To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
Posted on | May 14, 2010 | 21 Comments
Everyday is blessed. Everyday is buried up to the tip of my nose with chores, I can barely breathe. But everyday is a joy, the joy of living life to the fullest, all thanks to my kids.
The greatest change that has happened to me after having a kid of my own is I started seeing the world thru’ my mother’s eyes, I started walking the long road of life in my father’s shoes. Until that point, in my adult life, I might have said or internalized it a thousand times, “Yeah, I understand the sacrifices my parents made for me, I understand their love is unconditional (by default),” and similar heavy rhetoric that made me sound responsible and grown-up.
The truth was I thought I understood “it”.”It” is a vague all-encompassing term standing in for the complex apparatus of life. When a new being was brought to this earth via the organic machinery of my body, all the faux-knowledge flew out of me, heavy philosophical statements that one is prone to utter in one’s breezy twenties became null and void. I realized that I understood nothing. Even now I don’t know much, but I am getting better at the process.
Being a parent adds a whole new dimension to understanding your parents. You may be a mother who birthed her child thru’ sweat, pain (and wonderfully easing epidural anesthesia in some cases.) You may be a father, an adopted parent or some one who is taking care of a fragile creature as a child, whose best wall of defense against the big bad world is you. The day you don this role of a child’s protector, you make the biggest leap across the chasm separating the two types of people in our world: airline passengers who snicker/glare/frown at passengers with kids and those who don’t.
Today I can comprehend my crazy mother(I thought she was off the rocker, blame puberty) coming home on 11pm train and leaving at 5am by the first train in the morning after making our lunch for the day (an Indian lunch made from the scratch.) Her place of work was in a town 150 kms away and I thought she was crazy to come and see us every other day of the week. I can be my Dad who paced our hallway ten hours non-stop during the nights long ago rocking my 2 year old sister who was suffering asthma at the time. He’d go to work in the morning without an ounce of sleep.
When I told the news of my first pregnancy to my ex-boss (a respected figure in her field of work) she told me, “I am proud of my work, it is invaluable, but my children are my life’s greatest achievement.” No wonder before women started having careers; they bore ten or twelve offspring without any complaint.
Mothers who are career women take a lot of flack for neglecting their home and children. I am one, my mother was one. Despite her frequent absences from home due to her transfers to far-off towns, I was plenty proud of my mother, proud to be my mother’s daughter. For she was the one with her own cabin in an office overrun with cubicles and men. I remember my mother’s colleagues, mostly men, prodding us kids, to get the skinny on who took care of children and cooking, and chiding my mother for marrying such a good home-maker of a husband.
The truth was my father hardly ever entered kitchen. As years passed my father would become more dependent on my mother for most everyday jobs with exception to his morning walk, newspaper reading, eating and tinkering with old gadgets, like most men of his age. My mother on the other hand has not slowed down, it scares me to think that she is not eternal.
But in the end it was me who made my mother quit her job and career, indirectly in a way. My mother took voluntary retirement to take care of my second baby. That is what children make us do, they change the hitherto known course of our lives. They make unsuspecting people morph into mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles and aunts.
Like most of her fellow beings my mother lacks a fancy name (ref:Shakespeare) or wild hair (ref:Einstein) to stay in human kind’s collective memory forever[;-)] As is the case with millions of mothers before her she has nothing in her to bestow upon the world that it hasn’t seen before. She will definitely flunk in the first round of The Best Mom in the World Contest because I’ve not been called to judge the said competition.
Her legacy is the emissaries of her values – us, her kids and her grand kids – a smattering of her gene copies dispersed to the wind of generations. We may prosper or wither or die, but she has done her part in the best way she can and is still doing it (thanks to Graham Bell & Berners-Lee.) Happy Birthday, Ammae!
Two Trees at Kualoa
Posted on | February 27, 2010 | 12 Comments
Kualoa is a regional park and beach on the windward side of Oahu. Kualoa (ranch) is best known as a film location for productions such as Jurassic Park, Mighty Joe Young, Pearl Harbor, Windtalkers, Godzilla, and Lost. 932487 places to go before you die, 1 down, 932486 left. Slow progress, progress all the same.
Notes from my rear-view mirror
Posted on | October 17, 2009 | 51 Comments
Paradise in those days of bruised scabby knees and wild hair was set in red laterite country. It had grandmothers who moved around in an ether of Ayurvedic oils handing out admonitions and sweat-meats with equal ease. The main citizens of this nation were a mob of tanned and rowdy cousins who would crawl out of the woodwork the minute we city-dwellers landed. Within the next few weeks we’d map every nook and cranny of the wild farmlands to the last earthworm and the last dragonfly (Dragonflies were particularly useful as these when tied with a string on their tails could be used as backhoes for picking up stones.) Our feet would tear fields and playgrounds to shreds as a determined sun watched on while vaporizing an occasional itinerant cloud.
…..and what you see above is a piece of that paradise. If it was a human this photo will be eligible to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages by this year. It doesn’t know what it is missing. But you know. You are looking for 72 virgins, swaying palms and cool emerald water that are notable by their absence in my dated version of paradise. Instead what you see on either side of the mud road are rice fields getting roasted in ample solar radiation typical of April in South India. A river which could’ve salvaged the otherwise dry and dusty frame hides a couple of hundred meters behind me, the photographer.
I took the picture with my trusted Yashica. A few of my cousins and my sister are in the photo. The two men in lungi are passersby. The photo has been tickled a bit by my funny photoshop bone. I couldn’t help but contribute to the mutilation of the photo already warped by time, weather, scanning conditions and a 13 year old amateur camera aficionado (I bet you just calculated my age.) The only person untouched in the picture is the man wearing thoppikuda (thoppi= hat, kuda = umbrella.) It is my homage to an extinct age when thoppikudas could travel inconspicuously in public without eliciting puzzled glances and when I was at an age, like the one perfectly summed up in this song,
It was always summer and the future called
We were ready for adventures and we wanted them all
And there was so much left to dream
And so much time to make it real
Earlier in the day this song (or rather the refrain, I do not know any song beyond their chorus) was making rounds in my brain. Sung by the beefy bard of modern rock ballads a line from it was adopted by automakers world wide and affixed on many rear-view mirrors. The automakers might claim it was the other way around. But I wouldn’t doubt the ingenuity of bards of any kind, from anywhere, whether from New World or Old Country.
I’ve unstuck a line from the lyrics and have pasted it on the photo. The rest of it is here.
..There are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark
I think he’s right behind me now and he’s gaining ground
But it was long ago and it was far away, oh God it seems so very far
And if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
Like Kenny in the song this photo has a cousin of mine who is with us no more (you can only see his brown legs, not his face) and there are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark…..I am thirteen again and it is summer blazing up in the lost paddy fields in far-off Malabar.
Paradise Geo-coded: the exact location where the picture was taken two decades ago
Deep Sea Fishing in Alaska
Posted on | July 21, 2008 | 45 Comments
If you could visit only one place in Alaska I’d suggest Homer in summer. It is not the guide-book or the celluloid Alaska that many are familiar with or expect to see. It is not noted for its In-to-the-Wild hostile tundra that would coldly snuff out McCandlesses. It is too warm for polar bears except those made in China and found in curio shops. It doesn’t have enough magnetism to charm some Aurora Borealis(s) it’s way. A winsome little fishing town pointing its geographical finger into the waters of Kachemak Bay, the only claim Homer makes is as ‘the halibut fishing capital of the world’.
I have been smitten with Homer ever since I visited the first time. Please click here to read an account of the trip we made in 2004, serves as a good Homer primer if you are interested. Last weekend we ticked off one of the must-do-Alaskan things, fishing for Halibut in the high seas. Before you dismiss it as ‘Bah, fishing!’ let me tell you I am not a fishing enthusiast either. I have fished for salmon before and didn’t find much pleasure in donning the waders and communing with a fishing rod for the better part of the day with zero results. Unless there is a salmon run(which is like Kumb Mela or the Carnival in Rio of the salmon kind) there is no guarantee that the rare masochistic salmon will choose your novice rod to impale itself upon. Unlike that, halibut fishing is a highly rewarding experience, it looks like no one returns empty handed from a halibut charter. If you have a heart strong enough to handle a few dead fish and bandwidth to justify your bravado,
Deckhand Tim readying the rod and the hook.
Meet the keepers Davy Jones’ Locker
Bar on a Mountain
Posted on | June 7, 2008 | No Comments
Winter in April
Posted on | April 26, 2008 | 36 Comments
Louis Vuitton Presents: Mikhail Gorbachev
Posted on | November 13, 2007 | 14 Comments
If all the newspaper images that affected my childhood could be condensed to the most memorable few, it’d be just a handful. Among them will be – Kapil Dev’s victorious grin holding the Prudential Cup, Rakesh Sharma floating inside the Russian space craft and the duo who were competing to occupy the driver’s seat of the world at the time – Gorbachev and Reagan – sitting, standing, signing, discussing at numerous conferences and summits, with or without Raisa and Nancy at their sides.
While Kapil’s and Rakesh Sharma’s achievements were the stuff dreams were made off, Reagan with his Star Wars, laser defense systems and MAD gave me nightmares. India’s socialistic leanings and the Russian patronization we’ve been receiving ever since Nehru got infatuated with the largest European country that worshiped the hammer and the sickle only fueled my worries. I was certain Reagan would do target practice of his missiles on India before taking on the real enemy. So much for being the sidekick of the Reds. The eight year old me admired my parents’ knack to be preoccupied with more prosaic stuff as housing loans and price rises and remain utterly unperturbed by the evil guy in the white house hatching plans to annihilate the whole universe. Atleast there was someone in the family who was doing the worry duty and they didn’t even thank me.
Gorbachev and his birthmark were my heroes at the time. Glasnost and Perestroika were useful concepts I had been advocating to my parents who were absolute dictators like the Commies Gorby was trying to preach sense to. Only that in Russian these concepts sounded weighty and people sat down and took note of them. To this day I believe that Gorby and Scorpions have a 50-50 share in bringing the Wind of change, which brings me to the purpose of today’s history rant.
After what seems like a lifetime I saw Gorby again this morning, in the most unlikeliest of all places – in a Louis Vuitton ad! (Yes I am late, news arrives late when you have to rely on sled dogs.)
It is not the first time Gorbachev did “I am in your capitalism eating your moneys” thing. He had done a Pizza Hut ad in the late nineties. Can’t blame the man, from his looks in this newest ad he could seriously use some moneys. The former President of USSR is pictured(taken by Annie Leibovitz) as traveling in a limo, the backdrop is what is left of the Berlin wall and beside him on the seat is a Louis Vuitton bag. There is a newspaper of some sort in Russian on top of the bag, which has given rise to plenty of conspiracy theories, I’ll leave you to make up your own. Meanwhile I express sincere thanks to Louis Vuitton for bringing one of the most important historical figures of our time to a magazine page near me. Long time, no see comrade 🙂
Woodside Park
Posted on | September 27, 2007 | 51 Comments
A few photos from the park next door – Woodside Park(Eastchester). Alaskan fall is predominantly yellow(I remember tko_ak mentioning that) and its slight variations. Not many flaming orange trees here.
2 more
Some Really Orange Mushrooms
Posted on | August 12, 2007 | 12 Comments
Fallen Idol
Posted on | April 6, 2007 | 26 Comments
A plaster of paris idol(severed head part) of Ganapati or Ganesha, the Hindu God of new beginnings and eliminator of obstacles.
(I had written another entry about My Maps feature in Google Map and made a custom map of Anchorage with videos and photos, but the video feature of My Maps is screwed up as of now. So might post it later once they rectify it.)