Couldn't agree more...

never before have I felt a greater urge to write while being faced with no time to devote to the outpour :( oh, summer! when will you arrive?

Hello, world :)

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot...

Home...

Looking back on the last day of my first term back in school, I can hardly believe that it was only a short 4 months ago that I moved to this new place I call home now. But is isn't quite home yet. Even though this wondrous city has welcomed me ever so warmly, and charmed me in more ways than I had imagined; despite the many highs and ample firsts of the term that went by, I have to admit I haven't looked forward to going back home and to family quite as much in many years as I have these last few weeks. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had fervently wished for a year to end and for a new one to begin either.
In years past, the end of a year would bring with it a sense of wonder at everything the year gone by had brought with it, and a twinge of sadness even at time's relentless march, quickly churning through the present to the recent past, and just as quickly to a more distant one. But not so this year. I am ready to flip the page, and kindle the dying embers back to a burning fire, bright with hope and cheer.
Somehow, knowing that I will be in the familiar comfort of home as I watch the year trickle down to its very last minute makes the wait seem bearable. Oh, 2011! despite everything you have taken, I am thankful for the smidgeon of courage and hope you have left behind. And thankful too, that you've spared me a few precious days to savour the pleasure of fingering the shape of words in my head with much reading, and even some writing. In closing, I offer you, these...

--

Year’s End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell

And held in ice as dancers in a spell

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown

Composedly have made their long sojourns,

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze

The random hands, the loose unready eyes

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

- Richard Wilbur

the write experiment

A recent article on being socially hyper-neworked, reminded me of two things.

The first.

No matter what the medium and how fast and new and convenient (add any number of other incentives), it seems that the onus of keeping communication alive can still remain as one-sided as it did in the day of snail mail. I suppose I should have learnt my lesson by now. But the eternal optimist in me (or perhaps, it is the love of writing in me?) persists. As a child, I took to the concept of 'Penpals' on Young Times (a supplement of Khaleej Times) instantly. Unfortunately, my pals' responses went from excited to tepid to none at all. My parents reasoned that clearly this was a lot of work to undertake for the sake of complete strangers. They had a point.

So, I tried again with best friends. As I had many opportunities to experiment with this variant of penpals, what with moving schools, apartments, cities and countries (with the last one, I was hopeful of adding to my other agenda of collecting stamps ;)), I figured this model was guaranteed a greater degree of success. I would studiously compile addresses before each move and set aside generous portions of my pocket money for stationery and stamps right after, and promptly send my friends a letter with my new address. Ironically, with this second model, the responses started directly from tepid and rapidly progressed to none at all. On occasion I would receive letters written by the respective mothers. Sigh.

As luck would have it, from time to time our worlds would collide again. And what had been painfully buried as a failed experiment would be dug out again, by a careless comment, such as "I used to love getting your letters. And then you moved." I would think to myself, at least they loved it. Oh well.

And then email arrived. I don't think I need to elaborate on the response rate with this new experiment. :)

The second.

Social networking sites have created a new layer of awareness. What was blissfully ignored is now dangled blatantly in your face. For instance, in years past, I could be completely unaware that a friend was in town at the same time as I was, but chose to call upon another/other friend/s forgetting me altogether. Now, I cannot. What's curious though, is a good number of these kind folks are the ones to have taken the initiative to search you up and add you as a 'friend' in the first place, leaving you with the challenge of trying to figure out if the person now sporting uber-starightened hair, a new-happily-married-last name, and an interesting online avatar is the same person you saw everyday in school a decade ago; posing the dilemma of whether or not to post birthday wishes on his/her wall; and the familiar response to your 'How are you? It's nice to connect after so long'.

Someday in the not so distant future, we might be able to surround ourselves with the virtual clones of everyone in our social network. I wonder what the communication experiment will result in then. A babel of noises? Or, perhaps, a shattering silence. Only time can tell. I do know that I will continue to write...and sing :)

As Arjun says, just breeeeathe...:)

a bar of soap

Little nuggets of happiness are stored in the most unexpected places. Yesterday, after an evening walk at the beach with my parents, Mom and I decided to stop at a road-side bead shop on the way back home, and stumbled into another store that had eluded us for many days. The store, (appropriately) named EcoNut, was supposed to house all kinds of natural, minimally packaged, organic goodies of the kind that is rare to find these days with the explosion of retail multiplexes in the city. As overjoyed as we were to have found the place at long last, I was even more thrilled to find that they stocked NEEV soaps!

A couple of years ago, a friend had brought me a soap handcrafted by a community of rural women in a village in Jharkhand; the enterprise itself had been set up to employ rural people while creating a more eco-friendly alternative to the most commonly marketed soaps. I was sold. But it was many months before I actually tried it out. When the most favorable conditions of discovering I was down to the last few drops of my body wash and no time to make a dash to the store coincided, I went hurriedly looking for that most curiously packaged bar of goodness. At the risk of sounding like a self-appointed brand manager for NEEV, I will proclaim that it was and is still, the most wonderfully moisturizing and refreshing piece of toiletry ever to have been made. Its fragrance (of that earthy first-raindrops-on-parched-mud kind) was so redolent that it lingered for hours afterward filling my senses at every corner of my apartment. Panic instantly gave way to the most luxurious bath I ever remember having. Alas, like all things material, that bar of soap vanished into edible oil. And with it went my morning thrill of being surrounded by its exquisite aroma.

Now, nearly two years thence, I have been reunited with this wondrous creation of man (& woman- please check out their website, they do some awesome work!). :)

a familiar strain...

the steady rainfall and the gusty winds reminded me of this, my favorite song from more than a year ago

ओ रे मनवा तू तो बावरा है
तू ही जाने तू क्या सोचता है
तू ही जाने तू क्या सोचता है बावरे
क्यूँ दिखाए सपने तू सोते जागते
जो बरसें सपने बूँद बूँद
नैनों को मूँद मूँद...

Ahh! Music, rain and a steaming cup of tea...life is good. :)

In the end

nothing ever quite pans out the way you or I may plan it. Okay, so this post isn't about to be as serious as it was made to sound with that ominous start. But I thought I would document it here, anyway, that I am now the proud owner of both The Razor's Edge and The English Patient. And yet I brought neither along on my travel; the snippet about the former turned out to be very similar to Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund (both excellent reads by the masterful Herman Hesse, by the way). The latter, a hard-bound heavy-weight, (all puns intended) was too heavy to carry in flight. I did have very pleasant company in the form of a vibrant Parsi community living in Mumbai in the mid '80s, all on print of course.

In the end, too, Madras isn't quite the inferno I'd feared it would be. It has been raining the last few days and it is almost comic how breezy and pleasant it is. Also, this is the first vacation in which I've been able to visit the beach almost every single day. Ah, bliss! :)

Did I mention, how, also, in the end, after weeks of planning a mini ten-year high school reunion, one friend fell sick, another's child did and 2 others canceled their travel plans altogether? Yeah. So, that's that. What I'd envisioned as two weeks of frenzied social activity turned out to be the exact opposite. But, oh, well. I'm not complaining. Surprises of this kind, are not too bad. After all, there's much movie-watching, reading and writing, eating, sleeping and a lot of not-doing-anything to be done! :)
So long!~

a suitable choice...

Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that Somerset Maugham (who, by the way, is one of my all time favorite authors) modeled the character of teacher in his novel The Razor's Edge after Sri Ramana Maharshi. This book (and practically all of Maugham's work) has been on my list of books to read for as long as I can remember and this piece of trivia does make it a very inviting choice for my next read. What's this post about then, you ask.
Well. Yesterday, I also found out that the Stanford book club is reading The English Patient this month. Also a book that hasn't budged from the same list for years. It was an entry made after an aggravating experience when the DVD of the movie version got stuck at what seemed like a pivotal point. Hmm...I must note here that I own neither the Maugham nor the Ondaatje. In hindsight, perhaps this was a question better saved for the Palo Alto Library to answer.
Oh, my dear blog! It must just be that I miss musing about all and sundry to you, then. Hey, there! :)

I am not sure if this is something that bothers any of you, but it is certainly a tricky situation that I haven't been able to resolve for myself. Here's the problem:
Have you ever been asked to lend a pen or pencil for 'just a moment'? I'm sure you have. Now here's what happens to me- the moment becomes eternity and the person all but forgets that the pencil is mine and walks away with it. The dilemma is, whether or not to chase after the person and ask for the pencil.
It isn't really about the pencil, see. It's a trivial thing. But it's about the convenience of the thing. Every time that happens, I have to go around the rest of the day asking to borrow a pencil for 'just a moment' and then also remember to return it!
Ack!!!
p.s: I haven't yet decided if the title ought to be 'A Pen-ny for your thoughts' or 'Penning my thoughts'. ;)

Have I mentioned lately, how wonderful it feels to sing? Well, it does :)

The rains have put me in the mood for music...
For the first time ever, today I truly enjoyed watching the rain fall in bucketfuls. And for the first time too, I listened to music all day as I worked, previously impossible for me to achieve together...and what's more, as I reached for my Rahim Alhaj Oud CD, I discovered an entire pamphlet inside which I'd completely missed on the umpteen occasions I previously heard this album! Not only did it contain a description of the Western equivalent of each Iraqi Maqam (or scale) for every song, I found in it Rumi's beautiful words that seem to so aptly convey what I feel today...
And so I share, this.

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
It doesn't matter.
We have fallen into the place
Where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
Rise into the atmosphere,
And even if the whole world's harp should burn up, there will still be
Hidden instruments playing...

- Rumi

On his birth anniversary

and on this day of 09-09-09, a beautiful quote just for you:

"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."

- Leo Tolstoy, From War and Peace.

September is Hispanic Heritage Month and... *drum roll* Self-Improvement Month- couldn't have come sooner for me :)

The Daily News 08/27/2009, Page A02


Random act of kindness balloons


BY LISA FERNANDEZ

Bay Area News Group

A lost wallet. A generous offer. A random comment on Facebook.

This odd recipe sparked at a Trader Joe’s checkout counter has yielded an unusual outpouring of donations totaling more than $ 2,000 to feed the hungry in Silicon Valley. And an energized group of virtual — and real — friends say this viral story highlights the best in human kindness magnified through the hyper- power of social networking.

“ I was blown away at how incredibly fast others had thrown their hat in the ring,” said Carolee Hazard, 43, of Menlo Park — the good Samaritan who started the good- karma phenomenon. “ It’s been incredible to see this grow and how excited people are getting. I have told the story to my friends and they say it gives them goose bumps.”

What led to the goose bumps all began Aug. 11, when hypnotherapist Jenni Ware, 45, of Redwood City realized she lost her wallet while standing in line at Trader Joe’s in Menlo Park. Her cart was packed with groceries. And she had no way to pay for it.

Waiting in line behind the frazzled shopper was Hazard, a retired Genentech biochemist and green activist, who had her daughters, Makenzie, 9, and Jessica, 7, in tow.

“ She was clearly in distress,” Hazard said.

And without thinking much about it, she charged the stranger’s bill — $ 207.29 — on her own credit card.

“ I was at a low point that day,” Ware said. “ I couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle. But I reluctantly accepted it. I knew I was going to pay her back.”

Being kind to strangers isn’t new for Hazard. Her husband, Jon, a senior manager of engineering operations at Google, said his wife sometimes pays strangers’ bridge tolls, just to see their surprised faces in her rearview mirror.

Hazard is also the glue in her neighborhood, both in person and with her Facebook community. When she returned from Trader Joe’s that day, she posted her vacillation on whether to feel “ very good” about what she had done or “ very, very stupid.”

Later that same day, Ware retraced her steps, and discovered her wallet at Draeger’s Markets. She wrote her grocery store “ angel” a check for $ 300. She suggested her benefactress treat herself to a massage with the leftover cash.

Hazard thought to simply return the extra $ 93. Before she did though, she turned to Facebook again. She asked her online community: What would you do?

Within moments, friends suggested she donate the surplus to a charity, and they mentioned several. But the one that seemed perfect for this occasion, since it began in a grocery store, was Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clar a and San Mateo Counties. Hazard loved the idea and matched Ware’s original $ 93 with her own. Then another friend said he’d pitch in $ 93. And so on. Even 8- year- old Maddie Campbell, whose mother learned of the story on Facebook, walked over to Hazard’s house with her parents’ $ 93 check. She also brought along her own 93 cents.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hazard said she had $ 1,309.90 in her hand and almost $ 1,000 more in pledges. Ware’s friends are now sending in money. And some out- of- state friends have vowed to donate $ 93 of their own to their local food banks.

Second Harvest executives couldn’t be more thrilled.

“ It’s just amazing,” spokeswoman Lynn Crocker said. “ The money is very significant. But on a personal level, to be so generous to a stranger, and the stranger reciprocates, it just warms my heart. It shows me that the majority of people are decent and kind and loving.”

Ware and Hazard are no longer stra ngers. They’ve become Facebook friends and they’ve made a realworld connection that will likely stay with them the rest of their lives. Ware remembers that she was at a “ spiritual low” that day in the grocery store, and Hazard’s “ tap on the shoulder” reminded her of God and good people.

“ My faith in humanity is just huge,” Ware said. “ It’s just a reminder that there are these amazingly awesome people out there. And it also reminds me of how good I want to be.”

and August is the month of Romance!~

The month of...

Ice cream!!!! Apparently.
Okay, this is not about my little VOTM actually, but I just noticed today as I was about to change the calendar page over to August before leaving from work, that there is a tiny caption hidden in a corner for each month that says what that month is (meant for) observing/honoring/celebrating. And I am so far behind, I thought I would list it so you might enjoy/observe in retrospect (or look up for next year :) ). Well, that's not entirely true, I think some have been popularized and duly observed, such as Black history month and National garden month to name a couple, but for the rest, here goes:

January: Celebration of Life and International Creativity month
February: Black History and American Heart month
March: Wome's History month
April: National Garden month
May: Older American and Asian/Pacific American Heritage month
June: Adopt a Cat month
July: Yes! Ice cream month. (I always knew it deserved a month dedicated to it).
and...
August: will have to wait until tomorrow ;)

Madras in Alameda

For anybody interested, the Phoenix Adlabs in San Jose provides quite the authentic movie-going experience, corrected to a b-grade theater in Madras in the mid-80s, the reenaction, wholly, unintended.



Perhaps I should begin by rewinding to the conversation en route to the theater on May 31st, to the screening of Margazhi Raagam. (To be clear, this post is solely dedicated to the setting of a unique visual and aural treat and has nothing, absolutely, to do with margazhi or raagam). N, S and I agreed that bringing the traditional kutcheri to digital cinema was indeed a novel concept; we mused about the endless possibilities for improvisation that this unconventional format for presenting Carnatic music might provide; what effects might they create? Oh! what magic and dazzle might digital surround sound add to this divine art form? And so on we went...B, wearing a sage smile the whole while, kept his own counsel.



Our collective imagination soared and with it our expectations.



"My parents saw it in Madras last year and the experience was really pretty good.'



"I would've liked to see it in the Dolby labs in the city; it sounded like it would be the ideal place for such an experiment...I wonder what the Phoenix Adlabs would be like."



"Well, considering they only picked two locations to screen it at, it must be good."



"Yeah, it must."



"I mean, why would they present such a format in anything but a place with superb acoustics??"



Seriously.



"Yeah, the entire package is supposed to be pretty neat."



...



"So, where is the theater exactly?"



"On the right, a few blocks down I guess; we're still at 1600, we need to hit 1400."

"I am sure we will see it."




"I hope there is sufficient parking."



"I hope we aren't too late to find good seats."







...



"Wait, it's this one on the right!"

"Really? Do you see a parking garage?"

"No...not really."

Hmm...




...

We had arrived half an hour early, as recommended. The 'Phoenix Adlabs', we discovered, was the more ambitious name for the imagined alter ego of what's also famously known as the IMC6- India Movie Center. There was a line all right, of the much-branched chaotic sort you see in any kind of Indian congregation. They could hardly be blamed for gathering thus; the hallway just past the entrance could have barely held more than 50 people wihout some serious air circulation issues.



The canteen to the left was just coming alive as we got there; trays of samosas, bought the previous day at one of the numerous Indian grocery stores, no doubt, were being unwrappped; a coffee machine, with dust gathering on the top and rings of dried decoction in the transparent carafe stared back at us. A narrow carpet that had been worn to the point of being indistinguishable from the flooring, led the way to the main auditorium. The side walls were adorned with centerpage Filmfare poster cutouts of a pouting Kareena Kapoor and a sultry Priyanka Chopra.



Have you ever been transported in time to a place far away from just a fleeting sensation? A familiar melody perhaps, or the sight of a scooter in PA or the smell of earth as the first drops of rain fall upon it? I was. Quite violently.

Having scaled back my expectations by several notches already, I was completely unprepared for the smell that welcomed us in to the hall. I was thrown back to a summer 10 years ago, to a small dilapidated theater in Madurai, where the smell of dried cowdung patties on the outside and the pungent odour of bathrooms just cleaned out with phenol mingled freely, not to mention the various other tantalizing aromas that numb the olfactory system in an Indian summer.

As we made our way into the hall, which I might add was very nearly empty, the odour got only stronger. We realized as we sat down that this most incredible stench emanated from the seats! Oh! How wonderful that we should now be able to carry back a reminder of this experience all the way home! As I looked up to entreat the Lord, the peeling blue paint on the ceiling only filled me with more foreboding for the rest of the afternoon.

...

The auditorium started to fill up slowly. Children scurried about noisily as the ground floor of Nalli was recreated around us. That was all fine and well, until popcorn cones arrived. Now, I don't know about you, but that was just not something I had imagined along with a kutcheri. Coffee, perhaps, but popcorn and soda? This added a zing to the already heady mix of fragrances available, mind you.



A good three-quarters of an hour later, a small group gathered at a podium to the front of the hall. The gentleman, who'd served at the make-shift ticket counter, the usher, and also briefly seen behind the canteen counter, took on the mantle of well, I don't know, the compeer. He literally yelled out to us, mike and all notwithstanding, (he was excited I could tell) how it was that SIFA came to host this screening, solely for our enjoyment. After the group was done exchanging mutual admiration on a job well done, he shouted out to us to be sure to enjoy. Now that the tone had been set, we only prayed that the light bulb glaring at us from the side of the podium would be turned off.





...

For the next two hours, our ears were digitally pounded and stunned by what was to be an exciting new experiment in taking Indian classical music to the next stage. We certainly had a thing or two to recommend to the distributors for future endeavours, the most obvious being a better 'lab' at the very least.

Having said all that I must end by adding quite frankly that it was entirely to the artists' credit, singers, accompanists, cinematographers and the entire team really, that we enjoyed the music in spite of IMC. A brilliant performance all around, and a testament to the fact that despite a frightening package, the music inside had all the power to transport us to a vastly different plane and to move us as only music can...