Budgetting in Bangalore

I see that majority of middle-class urban kids (my family, relatives and friends) in Bangalore ranging in age from kids to teenagers and even into their early 20s are absolutely clueless about their parents incomes and the expenses and as a result of that or independent of that, are quite demanding of their parents and act entitled. (My sister would be enraged I am  implying her kids are acting entitled!) I have seen kids demand designer clothes, bikes, cars, pocket money to eat out with their friends and even parents on tight budgets give in to their demands without putting a limit or explaining the illogic of their demands. 
I would like Bangalore middle-class folks  to make a monthly expense sheet like the one below and the whole family learns where the money goes and discuss it. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 3 uses of this exercise. (a) increased fiscal awareness (b) this awareness may lead to needed changes (c) may bring about changes in spending behaviours such as a teenager demanding less pocket money once he sees that there is no money.(d) kids become savvy regarding fiscal issues and grow into financially literate adults who balance the budget well(e) increased motivation and practice to save for a rainy day

1. Salary of member one

2. Salary of member two

3. Other incomes such as rent.

OUTGOING MONEY IN A MONTH

1)Food 

2) Water bill

3) Electricity bill

4)Phone bills(all cellphones and  Landlines  in the house)

5)Internet

6)TV cable

7)Transport: Bus pass, bus tickets, hiring autos and cars, petrol, travelling outside the city

8)Tax for property

9)Rent or mortgage

10)school fees(books, pencils, trips, etc)

11) medical expenses(eye checkup and glasses//dental checkup and fixing kid's teeth//when anyone falls sick//)

12)Toiletries: Body soap, laundry soap, shampoo, toothpaste, dish washing soap, etc

13)Pet supplies

14) gifts when attending functions such as Gruha Pravesh, weddings, munjis, birthdays, etc

15)Clothes

16)SAVING FOR FUTURE

17) Entertainment: Movies, exhibitions, eating out, pilgrimages, vacations.

18)Life insurance

19)House repairs, car repairs, etc

20) extra curricular activities for children : Tution, dance classes,etc

21)servant's salary

     23) Giving money to friends and relatives

22)MISCELLANEOUS

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Writing this, I realized something!  Putting the 'COMPLETE' truth in the budget-sheet  above may not be such a great idea. I am recalling now, that my family gave a bribe of 10,000-00 to get a 'Khata' done just a couple of days ago. I don't know how to explain this 'expense' to my ten year old nephew(if he asks)...without ruining his innocence!

Also, I wonder, how will the corrupt businessmen explain the details of their business to their kids? Do they justify their income as legitimate? Do they cover it up? What about the politicians who make crores of rupees every month? Are their kids plain dumb and don't know their parent is a thief? Are their kids equally evil and bereft of shame, of a conscience and have no qualms about their parents' ill-gotten gains? 

Breakdown of  expenses (such as food) will give a better idea:

milk per day and per month

sugar, jaggery, salt, coffee powder, tea powder, bournvita

spices

rice, ragi, wheat, other cereals

dhals

vegetables.

ready made foods

fruits

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CRIME FICTION . FROM YEMEN!

Wajdi-Al- Ahdal (author) and William Hutchins (translator)
 A land without Jasmine (2012)

Paul E Hardisty's The abrupt Physics of dying

The hostage by Zaid Mutiee Damaj (Not crime  fiction but plenty of criminal behaviours but not recognized by those people of those days as criminal!)

A walk among the tombstones. (Actually, a drive through the cemetery...)

Today, February 18, 2019 was a cold but sunny and a clear blue sky day...too good to waste sitting at home...it's Monday, but  a holiday...Family day. 

For ages, we have been meaning to  photograph tombstones in winter as they  look beautiful in the snow.  Ergo, we drove to the Mount Pleasant cemetery at noon and had a good time  photographing. Met a few walkers, dog-walkers and joggers. (I cannot imagine how these joggers can go around jogging on slippery unsalted roads in minus 14 degrees celsius weather!)We looked in vain for a coyote my husband had seen here just yesterday. 

Snow covered cemeteries always remind me of the first chapter of the Dickens classic, Great expectations. I had imagined my photos to be  sombre, bleak and of the black & white kind. Instead I kept photographing the colourful flowers and bright red sashes on the floral arrangements in the cemetery. So instead of the bleak somber look I was going for, this below is what I got.

There were taps all over this cemetery. I wonder why? To water the flowers and plants folks leave in front of their loved ones' tombs?

 Not sure if this  above is a sculpture or a cycle stand.

How many people are normal?

I am reading the DSM-5 right now as I am writing an exam in a couple of months.
If I add the % of people with different mental illnesses listed in the DSM-5 and add it up, I bet it comes to more than 50%! Does that mean that at any given time, at least 50% of the people have mental illness? I do not have the time to do it now, but I plan to write the name of the diagnosis and the % of people with that diagnosis and add it up and see if I am right.

So what is normal? 

Observing myself and the people I know well, I realize that less than 20% of people fall into the mentally  healthy,  well adjusted and resilient category. The remaining 80% all have some deficits or the other. Many of them would have been 'normal' if  harsh child rearing practices of rural India, strife in families and joint families, poverty, etc  during their childhood was absent. 

The handful (I found 49 people whom I would label as normal or in excellent mental health among the people I have known all my life) of 'normals' I have seen i.e. people who are intelligent, decent, resilient, adapting to a variety of conditions without losing their mental health or morals or joy of living, who are physically healthy( or taking care of their illness adequately) are admirable. When I ask myself, how come these people turned out okay but the majority of us didn't, I realize that it is a lucky combination of factors they had. The factors they had: 

• Their own high levels of intelligence or at least average intelligence. 
• Intelligent parents who were also excellent in raising children, had an excellent sense of judgement, well-balanced in the face of difficulties which most middle class people of India face. Even if these parents were not above average with regard to child rearing skills, they were at least adequate with no major issues such as major marital discord, dysfunctional personality traits, familial strifes. There are  'mentally healthy ' individuals in my list who were brought up by parents with marital discord.  I observed  that in these families,  at least one parent, remained well-balanced and did not retaliate when verbally attacked by spouse. The calm spouse had a lot of tolerance and this ultimately paid off in that the other spouse came to his/her senses and changed for the better and the kids were sort of exposed to stress by the raging parent and sort of protected by the calm parent. I hope you understand what I mean.
• Excellent and safe environments when growing up. This is very important in India where girls are not safe on streets from lewd men and gropers and this has such a tremendous, damaging and permanent impact on teenage girls exposed to this. 
• Education. If they lacked education they at least had innate wisdom, common sense and good judgement. 
• Freedom to choose their own career and study paths unlike many of us who were either (a)forced by parents to do certain courses such as 'engineering' or 'medicine' or (b) we ourselves chose these courses though we did not have aptitude for it because we felt ashamed to choose other courses when everyone else chose these courses. The people in my list of mentally healthy were mostly married to people chosen by their families based on caste, etc. So that is a huge surprise for me as I am against arranged marriages!
• Fairly decent genetic loading i.e. no family history of major illnesses such as schizophrenia, etc.

In the 49 mentally healthy people I know, one core feature  they all have is  intact self-esteem. The people who are not in this group i.e. the rest of the people I know all have problems with self-esteem; nearly all have displayed behaviours indicating they have low self-esteem. The lower the self-esteem(among those who don't have a diagnosis of mental illness or treatment i.e. typical people) the greater the pathology in their behaviours. Based on this observation of mine, I now have greater faith in Adler's theory of personality  than the dozens of other theories of personality I studied and believed in. 

Based on my armchair research, I believe that if Indian child-rearing practices changed in such a way that children's self-esteem is not damaged but nurtured, we would have a lot more mentally healthy adult Indians. This in turn would go a long way to improve India. 

Child-rearing practices in many families I have observed tend to lead to development of fear, anxiety and shame in children as young as toddlers. This in turn leads to low self-esteem. The practice of shaming, yelling at, hitting children for 100s of their actions such as peeing in the wrong place, crying at the wrong time or place,  getting low marks in school, etc is universal in India. This irrational way of dealing with children damages children.  A cumulative effect of this erroneous ways of dealing with kids is the development of low self-esteem, anxiety and anger which carries into adulthood.

I am very well aware that many factors are not mentioned here such as the temperment of the children, the fit of the child's temperment to the parents' style of care-giving, etc but this is not a research but my own observations based on my interactions with people.

I really wish someone studied these normals and identified what makes them tick. Most studies seem to be focussed on the mentals and trying to identify why they became mental. 

Today, March 6th, 2019, I had a Eureka moment about how I maintain my self-esteem. This came about by a discussion I had yesterday about a female, middle-aged coder(whose coding is not great) employed in one of the biggest software companies of the world based in a developed country's "software region''. This woman's poor work quality combined with extreme hypersensitivity to feedback and  her false accusations of sexism is both holding up work and creating problems for co-workers. 
 I am beset with thoughts such as lacking a 'superior' intellect, lacking 'exceptional' good looks, having many undesirable traits (but not too bad) and this does impact my self-esteem. But one thought I have consistently used to deflect these blows to my self-esteem is telling myself that I am unique. There is no one else in the world like me...with the exact same combination of looks, brains, personality, situation, etc. 
I believe if everyone uses this sense of being unique(instead of wanting to be superior)  it will protect self-esteem and avoid all the damaging behaviours and moods which are a consequence of  poor self-esteem.
I wish I had the patience to research this idea of mine  but I dont have the time or the patience. I suppose I could at least write a proposal but not now...

Saw deer while driving on DVP, Toronto, February 15 & 16 2019

I  saw a deer, just behind my house (in the ravine, running along the DVP, East York)  for the first time on December 12, 2015. I was excited to see this majestic deer, with  huge antlers walking slowly by...right behind my backyard! 

I come from Bangalore, India, where urban wild-life (squirrels, birds like sparrows and crows, lizards, geckos, snakes, insects like butterflies) is disappearing due to increasing population of people and their crass  disregard to nature.  Coming from Bangalore, my gratitude and appreciation for nature is, therefore more than a native Torontonian's. 

Now, three years later, I saw deer again, two days in a row, when driving on the DVP. ( just after the Leaside bridge and before the exit to O'Connor drive). I saw three deer, on Feb 15, 2019 around 2 pm and one deer on Feb 16 around 3.30 pm, a bit more north along the DVP. 

There are deer in the Toronto ravines at all times. But this time the deer were 'visible' . The ravine was covered with white snow and the trees were like stick figures...zero leaves. The white  snow-covered ground with leafless trees enhanced the visibility in the ravine, tremendously. The deer whose colouring was exactly like the trees, still stood out clearly on the snow-covered ground..by their rounded contours. Two were nuzzling each others's necks and one was standing alone. The second day, I saw a solitary deer, same brown skin, sitting on the snow. 

The first day, we parked at the nearest possible spot and walked through the ravine but could not find the three deer.  It was impossible to photograph them, when driving at 90km an hour!

It makes me so happy to know that there are deer in my backyard!
Who knows? I may even spot the smaller animals like  rabbits, foxes, coyotes and skunks due to the clarity and visibility offered by the snow-covered ground. 

WHY DO SCIENTISTS GENETICALLY MODIFY AND ENGINEER THE GOOD OLD STUFF OUT AND CRASS STUFF IN?

I love pomegranates and eat one daily when it costs a dollar each. But in recent years, I have been finding  that the pomegranates are 'too sweet' and don't have even one bit of tartness in them. The high degree of sweetness seems nice for a while but now I am not relishing it as much.   I now long for the tart pomegranates we got decades ago in India. 

The same goes for the oranges and musambis and countless variety of fruits, vegetables and greens of today in Canada , USA and maybe India too. 

There is not one bit of tartness(sour) in the oranges. It tastes like sugar instead of a citrus fruit. 

The apples too don't taste like the apples I recall eating as a child but have a fragrance like another fruit. 

The fruits and vegetables of today  are different from their 'ancestors'. They are bigger and I don't know if this is  a good thing; and they definitely lack the flavour they had in the past. I recall the fresh coriander leaves sold on the street in Jayanagar 4th block of Bangalore. I could smell the coriander from a distance of 5 feet but the huge coriander bunches I buy in Canada, look great...larger leaves, longer stems but NO 'coriander-smell' at all ! 

The same goes for peanuts and pumpkin I taste and smell here. They are simply bigger but have neither the fragrance or the flavour of the fruits and vegetables and nuts of India of the 70s and 80s. 

These fruits, vegetables, greens, nuts and everything else of today are all genetically modified, hybrid stuff. Why this desire for people to make hybrid of everything? Why breed out the tart, sour and bitter and make everything sweet or bland? Oranges were meant to be tart, NOT sweet! Bitter Gourd was meant to be bitter, not unbitter.

Are modern people allergic to nature? Do they want to modify nature of every single thing on earth? It is the so called imperfections or differences which make each fruit, vegetable, nut, plant and animal, 'natural', unique and wonderful. Why do these scientists have the idea that all things, have to be big, colorful, sweet, or whatever their idea of perfection is. Why cannot they accept nature as it is ? Why can't they love things without this intense need to change them into something else?

I have now reached the stage of not being able to appreciate the flowers (tulips, daffodils) anymore . Every year, they come out with bigger, more colourful and a huge variety of flowers. But they now look too good, too fantastic to be natural to me and I am reaching a stage in my life when I want natural, even if it looks simple and ordinary. The new flowers look fake and garish. To me there's beauty in imperfections...the small and  scrawny flowers, with withering petals, assymetrical flowers due to petals having fallen off or eaten by insects are beautiful too. 

I recall a farmer in north Ontario who gave up growing flowers commercially. He told the buyers kept rejecting many flowers as they were 'imperfect'. He asked me, why does the modern world have such exacting demands of perfection from nature? I agree with him.

There is no end to people's demands for bigger, better and 'more perfect' as we are never satiated and expectations go up and never go down. People become jaded with the old and want something newer or 'better' than before. There is a whole lot of destructive psychology in this and I am not going into that today. 

My cat

 Above : my cat sleeping on quilt

 Wants to be cosy in the desk drawer

 Summertime, I take my cat out to the backyard...with my morning tea and evening coffee. It loves to bask in the sun, watch the birds and squirrels, eat the grass, sleep...

 In spring and fall, when it's too cold to step out, it sits in the mudroom/sun room and looks out the window...at Toronto wild-life (Squirrels mostly and sometimes racoons, skunks, cardinals, woodpeckers, finches and chipmunks) and falling leaves which seem like bird to him I think.

Half-awake, half-asleep, waiting for the cardinals, woodpeckers and squirrels.

 My neighbour's cat (above) roams freely in my backyard and this riles up my own cat who wants to chase him out of his territory! I always have my cat on a leash and  never let him in the backyard alone...

 Some of the best moments of summer days ...sitting in the backyard,  early morning or evenings when I return from work is when I sit in the backyard. Feeling the sun and wind on my skin. For company I have my  tea, a novel and my cat.

 I am pulling his leash to go back inside...but he turns his back on my and refuses. He cries, rolls over, bites me and finally has to be carried in. If I tug at the leash too hard, it slips off his body and he runs from me, refusing to get back inside! This is a daily ritual, morning and evening, in the summer months.

Giving company to someone working on his woodcarving hobby

 Above and below...exploring my neighbour's yard...boundaries are for humans.  But for animals, "All land is my land".

 Looking outside from the warmth of the bedroom windows, in winter months

My cat and the neighbour's cat checking each other out