#mommytakeover

Hi all, It is a pleasure to connect with you all here. So, I am taking over today and I am sharing my life story with you all, what a privilege!! Hope you get something out of this. I sure am going to gain a lot through this dialogue with you all.

So, my name is Archana and I am from Mumbai. But I hail from a small town near Mumbai, actually not very near to Mumbai  I am from Ambarnath, that’s near Kalyan. I am born and brought up there. It was really a small town when I was brought up there. Most families knew each other, roads were empty and quiet, and lot of trees and most families lived in small houses. There were hardly any apartment buildings there. Market was just one place which was spread around the railway station. Now the things have changed a lot. So, my childhood, quite cocooned, being the only child of my parents we were a bit too close knit. Moreover, I was a very shy, very introverted girl. In fact, I was a voracious reader, my memory of my childhood is mostly sitting in a corner of my house and reading those books – in Marathi.

Yes, I studied in Marathi medium school. In fact, for the size of the town, we had many schools in Ambernath. I went to a Marathi medium school, that was very dingy. The primary school I went to was in an area where most of the blue collared workers lived and I had a lot of their kids in my school. We were a few kids who would get driven to school or get dropped until 4th standards. Later in my secondary school, I started commuting to and from school alone with my friends. I had ALL kind of friends – by that I mean from all the strata of life and I played equally with them. My parents never showed any discrimination to any kind of people visiting our house. There were kids of those building construction workers, workers of my father’s factory, my school mates, and my neighboring houses. My childhood as I remember was full of fun, play and books. Indeed books, I remember every summer vacations my father will collect all the books that I was done reading and give them away to the kids in our hometown. The compilation came to a sack full of them.

So, life was going on very well in a cocoon and quite smoothly. Got my first shocker of life when I joined college. Suddenly I was thrown into a world of fashion, English conversations. For the first year of college, I did not understand a word of what the teacher was talking about and though I did not fail in my exams (thanks to my teachers), I was not comfortable with the setting. Then I realized and I decided that I needed to acquire new skills and I started a new journey…