Getting the folks in our family to laugh is easy. Most times, a lame joke about three-men-in-a-boat type of joke is enough, and there we are, rolling on the floor. But the occasion demanded something sterner, that is the reason three generations of women were seen tickling each other on the street after a hearty meal and laughing hard, while an amused son looked on trying to figure out what was going on. Tickle parties are fun and tickle parties are necessary he seemed to say earnestly.
Resist direnkahkaha
A Turkish minister has a protest on his hands that has people laughing their heads off, after a remark at his Ramadan speech. He said, “A woman should be chaste. She should know the difference between public and private. She should not laugh in public.” He says that his remarks were taken out of context, but if it gives people a moment to stop in their day and laugh, why not?
The Harry Potter star and newly named Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women is just one of thousands of women who have been protesting the politician’s remarks and even included the hashtag #direnkahkaha, which translates to “resist laughter.” Thousands of women have posted pictures of themselves cracking up with laughter.
Enough people have joined in on the backlash against Arinc’s remarks that both the hashtags #direnkahkaha and #direnkadin (“resist woman”) have become trending topics on Twitter.
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.
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)
Headache machine
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.
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 ….
When one walks into the home, one encounters, among other things, a large empty glass tank. Surrounding this monstrosity are objects of inane value, pens of dubious quality, forlorn candy wrappers missing their inhabitants and much more depending upon my energy levels at the end of the day for cleaning up. I like to think of the glass tank as the diverting pivotal point. With that on the center table as soon as you enter, there is no need to clean up around it, since it looks out-of-proportion and ugly anyway.
Piscine Bug
But, I am assured by the husband and daughter, that all that is about to change. That ugly glass tank will beg me to reconsider my opinion of it, for it is to be teeming with beautiful life soon.“When you look into the tank, everything will be so nice and quiet, you will love it there.” (I asked them why the household cannot be nice and quiet now, but I was told that I talk too much.)
Pursuant to the budding marine biologist’s fervent requests, a fish tank made its way home one night and has been sitting there on the center table ever since. It occupied the dining table for some time, but one day, we needed the table to sit down and eat, can you believe it? So, now, it sits on the center table.
I tell you, life in the nourish-and-cherish household! If ever it shows signs of quietening down, we buckle down and take immediate action to rectify the matter.Friends with fish-tanks have been contacted to find out the best kind of fish we need to have, research has been done on having peaceful vs semi-aggressive fish tanks. The daughter can now talk smoothly about Molly fish and polyps, the number of gallons of water per fish, and water cleaning techniques.
Her maternal Grandfather has taught her well. You see, her grandfather, before making any purchase first makes it a point to fill the house with brochures on whatever-it-is he intends to buy. Then his wife(my mother) loses it and says she is going to throw everything out. It at this point in time that he goes and buys something for which he forgot to pick up a brochure. It is a process. If you peek into our car, you will find brochures telling you how best to set up your fish tank. These brochures are not only there in the car, but also on the kitchen counter, in the mailbox and on the center table. You may even find one in the refrigerator like I did. I suppose there is a section about maintaining the right temperature somewhere.
It has been 2 weeks since the tank came home.We are already cracking on the gravel. I will keep my readers posted on when the fish can come.
P.S.: The nourishncherish-fishtank process is not a true reflection of the energy in the house.
Please indulge me once more as I meander down the memory lane. After all, The business of life is the acquisition of memories.
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.
Lovely Nature, Sweet Nature
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.
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.
The grandparents have arrived and ever since the children have been clamoring over them leaving me high and dry. They sometimes look at me and give me fleeting, commiserating hugs as if to assure me that they have not forgotten me, and then fly back like butterflies attracted to nectar filled flowers. The grandparents, are of course, thrilled with this reception. The son thinks goes a step farther in making them both feel equally loved and addresses them together at all times: Grandfather-Grandmother. As in :
“Grandpa-Grandma, see this car!”
“Grandpa-Grandma, I will show you my toys.”
“Grandpa-Grandma, I am going to pee.”
I saw all of this and did what any normal parent would do. I sneaked off for a longish hike with the husband one early Saturday morning leaving the butterflies, nectar etc. with Gpa-Gma. Got to make hay while the sun shines, what? Which seems to be a lot by the way. The hills near our place are dry and make for a brown water-starved eyesore. It usually is this way at this time of the year. Apparently, these hills made for some excellent cow-grazing pastures for the cattle years ago and all the forests were, well, deforested. As far as shortsighted planning goes, I think this is the classiest. For now: there is no cattle grazing up there. It is empty, parched grasslands eh hay lands with walking trails taking an insane amount of foot traffic for those wanting to burn off a few calories before that week-end sumptuous tuck-in after the week-long exercise-less tuck-ins that is. The Earth looks strangely unaccustomed to the onslaughts we continue upon it daily.
The Unaccustomed Earth
There is another thing one has to note in the nature of conv. between the h and self. If there is one word that truly describes it, it is FRAG.<Hey! No pouring water inside the bus!>.MEN.<Do you really want to fill up on chocolates now? Put them away – not on that sofa. Chocolate melts.>.TED. <What were you saying? Sorry, I got distracted>.
So, give us a few minutes in which complete sentences can be exchanged and we are like apes thrown in water. It is a skill lost. I suppose we can talk to other people without shouting out crazy things in between. The point is, after sometime we got our tongues rolling (mostly I got my tongue rolling.) The h. was strangely quiet and nodding. After a particularly longish sermon of about 23 minutes on deforestation and water-conservation etc, I looked at the husband smiling at me. I was pleased with the results of my talk. I asked him what he thought, and he said, “I think it may be because of the headphones I wear. I can’t hear anything. I think my ears are blocked again. I suppose I should get them cleaned. Couldn’t hear much of what you said.”
I suppose that is what most environmentalists must feel like. Or Unaccustomed Ears. Sigh!
P.S. A friend of mine had used the phrase ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ in a rather beautiful status update, and I have been stuck with the phrase in my head ever since.
I am a tad spirited in expressing the way we are consumed by technology these days. I look at videos that show us how we are all peering into our phones with a vehemence that is perhaps overdone and say ‘Ha! See? I told you so.” I may have been getting a little chatty of late about the topic. Of course, the wrong gadgets got offended with my unguarded statements. The tumble dryer that has been huffing and puffing along noisily but religiously in the background shuddered and refused to dry the clothes. It still chunked and bunked about, threw its weight around like it always does. It tried to remain the General in the laundry room, but there was no mistaking the fact that no drying was being done there.
The husband and I tried all the methods of repair we know without having to consult the vast Internet. That is to say, we reset the switches, gave resounding thumps on random areas of the dryer. We have seen mechanics do the same with astounding success, but our own thump quotients yield nothing. In fact, our oven got so offended with the Thump Technique, it refuses to acknowledge our presence anymore. “I Won’t Beep! Not EVEN If You Reset The Switch!” it said and turned its LEDs off with a spectacular flourish.
That is when the husband went you-tubing and found a whole lot of things that can happen to dryers. He went into the laundry room squeaking clean one Saturday morning accordingly and within minutes we saw a mountain of lint and the husband somewhere in there sounding like an astonished frog deep in a well and saying something like ‘Holy Moly! There is soooo much lint in here.”
“Do you want any help?” I asked peeking into the room with the toddler son in tow. He might have accepted my help, but he looked alarmed at the son’s expression. He looked gleeful at all the soft lint available for a variety of projects – there was a possibility of lint fireworks, lint flakes drifting in the room, lint piles for jumping in. The husband was quick to realize that the biggest help was probably no help at all. “NO! Just keep him away. I am fine!” said the martyr and went back to de-linting the machine.
If you are one of those folks who regularly move the refrigerator so the space under the fridge is clean, you can stop reading now, but for the rest of us, here is news. Apparently, the lint does not only accumulate in the lint filter (You know that narrow piece that says, “Please clear after use!” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer#Lint_build-up_.28tumble_dryers.29). Apparently, the lint overflows into every inch of space the lint can find. It expands, it builds its regime. It cranks hard at tubes going out into the big bad world and it frightens rodents into leaving. It seems to me like Genghis Khan could take a lesson or two from Lint on empire building.
Lint Lint Everywhere Lint Near & Far
A few hours in lint saw the husband emerge looking like he had been rattled by rabbits in a bag full of fur. He was clutching a large garbage bag full of lint, several portions of lint clung to his clothes, hair and feet. He looked a sorry mess. I felt a pang for the man and thought of inserting a bit of humor to the proceedings to lighten him up. “Have you been tunneling in lint?” I asked. I was shocked to hear my sarcasm was completely pointless for he was doing just that. “Yes…did you know that the tube that tunnels through the wall is filled with lint too? I got most of it out, but there is still some sticking to the pipes and I am heading out to the other side to extricate the remaining.”
I suppose this is often the case with technology. You never know which one will truly grow into epic proportions.Who knew The Vortex of Lint Terror or the Holy Tunnel of Lint would come from that small lint opening?
Thanks to the awesome skills of the Lint Remover, we are now wearing dry clothes again.
You know how William Blake said something about Wonder? I had forgotten, but luckily the Internet is there for souls like me who wonder vaguely what was it the bloke called Blake said about Wonder and Voila there it is.
You can use your sense of wonder for a great many things: To marvel at the bunk beds as the daughter and her friends did, or at the restrooms as the son did on our recent camping trip.
The husband and I fulfilled our sense of wonder by watching the night sky. Where we live, the stars are dimmed out by the lights of civilization, but even then, we set out every now and then to star gaze. Every time, we are a little farther away from the lights of civilization, we look up and admire all those generations before us who studied the skies and named the constellations. What a gift it is to us! One truly realizes the value of accumulated wisdom when one gazes upon the limitless night sky, does one not?
On that warm summer night, as we sat around the campfire after an exemplary meal, it was with that feeling of humility and gratitude that anything to do with the stars brings on, that we gazed. As we sat there, every now and then, we would detect a satellite moving across the sky. We even saw a few shooting stars in the sky. Conversation turned to how even the campfire’s lights can mask the true glory of seeing the Milky Way.
Time wore on and we turned in for the night.
We may have retired, but the son’s mind was still reflecting subconsciously on the wonders of the automatic flush or the blinking red light in the bathroom, I would never know. What I do know is that he got up enthusiastically every few hours to get a whiff at the wonderful restroom. It was at his 3:15 a.m. marveling session that I decided to make the best of it.
Stars Shine Down
Maybe, this was nature’s way of granting me the joy of seeing the true beauty of the Milky Way. I slipped out and stood under the stars inhaling the grandeur of it all. The mortal sufferings, the pain humanity goes through, the agonies we endure everything seems to stop for that moment when the stars shine down. It is as beautiful as it is therapeutic.
I came back yearning to see the beauty of the night sky again and found this trove of beautiful pictures of the night sky:
Everybody should get themselves a dose of the night sky every once in a while, even if it means visiting the restroom fifteen times with a wonder-filled toddler.
The summer heat beat down on the grasslands, the ranches and the river flowing nearby with a kind of fierce energy, determined to show us both how hot and long it can go on, on the summer solstice. We were out on a camping trip, and I cannot imagine how it would have been had we been pitching up tents and hitching it in the heat. As it turns out, we went in for cabins with full blast A/c and bunk beds that provided hours of entertainment to the bendy amongst us. The children want to climb something. If trees are not available in the searing heat, the bunk beds were just fine too.
The campsite was near a river and the thought of flowing fresh water nearby is always a calming influence.
We played by the river for some time.
Then someone suggested that we beat it to the swimming pool instead. So, we did. I had brought along a pair of pink and blue goggles and the children were remarkably well-behaved around them. When I had the extra one in my hand, one child asked me politely whether they could please use it, “By all means!” said I beaming. A few minutes later, another mermaid swam up to me and said, “Could I have the pink ones please?”
I beamed again and gave the pink one. This is when things started getting complicated. The mergirls and merboys were having a go in the swimming pool and every now and then, one of the merfolk would splash up to me and ask, “Aunty, can I use the pink goggles?” I’d say ‘Of course’ and go on chatting with my friends. A few minutes later, another merchild would ask “May I use the blue goggles please?” and I’d nod my consent to that too, little realizing what my little assents were causing inside the pool. It turns out that there was a fierce war raging around the goggles. One group wanted to use them and the other did not. The game had me fogged when the details emerged. So, every time somebody came up to me and asked me whether they could use the goggles and I said ‘Yes’, the folks went to the opposing lot and said that I had allowed them to use the goggles and the rightful owner of the treasure was their team. Then, another one would come up to me and I would nod again and the drama would start all over again.
When did I catch on, you ask. Well, to tell you the truth, my school teacher parents would have detected the war a mile away, but I was so intent on chatting with my good friends and it had been such a long time since I spent a summer teaching children, that it took a large-scale splash party in the pool to make me stop and think. What helped was that two folk were swimming up to me in great speed clearly trying to get to me first. The moment I had nodded my assent to one, child 1 whipped up a victory splash and whooped in joy. I saw the crest fallen Child 2 and only then realized what was going on.
This poster should have come to my mind a little earlier, but it didn’t.
Well, if anything, despite their struggles to get all the goggles to their own teams, they had been exceedingly polite and had maintained the quorum of splash-envy, and so deserved a goggle each whether they wanted it or not.
The waters don’t always show the currents and depth, do they?
The world is full of nonsense if you will just open your minds up to it. For example, one of my news feeds once thought it relevant to show me an article on how to pack when you have children and are going on a flight trip. Now, that is a nice title, knowing how we travel with children, and how often we have done it in the past with our own brood.
Maybe an example would help here. If you see us go on a week-end trip somewhere close by, you know drive for a few hours and get back sort of place, you would understand why I clicked on this link to read what novel piece of advice it had to give me. You see, once we had the car packed with the following among other things like suitcases and books:
1) Shoes (1 extra pair each for each member of the family)
2) Jackets (1 for every member)
3) 2 strollers (We only have one stroller rider, but I packed one in and the husband packed the other.) Both of us looked extremely proud of ourselves and told the other, “Ha! I packed something very valuable. The stroller. “
“What?! I packed it too. The red one.”
“I packed the blue one.”
Packing
I know what goes through the brain at this point in time. The stroller isn’t exactly a button. How then, does such a large thing get lost in the trunk? Well. Now, you know how we pack. If the place we are going to, has an attached kitchenette, the trunk gets fuller. Suddenly, rice cookers are jostling for space beside shoes and the curry powder is nicely sprinkling its aroma on the jackets.
We are planning on a small trip again and I wanted to gain the foolproof method of compact packing. I had enough of the “pack everything you need, may need or may one day need during the trip” doctrine.
To be honest, it astounds me that tripe like this gets clicked on, read and paid for. There isn’t a single thing of note here.
But, such is the world of news and writing. The unimaginative jostles with the trite, the run-of-the-mill nudges the novel aside, while a few pieces of inspired writing sprinkles its splendor on the web.
There are some mechanics whose work I admire. They have an orderliness about them. They take out things packed in 30 mm space, spread it out over 100 sq metres and put them back in 30 mm with minimum fuss and mess. I have always admired such souls of toil. So, when the father and daughter were pandering upstairs with a laptop lying open on the desk, I went up a couple of times partly out of curiosity and partly to keep the toddler son away from the table. (The son thinks he is helping out on the task and gets sorely disappointed when told that he can’t place his toy cars on that convenient hole inside the laptop where the hard disk used to reside. ) Halfway through the task, I saw the pair of them chattering about something and come downstairs. “Commencing after lunch!” said the mechanics. “But you just had coffee and chocolate milk!” said I. This was received with a chuckle and no retort. A moment later, the pair of them switched on the Television.
“Going to watch Television? “ I asked in that tone that mildly encourages one to finish up the laptop work. Among other things I was worried that a small thing will go astray and I will be called upon to get down on all fours and search.
“TV Amma. Not television. Television sounds so formal and then you don’t feel like relaxing with it.”
“Well, what happened to the laptop?” I asked.
“We watched a you-tube video on how to do it Amma. Relax. So, I know everything. We just could not do it because Appa wants to take another backup of the disk now.”
I launched into what I call my Science Teacher mode. “You can learn more by doing than by watching you-tube videos. “ I went on in this vein for a few sentences, and then let the thing rest.
A few days later, I caught her again and told her about the Science experiments that the President lauded, and how these children had taken simple problems and solved them.
It was a lovely afternoon chat, and I asked her what I could do to help her along in her ambition to become a biologist.
“You can buy me a pet!” said she before I had completed my sentence.
“WHAT?!”
“What amma? You just said that I will learn more by doing than by reading books or watching documentaries. So, in order for me to become a biologist, I think a pet would help me nicely. Maybe a dog, or a duck or a parrot.”
“I like snake.” said the toddler son playing with his toy cars.
Nourish-n-Cherish 
