Um, general rant mostly.

Its now been like 6 months since ive been near permanently living here at home - just sporadic trips (mostly need based) most people i meet seem to think that ive lost a fair amount of weight and generally looking significantly healthier than i've ever looked.

I am getting a lot of rest i think. I can put in 16/18 hour workdays and still get 6 hours of sleep because transit times and domestic chores are nearly non existent.

Drove to Coimbatore and back on saturday - there is a HUGE improvement in highway quality across Tamilnadu - now it just takes me like 3.5 hours to get there from Madurai - thats like an average of somewhere near the 80 kmph mark. This is in fact happening across India simultaneously as i see it - Ive been to Bangalore recently - of course around Madras - in Bombay - Gujarat - so theres something all these NRI types have missed. I actually can drive to Madras in 6 hours from Madurai - although i havent tried it yet - but this really changes a lot of business dynamics - maybe that - and a possible introduction of a shatabdi type train between Madras and Madurai -

Onto other things:

We went out for food yesterday - Zeenat, MB and me - to the only posh joint in the neighbourhood - and we  were like chatting - more like she was doing most of the talking. Key noteworthy points:

a) She claims to be in a 'stage of life' where she feels 'Lonely' - in Tamil she clarifies - வெறுமை (i checked MB's reaction to see if this was some prearranged gag - but he seemed genuinely surprised)

b) Shes very happy that ive 'settled down' here and IS is 'settling down' with his course - so shes now peacefully 'concentrating' on 'completing long pending work on house renovation*'

c) It now gets interesting. In one moment of weakness - she confirmed that her Top reason for hounding me about getting married is that she wants Grandchildren to obsess about. I point out that she has atleast 3 of them (All my cousins are moms and dads now - they all live in the neighborhood) - but she tells me that it is 'not the same' as your 'own' grandchild.

She then concludes - with the above powerful arguments as support - that i am somehow not 'falling in line' and she does not understand what makes me behave like such a killjoy when 'kids everywhere' 'listen to parents'

So, now in addition to ones regular family responsibilities that people talk about all the time - it looks like theres this new job of keeping one's mother entertained by frequently churning out new cute grandchildren at an optimum frequency, comfortably spaced out to keep her happy for the entire duration of the 'lonely period !?'

And I always thought that only teenagers or people in their twenties go through these 'Angst ridden' phases in life - Mothers in their 40s appear to have these attacks too - boy-oh-boy - they sure need a lot of maintenance.

Explanatory notes:

* - In the last couple of months - Zeenat has gone ahead and aggressively bought up tracts of land next to our house (needlessly large & a bit pricey in my opinion) and actually extended our parking lot into a sort of a wide open garden with all kinds of frills and walkways. She even wanted a fountain for lord's sake but MB put his foot down. Shes actually got all this done superquick - keeping a civil team on site round the clock and picking every last paverblock & granite slab herself - faster than i ever manage to get any civil work done at the factory.

Here is a sample of the results of her labor - the view from my Penthouse's window.

From garden