This week, as we all gather our loved ones and our thoughts to give thanks for all the love and luck we’ve received this year, it’s worth taking some time to look back and really take stock.

Last Thanksgiving, to do just that, I created “a reverse bucket list,” kind of the opposite of an actual bucket list, which is a rundown of things you’d like to accomplish before you kick the proverbial bucket. The reverse bucket list takes a look back at things that you’ve already done and are proud of — goals achieved, moments worth reliving, the idea of gratitude for the here and now and what you already have.

So this year, again, I offer up a few a few things that make my reverse bucket list. I’m sure there are more to come:

-Kavya, my beautiful, smartie pant, sparkly-eyed daughter. In the past year, she’s become this unique, quirky, funny, larger-than-life little character.  The things she says and does never fail to astound me — she’s so smart and so cute and so charming. She’s simply amazing. These first two years of motherhood have been as exhausting and as fulfilling as any I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

-My husband Navdeep. I’ve never met a smarter, sweeter, sexier man, and I’m so glad that we managed to find each other, despite startling odds. I’m so lucky to have a partner who gets me on so many different levels, who makes my goals his goals, whose brilliance startles me even after all these years. And in the past two years, we’ve gotten to learn about each other on many new levels — as parents, as writers, as partners. As someone once told me, he’s a keeper.

-My family, a boisterous, incredibly fun bunch whose unconditional love and support has been both my safety net — and the reason I’ve felt I can venture out onto paths unexplored. My stylish, smartie pant sister, my artist brother, my mother, who taught me what a mama should be, and my dad, who came to this country more than 30 years ago with a goal — to make his little family’s life better. This year, I’m especially proud that we have a full house — Kavi’s first big Charaipotra Thanksgiving, complete with Nani Bash down from Virginia. Yay! We have so much to celebrate!

-The life-changing six-month honeymoon adventure Navdeep and I took in India — and IshqInABackpack.com, the site where we’ve managed to document some memories we made. The trip altered the way we looked at each other, and ourselves. It took me off my tried-and-true path and into new territory. And we’re having new adventures all the time! Hawaii, here we come!

-My decade at People magazine. As crazy and stressful as those years were, they were formative in my career, and made me the writer I am today. They also afforded me a luxury that few writers have these days — the ability to earn a real living from home in my pajamas, writing about things I’m really interested in.

-Freelancing. I couldn’t have asked for a better day job. It’s fun and focused, entertaining and explorative. It leaves me enough time to spend with my little family, and it allows me the leeway I need to focus on other goals — like fiction.

-My class at the New School. I didn’t realize how much I needed a writers’ community until I found one. And I’m glad I got this particular bunch. They share my passion, my ambition, my goals. I’ve found in them the support I need, and the right to take writing seriously for once in my life. As we go into our thesis semester and graduation, this little peer group I’ve found continues to astound me. I hope we’ll be working together, both commiserating and celebrating, for years to come.

-Cake. I had a healthy dose of it this year — and can’t wait for more! Yay Cake!

-Writing. In whatever form it takes — screenplays with Meena, blog posts about Kavi (which I’ll keep for her to read when she’s older), those nearly complete novels (see New Year’s resolutions post!) or those countless emails Navdeep and I exchanged back in the day, unraveling our life stories. Writing has been my form of analysis, of catharsis, of revelation. I’m glad it’s the path I stumbled upon and decided to follow.

That’s just the start of my reverse bucket list — there are countless other things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving.

What tops your list this holiday season?

Lately, I’ve been all about learning how to optimize and grow my small business. But I guess I’m not the only one looking to the late Steve Jobs for a meaningful message these days.

According to Steve Jobs’ biographer Carmine Gallo, who spoke to 20/20 about the man tonight, here are the Apple founder’s seven principles of success that “anybody can use, to be more successful, to be more innovative, to live an inspired life.”

1. Do What You Love, no matter what it happens to be. “Don’t settle,” said Jobs. “As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

2. Put a Dent in the Universe:  Have a big, bold, clear, concise vision. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Says Gallo: “I like to say that your vision should fit inside a Twitter post.”

3. Say No To A 1000 Things. “You have to focus – reduce the clutter, make it simple,” says Gallo. In fact, according to 20/20, in the latter years of his life, Jobs wore the same black turtleneck and jeans every day.

4. Kickstart Your Brain By Doing Something New. Case in point: the inspiration for the Apple store came from the Four Seasons – there’s a concierge, a bar, a sleek, comfortable space.

5. Sell Dreams, Not Products. No easy task, but a worthy goal. “When you start asking What Would Steve Jobs do, it’s a high bar to reach,” says Gallo, “but it’s worth reaching.”

6. Create Insanely Great Experiences. “Innovation means creating an experience for your customer,” says Gallo.

7. Master the Message. Like anyone, Jobs had to learn to become a great speaker and communicator – but as all the wise words by Jobs that are plastered all over Facebook show, he took the challenge and rocked it.

Yeah, when it came to business — and life, for that matter — Steve Jobs didn’t mess around.

How many of these principles are you already practicing? And what might you implement into your own life?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And sometimes it’s true.

Take the image above. My husband, Navdeep Singh Dhillon, took it two weekends ago at the Brooklyn Book Festival. It’s the second time we’ve gone, and Kavi’s first — not bad for a 20-month-old. She had a grand old time. She got to color, run around the kids’ tent, hear Mo Willems read, eat gelato. It was a fun-filled day for her. And it’s continuing to instill in her a passion she already very much has, even though she’s not even two. It’s a love for books.

She can’t read them yet, but she can make things out, pointing to puppies and apples and creating her own little version of the story in her head. It’s a good place to start.

Boy was she excited to see that Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax, on a shelf of books at the festival. But boy were we disappointed to see the reason it had been placed there. It took its place, on the shelf of shame — or perhaps it’s pride? — alongside titles like The Perks of Being A Wallflower and Judy Blume’s Forever and Harry Potter andThe Hunger Games, all in a tent set up by the very noble organization, the American Library Association. The non-profit was on a mission that day: to get people reading banned books. In fact, they created a YouTube Channel of Americans across the nation participating in a Banned Books Read-Out to counteract the effects of censorship. It’s a genius idea, one that builds one person at a time.

Now I’m not saying that sometimes there isn’t sex and violence and drug abuse and other issues too heavy or perhaps inappropriate for specific readers in some of these books. Certainly that can be the case. But here’s the thing: most readers will find the right books when they’re appropriate for them. And if they’re not appropriate? Well, perhaps they’ll simply put them down. In the case of little ones, like Kavi, I think it should be up to the parents to make informed decisions about what their kids — but not everyone else’s — are reading. You decide what’s right for yourself and your family, but you don’t decide what’s right for a classroom full of kids — or a nation, for that matter.

And in this case, I certainly wouldn’t prevent Kavi from reading Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax once she’s ready for it. In fact, the book has a very important message, one I’d like Kavi to ponder herself, once she can actually read. In the meantime, I’ll continue to read to her. Even if some of those books are banned.

I’ve been dreading today. For week and months, I’ve been avoiding the hype, the news, the tourists, the sorrow. Especially the sorrow. Because it’s so heavy, I feel like I might just drown in it. The weight of being a part of that “where-were-you” moment, the moment that defines my generation, whether you were in New York or Timbuktu.

I was in New York of course. I was on my merry, oblivious way, headed to the center of the city that was the center of the world, coming from the Upper West Side to my office in Rockefeller Center.

Two days earlier, I had hob-nobbed with the likes of Britney Spears, Beyonce and Usher at the MTV VMAs. I got to write up the story and it was to be a central feature. I was 24. I was Living. The. Life. And then it all came screeching to a halt.

That morning, as I walked to my building, I noticed people outside staring up at billowing clouds of rancid black smoke. It was coming from downtown. Apparently there had been a fire. Still, I made my merry way. And I as I headed into the building my dad called – he never called this early in the morning – demanding to know where I was. “I’m going to work dad,” I told him, incredulous that he would be asking. Work. It’s what I did.

And then I remember him saying the words. “The Twin Towers are no more.” As if they were people. Because really, they were people. Thousands and thousands of strangers, who over the course of the day would begin to have faces and names and families. The weight of it was staggering.

Still, like an automaton or an idiot (likely both), I didn’t turn around to go home to New Jersey and be with my family. I walked into that building in a daze. I would spend the next 22 hours there, closing my stupid VMA story (“Just in case,” my boss told me. Just in case the death of thousands in our very own city was not enough to merit bumping the VMAs.) and then interviewing those frantically searching for and mourning their loved ones on the very day it happened. This wasn’t what I had signed up for at all. In between phone calls and fact checks, I bawled. There was a skeleton crew of us who had made it to the office, but despite my sister’s frantic calls to security demanding I be sent home – and emails from loved ones all the way in India, demanding to know that I was okay – I had never felt so alone.

The 9/11 issue we crashed was beautiful. It had stark, shocking images and in-depth reporting about the missing and the dead and the individuals and a nation that mourned them. It was a good piece of reporting. But still, to me, it wasn’t worth 22 heart-wrenching hours away from my loved ones. I don’t even have a copy of it today. I wouldn’t want to see it.

In the end, I got off easy. I didn’t lose loved ones. I didn’t lose my life. Still, in a way, that was the day that changed everything. In a way, change came very slowly. I stayed on the fast-track-to-nowhere at that office for five more years, thinking maybe, just maybe. But I was disillusioned. By that day, and by those after it, when news came of South Asians and other people of color being harassed by their fellow Americans, being shot in the back and killed in the name of justice when they really had nothing to do with anything. I tried to bring these important stories to my editors, but was told that they just didn’t have a happy enough ending. News flash: some stories don’t come with a happy ending. That doesn’t render them unimportant.

Today, ten years later, I woke nose-to-nose with my little Kavya. We’re now across the river from Ground Zero, not a ten minute Path ride away. Thousands will gather there this morning, this very minute.

But to me, it’s still a place of mourning. Mourning the thousands that died, mourning the death of the innocence of a nation, mourning the death of the innocence and optimism of one stupidly naïve young girl.

I’m not her anymore. I feel freer, in a lot of ways. The burden of that hustle is gone. It’s been replaced by clarity and a different sense of purpose. In some small way, I did get to help bring some of those stories to light. Not at People magazine. But where they were needed, really, to the youth of the nation, thanks to my sister and Sway and the power of MTV – which is much-maligned, but does come through when it’s really necessary. I’m thankful for that.

And I’m so thankful for where I’m sitting ten years later. At home with my little family, not far from that city or even the heart of Ground Zero. I’m still very much in my heart a New Yorker.

The fear is still there sometimes – especially today with the alarmists and the terror alerts – but there’s a different kind of optimism, a wiser one, that accompanies it. It tells me, every so often when that old panic starts to set in – that I’ll-never-get-anywhere-or-do-anything gleam in the eye – to breathe, to take my time, to enjoy my moments. To work hard and make it happen, but to remember that it’s not the end of the world. To never forget, yes. But also to remember that sometimes you need to let go. Just a little bit.

So that’s “where-I-was” when it happened. But I think where I am now is so much more important. As it should be, for all of us.

Photo by TedKerwin/Flickr

I meant to write this post days ago. Instead, I’ve used the last few days to make sure I accomplish one of my resolutions. The one I’m talking about? Hanging with my little family.

I’ve spent the last few days mostly hanging out with my ten-month-old daughter Kavya on the floor in the middle of the living room at my in-laws house, playing. We’ve played with blocks, we’ve read books, we’ve helped the big bad wolf knock down the three little piggies’ houses and cause all sorts of mischief. We’ve sung countless songs — Kavi loves music — and bhangra-ed around the room repeatedly.

Then today, my husband and I — and little Kavi, too — went out for breakfast to BJ’s Country Kitchen, a little throwback of a Southern comfort diner in the middle of Fresno. We talked over coffee, savoring conversation even more than the yummy food. After that, we headed to Barnes and Noble for one of our old school bookstore dates, where we purused stacks of travel magazines and made big plans for the future. After the bookstore, Kavi and I curled up and took an afternoon nap. All in all a great day.

And so, yeah, my resolution post is late. But I’ve already been working on making my biggest goal this year happen. Because my major resolution this year is to make time — and manage the time I have in a much more fulfilling way. In the past year, I’ve taken on too much. I had my first child, I started graduate school, I quickly expanded my freelance business. I feel like for the past 12 months, I’ve always been on, with never a down minute. And in that crazy mix, I haven’t been able to give any one thing the dedicated attention it deserves. A frequent scenario last year: I’m on the laptop, trying to get a few random on-deadline assignments done while chasing Kavi around the room and trying nab a couple of biscuits to go with my already-tepid chai. No breakfast. No exercise. No cuddle time with my husband or baby. Fun, huh?

This year, no more of that. Of course, there are the usual things on my list. The gym. Eating healthy. Cooking at home, with some pre-planning involved to prevent the last-minute panic. Cutting out some of my daily mega-dose of caffeine.

But these all add up to the same thing, really. A more balanced and thoughtful existence. A life that’s cleverly compartmentalized so that things get the attention they deserve. So this year, I want to slow things down. I want to make time for the things that are really important. Like my daughter. And my husband. And my writing.

I’ll save the run-down list for my planner. But this year, I hope to work smarter not harder, to finish what I start, and to slow down and keep in mind what’s really important.

So it’s Kavya’s first Christmas. She’ll be 10 months old, and we’ll be in California, sans snow, sans tree. Sans celebration? Christmas has always been an odd holiday for my family. We’re not Christian, by any stretch of the imagination, yet since we got to this country when I was all of 4, we’ve celebrated. Growing up, we had a tree — fake and white, with silver accents, bought for five bucks at a garage sale — and presents and even Christmas cookies. Of course, then there was the signature masala turkey and spicy alu ki tikkis to round things out.

Now it’s time to create our own version of Christmas with Kavi — and I’m wondering, since she won’t even remember and we’re on a budget and all, is it worth going all out?

And my answer is a resounding yes!

So what if we’ll be in California, where there will be no snow. And perhaps no tree. We’ll still manage to make it festive. We’re planning to institute our own holiday traditions for Kavya, right from the start. More important than presents, really, is the sense of ritual we give her, the memories we’ll be creating, even when she’s too young to realize what’s happening.

After all, I don’t remember what I got for Christmas when I was 5 or 8 or 12. But I do remember the timeless moments we spent as a family, gathering around, playing in the snow if it was a white Christmas, baking (usually inedible) cookies, carving masala turkey, and making memories. My parents pulled it all together to make us feel a part of our new community and its traditions. They didn’t always get it “right” — the first few years, the presents ended up in the chimney instead of under our day-glo tree — but we have fond memories of the holiday. It was about the ritual of the act, the gathering of loved ones in celebration, whether it was Christmas or Diwali or New Year’s eve.

And Kavya’s first Christmas will be extra special, because she’ll get to spend time with her Dada and Dadi, the grandparents she hasn’t seen since she was 3 months old. She’ll get to hang with Navreet Buaji and her cousin Seerit, who’ll no doubt be taking on the big sis mantle by now. And maybe there won’t be masala turkey — or maybe I’ll just swipe the recipe from my mom and make one anyway.

Then she’ll get to celebrate all over again when we get back home to Jersey, with her nani and nana and Meena Masi and Tarun Mamaji, all of whom will be waiting with presents and extended holiday cheer. Because it’s the spirit of the season that counts, more so than a date on the calendar.

Either way, there will be presents and definitely major memorable moments, all commemorated on film so Kavya can see that even when she was too small to realize what was going on, her parents were right there with her on her first Christmas, making sure it was super-special. As it should be.

How are/did you celebrate baby’s first Christmas? Do you institute any specific holiday traditions or rituals?

Image via wfyurasko/Flickr

I hadn’t been thinking about the plane as a death box, though.

Now, thanks to continued controversy over whether babies should be required to have their own seat on a plane, I have been. Lovely.

My husband is an avid, independent traveler. He backpacked overland from China to India, pitching tents in Mongolian fields overnight and eating snakes and who knows what else. (Apparently, snakes are a delicacy in China.) I’m more of a cushy traveler myself, but have been known to rough it occasionally. We knew having a child would change the way we travel. We just didn’t realize how much.

So we’d always been relieved — nay, grateful even — that the airlines didn’t require additional seats for kids under 2. Since she’s been around, we’ve only taken one trip. But we’ve got big plans. And thus far, Kavi’s always been a lap-kid.

Flying with Kavi in her own seat would be a major budget-buster for us. So in a way, I’ve been hoping that the government says screw it, and leaves things up to the airlines, who know that they’d see a sales decline if they required parents of children under 2 to purchase full-fare seats for infants.

But then there’s the whole death box scenario. The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended that all children, regardless of age, be placed in their own seats, buckled in like the rest of us. Or better yet, in a car seat-esque contraption. On their website, they note judgingly that “keeping a child in a CRS or device during the flight is the smart and right thing to do.”

Sigh. I know it’s true. We buckle Kavi safe and sound into her car seat every time we get into the vehicle. So why shouldn’t we when flying? It makes perfect sense. Of course, if I even venture such a suggestion to my husband, he scoffs. If the plane goes down, we’re all goners, he says. Which is comforting.

So tomorrow morning, we’ll be boarding the first of two long, tedious, cramped flights with a very boisterous and mobile 9-month-old. And we’ll be trading off holding her in our laps. With the whole death box scenario playing out repeatedly in our tired, guilt-ridden brains. Should be fun.

When flying, does your little one get their own seat? Or do you cheap out like we do?

Image via Molechaser/Flickr