Pongalo pongal…

I know it’s a tad too late to be posting about Pongal, but then hey there are no rules against posting about things and events which have gone by, are there. So, here goes.

To me the most memories I have of this particular festival is that of Ajji, my maternal grandmother ensuring that we actually had at least some sugarcane for the puja, some sakkarai pongal and some venn pongal for the naivedyam. And for some endearingly funny reason (at least it seems funny now) Ajji always insisted that all of us say “Pongalo Pongal!!!” right after the puja was done. Oh, Pongal is the one festival when I miss Ajji the most.

In any case, as time went by, as I grew older and I moved out of Bangalore post marriage. the Missus and me have kinda developed smaller ‘traditions’ of our own for various festivals. Of course, the second half of 2011 starting August till now have been quieter celebrations with the lil one Raksha taking up most of our time and attention, and sadly this Pongal was a victim of this quieter phase in the celebrations.

This time around I was at Thrissur, at the in-laws’ place, where the sweets made by my mother-in-law were out of this world (as is the norm with all her cooking) but the festival itself was more subdued and sadly the sugarcane was missing. Guess it is time the Missus and I put in more time and effort and thought into developing traditions of our own so that lil Raksha gets to know the significance of each one of these small celebrations that we have every 50 days or so

Happy belated Pongal everyone!!!

PS: This post was inspired by this other post which I happened to come across when I was blog hopping. So, thanks Ash for bringing back some good old memories.

Parental “telepathy”

Would it be too much to assume that a divine connection exists between parents and children across long distances? Do you folks think it could be possible that somehow your little toddler (“infant” would be the right choice of word here) realizes that you are having a relatively terrible day at office and decides that it also wants to communicate its discomfort at your situation in its own way? Is it possible that all the discomfort, frustration, anger, exapasration that I experienced in office was felt by Raksha in some way?

The reasoning behind this train of thought is the fact that today was probably one of the crankiest days that Raksha has had in quite a while. She just refused to take her normal small naps during the day today and ended up troubling her Amma quite a bit. She insisted that either Amma or her Thathi carried her or put her on their laps for almost the entire day without any reprieve. She kept on making those small little irritated noises which conveyed that she was not having her most comfortable day today.

Were all these signs of just another cranky day for Raksha, or could she actually feel my frustration across 300 odd kms. Given that I had quite a bad day at office today, I would like to believe that there was some divine connection, some telepathy that Appa and Raksha shared today.

What say you folks?

The Simpsons – My love affair…

I don’t really remember when I first watched the Simpsons, I am guessing that I noticed one of my US returned nephew’s son (who by the way is only like 4 yrs younger than me, more on that later) wearing a Bart Simpson T-Shirt. Well, he didn’t really call him Bart, and called him ‘Banana Man’ for some funny reason. I am guessing the fact that Bart was (and still remains) banana yellow in color had something to do with it. In any case, like I said earlier I simply cannot remember when it was that I watched my first full episode of Simpsons. All that I know is that this particular series remains one of my all time favorite TV series then, now and probably forever.

Think about it, the Simpsons has it all, a typical all American family with a bumbling dad, a well meaning but kinda troublesome mother, a brat of a son, a brainy daughter, a drooly toddler and to top it all off a stupid dog as well. What more can a typical American family look like. In any case, apart from the fact that this series pretty much depicts all that America and Americans stand for, the fact that it uses humor as a medium to talk about all that is right and wrong with today’s America is what makes it stand out among the crowd.

Each of the characters stands out in his/her own way. Homer with his bumbling ways at work, at home, with all his relationships, Marge, his loving wife, the only person that pretty much holds things together in this family, Bart, the omnipresent trouble maker, Lisa, the brainy little sister and Maggie, the drooly lil kid, all of them hold their own among a much larger and regular cast of characters in this series. Although the show primarily revolves around Bart Simpson and all his antics, each of the characters have enough ammunition in their personalities and their little lives in Springfield to make up for a lifetime of memories.

Why am I writing all this now? Because I just happened to catch an episode of Simpsons on TV after quite a long time, and funnily enough some parts of this one is loosely based on the movie – Face Off. The best part about this series is that this family never grows older, wiser or boring as the years go by. Wish all our lives were like that, where we could retain the good, funny parts, and never grow older.

New template for the blog

What do you do when you hit a ‘Writers’ Block’?

Simple, you just go ahead and change your blog’s template and look and feel and hope that for the next few days a few people visit your blog and go ahead and give you a few suggestions to make it look better. But then, here’s the catch. For this to happen you actually need a few regular readers for your blog, and given my case where I tend to go into hibernation anywhere between 3 to 6 months between each blog post, I really don’t think I have any regular readers of the blog.

But then, in any case, it’s worth a shot, so here goes. Hello folks, let me know what you think of the new template.

Thank you Steve Jobs…

One of the first times that I heard of Apple Computers was when the iconic IMac G3 was launched in the markets sometime in 1997. Upto that time whatever limited experiences that I had with computers was restricted to the off-white creamish colors that monitors, keyboards, mouses and system cabinets had then. I happened to see an all color print ad for the IMac man was it mind blowing or what. The fact that someone had actually thought up of a system in a color other than white was quite fascinating. Guess who was behind the design of this iconic product which pretty much made white colored computer systems redundant – Steve Jobs.

This was one person, one visionary whose genius all of us are truly aware of today, thanks to the marketing juggernaut that he managed to create with his second stint at Apple. How many of us buy MP3 players today, we buy IPods. Irrespective of whether we actually buy a Sony Personal MP3 player, a Creative Zune or a SanDisk Portable MP3 player, we buy an “IPod”. That’s because the IPod has become a generic term that is used by people to describe personal MP3 players today. That’s the kind of iconic status that Steve Jobs’ products have achieved today.

While I haven’t personally used his IMacs or IBooks, the fact remains that anybody who has ever used one of these systems is hooked to them and becomes an ardent devotee. There’s no way that person will ever be comfortable with a non Apple product. The sheer amount of detail that Steve paid to user experience and the form factor of his products is legendary. Just one look at any of his products and it is hard not to fall in love with them and buy them.

How many of us have heard of smartphones before the IPhone made its way into the markets. Yes, we had handsets like the Nokia Communicator and the E Series, but did any of us enjoy working with them. But then the IPhone first arrived in the US markets, and slowly the Indians returning home for their holidays started bringing them back to our shores. Today the entire world is flooded with loads of wannabe IPhones, but the truth is that there can just be one IPhone and that one has been personally designed by Steve Jobs.

While I personally have an Android phone which I bought after approximately 2 months after weighing in a lot of options including the IPhone, the reasoning was that I personally absolutely hated the fact that Apple forced me to tie up with service providers of their choice. I still feel that design wise and features wise all Apple products provide the most user friendly experience.

A lot of tweets, blogs and news articles have been doing the rounds yesterday in memory of Steve, and mine is just yet another one. But am sure Steve will find a way to aggregate all this, package it in a more user friendly way and play it back to an audience wherever he is right now. Thanks Steve for all the wonderful products, for changing the way the world looks at gadgets, for making all our lives more musical, more touch sensitive, more retina friendly. Your genius lives on through all the wonderful products that you made. Rest in peace.

Divine Calling

We have all either heard about this or experience this ourselves, haven’t we, “The Divine Calling”. Every once in a while, we hear voices in our head, we feel the strong urge, we feel someone really strong calling out to us, we feel a strong higher purpose and higher authority asking us to do something. While most of the time, it just turns out to be our iPods streaming low frequency sounds through our ear buds or our mothers waking us up from our deep slumber at 9 AMs on Saturday mornings, every once in a while ‘the call’ turns out to be something special, something meaningful, something divine, doesn’t it.

Well this Sunday evening was one such special calling. Standing there in Punkunnam Railway Station (a smaller suburb of Thrissur, Kerala) little did I know that I was being invited, waiting to be whisked away. I was waiting for the Aleppey Express to bring me back to Chennai when the Kerala Electricity Supply Board deemed it wise to leave me standing there in complete darkness. In the distance, the only light that was visible was that of a train engine. Although he wasn’t blaring away his horn, the gentle rumbling and the mild vibrations on the old railway platform meant that the light belonged to an oncoming train.

As the train drew closer, into the railway station, I turned away from the engine as I didn’t want the light to temporarily blind me or dull my vision. I needed to know where exactly my coach would be and therefore needed all the vision I could get to achieve this. The engine moved past and the AC coaches were only around 5 odd meters from where I stood on the platform. However, the doors of both the AC coaches were closed and despite me running helter skelter from one AC coach to the other and banging on the door, nobody opened them. The fact that Punkunnam was a small station and that the train would halt there only for 45 seconds slowly started putting a lot of pressure on me, and I ended up getting into the Unreserved coach right in front of the AC coaches.

However, I noticed that there was no vestibule or connecting tunnel between the Unreserved coach and the AC coach. Since the train had moved out of the Punkunnam station I decided to wait till Wadakanchery the next station or Palakkad, the next real big station where the train would halt for at least 10-15 mins where I could change coaches. I found myself a seat and sat there waiting for the next 5 mins. To kick start a casual conversation with the stranger in front of me I asked him how long the train would stop at Wadakanchery which is when he looked at me funnily and told me this train went to Guruvayoor and that was the last station for this train. I had climbed into the wrong train.

As I sat there planning my next move, asking my wife to book flight tickets for the next morning, a large part of me kept wondering how and why this happened. Was it because I didn’t take enough care to actually bother confirming where the train went to before I got into it, or was it a little more than that? Was Guruvayoorappan calling me to his abode for a higher purpose? Was there more to the story than meets the eye, or was this all just another example of how stupid I can really get at times?

In any case, the moral of the story is “The next time you get into a train, please confirm which train it is and where it goes to before you get into the train”.

Goodbyes, sealed with tears

I have always been bad with goodbyes. My mother on numerous instances has told me how I used to bawl whenever she left me at Kindergarten. In fact, I apparently used to hug the railings on the school gate and bawl my lungs out whenever she (or whoever else used to drop me) used to wave bye and walk away. For whatever reasons I hated any change in the people that I used to hang out with and during those days that group was a fairly small group comprising of my parents, grandparents, and a few select others.

My earliest memory of a goodbye was at Shimoga railway station on our way back from a summer vacation spent with my uncle and cousin. I remember both me and my cousin weeping away, one of us from inside the train and the other standing on the railway platform. For some funny reason, this image still remains clear in both me and my cousin’s memories and we have real good fun memories of that particular summer as well.

However, time flew by, I grew up, and as I grew older the popular notion that ‘crying is for girls and is not something that boys do’ was somehow ingrained deep into my psyche. Therefore after a point in time, I grew up into a youngster who pretty much used to bottle all his sad feelings, sorrows within himself, and probably converting all of that pent up energy into short temper and anger which used to manifest itself when playing ‘competitive sport’ (if you can call gully cricket and soccer with tennis balls ‘competitive sport’ that is). Most of my school days was spent in releasing most of this anger on the playing field and in retrospect, I am thankful that I didn’t cause too much physical damage to some of the guys that I have played with during those days. In a nutshell, I had reached a stage where goodbyes didn’t matter too much to me as I just didn’t know how to be sad, morose, miss somebody or something, I was a ‘boy’, a ‘man’s man’, and We didn’t cry!!!

And then college happens, and good friendships were developed. Friendships which brought along with them lots of happiness, camraderie, feelings of togetherness, feelings of belonging. Gradually I learnt that the saying ‘real men don’t cry’ was more of an unnecessary masochistic juvenile concept and that there was nothing wrong with crying and expressing one’s anguish and sorrow in the form of tears. I suddenly rediscovered how relieving crying could be, how the outburst of tears helped me to get rid of all those pent up feelings of sorrow, anger (at times), anguish, helplessness, etc. I stopped caring whether the world thought I was a wimp for crying, and I cried whenever the occassion demanded it.

In a nutshell, I had rediscovered the joy of crying all over again. However, goodbyes were still a problem for me. I had always been extremely awkward at saying ‘Good Bye’ to anybody since forever, and this was one problem I still faced. The whole concept of saying a good bye somehow never came naturally to me. I still haven’t been able to nail down an exact reason why but I guess it is a combination of factors such as not wanting to part with the person, not wanting a good thing to end, pretending that by not saying good bye things would continue as they are, etc.

Why am I going on and on ranting about how I forgot to cry, rediscovered the ‘power’  of crying and my discomfort with goodbyes. Because today was yet another day with yet another awkward occassion for a good bye. This time I had to say good bye to Suba and Raksha as they were on their way to Thrissur to return only after 3 months or so. Although I knew that I was going to be seeing them in a couple of days time over the weekend, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to say a decent good bye to them. Suba knows about this ‘good bye’ thing of mine and reacted accordingly, and Raksha doesn’t even know me well enough to bother whether I am around or not, but today’s good bye brought back this flood of memories. Therefore this post.

Lonely days ahead…

I have never had issues being ‘alone’. Both my parents used to work and therefore a significant portion of my teenage years were spent alone. I guess that’s how I picked up the reading habit. For a major portion of the day during my Summer Vacations and Pooja Holidays from when I was around 10 yrs old till I was around 18-19 yrs old, both Appa and Amma used to be in the office, and I used to be quite comfortable with solitude. I always had my books, my puzzle books, my computer games, my television programmes, my movies to keep me company.

 Of late though, after I started working approximately 11 yrs ago, the opportunities for me to be actually ‘alone’ have been few and far in between. Yes, there was a reasonably long 6 week stint during my Summer Job in the IIM Indore days. But then, that particular period was so physically and mentally tiring (selling hard boiled confectionary in coastal Tamil Nadu in the summer is no joke) that I really didn’t need any company other than the air-conditioner and a cold bath at the end of the day. Those days the only thing I used to look forward to was getting back to my hotel room (if you can call it that, given that it was a small ‘hotel’ in Thiruvarur) and going to sleep. However, keeping that 6 week stint aside, I haven’t had too much alone time.

 Yes, there was another 11 week period in Hyderabad when Suba went to London for the first time, and man, was that painful or what? I even stopped cooking (well actually, at that point I hadn’t yet started cooking) and used to eat outside. During those days I immersed myself in so much work at office to distract myself from the loneliness that I started spending more than reasonable hours at office. I used to go to office at around 7 AM in the morning and come back only by around 9 PM so that I was tired enough not to notice that there was nobody at home other than me.

 The second time that Suba went over to London for 6 weeks, it was quite painful once again. But this time around I engaged myself with movies and more movies. Everyday I used to watch at least one movie and put up a review of the same at my movie related blog at Jairam’s Jives (http://mahabore.blogspot.com). Despite this, the loneliness used to haunt me quite a bit and I did struggle a bit with it.

 The one time that I went over to the US for a 8 week period, now, that was true blue loneliness. I mean, after all, how much fun can one have in cities like Concord, California and Charlotte, North Carolina, especially when one is stuck downtown even on weekends without access to any form of friends or transportation. The only way to combat loneliness there was once again movies, and more movies, and immersing myself in work like crazy.

 It is only when I think of these experiences and memories that I realize how much I really miss Suba when she is not around. Yes, we have our tiffs, arguments, small fights even, when she is around. We simply cannot see eye to eye on a lot of things in everyday life. We have civilly agreed to disagree on lots of things. But when she is not around, I go mad, I feel like a large part of me is missing, I feel like there are no mirrors for me to look at myself in, I miss my sounding board, closest friend, best confidante, my soul-mate when she is not there.

 Why exactly am I ranting about all the lonely periods of my life? Why the sudden trip down memory lane especially the lonely paths of the lane? Because I am going to be facing one of the longest lonely periods of my life. Suba is going to Thrissur and is going to be there at least till the middle of January 2012. That’s a good 100 odd days. Yes, I am going to land up in Thrissur on most weekends between now and then, but the fact that I don’t have Suba to get back home to during the rest of the week is going to hit me hard. At this point I am completely lost as to how I am going to adjust to this. Hopefully the two weddings in the family in October and December will help me take my mind off the loneliness factor. Let’s see how this goes.

Child is the father of man

William Wordsworth said “child is the father of man” in his poem “The Rainbow” to refer to a situation where traits which are picked up by children when they are young stick on to them even when they are adults, ie, traits and characteristics such as irritability, self consciousness, attention seeking behavior etc. However, today I, in my infinite wisdom and going to provide my own interpretation of this wonderful saying – “Child is the father of man”.

From the day Raksha has come into our world, both my Suba’s and my world has been turned upside down. Despite our planning for the last 3-4 months regarding how we would need to adjust our lives, our sleeping schedules, my time spent at office, how Suba would plan her way back to working after her maternity leave, and various other myriad things, all of these plans seem to have been flushed down the drain, at least for now. Each day (and more specifically each night) with Raksha is proving to be a revelation about how Suba and me are patient enough and resolute enough. All of the websites, books, sessions with knowledgable people and talks with other mothers haven’t quite prepared us for what the little one throws at us.

Starting from the constant choking on milk to the sudden bawling for no apparent reason, from continous sleeping to continous prolonged phases of staying awake, our daughter seems to throw every rule-book of infants out of the window. I am sure that no software or algorithm developed by any of the top tier companies can come close to developing a Predictive Model for what Raksha is going to do next.

Today, the only thing that Suba and me have as tools or weapons to combat the seemingly irrational behavior of Raksha is our patience, our resoluteness, and self-belief that ‘Yes, we can figure this out’ and nothing more. The good part is that each day both Suba and me seem to learn something new about the little one and lo and behold, we also seem to get an opportunity to put our learnings into action.

Therefore ‘child is the father of man’ because children, especially infants teach us so much more about ourselves. They teach us that we have more patience than we believe we did, they teach us to re-prioritize our lives at short notice, they teach us what the really important things in life are, they teach us how to enjoy the small little moments which we otherwise tend to miss, and more importantly they teach us what being a parent is.

Thanks Raksha for all these lovely lessons. If you have managed to teach us so much in less than a month, then I am quite sure that ‘growing up’ with you is going to be a journey which Suba and me are going to immensely enjoy.

Interesting reads…22-Sep-2011

The following are some interesting links which I came across when browsing the web and thought I would share them with the readers of this blog wherever all you wonderful folks are from.

We have all heard about the Unique Identification Number scheme being launched by the Govt. of India, but have any of us spared a thought as to how exactly they are going to be actually implementing this scheme. Read this article in the NY Times to get a better idea about the actual implementation of the Aadhar scheme.

LINK TO NY TIMES ARTICLE ON AADHAR

Although we read lots of stories about terrorist attacks all over the world nowadays, have you ever wondered how and why there are so few ‘suicide bombers’ nowadays. Read this insightful article in which the author gives us his opinion on why suicide bombing as an option in not as attractive as it used to be.

 LINK TO NY TIMES ARTICLE ON SUICIDE BOMBERS

Once again, in the same lines as the article above, although we read and watch news items about terrorism and war, have we ever spared a thought for the news journalists who actually cover these stories. They literally put their lives in danger every time they are out there, trying to bring us the latest news from these strife torn areas. Read this wonderful article by one such war journalist. Very moving piece.

 LINK TO NY TIMES ARTICLE ON LOVE AND WAR

Finally, a favorite topic to end with…Bollywood and Indian movie stars. This article tries to explore why Indian movie stars, especially the leading men absolutely refuse to act their age. Funny read.

 LINK TO FIRST POST BLOG ON BOLLYWOOD STARS

Cheers………..mahabore