Health – Page 40 – Nourish-n-Cherish

The Balas at Bala

Last names come in a variety of different flavors. Family names, father’s name, husband’s family name, husband’s name, the name of your hometown, occupation. Our brand of surnames belongs to the Father’s-name-variety and given that the father’s name is all of 15 syllables, we can be excused for cutting it short to the first four letters every now and then. For convenience and sanity.

In other news, if ever one is looking for some aspect of the English countryside to compare and contrast with South India, I think an area of stiff competition could be in the names. The Welsh names were some of the most tongue-twisting I have ever come across. And this is from a person who has visited Hawaii(https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/aloha-hou-are-uou/) LLanfo, LLyn Tegid, Afon Trywryn, Gwydyr, Llangolen and so on. School is written as’ Ysgol’ pronounced Yisgool. Can anyone see how similar that sounds to the famous South Indian pronunciation of Is-cool? (Is School cool? Or is Is-cool cool? Or school is cool?)

For Is-cool to be understood as School and then to be -reinterpreted as Ysgol must be hard work. Now please imagine the plight of Indian Americans trying to understand the Tom-Tom’s British accent while pronouncing Welsh names. It is no wonder that we went-the-round-about-in-Ysgol what?! ((https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/the-roundabout-tom-tom/) Before we could understand the Tom-Tom and interpret what it is saying, the round about had already spun us out in a totally different direction.

However, there are benefits to this and one of them is the fact that we stayed in a place called ‘Bala’ (The first four letters in the alphabet soup that produces my father’s name) Bala is home to the largest lake in Wales and is a bustling town of about 100 residents (one of whom is having their home remodeled, and that is the talk of the residents) The husband and brother had found a marvelous cottage in the middle of nowhere i.e. about 5 miles from Bala. I kid of course, but Bala was beautiful (http://visitbala.org.uk)

The directions to the cottage were something like this:

Satellite navigation will end at one point in the road.
Keep going.
You will notice a road sign saying the road ends and there are no more through roads.
Keep going.

What they should have said:

The roads are narrow. If another car approaches, God help you.
You will see three ponds, three ducks, a farm full of sheep and 15 rabbits.
Keep going.
After this you will see two gates. Send the author of future blogs about the trip to heave and ho as hard as she can to open them, while the rest of the party sits in the car and cackles at her plight.
Keep going.

After all of this, I have got to tell you was the most marvelous experience of all time! For the first time in many years, we found ourselves without hearing any man-made sounds for a few days. All you could hear for miles around was the soothing sound of lambs and sheep baa-ing, the song of birds and the sound of a rushing stream of water. I suppose people find this when they go camping to some place in the woods or something, but smack in the middle of this bucolic heaven was a cottage with all modern amenities. If ever there was bliss, it was the gratitude of knowing a warm, comfortable lodging awaited you the moment the stars shone down.

Thank you Bala for everything (My father first and then the town).

Coming up next: What the sheep taught us at Bala.

To Look up or Not to Look up: That is the question

I was yawning the other day as I walked into the office. It is not like I had not slept well. I had, in fact, put logs to shame with the night’s repose. Optimism was brimming as I went to bed early after setting an alarm for the break of dawn the next day. The alarm, helpfully titled, ‘Fresh Air Beckons!’ , was to nudge me towards getting in a wisp of fresh air before the rigorous day got under-way. But I had snoozed the alarm and had slept on till my usual time. So far so good.

I opened my browser and I kid you not, the first article to attract my attention was this one:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31928434 (The article told me, quite morbidly, that folks who sleep longer die sooner.) Well, it doesn’t quite say it like that, but you know – sleepy heads, still muddling about before coffee and all that. In my befuddled state, this was like an alarm. It certainly worked better than my ‘Fresh Air Beckons’ alarm and I bustled about after a cup of coffee, desperate to make amends.

I mean, with the internet, there are studies on studies and studies on no-studies, studies on sleep and studies on no-sleep, studies on exercise and studies on no-exercise. It can all be a bit much. As long as you feel energetic and feel like you are living a healthy lifestyle, equip yourself with knowledge but don’t dwell on them is my philosophy towards it all. I am not sure it is a great philosophy, but the fact of the matter is that what we know today ‘for sure’ can change tomorrow with another research article that argues the exact opposite with statistics. So, how am I to find out what is best?

Of course, there are advantages too, for you can backup anything with research. Shirking at home without exercising? Just find a study like this to assuage your guilt: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31095384: Too much jogging the same as no jogging at all. Having done your part, you may now kick back and relax nibbling snacks of your choice. You just stamp pretty hard on that nagging squeak at the back of your brain telling you that you mis-interpreted the study.

You can do it with anything. Watch:

1) Prefer to turn your eye when cleaning beckons? Do you see socks lying everywhere, shoes waiting to be stacked, books waiting to be cleared away? No problem. Science shows people with messy desks are creative.

http://mic.com/articles/103954/the-science-of-why-the-most-creative-people-have-the-messiest-desks

2) Feel like sleeping in late, and battling against what people have been telling you for ages about the benefits of being a early-riser? Find another research article.

3) Got up early one day and feeling complacent and righteous? Casually toss out another study.

I wonder if there is a study on seeing why we need to feel validated by studies. Can somebody research the topic and let me know?

Smell the Phone!

Literature affects people in different ways. There is a reason I like light-hearted fare and uplifting works in general. Bear with me while I traipse down a familiar path.

I have noticed my literary fare of late has been morbid, laissez faire or tepid. After one book that made me want to cry while looking at tomato soup, I picked up some books with jolly titles : books with names such as ‘The Happiest People on Earth’, only to find that the happiest ones are probably the ones that did not pick up that book. Classics, good old classics should always set me back, I thought to myself as I picked up some classics to smooth things over – they turned out to be so depressing that I could not bear to even have sunny-side-up eggs for breakfast. It seemed like I was letting the author down by smiling or watching beautiful Spring unfold around me.

I usually spice things up a bit in my reading. One morbid, followed by two up-lifting. Then, one that hurts the brain followed by two that hurt the jaws while laughing. But really! Why is uplifting fare not given its due? This necessity to cry and make others cry is appalling. Schadenfreude is what it is. I have written about this with a certain whim before and shall do so again.

https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-indian-twist-to-the-schadenfreudian-principle/#comments

What then should I have done? Fallen back to my tried-and-tested pick-me-ups? But I did not want to do that just yet. There will always be misery, problems and what-not. Literature can and should teach us to take the rough with the smooth with grace. We need more authors who embrace the stout heart and the practical mind with a dose of humor. If any body has authors firmly placed in that league, please let me know.

With spring in the air, I thought I would be spending time sniffing the flowers and admiring the trees, but I got to tell you, this depressing reading has taken its toll. I haven’t exercised much, I have managed to fill my days up with a whole list of should-dos and have neglected my must-dos. (Incidentally, I read this piece about should-dos vs must-dos that I thought I must share with everybody)

https://medium.com/@elleluna/the-crossroads-of-should-and-must-90c75eb7c5b0

“This busy-ness is a malady.”, I cried as my husband and daughter rolled their eyes once more. I ignored it with a master stroke and continued, “What with the invasion of cell-phones and laptops into every aspect of our lives, our social lives blend with e-social, blend with the professional, where does one’s silly-side-up shine? Where does one get to be the person who stops to smell the flowers? “

My son took the iPhone, picked out a picture of the flowers and sniffed it. I started laughing. That’s it folks, take the phone, smell the flowers and galvanize yourself to go out and embrace Spring. The sidewalk is filled with flowers if we stop to look and sniff.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/17/sidewalk-flowers/

Happy Spring while I go and read a wonderfully uplifting piece of work.

A bad rinse is good?

It had been a rather long journey for us. We had already spent 13 hours on the bus. We had gone from (hot and sweaty) to (cold and hungry) overnight. The journey had been rocky and not, altogether pleasant. The bus had droned over endless hot, dry plains, before beginning its 3 hour ascent to the cool, refreshing hills in South India. It was 6 a.m. when the driver stopped for a break at a riverside village. “Vandi patthu nimisam nikkum” he shouted (The bus will stop for 10 minutes. )

Our knees looked like gnarled trees as we stepped out gingerly to stretch ourselves. I was happy to breathe in the fresh mountain air. We could hear a swift river flowing nearby and this small village was named after the river.

To add to the appeal, the fresh smells of Nilgiri tea wafted around us. The father and I made our way quickly toward it. The tea-shop was a shanty like any other on the route: A tin-roof, a couple of kerosene stoves and glass tumblers that were narrow at the bottom.

The point is, there we were, sleep-walking towards the spot where our noses were leading us and our bodies shivering with the early morning cold. The father ordered two teas in his booming voice. It was then that I stirred and noticed the men in the tea shop were clad in dhotis. The guy making tea was obviously a bossy sort, for he clicked his tongue at his helper. Distinctions were evident between employer and employee. The employee was a man, clad in a much-dirtier dhoti than his employer. I mean, if you are going to become this filthy, is there any point in wearing a white or cream colored dhoti? Why not just wear a brown towel or a tree bark and be done with it? Maybe it was their corporate dress policy, I thought to myself and settled into a sort of stupor again, my mind wandering. What if he wiped his hand on his dhoti and then put his fingers into our tea-cups? It happens all the time. Should I say something or risk it and down the life-saving and hope it would not become the life-taking in this case?

I peered into a vast vat with what seemed like steaming hot, very watery tea and said, ‘This isn’t the tea is it?” The father peered in looking worried. You don’t drink 100’s of cups of tea for nothing. When you peer into pots of murky liquid that you suspect is tea, it doesn’t make very good tea. I hesitated before asking the man – you see these chefs can be picky blighters. You look dubiously at their tea, and the next thing you know, they behave like recalcitrant mules on a mountain path and refuse to part with a biscuit packet, marketed by Parle-G.

I was trying to see how to put things tactfully (I can’t say I have progressed much over the years), when the bossy bloke bellowed to his helper, possibly the sous chef in the establishment. The disgruntled helper, or sous chef, wiped his hands on his dhoti and then plunged his hand into the vat I suspected to be tea and extracted a few glass cups. I mean! What? Had I not caught myself, I might have fallen over backwards in a neat scoop. The s. chef, however, noticed nothing and bustled about with his work. Having extracted the glasses from the muddy waters, he wiped it dry with a piece of cloth that would have given food inspectors in the western world a heart attack and deposited the cups on the counter for the tea.

The father and I exchanged deep looks packed with meaning and I saw the light of resolve and understanding dawn in the father’s eyes. His eyes had the it-is-a-simple-matter-of-education gleam in them. Once a teacher, always a teacher. He said to the pair of them, quite politely in my opinion, something to the effect of washing the cups in flowing water before offering us tea in it. Washing, he said, does not happen in stagnant water that looks like tea.

The disgruntled helper or sous c. growled. “Saar! It is washed!” he said

My father appealed to his inner teacher once again and explained that washing dirty cups in dirty water still leaves the cup dirty.

It did not go down well. The sous chef now looked like a sulky sous chef.

“Saar! All washed Saar. I wash again.” He smartly picked up the cups and dipped them into the same water again. I moaned. The father moaned and the chef groaned. Maybe the code of conduct with respect to washing cups had been gone over several times in his training, but had not registered much like the corporate dress policy.

“Flowing water pa! You must pour water over the cups and wash them. Otherwise, all the dirt will be in the cups too. What you want is to go for the clean effect of flowing water. Remember your town was named after flowing clean water from the river.“

What happened next could try the soul of the most optimistic teacher, for the man, simply plunged his hand into the water, took a cup and filled it with dirty water and poured it over another cup and washed it. He beamed freely at this bit of going-the-extra-mile-for-the-customer while we cried in our hearts.

“Clean water my good fellow. Clean water!” cried the father, while the helper stood there looking confused.

I noticed with a sort of sinking feeling that the father’s voice being a stentorian one, all tea-makers in the little river town on the mountainside heard this little altercation, thereby dishing our chances of picking up tea elsewhere. I tugged the father’s sleeve to let things be and asked to buy a bottled water. I then smartly poured a little bit of water on the cups and then asked for the tea in them.

I had, of course, affronted everybody by doing this. The father, for he felt that he now had to explain Economics to his daughter (Who spends Rs 20 on bottled water to wash teacups when the tea costs Rs 5 each?) The chef and sous chef cried too, for they never understood why folks bought water in a bottle in the first place, when it could be had for free in the river. To use good money to wash already washed cups was just excessive. They probably went home that night and lectured their children about not becoming obsessive and how a little bit of grime and dirt never hurt anybody.

As it turns out, they may have been right.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/02/23/387553285/kids-allergies-and-a-possible-downside-to-squeaky-clean-dishes

I quote from the article:

The findings are the latest to support the “hygiene hypothesis,” a still-evolving proposition that’s been gaining momentum in recent years. The hypothesis basically suggests that people in developed countries are growing up way too clean because of a variety of trends, including the use of hand sanitizers and detergents, and spending too little time around animals.

Squeaky clean dishes contribute to lower immune systems and therefore higher allergies.

P.S: The episode above happened about 20 years ago, but the mind has a way of resurfacing old snippets when it reads something new.

Tea Please!

For a 1-night trip to a destination 4 hours away, there really was no need for me to act like the Sergeant Major in Akbar’s Army about to embark on the Battle of Panipat. I can imagine him inspecting the elephants, looking over the horses, asking the chief trainer why it is taking so long to domesticate rhinoceroses, talking to the kitchen manager to make sure enough supplies have been packed for the long march ahead etc.

My tasks as I went about the house gathering things were just as varied. Make arrangements to feed the fish, take care of the trees, pack the snow pants, gloves and caps, butler up and pack the food, take on spare shoes, DVD, audio books, physical books, kindles. By the end of all this impressive bustling, the car trunk looked reasonably well occupied. The children and their parents were all counted and loaded. We backed out of the garage when I yelped like a cat that caught a stray pellet from a naughty child. It was as if a bolt went through me. “What?”, “WHAT?”, “Amma!” the voice modulation on each expression would have had Opera teachers proud. I murmured a sheepish ‘Sorry’ and scampered off to get a last minute something from the kitchen. I prudently hid it in the handbag.

“What did you miss?”

“Yes – Amma. The car is full of stuff!” said the daughter who had made the last seat into a sort of villa with curtains, pillows and a blanket. I doubt whether Emperor Akbar was as comfortable in his royal palanquin as she was.

“I’ll tell you later.” I said in a mysterious tone, donning a serious expression, for I was sure to be ticked off had they known what the commotion had been about.

I don’t know about you, but I find being perfectly dressed a chore. By perfectly dressed I mean for the weather. Take for instance, Tuesday. I checked the weather forecast, and it looked pretty much the same as Monday. On Monday, I felt like a shaved penguin in Patagonia, for it might have been bright, but it was tooth-chatteringly cold even indoors. My cotton slacks and sandals were struggling to keep bodily warmth and by the time I stumbled into the house and drew up in front of the heater, I was beginning to lose feeling in my toes. So, the next day, I turtled up and wore, I mean, I bucked up and wore a turtle neck sweater, closed shoes and went proudly, only to be sweating mildly.

Anyway, the point is, when I mess up on such a grand scale while looking at the weather forecast for a place I live in, I can be pardoned for messing up on a trip, right?

We started out from Spot A to Spot B. Spot A clearly thought it was May, and had asked the sun to shine that way, while Spot B thought it was January. It is only when we got down from the car to take in the breath-taking view that one realized that breathing in was alright only because the air does not freeze.

Chill-blaines crept up within an hour of being exposed and when I dashed into the department store for some milk, my mind was craving a good cup of tea.

“We can stop at Starbucks!” said fellow car-inmates, but I scoffed on an impressive scale even if I had to swallow some cold-ish air in the process. I stuck my nose up in the air and said that Starbucks may have gotten a lot of things right, but an Indian tea? No Sir. Epic Fail. I miss the good old cuppa Indian tea more than I can say on trips like these.

A few minutes later, we had washed up ashore inside our rental spot and I was rattling about in the kitchen. The children got their hot cocoa and I made us some impressive Indian tea scented with cardamoms and ginger. Just the right amount of tea, right amount of sugar at the right temperature.

Allow me to enjoy a moment of contentment with the tea. When you visit a place like this, it is but natural to view the hot cuppa tea with a devotion meant for divinity.

Once the tea had made its way in and warmed our innards, I confessed that it had been for the tea that I had dashed into the house at the last minute. All was forgiven, and I got the indulgent eye from everyone. “You and your tea!”

Yes. Me and My tea and proud of it! Well, even NPR covered the tea:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/02/24/359888857/tea-tuesdays-the-chemis-tea-of-pouring-the-perfect-english-style-cuppa

In the words of George Orwell:

Much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tea leaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/14/george-orwell-a-nice-cup-of-tea/

P.S: This has already become a decent length blog. I just might follow it up with another tea-blog for, ‘Traveling and Tea’ brings so many memories flooding into the brain.

The Creative Mind

T’was the end of the Christmas holiday, or if you prefer the politically correct version: T’was the end of the Holiday Season holiday , and the family was quietly going about the business of getting back to business. That is, we yelled across staircases for missing tiffin boxes, wondered aloud why things that were to be done during the luxurious break were still undone, books landed with a thump on the stairs, socks pushed under the sofa were retrieved and shoes frantically scoured the home for their partners. Folks wandering past the home may have been pardoned for thinking there was a nursery inside, but there! It was a typical end-of-vacation-day.

I opened the daughter’s backpack, put my hand in and let out a strangled yelp. I may have heard snapping inside, but I also felt like I was holding a fur ball. Judging by the smell, it could have been a marmalade-smeared rat or an orange-scented skunk. I felt around a bit more and there was another such monster. There was nothing to be done. I bit down the nausea brought on by eating too many cookies, remembered the brave deeds of my father while tackling rats in our childhood home, squared my shoulders for the onslaught and plunged my hand in with a grim determination to retrieve whatever monster the bag held.

There was no cat or rat to let out of the bag. It was just a couple of sad looking oranges that had long ago passed its ‘Best by’ date. Judging by the fungi on it, it may be long past the ‘Fling without spattering’ date as well. I moaned a sound that started out as ‘Ugh’, pitched up to a holler of her complete name, and squeaked down at ‘please’.

“Let’s clean it up.” I said becoming the stern taskmaster. We trooped up the stairs with the foul smelling bag and its 100 pound contents. I kid you not, that bag weighs about 100 pounds – I don’t know what is in there, for every child I see pulls this mini-suitcase-like bag along bursting at its seams with books it seems, and yet when it is time to buckle down to a piece of homework or an assignment, I see a fair bit of telephoning and neighbor hopping to ‘see if my friend has the book to finish the assignment’ happening. Sigh.

It was a good few minutes later, and the techniques of deep breathing successfully applied gave me the glowing answer. I let her deal with the bag with the able assistance of her father. There was still some bag-related noise upstairs, but it had mellowed to a gurgle with occasional spurts of “But Appa! I need that. It is for Moon-city.” (their play patch is christened something-city) This dash-city is home to some willow trees and a large grass patch. Lodged in blah-city is a variety of treasures ranging from pine cones to balls made of pencil shavings. (I have a series of blogs on pencil shavings that will make entertaining reading when I sit down to writing about it). It looked like a large layer of the general debris in the schoolbag was for Sun-city.

I like these glimpses into her childhood that I get. I hope this is the kind of thing that she will throw her mind back to when she thinks of her childhood. As a child I was best amused when left to my own devices and swinging on a tree trunk still tickles the endorphins in me. I agree with Bertrand Russell when he says that “The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness.”

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/21/bertrand-russell-boredom-conquest-of-happiness/

This illustration by Maurice Sendak gets it: <Everybody should be quiet near a stream and listen>

Everybody should sit by a little stream and listen

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/25/ruth-krauss-maurice-sendak-open-house-for-butterflies/

Anyway, back to the bag. Judging by the level of debris in her bag, she may be one of the most creative persons I know. For there is this study that says folks with the messiest desks are the most creative.

http://mic.com/articles/103954/the-science-of-why-the-most-creative-people-have-the-messiest-desks

I like the tone of this article. I now don’t have to castigate ourselves as a messy household, but paint ourselves as a creative household. Nice!

Mt Whitney – Part 2: The Pizza and the Bear

It was the night before the hike up the Mountains to Mt Whitney. The husband and two friends had arrived at their hotel after an uneventful journey taken photographs of their backpacks.

“We will be back in 16 hours – max, 17 if we slow down due to fatigue!” said the husband. They were to leave at 3 a.m. so as to be able to make it back to the trail head before sunset. “Expect to hear from us well before 8 p.m.” were the exact words if I remember correctly. I wished them all luck and went to bed. Usually, I only need to think of that beautiful, restorative nurturer of the soul (sleep) and off I go feeling sleepy. Within minutes, I can barely stifle my own yawns. (I just yawned as I typed this out, if you have trouble believing me) Yet, this time I tossed and turned. I was unable to sleep. Could it be the excitement of the upcoming hike for the trio, or worry or a mixture of both, I could not tell, but there I was messaging him at 2 a.m. and waking them all up. When I finally flopped to sleep a little after 4 a.m. I had received a note from them saying they were about to lose connectivity and from now on, they were one with nature.

It was easy to imagine them sighing over the stark beauty, breathing in the fresh mountain air, singing as they walked up the trail and watching the sun rise over the mountains.

The husband, however, hotly denied this state of euphoria. “Did you know I threw up within an hour of starting to hike?” he said with an unpleasant look on his face. I tutted and said that a gulp of the fresh air might have been the key. To which, he eyed me like a lizard eyes a fly and said there wasn’t much air to gulp. The high altitude was affecting each of them differently and every time they attempted to walk slightly faster, they clutched their heads and sat down. To hear them talk of the Diomox (high altitude sickness pill), is like hearing a child talk about candy during Halloween. A warmth infused with definite longing, and gratitude at the bounty. The mountains were good enough to make each of them succumb to this high-alt-sickness at different points in time though and they could help each other out. The silver lining.

Now, I have worked long enough in the software industry to know what to expect when people tell me that they expect something to be done in a day. I mentally make a note that it could, possibly, be 3 days, or more. Yet, I did not apply this logic to the hiking estimate that the three software engineers came up with. When they said 16 hours, maybe 17, I was liberal enough to give them 18 hours. The clock was now ticking on to 10 p.m. and there hadn’t been a peep from them. It was already 19 hours and the first twinges of anxiety started to manifest themselves. I swiftly diagnosed it as hunger and ate a piece of cake, 2 biscuits and drank a cup of milk. It was, as I was polishing off the milk, that the husband called. He said, they were 2 miles from the trail head and that they had grossly under-estimated how long it could take on the way down. He tried to sound upbeat, but there was no masking the fact that he was enervated. None of the waspishness in his comments, no smile lingering behind the words. Just a sober line saying he expects he is 2 miles from the trail head. Most uncharacteristic and caused me to furrow the brow.

One of his younger hiking pals had run down earlier and was, therefore, able to give us spotty information. But it had truly been hours since he had seen them too. I settled myself down to just wait for a few minutes, make sure they got themselves into the right car and headed back to the hotel. Another friend of ours was a tower of strength as he relayed information from the trail head to us. He even managed to find a GPS tracker on the phone the trio was using. Apparently, he had the same misgivings that I had when I heard their voices at 10:30 p.m. He said he would be much more peaceful if they just got back. Slowly, we watched the GPS tracker move away from the trail head going far away from the designated trail in what seemed to be a large circle. Could they have be delirious and therefore, not able to see where they going? We had no idea and worse, could do nothing. We were miles away watching a signal bobbing up and away from a path they were supposed to take.

The one who had run down all the way was back at the trail head with a welcoming pizza for sustenance. It was now 20 hours since they started and the parathas had long since disappeared.

For one moment now, I would like you to switch claws and start thinking like a bear. There you are, sitting by yourself, just waiting for Winter to come, so that you can start hibernating and be done with this gnawing feeling of near-constant hunger. Food gathering in these drought-hit times is challenging. You have had enough of bees and fast disappearing trout in the dry streams and rivers. There you are minding your own business and pondering on Life and whether good food has its place in the Meaning of Life, when the most deliciously esculent smell wafts up your nostrils. Is that cheese? With a whiff of garlic, and oh…some mushrooms too? That tomato sizzling under the cheese, over the fresh pizza crust – heavenly, simple heavenly! How some smells can convey how hot the food is, one never knows, and this bear was not waiting to find out. And so, it was with the friendly neighborhood bear. He smelled the pizza miles away and made for the car in with his tongue hanging out. He probably was higher up the mountains than the h and f were when he picked up the smells, but he beat them to the car face down.

In between GPS signals and maybe, lost, hikers, there was a thrilling bear adventure tucked into the whole thing. The pizza had to be taken back to the hotel, the windows of the car opened and aired out before taking the car back to the trail head for the h and f. One will never know whether a bear would have reacted better to Indian foods or Pizza. It is an experiment for whoever tries Mt. Whitney next.

Finally, after 22 hours of hiking, we heard from the h. and f. They had made it back. (Don’t ask anything more for now. Don’t dream of doing this pesky hike! )

Soon, all the right people were in the right cars, the bears were deprived of a most enticing pizza and the hotel room welcomed them.

Mt. Whitney was truly in the bag. The joy would come later – long after the intestines gorged out everything it had taken in over the past 96 hours in restrooms along the way. A short while after the Facebook post was out and had gathered an impressive number of likes. About the time, folks thumped them over the shoulder and hankered to hear their tale.

P.S: Our friend has written about the journey here, and he is also the one who gave me the pictures for the Mt. Whitney posts:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/krishna-srinivasan/hiking-mt-whitney/10152822684056613?pnref=story

Lead Kindly Light

Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom
The internet has been agog with the fact that sitting is killing us. We were meant to be standing up and we are changing something fundamental when we move towards sitting this long. Of course, I have been reading all this sitting smugly on my chair, sipping tea and resolve to fix it immediately. How, one may ask, but I could not answer for I do not know.

http://time.com/sitting/

There is a very sensible article that seemed to tell me exactly how to repeal all the horrible effects of sitting. Apparently, if I gave myself 3 small walks for every 3 hours of sitting, I could reverse the appalling effects of sitting. Though how I can throw in a dozen small walks a day is beyond me.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20141109-26159.html : 3 short walks required for every 3 hours of sitting.

On another note, the son has been accessorized with a pair of shoes that light up. The sister of his came up with ridiculous arguments for the shoes:

He needed the light-up shoes because when he walks at night, the lights from the shoes can light the way.
It saves electricity because when he wear those shoes, there is no need for any lights in the room: This coming from a child who leaves a light bulb trail wherever she goes in the house, and I yelp behind her switching off every single light on the way. I, to prove a point of course, switch off lights in rooms before I have made it to the door and bang up against something unceremoniously only to have a cackling I-told-you-so afterward from the daughter. but it is all in a day’s work and I bear my grievances with fortitude.
If he is walking in a forest and the sunlight does not come through, he can help us out with his shoes.

The last reason may have been the reason I caved in. One never knows when one can get stuck in a forest where the sunlight does not reach the floor right? It turns out that he got to walk in a forest within a week or two of his new shoes. To give the little one his due, he walked and ran for miles on end in the forest. The novelty of the light-up-shoes coupled with a serene forest atmosphere no doubt. But he did seem to emanate the ‘Miles to go before I sleep’ aura about him.

Maybe, I too shall get myself a pair like that and then parade up and down throwing in a dozen walks or more a day. In search of the light.

Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom

The Headache Machine

We all know that the use to which a particular technology can be put is only in your hands till such time that it becomes public. I wanted to find some weird uses of technology. This is what I love about the internet I tell you. Every time I want to find some weird examples, somebody has already helpfully written an article on it, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs and stand around. I love the one where the egg is fried on a hot laptop.

http://www.zdnet.com/weird-tech-12-geeky-uses-for-technology_p12-7000010007/#photo

Anyway, the product I am about to touch upon today is the Fitbit. Fitbit might have modeled its products for a range of uses such as measuring activity, promoting a healthy lifestyle or a move to encourage active living. I don’t think they saw it as a Headache Machine.

A friend of mine who works with preschool and elementary school children on a regular basis got herself a Fitbit. All day long, the curious children wanted to know what it was, why it was used and were thrilled with the fact that every time they pressed the button, a number bigger than before came up. In a few hours, the situation was encompassing a wide spectrum of emotions such as :

* Competitiveness (It must be 500 more. Nope: she was not walking while drinking that cup of water. Want to bet? )

* Entitlement (She will show it to me whenever I ask. I am a good boy.)

* Pessimism (Maybe it is only 2000 steps now – she sat for sometime, so it should have reduced steps said the algorithmic expert)

* Altruism (I am tired but I can walk with it for you to increase your step count)

One particularly persistent child asked to see the device about 7 times every 15 minutes. It was at the end of this long day that she told them all that it was a headache machine. The children looked at it in awe and shushed themselves. Reminds me of this article I read a while ago on the Fitbit.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/30/140630fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=all

Sounds about right. A headache machine it is. Ever since I acquired one, I hold 10,000 steps as a holy grail. I don’t want to run because it records less strides for the same distance. I would rather sidle up to the daughter to get her to bring me the Fitbit from upstairs or invent a huge contraception to get me the Fitbit when I no longer have it, than to waste those steps in going to get it. Do unrecorded steps help in your statistics? No, they don’t! Yoga? Swimming? Cross-Fit? Don’t bother mentioning those forms of exercise that don’t count towards my step goals. The worst is when I am really tired and hit the bed and see 13689 on my fitbit. Just 311 steps more to make it a round 14000? Come on! I tell myself and off I go.

There are ways I could help myself I suppose, like not taking Fitbit with me, but what if I want to use it the next day? My weekly average numbers would take a toss.

What would really help is the calorie counter. The Fitbit helpfully counts the steps I take to forklift a load of <insert healthy or unhealthy snack here>, but does not tell me how much I ate? What it needs to do is detect the chomp rate and prorate the step counter accordingly. A headache for the company maybe ….

Let Children Play Outside

Please indulge me once more as I meander down the memory lane. After all, The business of life is the acquisition of memories.

Regular readers of my blog know that I grew up in a beautiful hill station surrounded by hills, forests, springs and tea estates. Obviously, I spent a good part of this time enjoying my life. I’ve tasted berries whose name I know not, played in the rain, walked through the fog not knowing whether I am heading for a cliff, I have walked and run so far away from home, but nature always guided me back to my home (well, mostly, folks who worked in my parents’ school and realized I was lost), drank water from fresh water springs, cycled on ‘bridges’ made of slender logs, ran helter-skelter after spotting wild boars hiding in bushes.

Maybe, I could have died in a hundred different ways, but I also lived in a thousand beautifully different ways.

Which is why modern parenting makes me stop and think. Do we structure our childrens’ time too much too soon to remove the true benefits of unstructured time? Are we over-protective? So many of the things this article spoke about resonated with me.

http://time.com/3005611/helicopter-parenting-chilhood-obesity/

I quote from the article:

But today, to keep our kids “safe,” we drive them back and forth to school. “Arrival” and “dismissal” have morphed into “drop-off” and “pick-up.” Kids are delivered like FedEx packages. About 1 in 10 use their legs to get to school.

Do we really need 599 cars dropping off 599 children in a school less than 5 miles from home every morning? What happened to biking, walking or taking a school bus to school? It is no wonder that obesity rates are spiking.

The fact that I don’t see residential neighborhoods filled with children playing on the street saddens me. The only way to change that is to open those doors and step outside. Let children play.

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