Manu's Medley

Still not able to believe that your baby is officially a toddler now? I totally get it. The last one year would have been exhilarating and equally tiring for you as a new parent, getting to learn, process, understand and handle your special person in life. Amidst all that was happening within you and around, your baby has grown up and transformed into a toddler.  The little one would have learnt and experienced a lot over the last year and is all set to explore the world more on his/ her own. He is ready to take up new challenges and be more independent. If his focus keeps shifting from one thing to the other quite often, understand it is completely normal. Your kid is at a stage where he wants to try his hands at everything, but only for a short while.   The below detailed activities are suitable for kids in the range of 1 - 2 years. If your kid isn't ready for any of these, take a pause and try them after few weeks. This is not just any list from the internet, but the o...

Celeste Ng is an American novelist and writer. She holds a degree in English from Harvard University and Master of Fine Arts in writing from University of Michigan. Everything I Never Told You is Ng's first novel and has won her the Amazon Book of the Year award in 2014 and has been translated into 15 languages. Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts are two of her other novels that were published in 2017 and 2022 respectively.  Everything I Never Told You opens with Lydia Lee daughter of a Chinese-American couple found missing. After a few days, her dead body is seen at a lake in her neighbourhood. During the investigation, truth about Lydia's academics and social life surface. Much to the disbelief of her parents James Lee and Marilyn, she has very poor grades at school and absolutely no friends. She had been a loner always. After months of investigation, police confirm the unbelievable about her death.  Whom to be blamed?  How had it begun? Like everything...

Spring - A lovely reminder of how beautiful change can truly be. But without winter, we wouldn't appreciate the beauty of spring. It's the nature's way of reminding us year after year, that however hard and bitter the winter is, there is always spring - there is always hope!!! Naturally, after witnessing daily minus temperatures, wilted trees and a white blanket of snow all around, people look up to the onset of spring, to witness the nature transforming itself in to a whole new self. Spring in Ontario starts around late March and lasts until late June. But Ontario's weather is often tricky and experiences cold weather and heavy rains amidst the pleasant sunny and warmers days during Spring. But this is also the season, to spend time out in the nature and take part in Easter celebrations, Maple fest, witness various flower festivals, enjoy canoeing, grab fresh produce at Farmer's Market and many more such activities. Spring is also the time for trees to blossom. I ...

Brinjal is known as "the King of vegetables", for its beautiful purple body with a crown and rich nutritional value. There are umpteen varieties of brinjal and is known by different names grown across  the world - eggplant, baingan, aubergine, garden egg etc. This versatile vegetable can be easily turned into a variety of mouth watering dishes. In many recipes, it is also used as a substitute to meat. When I come across people who don't eat this wonderful vegetable, I silently laugh inside knowing what they are missing.  Fortunately, everyone in our family loves brinjal in whatever form it is prepared - sambar, fry, nune vankaya, guthi vankaya, vankaya pachadi (chutney), katrika kootu, katrika karakuzhambu, aloo baingan, baingan bartha, baba ganoush (mediterranean eggplant dip), grilled eggplant, eggplant parmesan (similar to lasagna) and the list goes on..... Baingan ka bartha is a very popular Punjabi recipe. As a pre-preparation, we have to roast the brinjal on direct ...

No one is born fully equipped with all the necessary skills to handle motherhood and the surprises it brings along with it. A mother is born when a child is born. With every passing day, we learn and evolve as mothers. Every mother's journey is unique and mine is no less. In this post, I would like to share the 3 mistakes I made as a new mom, their consequences and how I addressed those. 1. Loosing sleep over milk supply We all know how nutritious and healthy mother's breast milk is. It is the purest form of food for  newborns. Though I intended to breast feed my child, there was a delay in the milk production due to c-section delivery. Adding to the bodily complications after the delivery (stitches, abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding), frequent nursing, stress of not able to generate sufficient milk for my child didn't allow me to sleep in peace.  Due to the stress, milk production got delayed further and had an adverse impact on my sugar levels and recovery. My (gestational...

The Henna Artist is first of the Jaipur Trilogy - The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris, written by Alka Joshi. Alka was born in India and moved to US along with her family when she was nine. She did her BA from Stanford University and had written advertising commercials and marketing copy. She enrolled herself in the MFA program in creative writing at California College of Arts at the age of 51. Later she went onto write her first fictional novel - The Henna Artist, which immediately became New York Times bestseller.  For this debut novel, Alka drew inspiration from her mother's life. Her mother had to discontinue her studies to get married at the age of 18. Both her parents got into wedlock, against their personal choice. Both had dreams and goals to achieve. Sooner they had children and her mother couldn't have the life that she wished. Alka is known to have mentioned, “I can’t change her life, but I can change it in fiction. I can create ...

As someone said "There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family, or more happy, or more exasperated, or more secure." True to this statement, no family is completely happy or 100% perfect. It is a mix of every emotion that binds everyone in the family together. At the end, family is family!!! The web series Happy Family Conditions Apply portrays the same. This Hindi language series is directed and produced by film-makers Jamnadas Majethia and Aatish Kapadia of the Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai fame; and the star cast includes seasoned actors like Raj Babbar, Ratna Pathak Shah, Atul Kulkarni, Ayesha Jhulka in key roles, supported by Raunaq Kamdar, Meenal Sahu, Sanah Kapur etc. This is one of the titles Amazon Prime India announced in April last year.  Unlike other series, Amazon released only the first 4 episodes of Happy Family on the 10th March 2023 and went on to air the remaining 6 episodes, 2 episodes on every Friday, with the last 2 released on 31st Mar. It is a family co...