Heartcrossings

While cleaning my closet a few days ago, I found a book I had forgotten about for years. Zen Wisdom by Timothy Freke . This was a farewell gift from a co-worker. Meant to be daily reader, I found it hard to not read more than my allotted daily dose of wisdom. As a result of trying to take in too much too fast, I did not enjoy the book and it got put away somewhere. I am going to start reading again and hopefully I'll do it right this time. Don't meditate so that one day you will become enlightened. Meditate to make your life richer now. Meditate when you sit and walk, when you embrace your mother or care for your child. Meditate to bring joy to your existense - Shan T'Sing This was the quote for the day the book resurfaced in my life. I could not help thinking that the timing was significant. May be this is as the Buddhist proverb goes "When the student is ready, the Master appears". I must not have been ready of any Zen wisdom until now. Time will tell if I am re...

I read about Project Blanknoise in Ms. Magazine and felt immensely proud of the amazing women who started this. Growing up in India, a girl is cautioned about undesired male attention even before she attains puberty and after getting a whole lot of it in the form of groping, touching, stalking and leering they turn conditioned to accept it as a fact of life. Back in my day, I was considered dangerously bold because I stepped on the toes of a man with my stilettos in a crowded bus after being "eve-teased". He yelped in pain and I told him that was the only way I could stand unless he put some distance between us. My girlfriends were in awe of me but not everyone dared to fight back like I did. My aunt and I once slapped a guy in a crowded marketplace until our hands turned blue. A ring of silent spectators had formed around us. Several of them wanted to know what exactly the guy had done - such voyeuristic curiosity followed by complete inaction was typical. We did not expect...

My most recent Indian workplace experience is four years old now so I have missed out some of the hottest action in the IT scene there. But I was very familiar with the insane work hours and the absence of work life balance. My typical day started at 6:00 a.m. (to give me enough time for the commute) and ended at around 9:30 p.m. when I finally got home. I typically did not work weekends but most of my team did so regularly and without complaint. Though I was a single parent, I had family to help me with J and that was a huge blessing. There is no way I could have made it past the first year of my child's life without the support I had. My martial situation was an anomaly at the time but there were plenty of drifting couples at work. One woman's husband spent most of the year outside the country working onsite at client locations. She had a child about the same age as J and had her parents looking after him. Swapna and I went out for lunch sometimes and conversation would inevi...

Lindsey lent me her copy of He's Just Not That Into You . I had read reviews of the book before and was curious to know what the buzz was all about. It is short, easy to read and takes no more than a couple of hours to reach the last page. That's the end of the good news. For a book by a man that is supposed to tell women the honest to goodness truth about why their relationships suffer and inevitably fail, the analysis is flippant and blatantly one-sided. Life is not black and white as Greg would have us believe. Relationships are neither simplistic nor formulaic so any one size fits all theory (which this book is all about) is dead on arrival. Reviewers at Amazon who have given this book a one star rating have gone to great lengths about what is wrong with it, so I will not belabor the point. A good male friend once told me that to ascribe more sophistication to men than an unicellular organism is a huge mistake women make when they get into a relationship. The issue not so ...

This year on my birthday, I had J's friends trooping into the house with hand made birthday cards and gifts. One kid had made a bird feeder by gluing a plastic bowl inside a envelope and filling it with birdseed. This was my new bird-feeder. The other had a card with a picture of herself in the soccer field complete with a gap-toothed smile. I was very flattered to be remembered by so many cute little kids. J had already wished me, filled a bag with "treasures" - little notes of love and birthday wishes. Being a mom in a neighborhood full of kids brings unexpected joys such as this. I felt loved and grateful. Then late in the evening, I got a happy birthday call from Versicom. Apparently, my tax preparer had decided to wish me using this service where a recorded voice signs happy birthday to you . I am glad they skipped the personalization because I would have cringed to hear my name butchered. Since this was a first for me, I was amused at the idea. I would have not li...

When I look at other parents playing with their children, I wonder how do it - act like they were three again and do such a convincing job of it. The kids usually have a lot of fun with this kind of parent. This is a skill I just don't have and feel constantly guilty about not doing right by J. Another mom would have played Barbies with her, but I tell J to find something to do so I can finish reading my book or complete my chore. So when J spots a friend in neighborhood, she dashes at lightning speed to be with them. Bringing her back home is not easy either no matter how many hours she has spent with this friend. She seems perpetually play deprived. When at home, I encourage her to have conversations with pretend friends, dance to some music from our collection, color, read, write her journal - anything but ask me to play with her. J has heard me go on at length on the importance of being able to find happiness in solitude and how her happiness should not be dependent on somethin...

After the tide, followed many cat-paws breeze nudging water softly, without upheaval or event. And each time mistakes were made. New ones and riffs on old ones. All washing ashore like nothing had been before or since. The moon curved and filled in endless cycles as desire ebbed and flowed. Before a new tide, the sea is calm deceptively crystal. The familiar salt wind heads from the west golden and moist from the dipping sun Here is one last time before the sea gulps me whole.

White Light, Black Rain opens with scenes from present day Hiroshima. The vibe of the city is upbeat and very western. Random young people on the street are asked one question - do they know why August 6 1945 is a very significant date in history. No one knows. All it takes for a nuclear bombing and its aftermath to pass into oblivion from public memory is sixty years. Then we meet with the survivors themselves who tell their stories with amazing grace and stoicism. There are no tears or hysterics as they recall in graphic detail the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it altered their lives for ever. We meet a woman who has had six unexplained miscarriages, another one who has tumors erupt randomly on her body, a man whose flesh had melted away from his ribs to where he can see his heart beating. There is pain that goes far beyond the horrifying physical mutilation that they have lived with all their lives. They are called the "Pika-Don" people (survivors of the A-bo...

I saw this pretty desi woman dressed in a sunflower yellow shalwar kameez with turquoise details. The neck line was particularly interesting with turquoise beads and cutwork. She was the solitary splash of brightness in the monotone of blue jeans, sweat pants, khaki shorts and non-descripts tees at the grocery store. Like me, several others noticed her. Back home seeing women dressed in bright colors was so commonplace that I never gave it a second thought. I used to be like her once - dress in colorful cottons paired with terracotta and silver jewelry. Wearing a contrasting two-tone outfit like this woman seems very unnatural now. Not sure at what point it became difficult to feel at ease in the color palette that I grew up with and loved as well. Maybe being exposed constantly to the western color palette has alienated me from my native sensibilities. Even some of these beautiful combinations inspired by the masters lacks the warmth and pizzazz of a Indian woman's colorful attire...

I have been reading Candice Kelsey's Generation MySpace with mounting trepidation. Ever since J was born, I've had it in mind to take a long break from work at the end of her last year at elementary school. The idea (which may be completely impractical and hair brained) is to combine travel with homeschooling until the hormones have had a chance to stabilize and J has had opportunity to see how underprivileged kids live elsewhere in the world. The Buddhists have a practice I really like - that of sending their youngsters to the Sangha for a year. This would be my version of the idea - if a Sangha would accept her, I would love nothing better. We have been aware for sometime of the hugely lucrative consumer pool that the online tweens and teens present. It comes as no surprise then that products acquire personalities on MySpace and can be "friended" like they were a real person. The polls and quizzes trying to elicit honest responses from kids on taste, style, likes ...

A tsunami as it wrecks havoc blurs vision too but hindsight is always 20/20. Three months ago, Lipika was no less discerning of humankind than she is today or any less gifted with prescience yet the inevitable happened. In retrospect there were signs a plenty that she would have read had she known they were talking to her. Shaded by the rosy clouds of happy delusion, she failed to see the obvious. In having failed she is left with the detritus of an approximate relationship and a story to tell. In the final analysis there is no absolute bad. In a time when online relationships are getting to be more the norm than the exception, it is surprising how ill-equipped we are emotionally to handle the aftermath of failure. Indeed breaking up from a real time relationship has established conventions if not rules of engagement. Everyone is aware of the fifty ways to leave their lover. The in brave new world of cyber-relationships, there are undocumented landmines that one stumbles upon, hurts, r...

When I compare the quality of life for desi women home and abroad, its seems that that the grass could be greener on either side depending on their personal circumstances. This blog post has some interesting details. For a single woman in her thirties, the US may be preferable because it provides the much needed insulation and distance from inquisitive friends and relatives. She can actually have a normal life instead of being stewed in a pressure cooker to get married. Likewise for single mothers - she does not have to live like a social pariah for not having a husband. If you happen to be a your twenties and make good money, India can be very fun these days. Career opportunities abound and travel is often part of the deal. In the twenties, you are not old enough to be classified as "old spinster with slim matrimonial prospects" Chances are that you have a romantic interest and/or your family is match-making. These women are likely to have generous amounts of disposable in...

My tenderest, youngest love eighteen then now graying and receding. Only in dreams do your eyes hold the pale fire they once did. I seek your face in nameless crowds like a bright blob of red recognition. Ten years this August maybe seventeenth - a day whose minutes stretch for miles in memory. I asked you to define "this thing we have" Your silence buried whatever it was. And since then I have wondered, if I should have paused, looked back - maybe smiled. I may have had my answer.

Some thought provoking quotes on globality that will strike a familiar chord with expats anywhere in the world. I particularly love this one You cannot be international if you are proud of your nationality. I am only too aware of my desiness and my sense of belongingness to my culture and ethnicity. Should that context be stripped off, I would feel a terrible identity crisis. It would be nice to wake up one morning and no longer be conscious of one's faith, race or color. When you spend the largest part of you life in the country of your birth surrounded by people who are just like you, achieving that state is almost impossible. The best you manage to do, is to seek points of intersection with what you have little in common so can relate and connect. You stand a much better chance if thrown into an ethnic and religious melting pot at birth and left there to fend for yourself. You may emerge from it completely unaware and even unconscious of your "roots" but a have a ...

Since J started at summer camp, I have a new route from and to work . It winds through a wooded parkway and you drive at a languid 35 miles an hour because going any faster can make you a little dizzy at those sinuous turns. You slow some more as you near a large creek. The water is still and a lustrous green. The sun makes the tiny ripples glitter like sequins on emerald silk. On the grass embankment by the side of the creek are large flocks of ducks. They look uniformly well fed and content. Sometimes they amble across the road like time would pause for them just as you in your car do. I make the crossing ducks my excuse to linger longer than I need to along the creek, slowing down to a crawl. The signs for the interstate are less than two minutes away from here. The little slice of heaven between one highway and the next disappears like it were a dream. I have lived within a couple of miles of this creek for close to three years now and never knew of its existence until Mapquest tol...

Its always good to stack up on the good Karma while you still can. In some countries, when you are old you can trade your former goodness for money. This sounds a lot like sin-eating I blogged about a few days ago. Instead of a lifetime of bad deeds, the good guy takes on the points for someone else's bad driving. The system is obviously not smart enough to figure that a barter took place and the bad guy paid is way out of trouble. In India, petty criminals often employ beggars to do time for them in prisons. From the beggar's point of view this is a good deal. He comes into free food and shelter for a while - maybe some money as well. The bad guy does not have to deal with any interruption to his business. This might be an example of collecting the wages of sin and making a profit on it.

One of my co-workers who had a reputation for being incredibly hardworking and resourceful had suddenly started to slack off. At first it was showing up a couple of hours late in the morning or disappearing at the lunch hour and not coming back until much later in the evening. Later, emails would remain unanswered for days and he looked spaced out in meetings. He made up for lost time by working weekends and looked sleep deprived all week. Our manager grew concerned about him and asked some us who knew him well if there was anything she could do to help. It turned out that his wife had not been well for a few months now. Even after consulting an army of specialists and getting a battery of lab work done no clear prognosis had emerged. They were fast running out of time and money. Her condition was steadily deteriorating. When they were not in a doctor's office, they were on the phone with the insurance company to figure out how much they would have to pay out of pocket. The bills f...

My only experience with baby naming is that of naming J. Her formal name is a mouthful even by desi standards and everyone state side warned me of dire consequences in the school yard with a name like that. It would get mutilated horribly and beyond redemption. It would a life-long cross for the child to bear. She would hate me when she grew up for saddling her with something like that. I should brace myself to seeing my child turn into an out of control teen. Desis recommended that I tone it down to be more mainstream and not go near anything that was more than two syllables long. Meaningfulness was not of consequence, ease of pronunciation was of essence. The locals did not have any input on the kind of name I should pick but they knew that the one I had set my heart one was a disaster waiting to happen. I would regret my choice at leisure.I ignored public opinion and wisdom and had it my way. Until recently when someone asked J her name, she refused to tell it and expected me to do ...

I had heard about rudaalis (thanks to the eponymous movie by Kalpana Lajmi) and celebrants before. Today I found out about sin-eaters . Sin eaters and the custom of sin eating seem to come from Wales. Early descriptions of the ritual all mention the bread eaten over the corpse, as well as the payment of sixpence to the person assuming the sins of the dead. Below are two 19th century accounts of sin eaters. Apparently, a "good" Brahmin is also supposed to function as a sin-eater . I did not know this either. Not only does the 'good' Brahman model himself on the world-renouncer, but the status of the priest is irremediably compromised by his calling. So far from being a paragon of purity he is an absorber of the sins of his patrons, which are transmitted through their gifts. The perfect Brahman could theoretically 'digest' these sins without jeopardy to himself; but the paradox is that he is precisely the one who spurns the priesthood. There are more reference...

Reading this account of the demise of an old fashioned mishtana bhandar (literally the sweetmeats cornucopia) in Kolkata made me wonder what I would notice gone for good. It has been more than four years since I was there and it may be a while before a trip home happens. Coming back to Calcutta from elsewhere in India used to a comforting experience until the early 90s - you were never taken aback by change and transformation. The construction work for Metro Rail had been a work in progress for decades. On the way to South Calcutta to my grandmother's house, Rashbehari Avenue was full of construction detritus, makeshift dwellings of the workers, mounds of earth and huge puddles of water. The cobble-stoned road and the lane leading to my grandmother's house had been the same for over a hundred years. Time flowed at a slower pace the moment you got off the train at Howrah Station. You felt sorry for Calcutta's death and decay as you watched other cities around India prosper a...

Wanting to fly away with a helium balloon must be one of those universal longings of childhood only rivaled by wishing scenes from fairytales could come to life. Some folks apparently get to live their childhood fantasies and take off to the sky in their lawn chairs . Those of us who don't have what it takes to find a goose that lays golden eggs, or limber up a beanstalk to outer-space there is hope yet. We may win a few days working the job that was our fondest kindergarten dream. There is an Erma Bombeck quote that reminds us the importance of these often fantastic dreams and the need to act upon them even if childhood is far behind us "There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course. I've got dreams. 'Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box…"– Erma Bombeck

At first glance the idea of watering a virtual bouquet of flowers to keep it fresh seems clichéd and a copy cat of Tamagotchi and the like. But there are interesting spins on a well-worn idea like being able to embed all the bouquets you receive in your blog. You have incentive to water your flowers to keep them alive, the blog will likely remain fresh as well. It would only be a matter of time before the readership loyalty could be translated to masses of healthy and happy blooms. A quick glance at the flowers could tell the blogger and visitors how the blog has been faring.

I found a recipe for chicken roulade by chance and was so pleased with the results that I am on now a roulade cooking binge. Though, I did not follow a recipe for the whiting roulade , my version turned out pretty good. The fillets had been sitting around for a while because neither J and I care too much for whiting. I have too try the black olive paste stuffing with what is left over in the freezer. Next was tilapia roulade and that fared even better than the whiting number. J did not even know she was eating fish until I told her. I don't believe she has seen the last of my roulades yet. I will wait until she protests before I move on to the soups - specially the ones that use fish. It is ground I would need to tread with much caution because J loves soups just as much as she dislikes fish (at least lately). The idea would be to sneak fish into the soup without overwhelming it.

My town does not have one but the baby-sitting co-op is a wonderful idea. It is the village everyone needs to help raise a child and it is mostly free. The barter of time could naturally be extended to trading skills. One sitter could teach Mandarin Chinese in lieu of the other's piano lessons. The more diverse the community in ethnicity, background and profession better the opportunities for creative trades. More than anything, this gives children an unique opportunity to savor different cultures and lifestyles from the comfort of someone's living room. It challenges their comfort zone as they go from one baby sitter to a community of care givers.

If you have lived in America for even a few years you can't but help notice the one-line gems that show up of church marquees. While I have never been inside a church, I love this somewhat irreverent call to believers. Being that references to pop culture are rife, the message should get across to a majority of the constituents. When I compare this with my experience in India the differences are stark. You are taught early on that religion is no trifling matter. The gravitas can weigh you down. This is not to say that we could not have a close, personal relationship with God but when acting as a community reverence toward scriptures and rituals was of paramount importance. The church signs make me wonder if Hindus may benefit by allowing a certain amount of levity take over their religious discourse. Reading The Art of Living by Swami Chinmayanada in high school was the first time I felt my religion spoke to my condition in simple easy to understand terms. Not everyone needs or is...

Reading Ragweed by Avi is my madien foray into the world of tween fiction. I am trying to stay ahead of the curve so when J's time comes to speak in tween-speak, I can fully comprehend. This is a story about cat and mice, good and evil, haves and have-nots. For an adult it is easy to draw a number of parallels (a lot of them quite distasteful) between the story and the real world we live in. Like the rat in Ratatouille , Ragweed desires more from his life than the average rat and that is his undoing. The underdog (aka the mice) win in the end. Right is not decided by might but by strength in numbers, quick thinking, sense of community and organization. Avi's book reminded me of Haroun and The Sea Of Stories . I read it in my late teens and interpreted it as an adult would. It seemed like a parable for the Indo-Pak conflict. Though an intensely satisfying read, I wished I could have approached it with the wide-eyed wonder of a child and savored the fairytale elements in it. Wit...

Ineresting essay about how we envision the future for the society very differently than that for ourselves and our loved ones. " We tend to see utopia as relentlessly personal, while the apocalypse is one of the few shared universals. In other words, while we can posit a future for ourselves as individuals (and even as members of a family) we have little in the way of positive imagination for the realm of the social, much less the political." Fear of the future is apparently something that grows because media outlets feed it. The 24/7 coverage of bad news from around the world is hardly conducive to nurturing hopes for a happy and peaceful future. We imagine the worst will happen, the media seeks out just the kind of negatives that would align with our imagination until it becomes a virtuous cycle.

Mythology from across the world is rife with instances of half-human, half-beast creatures and you wondered where the ancients came up with such fantastic ideas. Looks like we are on our way to do much the same . The beginnings of modern day chimeras are incubating in state of the art biotech labs. The categories we've taken for granted—mommy, daddy, people, animals—are blurring. We're losing our innocence. But there's no going back to the days when humans weren't beasts and everyone had a daddy. Those days never existed. O brave old world, that has such creatures in it. It is hard enough to do a birds and bees lesson with a child growing up in a world where the definition of a "family unit" is fluid at best. They already know all moms and dads are not made equal. In the future a kid might find out that their tennis buddy with the mean backhand is the product of commingling a lion's genes with those of this mother. The kid himself may have come from the q...

The concept of 6 Billion Others is as beautiful as the aesthetics of the site itself. In a time when "I" is the society's reigning deity, this is a refreshing departure encouraging us to seek the common, unifying themes that join diverse cultures and peoples. The idea of mapping states in America to countries with similar GDPs is interesting in that it brings far flung countries together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Political and geographical boundaries turn insignificant in the context of their collocation. You wonder what might happen if borders could morph at will and regional tensions be eased merely by bringing in some new neighbors.

When I went to pick J up from Sirisha's a few days ago, she invited me in. Though we have traded bowls of sambar and halwa a few times, we have never been inside each other's home. Her daughter comes over and J goes to their place but our interactions have been limited to phone calls and short exchanges from the balcony. As it turned out her husband was out of town that evening and would be back only much later. This is not the first time that a desi wife has turned more convivial than usual in the absence of her husband. I feel like I am participating in something clandestine akin to an extra-marital affair had I been a man. I would much rather visit them when Suresh is at home but that apparently is a bad idea. So we got chatting about this, that and the other. Sirisha is back in the job market after a few years and is finding it very hard to land one. He wants the second income but does little to help her find the source of one. In the meanwhile, he controls the purse stri...

Creativity is not as generously rewarded as it should for a Java developer spending their free cycles doing OSS work. While it brings them peer recognition and admiration, it does not automatically translate to better job prospects or even career growth. The day job may still remain the mind-numbingly dull thing that gets the bills paid. SourceKibitzerBio seems to be a great way for these folks to showcase their contributions and get the well-deserved attention of prospective employers. A nice extension to the idea might be to mock-up real world applications which uses one or more of the components someone has in their portfolio. That would give the not-so-technical hiring manager a better grasp of how the developer's work can be useful to their business.

Read this essay by Madhu Kishwar about Indian women, their objectification via beauty contests, social standing relative to age, advantages to women in an arranged marriage and a myriad of related themes. While Kishwar makes a compelling case all around, she also reflects upon some unexpected and unintended consequences of her own actions. When she lobbied to abolish the elitist tradition of beauty contests in Miranda House in the 70s, she had hoped it would give the long suffering , second class behenjis (a desi allusion for homely, unfashionable women often without a posh address or a rich and powerful father) a level playing field. As she looks back, that was not what really happened. The beauty queens of the 70s have gone on to become third world feminists (maybe feminazis in their overzealousness) because they have kept up with the dictates of fashion. These women look chic in ethnic and head up organizations dedicated to South Asian studies. The behenjis have done what they were ...