Hello Blogland!

Dear reader,
Let me tell you who Karthi is... it's not me! Karthi is short for Karthika, my family's dream home in a village in Thiruvananthapuram. We got it built more than a year ago and spent one night in it. Then we moved to Pune, a 36-hour-long train ride away from our home because of a year-long assignment for my husband.

Karthi is the name of my blog because to me, our as-yet-uninhabited home is a metaphor for several things, most of all, my own life. In the past one year, in which I had a BIG 35th birthday, I have come to certain realizations. Many months after moving to this tiny apartment, I let all my homemaking slide because I was engrossed in thinking when I would be able to live in Karthika, making up and collecting ideas to decorate our dream home, and daydreaming about how life would be so perfect once we got back to living there. I was constantly finding fault with everything here, the heat in Pune, the black dust and cement dust that blackened my apartment's floors each day, the unfinished apartments sticking up like eyesores in all directions, and on and on and on.... (I'm a very good complainer!) Then I joined a reading group led by my elder son's Kindergarten director. That opened up vistas for me that I had never imagined possible...

I suddenly found that this "waiting for the perfect ... " has characterised all my life as in "Life will be perfect...
...when I grow up
...when I have job of my own
...when I become pencil thin
...when I have babies
...when the babies start sleeping all night
...when my book is published
...when the babies are potty-trained
...when I have a sewing machine
...when the babies are old enough to go to school
...when we have a house of our own
...when we finally start living in a house of our own

I think you get the idea. So around the beginning of 2010, (or mebbe half way into Feb!) I resolved, or rather made some vague and meandering moves towards not putting my life on hold any more in favor of a particular geographical, social, emotional or physical state. Today my motto is "Carpe Diem" (in that eerie Robin Williams whisper). And what have I done with the days I have seized? Stay tuned/ bookmark and follow to find out!!!