Karen and Simonne focus on the 7 laws of Sheconomics – Take emotional control (lolJ); Go beyond beliefs; Spend with power (good one); Have goals; Look debt in the face (be brave!); Share financial intimacies, & Know tomorrow comes (as it should).

The book got me talking to people about women and their economic and money gene. Many women said, hey, yes, I never understand the whole darn thing. And many women and men said – that’s not true – some of the best economists in this country and abroad are women – just check out the financial departments in the government and in companies and look at ICICI’s top band - and of course, there’s the Suze Orman show….etc. I sort of agree with both. I also think women have been kind of brainwashed into thinking they can’t understand finance – a little like the woman driver syndrome. But basically any woman who’s ever run a home (single, married or with kids) knows how budgets work – they just have to up the scale and expand their knowledge. And while I won’t ever say men understand finance better than women, Sheconomics as a word connotes a whole different relationship (which may or may not be in the book!)

I’d recommend the book – to all of you women from 18 to 60. If you’re older than that, hopefully you’ve settled into a good equation in all your relationships, including with money.

What are we doing here with those kids? You can only be happy and loved if you have A kind of car?

Are we messing with their heads, or is that really how life is now? Is Club Mum discussing this?

Figured a while ago that like you, I wanted a clean, green world for me and mine, don’t want the glaciers to melt or the forests to disappear, don’t want the summers hotter and deadly environment disasters. So I fight with stores that give me things in plastic bags, and I bully friends and family to share cars, and I re-cycle everything I can (in my mother’s days it was called ‘thrift’). Remember the time when all our toys and books and clothes got re-cycled? Our siblings and cousins got them or we got theirs. Worth looking at again - worth teaching the kids too. Re-cycling comes naturally to women - maybe Renewable Energy should be a woman’s portfolio?

Delighted to walk into maxiMum store this morning and walk out with organic skin care and charming re-cycled stationary. Looking good naturally just at the thought of it!

And did you ever have a wonderful day that you wanted re-cycled? Thats a tough one…worth a conversation!

Are we losing our kids to the numbing visual medium of television and internet? Is media taking over their lives? Are they ever going to know the joy of reading the books we did – and living out worlds of history and ideas, of imagination and fantasy created in response to stories and the written word? Why doesn’t my child read? How do I make her? The questions came from many parents. And the answer at the end, quite clearly – you can’t make her read. But you can show her what fun it is, you can read to her and him every night, you can surround her with books and as she grows you can almost prove that the book and the tale it tells is a special gift, yes you can open up many worlds. Parents, adults, who put a value to books demonstrate that spending money on books is as essential as, or more, than a host of
branded consumer dreams.

He won’t always read what you like, he may not read as much or as little as you do, he will be his own person,but he will remember and recreate the stories and the time you spent reading with him - till he goes off to spend that time with his own book.

We talked of this and more at the maxiMum store on 17^th May as a group of parents gathered to chat with Jo and Swati of
Eureka who brought with them many ideas on how to encourage children to read and filled the space with colourful, tactile, I-want-to-read-them-all-now children’s books. I think most of us headed straight to a bookstore. (I hope Eureka, Swati) to pick up a book for our kids to read - after we’d read them ourselves !

Do you know that this is Happy TV Turnoff Week (20-26 April 2009!) the international campaign against television.

Want to try it on your kids ? Read below and more at

http://www.whitedot.org/issue/fix_tvturnoffweek.asp

Excerpts
The TV Turnoff is great for kids. Young children don’t want TV. Parents
have to teach them to watch it. When older children are asked, it’s not TV
they say they want. They watch it because they’re bored. And television just
encourages them to stay bored. A week without television gives children back
their natural creativity. Here’s a teacher from one of the 25,000 schools
that participated last year: “Kids get excited at how easy they find
not-watching. If at the end of the day they haven’t watched TV, there’s such
pride.”

Even if you are happy as a “discerning viewer”, remember there’s a whole
industry of highly paid, well educated people whose job it is to see that
you don’t discern. They get paid to keep you sitting there - no matter
what’s on. That’s why the best way to moderate your viewing is to stop
watching entirely for a while. It will give you a chance to see how much TV
you really need.

‘Dreamtime’ is often used, indigenously in some countries, to refer to ‘the time before time’ or ‘the time of the creation of all things’.

Through a series of pendants comprising the collection ‘Dreamtime Stories’, I have reflected on this aspect of creation- the act of or the result of- the natural and the manmade; woven around the cultural context of the sun and the moon- defining our very raison d’etre- misplaced in the conscious, placed in the subconscious, reflecting the urban Indian dichotomy: the obsession with the mass-produced, unregulated- all in the name of modernism and yet the desire for a unique multisensory experience: to see and feel, to hear and feel, to touch and feel.

The style is contemporary and distinctly Indian in its sensitivity.

Design is certainly inspiration, imagination and genius, but it is first and foremost culture that shapes not just the visual style of the ornament but imparts a visual style of a time and a culture….to be continued

Then, just like that, like in the Bollywood movies he loves, things change.He wins the lottery of life, at least for a while.He gets a large some of money – around $2000, which is an astronomically high amount for him – to act in a movie being produced by a Hollywood producer - called “Slumdog Millionaire”.He thinks he is rich at last and his life will change. The movie is completed and gets nominated for the Oscars.It gets several awards en route to the Oscars.People start asking him about it and he becomes famous in his own slum. And he hears that he will go to America! His life takes on the quality of a dream. He flies to LA – flies! when he has never even been in a car. He stays in a hotel of incredible luxury, of soft beds and large spaces, gets a huge room all to himself and has people who wait on him. He is asked for interviews; he is photographed and walks the red carpet. He meets Angelina Jolie and doesn’t know who she is, as he has never seen Hollywood movies, but is excited when someone tells him that she is an international superstar. Parties, limos, and all the food he can eat, star treatment at every turn – it’s the best time the poor boy has ever had. Then they win big at the Oscars and he goes on stage with the Director, and gets to hold the Oscars. Pure bliss.

It all ends of course, and after the celebrations he takes the flight back to Mumbai, back to his home, and back to the only world he knew, before all this started. The money has gone, and his father hits him when he is jet-lagged and refuses an interview. The boy again wakes up to the stench of the slums, the heat, the beatings and fear. But now he knows there is a better world outside. To live with what you have is difficult enough, but to live with the knowledge that there is a better world outside that you can’t have is pure hell. That is reality and facing reality hurts. So he refuses to take off his fine and expensive Oscar clothes, just as he doesn’t want to shed the life he experienced for a short period of time, but life, well life refuses to go away and after a while he realizes the clothes have become tattered and dirty. And he pretends he doesn’t care.