Halloween

To experience the culture of another country, you have to do some weird things which might seem crazy to you, but is perfectly acceptable in another country. With today being Halloween and me being involved in celebrations at the place I work at, I found an interesting article which explains the origins of Halloween, its customs and traditions.

Compare this to tomorrow's big event 'Diwali' and you have an interesting study in contrast.

From philosophy, we move to real world events - kudos to Mahendra Singh Dhoni for a truly memorable knock during the 3rd ODI at Nagpur... maybe we should start drinking a litre of milk a day to emulate his performance against the Lankans. Way to go Dhoni!

The Human Spirit

Stumbled across these thought provoking photo essays in Time Magazine.

CAUTION: If you are disturbed by human death and suffering, i wouldn't recommend that you view the following.
One Life At A Time - Photographs by James Nactway
A Diary of Healing - Mary Ann Nilan copes with Breast Cancer

The best shrimp i ever bought

Finished that run i was talking about earlier. Headed to buy groceries with a friend of mine. He had run out of supplies and i had told him i would take him today. He didn't know that i was going to wake him up at 9 on a saturday morning!

I didn't really need to buy anything, but decided on replenishing my stocks anyway. I walked over to the seafood section. There wasn't anybody attending to customers when i stuck my head over the display of frozen shrimp. I really wasn't in a hurry and took my time deciding whether to buy any or not. One kind of frozen shrimp looks just like another - how do i figure out which one is fresher or any better than the other? There were salt water, fresh water and farm grown shrimp from thailand; each one of a different size. I decided to get the American shrimp - they were larger and had a gray hue.

While i was mulling over all this, an elderly gent walked behind the counter and apologized for not being there. I said it was okay and added something crazy, "That is fine, i was looking at the prawns anyway." I told him what i had decided on and asked for a pound (if you are ever buying unshelled shrimp, a pound is just enough for a single person - unless you have a recipe that calls for the shell too!). As he handed me the packet of shrimp he said, "Our competitor is charging only 3.99 a pound while our price is much higher. Just tell them that at the cash counter and they will match the price." I looked at him for a brief moment, muttered an awkward "thank you" and proceeded to walk away. He added with a smile, "You didn't hear that from me."

Time to run

Have to do a 10 mile run today. Why 'have to' you ask? i signed up for a training program for a marathon.

It is early in the morning and the temperature outside is around 45 F. I am tempted to go back to sleep. I am never awake this early. I had to drop off a friend at 5; that is why i have time to blog right now. My sleeping bag has never looked so inviting. Too late to back out now. I usually run with my roommate, who too has signed up for this. He is away for the weekend and there isn't anybody to drag me out of the door.

well... got to hit the road. hrmph!

Mani on the prowl

Mani-an Ode to Nikhil.
LANGUAGE: Tamil
CAUTION: This clip is not intended to be listened to by children or relatives of mine! Strong Sexual Content. Discretion Advised! (Everybody will want to listen to it now!).

Ramki on Wilma

My friend Ramki is in Miami. I called him to find out what he is upto, after Wilma. I wanted to do it in English but most of it is in Tamil.

I couldn't get ramki to say much, about Wilma, but plenty about everything else :-)

Rain, rain and more rain

This is without doubt the worst years in terms of natural disasters - tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods are hitting all parts of the world. Singara Chennai was almost washed away from the face of the map with a considerable amount of rain over the past couple of days. El Nino? or Mother Nature cleaning up for all the things we've done to her over the years?

Time to plant a few more trees instead of a few more bombs!

Extra!
Rains in Chennai

Shivram and me testing audio blog!

Audio Blog Trial

I just found out there is something called audio blogging! You call a US number and leave a message and it turns up on your website. Very exciting. You use your blogger account for this!

check it out; click here to go to the audio blog page.

Yin Quote for the Day

The roses, the lovely notes, the dining and dancing are all welcome and splendid. But when the Godiva is gone, the gift of real love is having someone who'll go the distance with you. Someone who, when the wedding day limo breaks down, is willing to share a seat on the bus.

-Oprah Winfrey

~ to balance the yang of badmash (and for yours truly to regain some credibility).

This week's badmash comic

Click on the image to see it in full size.
Very funny. Very true.

The Devil's Dictionary

Compiled by Ambrose Bierce in the early 20th century, it puts a twist on words - here is an entry

ACCORDION, n.

An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

The copyright has expired and you can find it online at many sites. Click here for one. Have fun.

Ramki meets Wilma

Wilma (the hurricane and not Barney's wife) passed through Miami on Monday. Ramki decided to bunk it out at his friend's place. He ,after a long set of events, headed home last evening. His roommate told him power had been restored. Unfortunately for Ramki, power hadn't been restored, all the palm trees that formed the scenic view from his apartment window had been erased and the alligators in the nearby lake were having a wet t shirt contest.

By the time Ramki could take all this in, it was too late for him to head back to his friend's place again - there was a curfew in effect. If you ask, how long could it possibly take, consider this. Ramki on an average takes 3.45 minutes to decide on a can of milk and 2 minutes to pick out a loaf of bread. The both of us spent half an hour in publix buying tomatoes, green chillies and a bottle of port wine. We were walking up and down publix like the bunch of dodos in 'ice age'.

Hope he does ok. On a side note - Publix, the one next to Ramki's house, makes excellent Guava pastry and Colache. What is priceless is Ramki's spanish -he inists on talking to ladies at the snack bar and the counters in spanish. He tried teaching me some "mamasita" and it came out like "mama.....sita", two separate words; the first one being uncle in tamil and the second one being the better half of one of lord Vishnu's earthly incarnations.

This class just got nuttier

The professor just dove into a bunch of crazy equations and i forgot to bring my swimming trunks! Help... i am drowning in regression analysis...

I actually blurted out something in class now - i usually keep my trap shut. I was typing here and the professor was posing a question to the class. I blurted out something, unbeknownst even to myself! The professor asked me to speak up and i repeated what i said. It was the right thing. phew! he must think i am typing notes furiously :-)

I went back to typing this entry - and the professor is nodding in silent approval. I hope he doesn't surf blogs.

Sitting in a boring class

I am sitting in my finance class. Real boring. I decided to take my laptop along. Now i surf the web and check mail in class. The class actually got interesting once i started blogging :0)

The day has been nice so far. Can't wait to get out of this class and go home. The professor is talking about some 'Warren Buffet'. Looked him up online; supposedly the second richest man in the world.

will get back to trying to pay attention!

Victor E Frankl

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

---------------
Choosing one's own way; attitude; perspective; freeing your mind; i find them in almost every book i read. Amit was talking about a Deepak Chopra book that he was reading that meandered around the concept - but he wasn't impressed. I guess Frankl's book should be a better read (check out the link under 'people') - eventhough i have yet to read his work i am impressed by his resilience - for a man to spend 3 years in a concentration camp, loose his wife and still go on.

Adversity

Discarded chicken scraps bought from a restaurant barely make a meal for Untouchables in Bihar, one of India's poorest states. These villagers belong to the Musahar, or rat-eaters, caste, its members known for hunting rodents. - William Albert Allard (Photographer) in NGM.

"Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight... when we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another."
- Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

Like so many other aspects of life, i see it, but choose to do nothing; pretend it doesn't exist and then going about trying to create 'meaning' in a life that lacks substance. why? Fear? of what?

Attachment

"Among virtues, freedom from attachment is best."
- Dhamma Pada, 20th chapter, first verse.

"If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work."
- George Orwell

If i took the two arguments without considering where they came from, they represent a contradiction. If i did consider their contexts, i cannot find a common truth embedded in them.

Here it goes. It is of a general belief that religious tradition in Asia tried to give hope to people who knew nothing but poverty and suffering. Hence most eastern philosophy stresses on renunciation and ways to escape the 'illusion' that life is. The 'fact' that all the suffering people went through was only 'illusion' gave people hope. Their new quest was not seeking joy in this world but in the next. Their salvation would be freedom from rebirth; something that had to be avoided at all cost.

Most Abrahamic religions(Judaism, Christiniaty and Islam to name a few) seem to deal with compassion and codes of conduct. They seem to address problems on a social level and are far less esoteric when compared to budhism.

If i did not make this geographic distinction, i have then, two different schools of thought saying exactly the opposite things about the issue. Does it then become an issue of personal choice; to what school you choose to adhere to? In that case, is there nothing that is absolute?

For the moment, i think the following should suffice :-)

"... How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet."
-W.Cowper

Beauty

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting--a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion.”
- Margaret Cho

For a long time i tried to believe that beauty was indeed an illusion. It was probably an attempt by my psyche to reconcile itself with all the beautiful women it chanced to gaze upon. But is not youth, in any form, beautiful? But there are a lot of pithy sayings that remind you that the beauty of youth is just that, something that belongs to the transitory phase of being young. Taking it one step ahead, the next thing you will hear is that we are all dying from the moment we are born.

This is indeed a very pessimistic view of life. We have only one and it is too precious to spend it rejecting all that it has to offer. Does something that is impermanent not worthy of being called beautiful? If so, nothing in the world is beautiful. Both you and I know that is not true. I do not talk only of the human form here, but everything that you have ever experienced that made you feel more alive - an orange sunset, trying to get a hold of a 100 pound dog that thinks it is still a pup, your favorite bit of music - these are not illusions.

Philosophy goes so far as to say that the world is 'maya', an illusion; because it is impermanent. I do not know why there is a fixation on permanence. Nothing is. Why should something last forever? Every flower withers and dies. Every building ever built will return to dust. So will we. Everything that we feel will be lost in time. Aren't we all part of an on going process? Isn't life a string of such moments woven together?

Zen doesn't think so. It believes in centering yourself, to a more permanent part of your conciousness. Having no experience with this, i won't be too hasty in rejecting it.

Do we reject beauty because we reject change? It is a common human condition. We don't like to grow out of the comfortable niches we have carved for ourselves ( i am the poster child for seeking comfortable corners). If we accept beauty we must then accept change and flow too. Maybe that is too scary? Probably this is why 50 year old women get botox shots and use half a pound of foundation on their face?

The male archetype is supposed to prefer permanance while the female archetype flows and changes. I say archetype because all of us supposedly have both, in different or the same proportion. Much of human philosophy is male oriented. I am not familiar with feminist literature but feminism in general tried to supress the female archetype so that the woman may compete / supersede the man in man's world. There is a focus today on changing the world and not the woman. Maybe philosophy that arises from a female archetypal thought would throw more light on the issue?

Death

"Just Look!
Even the blossoms that are destined to fall tomorrow
Are blooming now in their life's glory."
- Takeko Kujo

Many people i know do not like to talk about it. Especially from an Indian perspective, death is not something that you talk about. I will not debate the issue of what happens after death. It is a realm that we cannot see and whatever your belief, it is personal and not up for discussion.

It has been almost two years since my grandfather passed away. He was my mother's dad. He was a doctor. When i was young i used to go with him to the clinic and sit outside his door as he took care of his patients. Half way through, we would stroll out for a break. The clinic was located right in the middle of usman road, T.Nagar ( think of mardi gras with clothes on - in terms of number people, nothing kinky). The both of us would have a Duke's lemonade and something to bite on and then he would buy me anything that i wanted and we would head back to clinic to wrap things up.

My father's job called for us to hop from one place to next and we had to leave Madras. I spent most of my summer holidays at my grandparents in Madras. I used to spend my afternoons chatting with him. A particularly animated discussion on the difference between hydrocele and haematocele is something that i will never forget. I think it was something to do with the fact that he was a doctor. He could discuss sex and its accoutrements in an instructively plain manner; something many cannot do.

Before i left the country, he visited us in Madras (by this time, he had moved to Salem and we to Madras). We had a lot of fun together. I was all grown up and we were having a nice time with bad language and a lot of innuendo. My mother was furious with me but my grandfather told her to let it go this time as he was having the best time he had had in years. He said he felt he was feeling much younger. I am sure he was holding out on me, but i had to believe him.

The next time i saw him, he was clinically dead. A stroke had put him into a coma and a ventillator was pumping air into him like he was a tire tube with a puncture. I couldn't gather enough courage to even touch him. I always felt that the person lying before me would somehow wake up and say 'hi' if i touched them; as if they were only sleeping. This scared me and still does. My grandfather passed away a couple of days later.

Probably the only thing i felt was shame. Strangely no sense of loss. My mother's side of the family is very strong. Even so, my grandmother was shaken to her core, but held herself together. My mother would break down at times, momentarily but would pull herself together. I couldn't even touch him! It kept going back and forth in my head. I was born prematurely and was no longer than four to five inches long and covered with wrinkled skin. According to my mother, my grandfather was instrumental in making sure that i made it. And now, i couldn't even hold his hand.

I am not haunted by it. I am only trying to understand why i acted the way i did. Was it because i felt than my grandfather was no longer alive? What then is being alive? Life has to be something more; Is death nothing more than wiping a hard disk and tossing the hardware out for recycling?

Why do we mourn death so? I wonder if it is because of the sense of loss we feel in the world that we have lost someone we loved or that it shatters the illusion of stability that we create for ourselves. Read somewhere long ago that the only thing we know for certain from the day were are born is that we will die; we know not when or how but we know we surely will. To live with this thought in your mind; really consider it everday allows you to value the time you have been given. This doesn't work with me. Apparently, it does wonders for Steve Jobs.

Lonely world

How many people do actually want to read what WE write individually / as a group here and I dont mean people who stumble across while browsing the blog site and of course excluding ourselves. So is this our attempt at a time capsule and leaving some mark on this world ? Or is an attempt to amuse ourselves over our antics.

See Vikram - this is what happens when pigeon shits on your thoughts. BTW who else are members ?

A

As if explanation necessary

Splachack (spluh-chack) - and its explanation.

Opinion - I know that blogs are meant to be personal voice boards and anyone can say whatever they want (hyperlink: US first amendment - before which everybody got smacked for saying anything a-la Ganguly Chapell episode or like when I say something about my in-laws).

But this first post by Rita's X boyfriend, kinda made me feel that some pigeon headed guy wanted others to feel crappy or possibly experience what 1 year old kid feels when they drip their cerelac all over their face and shirts.

BTW Vik - congrats on decoding my opening salvo :D

A

whatcha say u?

"In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny anymore. Economics is destiny, Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects."

-The Satanic Verses

will discuss this further later; will let if grow on you a bit for a while.

meaning

if you are wondering why the site is named thus, try comming up with names for blogs :-)

Splachack

Splachack (spluh-chack) - noun

The sound that is usually heard when a soft body is squashed/falls against a hard surface resulting in possible loss of physical integrity.

"splachack fell the bird droppings. Ramu looked at his blue shirt, that now looked like the turbulent sea; all thanks to the few hundred pigeons flying overhead."