Category: News

The Ugly Sweater Party

In an effort to snap out of all the melancholy that set has set in, in the past week with brutal incidents and heavy reading, I looked for news other than the shooting and the gruesome and the inconsiderate. What drew my eyes was sadly this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/doomsday-phobia-grows-china-december-21-2012-mayan-apocalypse_n_2292136.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

My nerves are weak I tell you. They can’t take the brunt anymore. 2012 was supposed to be the year. 12-12-12 was a huge anti-climax for those who fervently believed the Mayans and that Earth would vanish in a huge apocalypse. Now, these scary samaritans are going after 21st Dec as doomsday.

In the meanwhile, office parties and the holiday season is setting in like every other year. I love the holiday season in general. I usually get in the Yule-tide spirit and can be found ho-ho-ho-ing with my children in a fashion that has Santa drawing up his training programs on ‘Correct Laughing Techniques’. But does any of that make me cringe at laughing? Far from it. I draw inspiration from all the finger-pointing, keep a firm upper chin and continue smiling through the holidays.

I like themed parties in general, but this one went too far in my opinion. Everywhere I turned at work, there were these huge signs posted in purple.

JOIN US AT THE HOLIDAY PARTY

Event Dress Themes – Ugly Sweater!!!

Get in the holiday spirit by wearing an ugly sweater to work!

Bing something like this on me and my brain stores it somewhere for processing later on. I walked in to the office the other day, and there was a lady wearing a sweater I would positively recoil at if I saw it in a store. The sweater had large multi-coloured squares on it. Brown, yellow, mustard competed with pink, cream and red. Each box had a different pattern on it. You know the snowman and the mapel leaf and the snowflake and such.

ugly sweater

Naturally, the fertile mind that mine is put two and two together and I asked her, "Oh! Is today the Ugly Sweater Christmas party?"
"No! That is not for another 2 days." she said. Clearly, this was one of her better looking sweaters that I slandered.

She pouted a bit and then sat there not saying a thing. All this not talking was making me quite uncomfortable.

"Oh! You were wearing a very Christmas-y sweater, so, I thought today was the Wear-your-Christmas-sweater-to-work-party." I finished meekly. But there was no denying that she had read the same sign up and down the office too and my attempt to water down "Christmas sweater" for "Ugly sweater" was not much of a success.

I muttered "Nice bright sweater!" and beat the retreat before I had the acorns plucked from her sweater and thrown at me.

Sigh! Next time, please just say Christmas Party won’t you?!

I hope this pain will one day be useful

Ever since I heard of the mindless violence inflicted upon Elementary School children, I have been really angry and sad.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57559261/20-children-6-adults-killed-in-conn-elementary-school-massacre/

I was wondering how to address the topic with my Elementary School daughter and how to tell her that we will be there for her and that there are horrors in the world inflicted upon the innocent (without alarming her). This article tells us to use an age appropriate mechanism, but my husband and I were still not sure how to go about it.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/12/14/connecticut-school-shooting-what-to-tell-your-kids/

Finally, when we picked her up from School, we asked her in as casual a tone as possible whether anyone told her anything at School. Her answer surprised me. She became defensive and blurted: "But it was not my fault Amma. Nylan was the one talking to me. I was only listening to him, but my teacher thought I was talking and she turned my card over as a warning. Did my teacher tell you she flipped my card over for talking?"

Inspite of the fact that I had cried in outrage while ranting about the whole shooting incident at CT just a few minutes before, I  couldn’t help smiling.
"So why did you not tell your teacher that you weren’t talking?" I asked her.

"AMMA! I can’t get him in trouble. I can’t tell-tale on him! So I just took the warning, but in the recess I told him not to talk to me when the teacher was talking." Apparently, the Code of the Elementary School Goers is quite rigid with respect to tell-tales.

As I thanked my stars for the ability to hear such a wonderful tidbit of her life in School, my heart went out to all those families and friends grieving for the loss of these children. The tale of the recess untold, the code of their friendships unraveled. May their souls rest in peace.

May their little souls also guide our misguided policy makers to make a decision that is not only right for the country, but for innocent lives everywhere. I hope this pain will one day be useful.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html

perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim
(Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you.)

Walking on Water

You know how it is when you are growing up and folks (mostly parents, aunts and uncles) are always telling you about how life in their day was stern and earnest. The ‘You-youngsters-have-it-easy’ theme was an all-time favorite. They would gas on about how education was something they loved and why we should not be complaining about how easily education is served on a platter to us. How in their day, they had to walk across the town and then catch a bus that had no seats or fuel(sometimes): all to get to a school, that did not have teachers or roofs?

I always envied their stories. Because the most I could tell my children was that I had a wonderful childhood. It was true that it rained 10 months a year, but that was not nearly as bad as it sounds. When young, splashing in the rain and singing songs while walking up and down the hills was really not tragic. (I’ve tried the martyr theme with this and it fell flat, because I could not keep the glee of the good-old-days from my voice)

Which is why I am almost jealous of this class of students. Imagine this:

Septuagenarian Great Uncle: Youngsters these days! Pah! In our day ….
Kid: Huh? Telling me something grandpa? (unplugging music from ear)
Septua. Great Uncle: Grunt! Humph! You youngsters have no idea about the kind of lives we led. The perils we had to face in order to procure an education. There we would be waiting for the bus to come to the village. There would be a bus only once every 2 hours. So, if we missed it, we had to walk to school over 1.37 miles away. How long to stand for the bus?
A sound like a whistle of steam escaping a tea-pot draws the attention to the wistful sigh that the uncle just let go.
Kid: But you told us you whiled away time playing marbles at the bus-stop.
S.G.U.: Well…yes! But only while waiting for the bus. And when the bus did come, do you think we could waltz in and sit on the seats?
Kid: Why would anyone waltz into a bus, unless you are performing the bus-boarding-scene in a Broadway show?
S.G.U: *Completely ignoring the smart observation regarding buses and waltzes* Then…we had to study really hard. The homework we had was meant to make us think. Not like you – having free time to listen to music and not studying.
Kids: Really?! So you had to play with marbles while you waited and had a bit of homework, but did you have to walk on water for your homework?
That is our assignment you know?
S.G.U: What?
Kid: Our assignment: Walk on Water.

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/weird-news/weird-news-fla-students-walk-on-water-for-class-assignment/article_bc80890c-29ed-11e2-9c5d-001a4bcf887a.html

 

walking-on-water

Ha! I could pay to capture the expression .. Sigh!

Some Precious Spittle for Diwali?!

Our family loves Diwali. The light seeps into our hearts and our inner self glows with all the mellow happiness of good food and excess sweets. President Obama makes sure that he wishes folks a happy diwali too and I loved his message urging us all to remember our less fortunate brethen as we celebrate this wonderful festival. I tried to beat the greeters, but by the time I went online and blogged about a Diwali, folks were already losing the mellow looks that ghee and sweets bring on.

In fact, they seem to have gone a step further and are vying with each other to act nasty. Like this open challenge and I quote:
"A local religious leader has announced a reward of Rs 5 lakh for anyone, who spits on lawyer and BJP MP Ram Jethmalani’s face for describing Lord Ram as a bad husband."

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-11-13/india/35087443_1_bjp-mp-ram-jethmalani-lord-ram-seer

Hardly the spirit of a wonderful holiday to pay good money for spitting at folks. Yet there it is: religious leaders are the ones apparently loaded with money enough to squander Rs 5 lakhs for some precious spittle. Ugh.

This seer went on to proclaim that "A threat presupposes violence and spitting is a harmless non-violent act." I doubt whether his stance would be the same if he were at the receiving end for some reason.

PS: I am not going into the the whole Ram-is-a-bad-husband argument for obvious reasons.

Will Macedonian Job Listing Interest Korean Elephant?

I’ve read through a fair share of job listings. I remember looking in the Indian newspapers as a girl, hoping to find some hidden gems of novelty, and was almost always rewarded. If nothing else came up, there was at least the seedy lawyer asking for someone to be employed in some capacity and almost always had a combination of the words: prosecuting, witness, clerk, short-hand, typing etc. in legalese. (Lawyer offices are incapable, by design, of simple sentences and take pride in complicating things.)

However, I must say this Macedonian minister takes the cake. He wants to employ certified genii as assistants. He would not settle for any IQ scores below a 140 it seems. Apparently, the intelligent minister has not stopped to ponder about why a person endowed with an IQ of more than 140 would want to work as his assistant.

http://www.modbee.com/2012/11/08/2447578/macedonian-minister-looking-for.html

Maybe, somebody would be kind enough to send him Koshik’s resume for the position if Koshik is interested.

 

macedonian minister

Who is Koshik? Well, he is an elephant in a Korean zoo.

http://news.yahoo.com/elephant-south-korean-zoo-imitates-human-speech-080222456.html

Koshik is astounding scientists there with his intelligence. Koshik can utter more than a few words in Korean, and is evidently picking up human speech patterns.

The question, of course, is whether the Macedonian Minister will he have the IQ enough to understand what the elephant is telling him?

The Power of a Sorry

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was visiting her grandmother in the village. The village was a beautiful place and she had many friends. There was only problem that reared its head every so often: she hated to apologize. Having to admit she was sorry for what she had done was so dour to her existence that her grandmother decided on out-of-the-box techniques to make things easier for her. When she stalked off with her nose in the clouds and a pout big enough to scare the cat, her grandmother told her, “You don’t have to say ‘Sorry’, just tell me what your mother is wearing.”

Ha! But the little girl was too smart for that, she answered resolutely in Tamil, “PODAVAI! You think I will say ‘SAREE’? ”

Looks like my grandmother’s trick would not have worked on Scott Forstall either. He was ousted from Apple after refusing to sign a apology or taking responsibility for the poor quality of the maps on iOS.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57542297-37/apples-scott-forstall-ousted-over-maps-apology-wsj/

It looks like Mr Forstall learned from his company though:

http://www.examiner.com/article/uk-court-rejects-apple-s-apology-to-samsung-orders-apple-to-do-it-over

The UK court rejected Apple’s apology to Samsung as ‘not an apology’. Ha!

PS: For all those smart people out there, who think they know the little girl; I am not the little girl in the story above (Just saying)

The Mosquito Waltz

Visit my parents in the evenings, and you will find them waltzing to the rhythm of the evening sitcoms, with a spring in their step, either smiles or scowls on their faces and dancing to a tune that unites them against their enemy of the evening. Their dance is not all romance, though it makes for a wonderful scene. They are fighting mosquitoes. They hold something similar to badminton rackets and they sway them through the air. These rackets send minute shocks to the mosquitoes and squelches them.  I told them to choreograph their performance to some catchy tunes, but they don’t listen.

 

Mosquito Dance

Now imagine if I walked into their home one fine evening and found them with big, yellow sten guns and shooting with some nimble footwork , jumping behind sofas, putting James Bond to shame? I have to admit watching them waltz with badminton rackets conjures better images in my mind.

Yet that is what they would be doing if they got themselves a Bug-A-Salt.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444657804578048483443945820.html

 

Inventor demo bug-a-salt

(Inventor demo for the Bug-a-salt gun)

This wonder supposedly takes pests down by shooting salt tablets at them. I can’t imagine what would happen to the salt plastered walls of houses where humidity is high.

Just another product?

Who knows?

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Data Storage & Retrieval

I remember using floppy disks. Not only that. I remember feeling pretty good about myself. You know? The cutting-edge-technology-feeling and all that. The parents were still writing in Diaries – pah!

Then, CDs came along and all the ‘important documents’ I had on floppy disk were not transferred to CDs. I don’t miss them anymore, so I guess they weren’t that important. At first, I dismissed these little things till I started missing the important things too. Like this wonderful video of the daughter, when she was about a year and a half or two years old. She could sing this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘When at home alone I sit’

When at home alone I sit
And am very tired of it,
…
High o’erhead the Bumble Bee
Hums and passes.

storage

I remember wondering what she was jabbering about till I caught hold of 3 or 4 words in the poem that weren’t entirely masked in baby-tongue and my heart swelled like a balloon. I pulled the proud-parent-act and promptly recorded it to show her children. I used to sing it to her every now and then, but I had no idea she had memorized the whole thing. That video is sitting in some tape somewhere that I can’t access anymore.

Of course, books as we knew them for the past 500 years is changing too. The e-books have wormed their way into our way of life.

Then I read this news article about how scientists encoded an entire book onto a DNA strand. How are we extract the contents out of a DNA strand though?

http://www.zdnet.com/harvard-scientists-encode-an-entire-book-onto-dna-7000002879/

Now that is something that is really interesting……can I infuse my DNA with the book and hope that the part of my brain that fuzzily recorded the little daughter’s song in my head would merge and help me when I retrieve the book?

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King Retains Throne; Panthers Flee

The place: Kulu Manali

The time: Two years ago

The post dinner walk found us looking contented and laughing like jack-a–es as loudly as possible to frighten the panthers that were rumoured to be there. We settled down to sleep with an unsettled question hanging over our heads. Damocles could have slept better with that sword of his hanging over his head. Was the panther really there? The night was dark and slightly chill. It must have been around 1 a.m. when a growl woke me up. I shrugged it off and tried to get back to sleep, but before long the growl grew to a full fledged ROAR. I sat upright in bed and tried to wake the husband. He wasn’t there. Another roar erupted – this time much louder than the previous one.

I was alarmed to hear it from the bathroom. Could a panther really have come in? I nudged forward with a hard-bound book in my hand. (Something tells me that I would have thrown the book and run like a screaming banshee if a panther had emerged, but still)

I’d like to think the panther came and got frightened away by the husband’s bravery. He slunk back into the shadows at the roar of a greater master. The G.master, in the meanwhile, was not in a good shape.

The events above happened when we tempted the Gastro-Gods. It all started with some one extolling the virtues of street food. Apparently, the essence of good food comes from a chef who doesn’t waste his time washing hands and utensils. So off we went looking for a ‘Dhaba’ after getting some yogurt and rice for the kids from the resort. We walked down a steep hill(this is Kulu Manali remember), past some bridge of some sort and in a quaint grassy place was nestled the shabbiest shack with some garden chairs. We were given glowing reviews about the food by the receptionist at the resort. We Namaste-Bhai-ed him and settled down.

I still remember the dinner:

  • Egg Curry
  • Butter Naan (The butter was taken with a spoon lovingly dipped in hot dirty water and slathered on. I could not see a refrigerator on the premise, but then, if they could have a fridge, they would have put up a few more garden chairs to ‘expand business’)
  • Paneer butter masala
  • Buttermilk
  • Butter shahi mushroom (Duh! Clearly, he can’t store the butter without a fridge)

One cannot say whether the butter was the culprit or the oil or the eggs. But what did happen was a violent upheaval that frightened panthers. The husband had a combination of several things going on – diarrhea and dysentery and vomiting prominent among them.

Two years later, stomach flu hit the family. It started with the daughter, and then the son. Since they both insisted on staying close to me in their moments of distress, I joined their party. We all merrily used the bathroom and threw up freely on sheets and pillow covers. The washing machine groaned its way through the pile, but we got by.

The husband clearly forgot about his brave days of frightening the prowling panther away and said he was strong, and that was why he was unaffected. I don’t think there is such a thing as a jinx, but if there was, this was surely it. Panthers and mountain lions were seen packing their bags in fright when the husband’s stomach heaved.

We all got better, but he remains the king of stomach upsets. Why did I think of all this?  I just read this article about this NY Times correspondent getting the goods from an innocent looking mango and could not help thinking of our own gastro-adventures.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/when-the-mango-bites-back/?src=me&ref=general

Handler in trouble?

The world is agog with the fact that His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_harry) otherwise known as Prince Harry .. er .. erred.

I have no problems with Prince Harry making a public spectacle of himself. If that is what he wants, so be it. The man is 27 years old and if he chooses to dance naked in front of some girls in Las Vegas when they have their cell-phones out for clicking pictures in the middle of the night, so be it.

My problem is that his ‘handlers’ are in trouble for this indiscretion. Does a 27 year old need a ‘handler’ to tell him that imitating inebriated babboons is not a good idea.

http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/royals_furious_over_prince_harry_ZxI4elJOFPQJV41P0A89sI

Even a prince should get that. Right?