Random Thoughts: Tiny Bastards, Collateral Damage and Pink Sarees

HOUSEWORK. Chores. Sorting out things. Vacuming and mopping. Washing and drying. Just generally keeping the house dust free. I wish I could stay in rustic, little hotel rooms everyday so things are always organised for me when I return from lunch. But my home is not a hotel room and unfortunately, I'm the maam and the maid all rolled into one little person covering an area of 1,500 square feet! It's a tough job when you have to juggle chores between a full-time job and it doesn't help to have a billion microscopic dust particles that seem to have a hundred sets of feet each to invade the living space right after a cleaning session. I hate those conniving, tiny bastards. 

My favourite spot is the floor space behind the sofa on a sunny day. 

It's not like I live in a particularly dusty country. Apart from the stupid haze, thanks to a certain neighbouring country for their clever handling of forest fire or whatever it is that they keep burning annually, my country doesn't have dust storms. Thunder storms yes, but no dust storms. Still, I can't figure out the particles that race back into my house just days after cleaning up. 

Yet when I actually hire help (usually only when I'm unwell), I turn into this person with chronic OCD. It's like I need things cleaned a certain way, in a certain pattern and I find myself to be massively disturbed by the foreign presence sorting out the nooks and corners of my kitchen or the framed photographs in the living room cabinets. I guess it must be the unfamiliar foreign presence in my personal space and my inability to be the perfect bitch in situations where I'm required to be one. How do you tell an intimidated 18-year old that the space beneath the kitchen stool is still dusty for the third time? She should be in college, having the time of her life - not scrubbing someone's bathroom floor in a foreign land. 

Not sure if the part about having OCD is just a female hormonal thing but it got me into thinking about having a group of female soldiers to tackle a mission in say... Mogadishu or something. Just a random thought after watching a documentary on Killing Bin Laden and the movie Act of Valor with the story of an elite Navy SEALs team embarking on a mission to recover a kidnapped CIA agent. 

No great acting here but I quite enjoyed the show

LOL. I'm suddenly reminded of an incident I witnessed in much fear near Pasar Borong Selayang (a local wholesale market) involving some women from the Nepalese immigrant community. A fight took off, and these gentle-looking women clad in sarongs suddenly morphed into some ferocious hyena type beings, grinding their betel nut stained teeth, growling and pulling each other's hair. One literally tossed a child of maybe two into the air like a rag doll and lucky, someone was there to catch the toddler. I don't know who took whose husband in that scenario but I fled the scene for the fear of becoming collateral damage. Mind you, it's a notorious area by reputation and these women were mad in rage. 

If that's bad, then a mob of men stripping and beating up a 19-year-old girl which took place in India in July is beyond that. Who does things like that? The parents of these men should hang their sons and later also hang themselves to eternal damnation.

Which is why I cannot help but grin pinkly when I read about the pink saree gang's mission in Bunkelhand in south-east Uttar Pradesh, India. The group known as the Gulabi Gang which began with a few members in 2006 has some 300,000 members now in Uttar Pradesh alone. They only take matters into their own hands when problem-solving in a non-violent manner does not fruit any results. Now I'm against men and women beating up each other but wouldn't it be sweet if this gang could teach the mob of men a lesson with their bamboo sticks ?

You don't want to mess with the Gulabi Gang. (Pic from here)