaine is so sweet, he is addictive. It won't take an Einstein to realize that Dad was not too impressed by the name. Standing by his side and agreeing was Mr. Godiyal, Dad's old friends and Anant's to be father-in-law. Dad wanted to call him Mahabali (YIKES) and Godiyal uncle felt Rustom was THE name, but Anant and Jyoti-his fiancee- stuck to Cocaine.

Like in most instances, I was called to referee this melee, and I told each party to call him by whatever name they want, and the one he liked, he would respond to. As Jyoti is the one who is mothering Cocaine right now, and she spends the most time with him, he responds to Cocaine and my dad has accepted that now. I kinda like Coco, and he does not mind that word-neither the dog, nor my pop.

He is being potty trained of now. Since I live away from my fathers house, I get to meet Coco only twice a week, and have to deal with making him poo in the toilet a little lesser than the others. The family are at their wits end. they try locking him up in the toilet right after he has eaten, and all he does is yelp up a storm. His yelps are so sympathetic and guilt inducing that they tend to let him out before he can do his business. He then starts running like a wild, erm, dog inside the house and poops in my brothers room!

I will sum up this article by saying that the only difference between raising a child and a Dog is that the process of procreating a child is way funner than the process of buying a dog!