Everything we grew up with is now taboo: Shunali Khullar Shroff

When it comes to being a parent, there's no one style that fits all. Despite the best expert advice and tell-all books that attempt to guide you, one can very easily end up feeling baffled. And that's precisely what Shunali Khullar Shroff found, when she turned from a career woman to a stay-at-home mom to her two daughters, now seven and 12. The former journalist and public relations expert chronicled her experiences in her blog, which has been ranked among the top 10 Indian blogs you must follow by The Jalebi Chronicles, and later in her book Battle Hymn Of A Bewildered Mother, out this March. In an open, frank and often amusing manner, Shunali writes on her adventures of motherhood, travels and other observations. She tells AfterHrs how it all began...

TURNING BLOGGER
"I worked at Asian Age in Mumbai shortly after it was launched. Then I took a break from writing altogether and worked for Star TV, had my PR firm, had my children. I was always a voracious reader and would keep a diary, but I can't really say I was writing in all that long spell since I stopped working as a writer. It was around 2010, when I began to feel a little void.I didn't want a job and didn't want to run my own company because I wanted to be around my kids. A friend of mine pulled me up. She said, 'Why don't you do something with your life? Why don't you start writing a blog?' I didn't even know then how to go about making a blog," says Shunali who now blogs in sporadic intervals.

"A few years after, a friend in the publishing industry suggested I should do a book. Doing a book is very different from doing a blog. Blogs are disjointed. I write about travel because I'm completely consumed by wanderlust and I write about parenting because as a writer you write about what is constantly unfolding around you. Right now, as a writer, my role as a parent defines me the most. So it came naturally to write about my experiences as a parent which was not in a preachy way... It was actually my goofiness in it, my ineptness and my inability to figure out children and child-rearing. It was a lot about how bewildered it left me. So when my friend suggested I put a book together I did that and sent the manuscript to some publishers and heard back from three. Hay House was the first."

MOMMY TALES
"I had two-three posts on my blog about parenting, based on which, my friend from publishing had told me, 'Work on something like this.' And so, I worked on a lot more. The first chapter talks about all these celebrities who make motherhood look so glam. Victoria Beckham has four kids and Angelina Jolie has a republic travelling with her. So I used to look at all this. I wasn't very maternal by nature before my kids happened. I'm a dog person. And like any young girl today, you're working, focusing on your career, you're going to the gym, you're enjoying your marriage, you're partying, you're travelling - children isn't something you really think of. My partner, who ran the PR firm with me, she and I were travelling to Amsterdam and Barcelona on holiday and I picked up a magazine at the airport to read. On the cover, there was Jade Jagger with some four kids at her Ibiza home looking really glam. So by that time, I was thinking I should have a child now. I used to think of children as a terrible imposition on my life. When I read the mag, I said, 'Wow, she's having a party! She travels, has her jewellery business, a great life and her kids looked so well dressed in Burberry and Chloe'.it looked like an ad to have babies. I bought into it," explains Shunali who found her own experiences to be quite contrary once she was with child. 

"I was looking at motherhood from a very different set of eyes. I was comparing it to these glorious images I had of Jade and Angelina. And now what I was dealing with was very different. I had no life, I was fat, I didn't have a career. And then I tried some crazy experiments - when my baby was one-week-old, I started playing French CDs thinking she could learn French faster - all madness. I never felt confident as a mother. Because today all the self-help books are constantly sending out one message. That you have no instinct to be a parent, you have to learn it. So suddenly, what our parents did so naturally, we are having to read self-help books. Slowly but surely we are being brainwashed into thinking without taking lessons from a psychologist or an expert in the field we are incapable of doing anything. When I read these books I felt extremely inadequate. They tell you don't shout at your kids, don't do this, don't do that. Everything we grew up with, is now a taboo. I started thinking that I messed up my child. All those books made me feel like a bad mother, therefore this book."
The foreword to Battle Hymn of a Bewildered Mother was written by Priyanka Chopra, a rather unlikely choice. "I know Priyanka is not a mom but she's an army kid like me. There's a lot of that versus now. I only know her a bit and she not only wrote one line but an entire foreword. I could relate with the kind of person PeeCee is: spunky, young, living her life; so, because my book is a transition from that to what I am today, she seemed the right person," she adds. 

VARIED INTERESTS
Shunali's husband Shravan Shroff, who is often mentioned in her writings, was one of the first to start multiplexes in India. But she has no screenwriting ambitions. "I'm not a cinema person. I very rarely even watch movies. If somebody reads my book and feels they can make a movie, why not?" she says. "I love reading; at any given time, there are lots of books in my house. And I'm a Buddhist practitioner, I practise Nichiren Buddhism and so it's part of my daily life. I also occasionally bake for my kids, I'm not very domestic otherwise. My parents' side of the family runs a trust where they identify certain underprivileged homes where we pool in money and educate them. The other cause that's really close to me and even more than girl child education is the environment. It disturbs me no end. My husband laughs at me, but even if we are in a hotel room, I tell him to switch the light off before leaving. He says I can't singularly save the planet, but it matters so much to me."

Her other passion is travelling and both she and her husband try to see as much of the world as they can. "Kyoto is beautiful. Among the unusual places I've been to, are Israel, Azerbaijan, Beirut and St. Petersburg. I love art and museums. My friend calls me a museum wh*re! When my kids were very tiny, I used to drag them to museums. I thought if I took them to these places from a very young age, they would develop a palate for art and be really intellectual. I have to beg them to come now," laughs Shunali.

GOING FORWARD
"I'm attempting to write fiction now for my next book. But I've never written it before, so it will take me some time to get my act together. Random thoughts come to me and I just jot them down. I'm not in a hurry. There's too much else going on in my life. My daughter has almost become a teenager. So far, I've written about her and it's fine, but as a teen.. they get damn touchy and will disown me. Maybe if I do fiction, I can change the names and write everything," she adds with a smile.