Life – Page 83 – Nourish-n-Cherish

Famous on Facebook?

It was a wonderful day. I was going about the joyous task of collecting garbage for the garbage truck the next day. I peeked into the kitchen trash and the fresh smells of carrot peels with coffee waste swirled up. I inhaled and exhaled with a rapidity that would have had a rabbit scuttling in fright. I then went for the lint removal in the washing machine dryer and added that non-smelling lot to the kitchen waste. It gave the gooey, soggy mess some texture. I grinned with an eye of a creative person and saw that what would really seal the deal was diapers. I charged for the diaper-genie in glee. To my dismay the diaper genie’s bag had burst and well, I shall spare the reading public some horrific images of the ensuing drama, but the important thing is to keep your positivity about you. I think the diapers added a new twist to the garbage scene. I had all the garbage collected – well all the garbage in the garbage cans collected, because there is garbage hiding all over the house, but that makes for another post on another day.

I suppose artists in the olden days used to get this sense of accomplishment when they saw beauty in the most mundane things and created entire worlds out of them. I felt a little like that, Of course, it was a harder path in the olden days for gratification was far from instant. You had to wait to be unearthed and then some before you could be liked. All that has changed.

With Instagram, stories were told through pictures. The golden era of ‘Being Liked’ was taken to a higher level. Suddenly people found that pictures of their feet in the sand was as wonderful as a sailboat badly framed in the distance when at the beach. They found that pictures of themselves in various poses was very welcoming indeed. The innate altruism in people kicked in and they strived to give their friends more and more of themselves. Just to give people what they liked, they uploaded more pictures. They were all consumed by a hungering public.

What if? What if? Creative people buzzed to see what they could do. Of course the common man had to fumble along trying to see what they could do in that regard. Voila! BinCam was born.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324503204578318462215991802.html

BinCam looks just like your average trash bin, but with a twist: Its upper lid is equipped with a smartphone that snaps a photo every time the lid is shut. The photo is then uploaded to Mechanical Turk, the Amazon-run service that lets freelancers perform laborious tasks for money. In this case, they analyze the photo and decide if your recycling habits conform with the gospel of green living. Eventually, the photo appears on your Facebook page.

The artist in me needed practice, but with folks like BinCam helping me out, I am sure I shall compete with the best in the industry. We could run student competitions with scrapbooks of trash can pictures and children will soon be yearning to take out the garbage so they could compare notes.

I wonder how our garbage compares to real celebrity garbage. There can be a competition and the true winner becomes Famous on Facebook.

The possibilities are immense.

Gold (Just Gold)

When I say something that is Economic sounding, it is because I like to sound wise in these matters. But if you buy a cart of gold and dig up your home to hide it based on my advice, I would not advocate that. Just saying.

What is appealing about Gold is that supposedly the total weight of gold remains constant and will therefore retain its value regardless of currency fluctuations. Currency may come and currency may go. Dig up some coins from the Harappa civilization and try to use it in the laundromat slots and you will see what I mean. Gold, on the other hand, is not like that. Gold in the Harappan civilization was valuable and is valuable in the current world.

My alchemical knowledge being as good as my economic knowledge, I can categorically state that there is no way to manufacture Gold. I was surprised therefore, to hear that this restaurateur is trying to get us to ingest gold (I am not sure what his ultimate goal is, since what goes in comes out and all that) This restaurant sells gold-plated Dosa at an abominable price.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vLOhR5oUNgk

http://itotd.com/articles/477/edible-gold/

If he is hoping humans would spout gold in the process, I hope not. I’ve seen people with golden teeth and my reactions have been civil on the outside, while the intestines coil and uncoil rapidly sending a “FLEE RIGHT NOW!” signal. It has something to do with the odd glint in the smile that gives the sinister-shading to the whole thing. I hope that doesn’t get in fashion anytime soon.

I read this a while ago and tucked it into a corner of my brain, but when I saw another news item that linked Gold, I could not pass it up.

There is one place on Earth where you can earn your weight in Gold. Dubai has offered its residents a gram of gold for every pound lost, and I was wondering whether the restaurateur would think of going there to stock up on supplies for his Dosas.

http://theweek.com/article/index/247191/could-dubais-gold-for-pounds-weight-loss-program-work

Ah well…The World is full of shining stories if you take the care to look for them.

Childhood Heroes and Cricket

Once upon a time, about a decade ago, or more precisely a few days after our wedding, the newly wed husband of mine was chatting up my younger brother. I lolled around in the background listening to the boys taking in the sights and talking about Cricket.

“Do you remember Kapil Dev’s batting in the 1983 World Cup?” asked the husband breathless with excitement. Clearly, it was one of those turning points in his life because that was the time he remembers the transformation in his image. The time he became the go-to-guy in the extended family. Suddenly, all his young uncles and their friends could bank on the lanky, shy eight year old boy to tell them all about Cricket. He had every player’s statistics at his fingertips. He had an audience for his gospel on batting techniques and strategic fours and sixes. Through all the frenzy, one special hero emerged: Kapil Dev. Kapil Dev was the hero for an entire generation. How many times have boys fought over who can be the Kapil Dev in their roadside matches?

Life moves on, however. Memories recede to farther and farther corners of the brain and sometimes fade. Only we realize that some memories don’t fade. They simply lie there waiting to be awakened again. One such was the Kapil Dev memory. It so happened that the husband got to meet his childhood hero recently.

When he came home after meeting the Cricket legend, I asked him how the experience was and he said,
“You know? As a boy I dreamed of meeting Kapil Dev and never once did I stop to think what I would say to him if I did.” The strange thing is, the intervening years seem to have done nothing in that department. He continued, “I had all week knowing I was going to meet him and I still didn’t think about what I was going to say to him.”

A glassy look came over his eyes and he went on mute. There I was waiting to listen to the rest of whatever else happened at the tip of my chair, but there was nothing. The eager wife waiting for the hero-blessed-husband to chat was left wanting. There was silence. Well he was sipping his coffee, so the slurping noise filled the gaps but not much else. I prodded him gently by poking his ribs and yelling “HEY! ”

He “Uhhned?” and said, “It must be really hard being a celebrity. Imagine, I went there and told him it was nice to meet him, but my heart was thumping that it was nicer still to take a picture with him. That’s all most people were interested in. A picture to be posted on Facebook.”

But the husband brought up a good point. What do you say to the celebrities? They certainly inspire us to dare to dream, but what do the celebrities get out of the exchange?

The husband got this…..

The Lost Heart

Through nobody’s fault, I found myself in a state wanting to submit an entry for the 3-minute fiction contest on NPR with an afternoon to spare. Add a production problem at work, 2 unbathed children playing with mud and a hose in the backyard, and a hungry family to the mix and you have the components for story-telling complete. Obviously, I was using all of this as a perfect excuse to not sit and write something. But the husband would hear nothing of the sort and shoo-ed me away to write. The theme was to write a story in which a character finds an object that he or she has no intention of returning.

I wrote out more than a few stories. I had almost decided on this one, but the daughter was so disgusted by the story, that she would not let me send it in. I have written a good many stories for her age group over the past few years and she has always been my trusted reviewer and critic. I love discussing my writing with her. Sometimes, the insights she offers can only come from a child her age and yet seem far more reasoned than I had supposed from someone her age. So, I honored her and did not send this one in, but decided to put it up on my blog instead.

The Lost Heart

This story is about a young girl called Fibrill who found a heart. A human heart.

The object repulsed her, but she bent down and picked it up anyway like she usually did. This time, a longing engulfed her. The mass felt alien to her hands, but she persevered. She could give it to her mother and maybe that would make her happy. Yes that was it. She ran with the heart in her hands. She was running along the clouds as fast as her legs and the dead weight of the heart would allow her to. But the heart was not dead yet. It was still pulsing and throbbing.

As she burst into the kitchen through the back-door, her mother looked shocked. “What is this?”

“A human heart! A human heart….can you check if it is alive?”

“Oh dear. I wonder who is missing it. Give it to me.” said her mother rushing to her side.

Her mother touched the edge of her nose. She saw the familiar transformation as her nose turned blue and the electric blue from her nose tip spread to all the nerve endings in her body. “Fibrill! Give me the heart right now. There is still hope left.”

The shot of blue pulsed through the heart and Fibrill’s inside, but this time Fibrill did not part with the heart. It was her heart now.

The man, whose heart it was, lay limp on Earth below.

The daughter did not know the word, but I told her that the word she was looking for was ‘Morbid’. Her expression said it all. Never one to hold back, she said, “Amma – you usually write things that make people happy, how could you write this?”

“Didn’t this make you happy?”. I love needling her.

“No way! This makes no one happy. A heart is lovely – like this! ” she said indignantly and drew me a heart on a post-it note. I must say that is the way I like hearts too. Beautiful and full of throbbing love.

Please let me know what you think of the story.

PS: Ideally, I would have loved to finish the story differently, but the requirement was to have the person not return what they found.

The Crow Vs Grandfather Dilemma

Is your grandfather a crow?

I don’t know how many human children can answer that question unless they were sired by crows, which is rare.

Every parent, grand-parent, aunt, uncle or friend remembers some gems of baby talk from the children in their lives. I remember swelling like a balloon fish when the daughter sang her first song. I hadn’t known it then, but it was pure audacity calling it a song. It was gibberish, but precious gibberish all the same.

The daughter had trouble saying “Tha” as a baby. She seemed to think that “Ka” and “Tha” were the same. That would have been no problem at all if there was another word for grandfather in Tamil. It turns out that the Tamil word for ‘Grandfather’ has not one, but two “Tha”s. (“Thaatha“)

The child tried and tried and called him “Kaaka“. It was not an ideal replacement given that crows were inclined to respond every time and break their flight midway to answer her. (“Kaaka” means “Crow” in Tamil). So, every time, she hollered for a crow, the grandfather would answer, and the crows gradually learned to tell the difference. They had their little training programs written out that said, “If a child calls a crow when you fly over Latitude x and Longitude y, do not stop over. You are not welcome and will scare the child. Keep flying and stay productive. The resident grandfather there thinks he is a crow and will handle the situation. He responds to ‘Thaatha‘ and ‘Kaaka‘ ”

The crows and grandfathers were mutually happy with the situation, they waved to each other from afar and life chugged on.

The problem is that the training manual for the Crows has not been updated for several years now. Years passed, the child had a brother who is now stringing words together and this young man cannot say”Ka”. He can only say “Tha”.

Cars are Thars and Cows are Tows.

So, this little fellow stands in the garden and yells for a Crow (“Kaaka Kaaka!” he screams. The audience hears”Thaatha Thaatha!“) The crows fly on, while grandfathers respond.

All very confusing I tell you. Both Grandfathers and Crows need new training packets.

Grandfather or Crow (?) — Thaatha: Grandfather
Kaaka: crow

Let’s end on a bit of a tongue twisters for children, crows and grandfathers (kuttis, kaakas and thaathas) shall we?

The Thaakaa Kathai

Thaatha-ku Kaaka kathai

Kaaka-kku Thaatha kathai

Thaatha-kum Kaaka-kum Kutti kathai

Kutti-kum Kaaka-kum Thaatha kathai

Thaatha-kum Kutti-Kum Kaaka kathai

The Frog Said: PJ LOL

Humankind has to stop every now and then and take a breath to see what are the things that need to be passed down from one generation to the next. So far, story-telling seems to be the best way to make sure that essential details are passed down. Things that may be important years afterward like spiritual knowledge, or the virtues that are important. The only problem is we seem to be passing on a lot of stories, and not all of them are poised to stick for a million years. I mean marshal the facts: we have Mahabharata, Ramayana, Greek legends, Norse and Roman mythology that have been around for thousands of years. As if all this were not enough, we keep adding to the repertoire all the time: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter etc. To this ever evolving and rich lot, we must add tales of real men and women like the unfortunate noblemen who have found his fame as the greatest gobblers of all time: The Earl of Sandwich

Yet, will all this be enough to prepare us for success a million years from now? Time for me to stop, take a breath and tell you where I am going with all of this right? Well, here is a startup that is operating on the premise that people will pay to send text messages to a potentially habitable solar system that is at least 17 light years away.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/17/technology/enterprise/lone-signal/?google_editors_picks=true

I quote from the article:

The messages are being beamed to Gliese 526, a potentially habitable solar system that is relatively close to Earth.
In addition to the text messages, which can be written in any language, Lone Signal will simultaneously send a message written in binary code — the language computers use to communicate — that contains basic principles of physics. The idea is that these principles apply throughout the universe and thus are more likely to be understood by an alien than, say, a text message written in English.

Every system’s design has a few assumptions. I am glad these are called out in the news article clearly. Binary code and basic principles of Physics can apply throughout the universe.

What will we do when we receive answers from these beings? Maybe a thousand years from now. Will our children know the lore of the anonymous text message that was sent to them hundreds of years ago?

The aliens received the message, decoded them and got “PJ LOL” from the message. After years of research trying to understand its meaning and craft a reasonable response, we receive “DGKG DF@#JRJF”

Now what?

Once upon a time, a frog lived in a well…

PS: The UK government has now closed the UFO desk as well. (http://www.space.com/21671-ufo-files-alien-spacecraft-mod.html?cmpid=514630)

Chocoleg Law Enforcement

It was one of those days when I was beginning to ask myself why we have made life more complicated in an effort to make it simpler. I was just tutting and clicking my tongue when I saw this news article. This child wrote a letter to the Vice President with a possible solution to the gun control problem. He suggested making bullets of chocolate.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/joe-biden-letter_n_3271533.html

How marvelous! It need not be chocolate, but it could be bullets of a different nature: a stinger rather than a killer. The bullets of the killing kind can only be obtained in limited quantity after intense background checks and so on.

If chocolate bullets work, why not Lego blocks in police chases?

Imagine this scary criminal heading out. He is prepared: his car is ready and he grabs his gun. He decides on wearing his vibrams since it ought to help him if it comes to a chase on foot. Of course, he hopes there will be no chase at all, but hopes and dreams turn out quite different from real life. This criminal is about to learn this hard truth very soon.

After the deed is done, he sees that his worst fear is coming true. The police cars are clobbering him. A hot chase later, a patrol helicopter appears on the scene and it starts raining down Lego blocks.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57572674-1/lego-spill-tangles-up-west-virginia-highway/

There is no way for the car to maneuver. What does he do? What does he do? He glances at his feet in desperation. The vibrams. That is what he must do, he has to go for a run.

The Scary criminal laughs and grabs his gun to take off on foot and what happens?

OUCH! Running on lego blocks hurt man! Ask any parent who has trod on the things at the middle of the night, and they’ll tell you. Left with nothing to do, he whips out his gun and starts shooting. For a second he is triumphant and then realizes that the gun has done nothing but spurt a fountain of chocolate.

“FATE!” he exclaims and throws down his gun as he stubs his toe on a Lego block of hideous proportions.

The criminal is caught and the watching populace cheer at the ingenuity of the operation.

Give a few minutes for a heli-based giant vacuum cleaner to suck up the lego blocks and spray water on the chocolate rivers to wash off the cars and life is beautiful once again.

Do you see any problems with using chocolates and legos for preliminary law enforcement? I quite like the idea.

The Queen Mother

The Mother’s Day gifts from the daughter are always a bit overwhelming. For days ahead, I am not allowed to step into her room or throw out any scraps of paper because they may belong to a piece of the gift she is making for me. I sigh and turn my eye at all the ensuing mess secretly enjoying all the effort that goes into the presents she showers me with.

This time, she said, I must be prepared to have the wind knocked out of me, for the gift would make me wish I was a Queen that no one would bother ever again. I really am not sure where she thinks that the most appealing thing for a Queen is not to be bothered again. I mean wouldn’t the Queen wonder why everyone is leaving her out of things? Imagine yourself to be the Queen. There is a dinner banquet downstairs and everybody arrives dressed immaculately, having wonderful conversations amongst themselves, and pile into the food without the Queen. What would the effect be on the Q’s psyche?

Anyway, I must say she got her wish. You see she made me a crown of a magenta color. Then, she went ahead and glued on large ‘precious stones’ on them. She gushed that the color would suit me splendidly and I thanked her for it. She was right – the color suited me perfectly. I blushed a matching magenta wearing that crown. Of one thing she was assured. With me in that crown, there isn’t a single soul who would think of bothering me!

I wanted to wear the crown and go down to the Supermarket to see the effect it would have on people, but I chickened out. I just couldn’t. Like all windows of opportunity, the crown window was an extremely slim one. Risk it on Mother’s Day and tug the daughter along, there was a chance people would think me as a mom in need of an intervention, but could have escaped without being marched off to the loony bin. But, I let Mother’s Day slip through my fingers. I regret it a little now. If ever there was classic blogging material, that would have been it. I must make a note of that for myself for next year.

I am waiting to see if the husband would get himself a crown to call himself a King. If he does, I will need a little bit of help getting him to wear the thing in public, but I suppose it is worth a shot for a blog entry. What do you say?

Walking with Spirit to Dakota and Pluto

I’ve written about the pony before. The daughter loved riding that pony, Spirit, so much, that this was her entry for the Google Doodle.

I was pleasantly surprised at this entry of hers. She practiced it on her little drawing board multiple times over. It started off with a barn and then morphed into the all-to-do-with-horses theme.

Maybe an occasional day with horses could be her indulgence we thought to ourselves and arranged for another pony ride for her. But this time, they gave her a horse, and told her she could ride it herself. Tell the husband something like this and his inner hero rises automatically. “Don’t worry!” he tells her. “I will ride with you on another horse to make sure you are fine. Don’t worry!”

“But I am not worried!” laughs the daughter rolling her eyes perfectly at this (an art form that seemed to be have been honed over decades of practice, but it can’t have been seeing that she is less than a decade old)

Stung, the husband said, she did not know anything about galloping horses and he would be her savior if the need arose. So, the pair of them set off to get saddled and bridled or whatever else horse-riders and their mounts do. The first thing they were required to do was to fill a form asking if they’ve ridden horses before. The daughter proudly answered ‘Yes’.

The husband flashed his mind back to the time his parents had arranged for him to mount a well-nourished donkey that called itself a horse on the beaches of the dirty Marina Beach in Chennai at the age of 9 and decided to answer ‘No’. “That horse”,he said later, “used to stray off to eat peanuts and trash paper on the beach completely forgetting that a rider was upon it!”

keena riding

The daughter was assigned Pluto and the husband Dakota. Dakota was supposed to follow Pluto. The husband was to chase after the galloping Pluto remember? They waved their good-byes and set off. From here on, I enter the terrain of pure hearsay. The accounts of the husband and the daughter diverge a good deal, and I have taken the liberty of constructing my own sequence.

The husband says that Dakota seemed to think Pluto was his playmate and took great pleasure in tickling Pluto on his hind. The daughter says that Pluto was doing fine till Dakota annoyed him. Pluto and Dakota reached an impasse and one of the instructors had to intervene and send Dakota ahead of Pluto.

There was another problem: Dakota differed from the horse on Marina Beach in one respect only. It went for grass and not paper and trash, but that may be because the trail upon which they rode did not have paper and trash. It kept going off to eat grass and straying from the path.

The daughter had to take on the role of savior and had to shout out instructions to the husband on how to reign Dakota in and keep him on the path. The husband hotly contests this and says he knew all along how to go about horse riding, but did not want to yank at the reins for it might hurt the horse.

What can I say?! Potato – Potaato.

3D Arguments

I often see people at meetings, lunches, trains and restaurants looking down and screwing their otherwise normal eyes into weird angles while concentrating on their phone screens.

Looking down and looking intent achieves two purposes in public:

1) Look important : I am sorry, did I just miss something? That should be okay because I was catching up on something else and if the something trumps the s.else that I just missed, I am sure I will know when I am looking at the phone in the next meeting what?

2) Look busy: Thanks to modern technology, one has time-wasters at one’s tips. There is Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and then there are the myriad apps for news and games. All of these allow people to zone out from their current surroundings.

As if this were not enough Samsung is looking to introduce transparent flexible 3D screens. We can look straight at people, and give them the illusion of listening to them, while the TV screen flashes in front of you. I wonder how old couples’ quarrels would like when this becomes commonplace.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2070741/Samsungs-transparent-flexible-screen-3D-real-looks-like-touch-it.html

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