''This just isn't fair!'' I wanted to scream at my father but honestly it didn't quite occur to me. I was barely nine and rebellion apparently wasn't discovered then. Besides we'd done this before and it hadn't exactly killed me. It wasn't like I was being forced to choose Prince Adam over He-Man. Oh no, it was much simpler. Dad had just told us we'd be moving. Soon. Again.

That was dad. He never asked us if we wanted to move- he simply informed us two weeks in advance that we had to. I caught my mother throwing a few concerned glances at me. I had just finished telling her how after almost 10 months into my third school I was finally feeling comfortable enough to settle down. ‘'Hey munchkin, its gonna be alright. You'll soon make new friends and besides Suzanne and Shirley would love summers down south with you''. Yeah. You got that right. We were moving down south from Mumbai, then Bombay. And Suzie Shirley and I happened to appeal to each other so much so that the previous night we had pricked our fingers and swore to be blood sisters forever. I had no clue how long forever was but I certainly didn't think it would be over in two weeks flat.

Did anybody even think of me? It was just over a year ago that I was hauled from Coimbatore down south to Bombay in the west coast. Inhabitants of the adult world felt the transition wouldn't affect a seven year old in the least. If only they knew as much as they thought they knew. For one, an average North Indian considered anything below the Vindhyas ‘Madraas'. I was one of those right from day one. A year in Bombay- a whopping 14.5% of my total spent life then, precision beyond brilliance while spewing out fluent Hindi and Marathi- and I was still the god awful madraasi.

Life at seven and a half isn't all about pan cakes and honey. It's a tough ride out there when you are learning some of life's gravest lessons- the most important one being that not ALL kids pee squatting. And if you do then you are also required to wear pretty pink  frocks, clutch a frilly rag of a doll and skip around town singing, ‘Georgie podgie pudding and pie...'. Then there is this peer pressure to hate anything that walks on two legs, climbs trees and fences, has a toy car and responds to ‘Jeethu', ‘Aaron', ‘Suhail' and other equally ridiculous names.

All this is sensory overload enough without wanting to think of ways to tell your blood sisters that 336 hours after the elaborate commune swearing in you'd really have to get up, dust your candid little bottom and leave for good. Now that's exactly not what you could call commitment. Mind you this is the age when mind doctors as well as all survivors of the innate eccentricities of life say, a young mind ought to be fed on a moral and ethical diet.

Too many minds in the previous paragraph and basic nutrition apart, all this doesn't really matter to an adult I guess. Ethical connotations lose their context when pitted against adult inconvenience. Thus evolved the concept of what is rather in a pretentiously philosophical manner termed, ‘situational ethics'. Light years ago a twisted priest Joseph Fletcher decided that ‘absolute standards could be considered less important (read ignored) than the requirements of a particular situation.' This meant that yardsticks used may vary from one situation to another and may even contradict one another. Phew! Now that was a rather unexpected spell of adult brilliance there, but I don't think I can ever use that to justify things some people do.