As the mango season nears,there is a perfect stage being set for good amount of tamasha to be unfolded in the lush green campus of BHU. Every house or blocks of two or four houses have a couple of mango trees. The waiting starts when flowers bloom in March. Street urchins start pelting stones and start eating raw mangoes causing characteristic contact dermatitis around mouth. The scorching heat of summer has only one good promise that coming days are fruitful literally. Lo behold..You find mangoes as sweet as honey start dropping in your back yard. People become alert now. The ones who never witnessed what a mundane 5 am looks like start waking up at 4 am to collect the bounty mother tree decided to drop in the respective backyards lest the amateur 'chors' make them disappear like professional magicians.
Real problem starts when the tree has spread its branches across all four houses of the block. The house people in whose garden the actual tree trunk is located, believe that the tree belongs to them while rest of the houses contradict this theory. In the facade of 'love thy neighbor' dictum there is equal distribution of treasure.
In the fertile lands of Ganges, there are always more mangoes than one can consume and people start distributing them. Some people try to settle scores by not giving them or giving the sour or too soft ones to their frenemies. Some confirm their kanjoosi by offering just two - three mangoes. The same kanjoos ones and the lazy ones stop preparing sabzi for the rotis for being obviously kanjoos or lazy or both, and start using mango as their side dish for next two months.
No wonder aam is not aam, but maharaja of fruits.

The last two weeks have been unbelievably romantic. My maid came for fifteen consecutive days! Life went smoothly. I ate food at proper time and slept at ten sharp, managing to even fall asleep within stipulated fifteen minutes of hitting the sack ruling me out of the list of insomniacs. It’s a different thing that I feel uncontrollably sleepy within an hour of trying to make my soon-to-be-a-teenager son learn mathematics. Though I believe that it’s a fool proof way to slip into bliss of slumber, I haven’t been able to use the method consistently perhaps because my brain has weighed the options and processed the information that trying to make my son study is tougher than tossing and turning in the bed trying to count crawling lizards on the walls in the obscurity of night.
Though the fear of maid disappearing on one fine morning without prior notice looms over my head perpetually, it is during this honeymoon period that I am actually able to ignore it. So I make solid plans of productive days ahead where I would wake up early, do yoga and pursue all known and unknown passions of mine. After all I am highly educated and my time is better utilized making some contributions to mankind (not the company, mind you) rather than punishing my body doing paltry jobs like jhaadoo pocha and bartan.
I am greatly inspired and have decided to do things which will take me a few steps closer to an award or two. For once my husband may also show some hint of jealousy when people start recognizing me in the restaurants and malls, clicking selfies with me because autographs are so old fashioned. I must decide which profile is better for selfies.
’Aaj mein upar, aasmaan neeche’ my mobile rang. I changed my ring tone yesterday as per my mood nowadays. Usually it is ‘tujhse naaraaz nahin zindagi’ and I felt that it was kind of not matching with my aura of late and so I changed it to this one. 
‘Auntiji, aaj mummy nahin aa paayengi. Bahut tez bukhar hai’ my maid’s daughter said in single breath and kept quiet till it filtered through ear-brain barrier which has almost become impervious to any bad news. When Mr Steve Harvey said ‘it was my mistake’, even Miss Columbia would not have been as shocked and disappointed as I am now.
My immediate desire is to use all useful expletives to burn off the sudden burst of energy caused by cortisol release. But remembering that my anger has the same effect as pouring water on a rock, asking my son not to use gadgets or asking my daughter to eat without speaking, I decided not to act upon it. No matter what, I can’t change my destiny especially when my goddess in disguise has chosen to fall ill on this particular day. 
I say ‘fine’ and hang up without even asking when she is planning to give a darshan again since I know all very well that she hasn’t decided till now, when she wants to get well.
I am not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in nazar. I didn’t put a big kaala teeka on my kids’ foreheads or soles, didn’t ever do ‘nazar utaro’ ceremony of my kids even if I thought that only my children looked good and all the babies of rest of the world looked really bad. I never said ‘nazar lagi hogi’ when my babies started howling in the midnight without apparent reason, thinking that probably it was some earache or a bad dream. But this is different. I couldn’t stop myself uttering ‘meri nazar mujh par hi lag gayi’, waking up my hibernating husband. He said ‘what happened? You got too many pimples? I think you should go easy on sweets’.
‘No, maid is ill’ I slumped.
You can see now, why my name was not there in Republic Day award announcements.

Life of a clumsy person is bad enough. You are busy and have no aptitude for technology is worse. If your husband gifts you all expensive gadgets on birthdays and anniversaries is an extra problem mounted. And your son who is crazy about gadgets fidgets with them so much that the basic settings on which you operate these gadgets become completely inaccessible in the most desperate and embarrassing situations, say in front of the patients ?! OK... now there is no way I can handle this anymore. My condition is like 'markatasya surapanam' the Subhashitam that explains the condition of a monkey. You get a monkey drunk and it gets bitten by a scorpion and then a demon possesses him and imagine the antics of the monkey. My family has failed to realize this.

Computer is not exactly my best friend and my son comes to me everyday and displays his newly acquired skills on computer, some graphics, or something like how to make your own search engine, and explains word by word how he did it. He is all excited to tell me all the wonders the binary system has to offer to him and human race in general, and I fail to understand major part of the conversation and just decide to give a bright encouraging smile to my baby who has grown so much that I can't understand his language!

I can never escape from this onslaught of technology and wherever I go I encounter situations where I find myself blankly staring at the person who is releasing technical jargon at the rate of at least twenty per minute which I feel I have heard somewhere and never tried to figure out the exact meaning. I can't act like a fool all the time. I choose to act like an intelligent person and nod my head in a serious manner, and say a happy thanks to the person and run. I run to take a deep breath and to call my husband to tell him the words that I heard, at least a few of them that I can remember, tell him the context and ask him to takeover the matter till it is totally sorted out and handed to me in a platter in the most simple format.

The worst part of the technology is touch screen. Period. Don't even argue with me on this point. I don't know why anyone thought that touchscreen is an advantage. It has set me so backwards that forget about gadgets, I try to open my refrigerator and almirahs by touching them and feel so foolish. I am unable differentiate between the touch screen and non touch-screen machines. Believe me ,it is not a good feeling to find yourself trying to open your table drawer by hovering your hands over the handle. These touchscreen gadgets are very temperamental and moody too. Sometimes you bang your hand on the screen and nothing happens, and on other times you just hold your fingers near the screen trying to figure out which option to choose and voila! the option you were not going choose is already selected and now you are reading an ad for mutual funds.

Always, he learns who is willing to take a chance. Computers are all about trial and error. Everything is in front of you and it is just your ability to decide to click on certain option that defines your aptitude. Playing safe all your life doesn't help here. And being 'she' and not 'he' doesn't help either. We the women who have painstakingly learnt the habit of anticipating problems well in advance while taking care of kids are unable to unlearn. At least I am conditioned to be so. The question of whether to make idli or dosa for tomorrow's breakfast looming large over head makes my brain run away from new problems that may arise just at the click of the mouse.

With technological advancement running like Bolt, and me, bolting away from it, ten years down the line God knows mera kya hoga !!!