Welcome….
……………. back to yet another of my unscripted episodes where life directs, pets reign, family stars, work improvises, and I simply sip my tea and narrate.
You know, sometimes I feel like life is just one long, unscripted reality show — except the production team never calls “cut,” there are no retakes, and the audience is… well, mostly just my dog staring at me like I’ve lost my mind.
Also as you know, some people climb mountains to find the meaning of life. I, on the other hand, simply sit on my balcony — tea cup in hand, dog at my feet, Indies flopped around like retired philosophers, and the turkey giving me side-eye — and observe the circus that unfolds daily. Trust me, it’s far more entertaining, and you don’t have to carry oxygen cylinders!
Starting where? I think hard and then the whiff of freshly made parathas floats through my kitchen chimney into my lawn and I snap my mental fingers with an: Of course, Food!
Once upon a time, we ate to live. Now we live to eat, and then feel guilty for eating, and then read umpteen articles about gut microbiomes while chewing a lettuce leaf with the enthusiasm of a tax audit officer. There’s gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, guilt-free, taste-free food. I mean, it’s called a cheesecake, but it has neither cheese nor cake anymore. Every few years, food comes with new instructions. Carbs were villains. Then fats became villains. Then came sugar. Now even fruit is suspect. I grew up on dalia, parathas, pooris fried fearlessly in ghee, and homemade achar that could qualify as biological weapons if dropped from a plane. Yet, here I am — alive, well, and carrying the collective wisdom of a thousand diets I never fully followed because I never quite understood them. I also did not have the patience to make meals separately since there wasn’t any tangible evidence . Videos? Nah! Who believes in this cynical world and times! Anyways, my grandmother would have called this fraud and gone back to frying pooris in ghee, living to a ripe 99 with excellent joints and glowing skin.
And we are forever existing with the most universal emotion — food guilt.
Modern food advice has become like unsolicited relatives at weddings:
“Don’t eat that.”
“Eat this, but only between 6:07 am and 6:19 am.”
“Make sure your grains are from the foothills of the Himalayas and your salt has passed a background check.”
And while all this is being analyzed, my Beagle, Loki, is under the table licking the floor like a Michelin-starred critic inspecting the kitchen tiles.
Then there are the people we work with, have worked with and never hope to work with!
Oh, the drama. There was one who’d send 2-line emails with 17 disclaimers. The one who breathed stress like it’s oxygen. The one now who believes “urgent” means “I forgot to plan.” And of course, the one who is omnipresent, hovering like a drone over every meeting, contributing nothing but their Wi-Fi presence. But I have smiled, nodded, and sipped my 100th coffee like an HR-approved zombie.
Ah, my professionally organized mess.
I have met people at work who can schedule meetings to plan future meetings. There are the ones who’d nod wisely, adding no value except to repeat what the previous person said but in reverse order. Then there’s always that one person who believes Excel sheets can solve world peace.
In one meeting, someone once said:
“We need to think outside the box.”
Before I could stop myself, I muttered, “First let’s find the box.”
Of course, Zoom conveniently froze my video at that exact moment. A technological mercy, perhaps.
Now, let’s talk about friends. Friends? Ah, my chosen family.
Oh, my inner circle! They are my chosen tribe. We meet — occasionally drenched because Hyderabad rains have a perverse sense of humor — and proceed to eat like we’re practicing for a famine. One of us will always bring a new diet update, only to abandon it halfway through dessert. The conversations swing from world politics to Netflix to someone’s aunt who once wore mismatched shoes to a wedding and blamed it on poor lighting.
But what I love most is our mutual contract of brutal honesty:
“You’re being stupid, darling.”
“Yes, but a lovable kind of stupid.”
That’s friendship in a nutshell. No judgments. Only eye rolls.
We meet, laugh, eat like starving hyenas, and analyze each other’s life choices with the precision of a neurosurgeon. We give each other the most brutal advice with absolute love:
“You know you’re being dumb, right?”
“Of course. But continue.”
That’s friendship. The people who’ll take your call at 3 AM and remind you of every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done since they’ve known you.
Pets? The real landlords of my house.
Loki — the beagle with a PhD in naughtiness — believes he owns me. My job is simple: open doors, fetch treats, and serve as emotional support human when fireworks ruin his evening. He rightly believes he owns the house where he lets me live because I’m the one who can reach and open his treat jar.
Juhi, my Indie with the strategic brain of a retired army general, watches everything and everyone, making judgment calls silently. She will greet you, but not before scanning your character. Buttercup, my quiet Indie shadow, believes in spiritual detachment. She appears, observes, and disappears. No drama. I often joke she’s been meditating in a previous life. The Indies think they are intellectual beings with distinct political opinions based on the direction of the ceiling fan.
The bunnies who think that ‘carefree’ was a word invented for their attitude and ‘careful’ for me! – You had better be careful how our living quarters are cleaned; You be careful how we are taken out; You be careful what is given to us for food – keep a leash on the fruits & greens for they’ll end up in no time inside our tiny stomachs!
And then there are my turkeys, who have a well-defined routine and deeply disapprove when I disrupt it. The way they stare, you’d think I’ve violated ancient sacred rituals. And Well, let’s just say negotiations with a turkey especially Bruce lee can be more complicated than international diplomacy.
Honestly, if these creatures had social media, I’d be roasted daily on their Insta stories. But my sanity and insanity is rolled into these cutest fur and feather coats.
Family dynamics? That’s a daily stand-up comedy show. Our kids and parents? Ah, the circle of irony.
My son, in his dry wit, often says:
“Mom, you have Wi-Fi speed reflexes when it comes to catching my lies.”
Of course I do. Years of being a teacher and a mother sharpen your Spidey senses. I knew he was faking a tummy ache before he even said ‘ouch’ as a child. But how times have changed? I spent years teaching my child how to hold a spoon, and now he teaches me how to operate my phone.
Parents? Oh, they’re tech ninjas now. My father, who once resisted mobile phones, now FaceTime’s me to discuss varied topics.
“Log into the app and let’s catch-up!”
Yes, Dada. We sure shall as we discuss all about our day and the next. My father, who once couldn’t fathom online banking, now sends me funds on my request with suspicious ease — followed by a mail which asks me to check if it’s come!
And children, they need the constant Mom-monitoring app and to think when young they had that sixth sense to ask the most profound questions when you are mentally done for the day:
“Mom, do ants have friends?” And then the hasty retreat because my expression would reveal the exasperation.
And finally, our marriage – our spouses. A beautiful, baffling, hilarious partnership.
Loving, supportive, occasionally baffled creatures. Mine thinks every cupboard can hold “just one more file.” He calls it ‘organized chaos’ — which roughly translates to “only I know where anything is, and you will never find it.” He also has a theory for that every file, every cupboard and every cable that snakes around the house. He calls it “scientific storage.” Of course, being an IIT-ian! I call it “organized archaeological excavation.” When I ask him why every drawer looks like an election manifesto draft, he smiles and says: “You never know when you might need it.”
Marriage is essentially two people navigating life’s absurdities while arguing about how full the fridge really is. True. Like the budgeting of groceries and Amazon purchases. Very useful during family dinner debates!
The thoughts we harbor? The mind? Oh dear, the mind.
Oh, that’s a whole season by itself. Overthinking about things that haven’t happened, worrying about conversations that didn’t take place, and mentally rehearsing Nobel Prize speeches for arguments we won in our head while brushing our teeth. It’s like having 147 tabs open on your browser — 3 playing music, 2 frozen, and one suddenly refreshing to show embarrassing memories from a Class 5 Annual Day.
At 2 am, my brain chooses to ponder over highly productive questions:
“Did I switch on the dishwasher?”
“What if pigeons actually hold secret meetings when we’re not looking?”
“Did I really say that in 2002?”
So how should I conclude in conclusion? And so from this, I think again: What is life?
Life is messy, noisy, unpredictable, funny, and exasperatingly beautiful and absolutely hilarious if you learn to laugh while dodging the flying objects. No script, no safety net, no user manual. Just winging it, one day at a time. We make plans, God smiles. We clean the house, pets mess it up. We diet, cake arrives.
But if we can laugh — truly laugh — at the absurdities, I’d say we’re winning.
No filters. No scripts. Just living the chaos, one giggle at a time.
As for me really? Seriously who needs therapy, when you can just blog?
#TheCocoonDiaries
#MyRealLifeRealityShow
#LaughingThroughLife
#BeagleBoss
#IndieChronicles
#TurkeyNegotiations
#MomsSpideySense
#WiFiMarriage
#TeaCupTherapy
#TheGreatIndianRealityShow
#LifeUnfiltered
#HumorIsMyVitamin
#EverydayCircus
#FindingZenInChaos
Wickedlyours 
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