Tag: Life

What ties a Unicorn & a Book together?

Qn: What ties a unicorn and a book together?
Ans: A tie

Ten years is a short time. Seems only yesterday that I met the man I love and gave him my first useless material gift. (The gift of my gab he still enjoys.) A decade later, we have managed to fill our lives up with our children, our friends and family, our own interests and hobbies and our careers. But it never does to forget the past, or look through them with rose-tainted glasses.

In 10 years some things have not become easier, in fact they have become harder – like finding a suitable gift for my husband. He is a minimalist. He doesn’t wear a watch, saying he prefers to see the time on the cell-phone given by his company. (The one he uses to cut me off mid-sentence because there is never enough charge left on it – that one) His clothes are bearable if I spend enough time to get him some new shirts and t-shirts and place the products so he gets them where his hands automatically reach out. Otherwise, he will willingly wear the maroon t-shirt (also given by the company) or the gray t-shirt everyday till I shriek in agony.

So, I lay in bed racking my brains on what to get him for his birthday when the brain-wave struck. Of all my gifts, the most useless has got to be the one I got him first. Allow me to ramble a bit.

My father was always dressed in a suit and tie as a school teacher in the Lawrence School, Nilgiris. Suits on school teachers make them look regal and I suppose is required to set the atmosphere among a bunch of kids trying to place wet soap on the hallways for fun. He looked majestic as he strode through the Assembly of students in his suits(even though the suits were often tailored to fit somebody else, but that is the subject of another blog). Every time I bought my father a tie, he beamed and sported it the very next day.

Now, the only images of America I’d had back then were from movies where I’d seen dashing handsome chaps sit around in suits and have lunch or walk very fast along shiny corridors. I observed. I deduced. And when the man from Sunny California was to come to Sunnier Chennai to see me after months of chatting and talking on the phone; I bought him a present that I hoped would be appropriate and useful. A tie.

I don’t know why I bothered gift wrapping it, since it was clear he didn’t want to discern the difference between the wrapping paper and the tie housed inside. I was guilty of choosing similar patterns for both, but still….

I thumbed through the albums of his school days hoping to see if they had a tie as a uniform. Many “English” schools in Chennai boasted of this monstrosity, and sold ties that could double up as leashes since they had a buckle on them. His school even had “English” in the name. No luck there either. He truly had passed life skirting ties entirely.

It was a perfect gift in many ways, since it set the expectations right. It set the trend for a lifetime of poor gifting from me.

Every now and then, we would laugh about the tie, and since I don’t ever want him to think that the woman he loved has changed, I renewed my vows of poor gifting and bought him a tie!

Then, I got to work on the easier gifts for the 7 & 70:
I got my daughter a magical pony i.e. a unicorn and wrote a book for my father.

7 & 70

The summer vacations ended on a reluctant note for both the daughter and I. This is the first time I was home for the summer (At my school, we had vacations when the weather was its most vindictive, namely monsoon and winter). Of course, we both had a blast. Which is why when I started work after my maternity leave and she started school in the same week, we both felt lost and moody (well, me more than her). She was quite happy to go pottering off with her new friends, some of whom apparently had some kind of viral fever. Have I told you she is hospitable to a fault? Yes she is….so, she gladly housed the virus and came home overflowing with love and kissed her infant brother. Sigh! Well, we all know the train of events to follow that particular show of affection.

To catch me at my cranky best, all you need to do is give me a cold, and throw in a couple of sick kids of my own making and a few sleepless nights as a bonus. The dumbest parts of me shine through and the crabbiest aspects surface. I spent a few hours at the Doctors listening to how this is a passing phase and needs no medicines and then more than a few hours listening to my mother rue the state of the American Healthcare System and why they don’t give any medicines. Rudimentary, it would seem to her. The lady who used to self prescribe antibiotics and dewormins with great confidence. (subject for another blog)

We all got better just in time to prepare for the adrenaline rush of meeting our dear friends and extended family on the occasion of the 7th and 70th birthday of my daughter and father. We kept the 70th part of it as a surprise for the septuagenarian and watched him smile his evening through. I know people have busy lives and yet they all set aside the time to come and give us the precious present of their presence. A special thanks to all of you for taking the time out to wish the 7 & 70 folks, you truly made them feel special.
Have a good day while I garner my thoughts for the next post!

Slay the Dragon (NOT the Parrot)

My dear father loves the stock market and anything to do with it almost as much as his children. I know we rank higher in the love chart, because he doesn’t forget facts about stocks, but he does forget facts about us. Lock him away without a physical copy of Economic Times therefore, and he gets forlorn. So, imagine his glee when the husband got an opp. to visit India on Business.

“Please get me a copy of Dalal Street and Economic times, pa. Not the Sunday ET mind you.” he told him as soon as he heard the news. The husband nodded glad to be able to buy something that would make the dear man happy.
A hectic packing schedule later (another blog waiting to happen), we went to drop him off at the airport.

The father gong sounded, “Remember to get the Economic Times pa. Remember not the Sunday ET. I will send you an email also to that effect. Not Sunday. Any other day is okay.”

He gave him a final wave before leaving the airport with the loving words, “Not Sunday!” (Once a teacher always a teacher – repeat after me, “Not Sunday”)


Now, my father knows that life can be intense and people tend to forget. So, he typed out an email mid-visit thus: (I shall, in another blog, touch up on the typing)
Dear XXX
We are all finehere.My new boss(the Baby ) and hisstser are doing well.Pl. buy Dalal Street and Economic Times.
Love
Appa
PS: I do NOT want Sunday Economic Times.

Now, the husband glanced at this email on Monday morning. He was supposed to leave India that night. So, his head swimming with ‘Sunday’, he tried his level best to procure a copy of the Sunday Economic Times. Failing to do so, he weaseled up to the peon in the office and asked him to see if they had a copy of the Sunday Economic Times anyway. He was in luck as the peon had stored away the Sunday copy. It isn’t everyday that working-in-America saabs thank the peon for old newspapers. The heart felt thanks made the man’s heart swell and he felt morally obliged to give him Monday’s copy as well.

One can imagine the triumphant scene whence the prince was told to slay the dragon (not the parrot) to obtain the approval of the king. Slay the dragon but not the parrot. Remember not the parrot. And the prince crosses 7 seas, dons bitter pills, fights gory creatures and slays the parrot.

The king and prince have since made up, since the dragon was also slain by mistake, but there it is – not the parrot!

It turns out that the Sunday Economic Times costs 3 times the amount and has 1/3rd the content of a week day ET, hence the “Not Sunday”

Too Much Happiness

Many persons who have not studied Mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, this science requires great fantasy.
– Sophia Kovalevsky

I read about Sophia Kovalevsky recently and the lady’s life was pure inspiration. (The short story: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro) Here was a person who was not only a mathematician, but also a novelist. She was the first lady to ever become a Professor of Maths in Europe and this was in the 18th century. There are a number of awards in her name to encourage girls to pursue Maths.

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I see a century and a half later, we are still limping along on this path, especially in the USA. Our minds perform best when challenged and when we shut off challenges, where are we? Fighting against preconceived notions has been a bane for many generations. This study looks at the effect Elementary School Teachers have on the children. Not surprisingly, if lady teachers were less confident in Mathematics, the girls tended to start thinking this to be the norm. The study touched a nerve because I have heard so many teachers confess that they are not great in Maths in Elementary Schools, when they shouldn’t be.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125172940.htm

What Maths needs is patience, practice and understanding. It is as much an art as a science. When equipped with the right sort of discipline, this subject is music for the soul. I was blessed in school to have teachers who brought out the joy of Mathematics in me. I can only wish the same for all generations to come.

Physical Google – Where are you?

With great advances in technology, the size of things produced has become smaller and smaller, while we seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Consequently searching for something in the house means ransacking the house more thoroughly than a bunch of bandits would. Why not keep things where they belong you ask? A fair question to anyone who doesn’t know the pride and joy the father and husband take in leaving the house a messy place. “That is what makes it a home, otherwise, it would be a hotel!” they proclaim loudly and admire each other’s sentiments and pat themselves on the back. I would pat them too, albeit a bit too hard for their liking.


I don’t know which animal it is that does this – I think it is a badger.(It is not an ostrich contary to popular opinion – the only pic I could find was of an ostrich though) Namely bury its head in the ground till the danger passes and then surface. I tried the badger technique the last time around and was quite unsuccessful. You see midway through burying myself in the hole and ignoring the whole search act, the corner of my eye caught a sofa being upturned. I don’t think badgers have sofa sets in their homes to be overturned while searching for something, but if it did, I think badgers would revise their opinion of ignoring events such as these.

I had merely uttered the threat idly because of I was tired of finding things that I was not searching for just then and not finding the things that I was searching for then. Little did I know that the threat would result in the house being turned upside down in the literal sense of the word.

All because the latest thing being searched for was a memory card. The size of my thumb.

Also, I wonder if you’ve noticed that the size of our belongings seem inversely proportional to our size. For instance, the youngest offender in our household, Tucky, is but a few months old, and he too cries when he loses sight of his possessions. But unlike our possessions, he does not need sofas upturned. He just has to look around the room – his possessions are there – loud, clear, big and bright. Whereas ours are dull grey, or better yet dirt colored memory sticks!

Just because we learn the art of camouflage doesn’t mean we impose this learning on our belongings – but alas, humans apply their learning everywhere. If Google could come up with a search engine for the wild, wild web, why not come up with something for physical objects?

Leave the old flush alone

“Can you imagine plumbers charge $50 for something as simple as replacing this lever? It takes five minutes to do!” proclaimed the husband holding up a black-ish looking object. I looked impressed. He was holding up a contraption that looked technical in a very plumbery fashion, not to mention that triumphant glow on his face. Having repaired the toilet flush when it acted up once before, I felt he was entirely justified in feeling competent in the general area of plumbing.

He started off at the end of a long, hot day after a refreshing shower. The flush in one of the bathrooms was having a minor hiccup. Once the water filled up, the water continued to leak without shutting off the water supply. This was because a lever that was supposed to tell the water knob to “Cheese it!” when the water filled up, wasn’t doing it’s job. I hovered around for a minute or two, and then loitered about the house doing the intangible, unnecessary things that I do. Then, I put the children to sleep; all the while listening to the water go on and off. By now, it was evident that it was no 5 minute affair the c.plumber was dealing with. I mean two children don’t go to bed in that span of time in our household. So, I went in to the bathroom – just to get a general status, you know – mutter the encouraging word and pat the tired back sort of thing.

What met my eyes shook me to the core. On the floor was the erstwhile dry, clean man that I love. He looked like the flush had whipped him a couple of times, while rapping his knuckles and making him kneel down in a pond of water. My heart bled for him, and I enquired. I must have sounded like a rattle to a baby, because I was given the situation in so many words. Pretty soon, I was kneeling down in the wet bathroom and oggling at a petulant knob with my neck corked at 22 degrees in the NW direction, with a cutting plier in my hands.

I’ve been meaning to talk to these architects about this. Why place these toilet flushes in a corner – why not in the center with a full view of all the knobs? While I struggled with the cutting plier and tried to angle the grip, I banged my head a couple of times against an inconveniently placed closet. The husband had replaced the lever just fine and while tightening the knob found that it was an obstinate one and refused to tighten all the way and stopped one turn short. Anywhere else, that would mean a creak, but with water it means an incessant drip, and could not be ignored. So, I tried my hand at it. “All I need is a small mirror to get a good view of the knob”, I said.

So, the husband handed me one. While calculating the length of the mirror and estimating the length of my hand, there was a difference of a couple of centimeters and the dratted thing fell with a resounding crash.

The children asleep in bed, the husband and I in the bathroom, the sound of a mirror breaking and the steady sound of ‘Drip Drip Drip’. All you had to do was turn off the lights, and I would have screamed. The experience had set us both on edge. I wonder how tightening corks and screws and things under the flush can frazzle one’s hair, but it did. We both looked like a ghost chased us down a scary lane in the middle of a cold wintry night.

Cleaning up broken glass in a pool of water has problems writ large all over it. To cut a long story short, we took out the new lever and put the old one back on to stop the drip. Then I cleaned up (without cutting myself on the shards of glass I might add), had a shower and came out to the welcoming cries of an infant demanding his midnight snack.

“I wonder why plumbers only charge $50 for this!” said the husband, and I agreed whole heartedly. The solution to the flush problem was a simple enough one – we just pulled the lever manually and made it do its duty forcefully.

“Leave the old flush alone”, is the new watchword in the house.

If Dear were dear

You know how you start to write a letter and automatically start to address the recipient as ‘Dear’? I’ve always pondered about that. Sometimes, I’ve written ‘Dear’ to folks I could not whole heartedly call as dears. In fact there have been a few where my imagination drew a blank at even trying to imagine anybody else doing so.

A case in point: There was once this man to whom I had to address a letter. He was a Deputy Sub Registrar of something in a government office in India. As is the practice, I had to use the opening “Dear Mr So and So”. But believe me, never have I found a man less dear to me in all my life. It may have been the fact that I witnessed the man at his bossy best. He was man-handling a sorry looking sallow faced peon without actually touching him. How is that possible you ask? Well, the man’s legs were squeaking under him and his knees were positively quivering with emotion, not to mention the stuttering and the silent unshed tears. He had a patchy pendulum like motion going. His body seemed to oscillate with the frequency of the deputy to the sub assistant head registrar’s tone of voice. If those aren’t symptoms of being manhandled, I don’t know what are. I asked somebody nearby what the row was about and he answered that “Saar” being an important person was entitled to get angry at peons like this. Apparently, the great power and responsibilities of being a sub deputy assistant registrar or whatever he was, was too much for the man to handle, and he was therefore entitled to behave in this appalling manner.

What I would have liked to do was address the fellow as an “Egotistic procrastinating shirker” (I had requested for something five times already, and had nothing to show for it other than carbon copies of my own letters.) The peon in question told me it is not a good idea to draw his attention to that fact – I had written a loving letter enclosing copies of all my previous letters and rounded off with polite sarcasm by asking him when he would be able to consider my repeated requests. Which was why my heart went out to the peon. He knew the man and his habits, and he had evidently saved my letter from being ripped apart in anger and the shredded peices joining the breeze on a hot day.

Dear Sub Assistant – my foot was my general feeling then.

So, it isn’t with too much regret that the practice when it comes to emails has shifted to the more informal ‘Hi’ – I don’t mind saying hi. with ‘Dear’, one had to use the superlative for folks one really considers dear. So one uses ‘Dearest’ for dear folks and ‘My dear dearest’ for dearest and it was all most confusing.

I would like to see the reaction of the s.a.d.registrar when the peon hollers a ‘Hi’ at him and asks for something to be done.

I sleep like a baby …

I don’t remember being an infant. I suppose most people don’t. But given my preferences now, I am not sure I would have enjoyed being the infant me. Well obviously, my parents tell me I was a happy baby, but I am just wondering. Let me tell you my reasoning…

Some people do it for economic reasons – it is their job, they get paid for it. Nothing else could make it worthwhile, especially if one has to do it everyday – day after day. So, they torture themselves and do it anyway. The night watchman waiting for something to happen in the still of the night while his eyelids are stretching themselves to see how much further it has to travel to close completely. It is a tense moment, another second for the eye to close completely when the sub-conscious, with that quirky permanence, reminds him of his duty and his neck jerks in that ungraceful manner and pulls the eyelids open again. There is little chance of conversation to help things along unless he chooses for his conversation the very person he is looking out for; a thief. I feel strongly for thieves too. It must be pretty rotten waiting with sleep gathering around them for the right moment to strike and then find a pesky night watchman jerk awake in the nick of time. I digress.

Anyway …. I have professed my love for the nightly snooze a good many times on this blog. I’ve sacrificed the restoring quite a few times – but I cannot pretend to love those long hours that stretch mercilessly through the night with a Production issue. I am not fond of interrupting my slumber by jerking awake. Yet, the call of duty is a tough one and I rise and shine … well rise dully and shine rather desultorily.

But infants have none of this. There is nobody paying them to keep awake. Not to be harsh or anything, but the world around them will function a lot better if they do sleep. Yet, you find these night warriors the most willing of folks to keep awake. They think nothing of going to that state of near sleep and plucking their eyes open. When sleep seems inevitable, they do what night watchmen cannot do. They cry themselves hoarse and awaken not only their senses but everybody else’s too.

Maybe the psychology of the thing to not do things asked of us starts early. When folks ask us to sleep, we don’t. When they ask us to remain awake, we’d like more than anything in the world to sleep. As for the adult me, I can do a straight 12 hour stretch anytime you ask me to – quite the obedient one what?

Well….till little Tucky learns to sleep like an adult, I get to sleep like a baby every night.

Sundaes: Sorry – what flavor?

My mother is an accomplished cook (A well documented fact in these chronicles). She came during the precious last weeks of my pregnancy and let her culinary talents flourish. Meals I prefer to classify as feasts were produced at the slightest drop of a hat. Then, I went into labour and had a baby. About the same time a terrible metamorphosis seems to have happened to her as well. There is a distinct degenerative trend in her cooking.  She spurns the occasional chilli, recoils from spices, and classifies half the vegetable kingdom as unfit for consumption. As if this weren’t enough, she upped the frequency of feeding me this cuisine. I only have to remain half awake to have some bland soup, or drink thrust at me with loving hands. The theory being that the extra nutrition is needed to feed the baby. She tells me of post partum mothers of the post Indian Independence era making ghee their best friend and drinking cups of it, while subtly deploring that I don’t accord it the same treatment. The general rule of thumb being that bland is the formula that is safest for mother and baby.

In spite of all this, there is the occasional discomfort that the newborn exhibits. Guess what this loving mother of mine does? After the immediate task of alleviating the discomfort of the infant, she then spends her considerable mental faculties evaluating and tabulating everything she fed yours truly in the past 24 hours. Then she proceeds to rank them by taste, and she boots the tastiest of the lot from the already shrinking list as the potential offender. Once, the tastiest thing I had eaten was an orange and they were on the potential list to be banned. They only survived because of my vehement opposition.

Why am I telling you all this? To prove that breast milk is one of the most thought about items on the post partum agenda. Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, great aunts are all full of tips on breast milk. So imagine my surprise when this rare commodity was featured in a news item alongside commercially sold icecreams?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/02/25/134056923/breast-milk-ice-cream-a-hit-at-london-store


To be teased as the cow in the house is one thing; to make a career of it quite another.

To follow up on this news item, UK banned breast milk sundaes soon after.
http://allweirdnews.com/breast-milk-sundaes-not-allowed/

One thing still nags me : who is the target audience for this icecream? It can’t be the infants surely ….

Angry Birds

Angry bird developers would do well to visit my home for a little practical demonstration of angry birds. There is one outside the home aiming his attacks at the home and there are several angry birds within swearing at the unfortunate bird outside the home. I know the situation makes ones head boil a bit, but all shall be clear in a jiffy. Here…

What does that look like to you? It looks like stained glass to me. But, when I look at a rose plant, and know that it is a rose plant, I will correctly guess the flower to be a rose. You know what I mean? The same analogy here. I know that is stained glass and maybe, that is why it looks like stained glass to my eye. I wish to give the bird a fair chance before judging it too harshly. So, if folks agree that it looks like flowers, I applaud the authenticity of the work, but deplore the fact that it should be flower patterned instead of a random modern art effect.

You see the bird that I have around my house seems to belong to a rather dim-witted variety. He (or She) comes everyday, pecks twice at the ‘flowers’, and finding no nectar blinks looking disappointed. Maybe, the learnings of its youth conflicting with real life experiences. We all have them once in a while. How your parents tell you that it is not okay to drink water out of a tap while growing up in India, and come to the US to discover that water from the tap is just what your Doctor prescribes for glowing health. Something like that. Mama birdie probably spent night after night telling stories of how she procured food and nectar. “Go for the bright colored flowers. They are the real stuff. You don’t want to spend time and energy going after the ones nature intended to be mere flowers, but did not endow with nectar.”

Hard to ignore this kind of ingrained birdic knowledge. Pretty sound theory for birds to pick up too. Yet this bird finds that his thorough application of these learnings yield nothing. Zilch. So, he (or she), pecks again – twice for luck each time. Then, the same thought process seems to surface – always with the same intensity and the same conclusion. I know the bird flies away for a bit, circles around and attacks from various viewpoints. How do I know? Because the silences are always approximately the same length of time and then ‘Peck..Peck’ followed by a scrapping of feet and a fluttering of wings.

I suppose he could try a different set of flowers around the place, but these are so strategically located. No need to alter one’s flying altitude – conveniently located at sparrow flying height. Brightest in the locality. It has all the factors going for it, except for being unnatural, and having a family swearing at repeated attempts to extract nectar from inside the house.

The only suggestion I have for dealing with the situ. may not be suitable: throwing a stone at it – just to get the bird to dislodge. But, birds are smart that way – they fly away, leaving the path clear to the stained glass window. I don’t think I have the time to deal with broken windows at sparrow flying altitude now given that the youngest bird in the house is also highly fascinated by the same windows, and spends his waking ogling at them.

Sometimes, inaction is the best action. I have decided to see how long it takes before practical experiences overtake theoretical application in birds.

Peck Peck – Got to go. Couple of things to finish in the next five peck attempts.