That special month.. that special day!

November is almost over.

Three birthdays done and one more to go, in this family of all November borns.

First was the little ones birthday, which was celebrated the usual style with a small group of her school friends, sister and cousins at a local "paint your own ceramic" place. She had fun, getting two dresses for her birthday, dressing up, distributing cup cakes etc. We are going to miss this phase soon as our little girl is already eight and has a mind of her own. 

Next was Jr.'s turn. She had a deal. If we skipped a birthday party (which we were not planning to have in the first palce.. we had told her "you get a big party for 10th, then 13th and 16th.. nothing inbetween!") she will get my hand me down iPhone and I get to spend the 200+ bucks to upgrade to a new iPhone. So we ate out at a place of her choice and called it a Happy birthday. There are no birthday photos this year for Jr. ! Here she is, all grown up, at the little one's party. 

My birthday gift to her was a book "Indian Melodies for the Alto Saxophone" which had western notation for most of the entire Carnatic music series with Geethams, Varnams and some Keerthanais. The best part is that the book came with a CD where Kadri Gopalnath performs the lessons on an Alto Sax, so we know what it is supposed to sound like. Jr.' loves it compared to Daddy's hand written notations. We strongly recommend this book for other folks who are learning Saxophone in the Western style trying to do Carnatic music songs. There will be a video of her doing some songs later this week if she works on it. I call her "Nagubaby" in hopes that she will play one of my favorites "Nagumomu" and so far she is givng me the nasty look. 

It was going to be a hit or miss for my birthday as my travel plans were in flux. Last minute we found that I was going to make it back home, just before my birthday. The family was all happy with that news. There is always the plans and reality. Got a massive food poisoning event at the last meal on the trip, that pretty much wiped me out. It was a miracle that I made it back, on a long flight, all weak and throwing up. 

Got out of bed to throw up and saw it was 2AM. Wished myself a happy birthday and went back to sleep. My entire birthday was a blur. Mostly slept through it on a Gatorade and water diet. This is the first time I opened a birthday with throwing up. Well, there is a first time for everything!

The last few days has seen some improvement with bread and yogurt rice becoming part of the diet and so far they have stayed down. It is going to be a long and slow road to recovering from this one as my ability to smell or taste things is gone. 

Even with all this going on, life is not without a lighter side. A few days ago, I felt barely alive and was half asleep fighting my stomach and lying down. It felt like a dream. A small hand reached out into the comforter, pulls out my right thumb, presses it down somewhere and places my hand carefully back in position. When I woke up, realized it was the little one "opening" my iPhone using my thumb print, to play games! Reminded me of the villains in old Tamizh movies who get the dying man's thumb print on a document that wills away his farm!

We are now down to San's birthday which involves "more travel" as part of the birthday gift. Prayers are already in effect for me with family and friends so I recover fast. Someday I will write a book for folks with food allergies as a "travel guide". In the meantime, it is time to go back to sleep and get back to normal! 

Musical phone

Jr. has been encouraging me to go for the iPhone 5S since the day it was released. We even went and stood in line at the local Apple Store. There were 100 guys still in line for the 33 remaining phones in the store. We left after the "line keeper" lady gave us the scoop. Apparently she said the same thing to all the other folks in line! So they were all hoping that somehow the folks in front of them magically drop off? The takeaway from that experience was "we live in a world full of hope" and "always do the math before standing in line the next time".

We learned later that Jr.'s real motivation for daddy getting a new phone was to get my iPhone 4 as a hand me down. At every opportunity she reminded me (her mom is made of tougher stuff and they both know it!) that she is now a middle school going girl, all her classmates have their own phone, how she "needs" an iPhone, how it is going to make our life easy etc. etc. 

Finally we went to the local store which promised an exchange program of sorts where they give you money back for other Apple products. We took with us an iPhone 3GS and an iPod which my BIL had gifted San with a personal engraving. San loved the engraving so much that she decided to store the iPod and pray to it daily than play it. So the thing died without being used.. or so we thought.

The story guy powered up both devices and declared "you get 2$ for the iPod and 5$ for the iPhone"

I said "really? 2 bucks?" and he goes "you would have got $2.60 if it was not engraved!".. btw, the battery is not dead, it works fine!

The little one put the headphones on and declared "This is awesome! such good sound and it is like the entire iTunes is in this little thing! I am going to use it.. " and has been inseprable from the iPod since this discovery.

We told him to give the 3GS back. I might as well keep it at home and pray to it instead of parting with it for 5 bucks. 

The phones are all set. I now have a nice 5S and Jr. has the 4 which she has been customizing since morning. In other words, she is removing all traces of me from that phone and is succeeding rather well. 

I told the little one "You see this 5S.. that is what you are going to get in 3 years when you go to middle school". She was not impressed. 

Oh yes.. forgot all about the title.. It was not just a take on Musical chairs. The new phone and the 4 have been updated to IOS 7 and we as a family love the iRadio. The clarity is amazing and the song selection so far on the Bollywood channel is nice. For some reason it plays so well on bluetooth in our cars on the 5S compared to the 4.

I was on the fence on this purchase even after I was already eligible for an upgrade for more than a year.  

Was a good decision to wait for something after the iPhone 5.. 

Good job Apple! 

That was Jr. inaugurating the camera on the 5S. Considering the background was so bright, would have expected a washed out pic on the 4. This one practically took a High Key image.. Nice! 

Now I have higher expectations three years from now.

Knowledge is power.. looks like it!

This post may not make sense without a preview.

Almost two years ago, after realizing that the whole object of the physical aspect of Yoga, was to condition the mind to do better things, had tried a few meditation experiments which had weird side effects!

You can read about them here..

This blog is not new to my thoughts on Knowledge, higher learning and how it links to the way I was raised etc.

Recently, in an attempt to know more about the meditative aspect of Yoga, yours truly stumbled on a video link on Youtube, where Sadhguru a self realized mystic, talks about meditation, spirituality etc. It was an hour long talk recorded at Dartmouth.

Since watching that video, there was a wish to meet Sadhguru in person. Last month, we saw a booth at a local Indian festival where Sadhguru's organization "Isha" gave us a flyer that anounced his bay area visit will include a three day lecture on Inner engineering and also teach the "Shambhavi Mahamudhra" for all the attendees who make it to the last day.

This happened to be on the weekend of the Navarathri festival. After a lot of negotiating with Sangeetha and the kids, they agreed that I should go, because it had been a wish for quite a few months at that point. So off I went to meet Sadhguru and missed Saraswati pooja and Vijayadasami.

Sadhguru was as charming in person, as he was in the Youtube videos. He mostly spoke of common sense things, which we all know deep down but refuse to see head on! At least, that was my take on it.

The 2 1/2 day event was from Friday 5PM-9PM, Saturday 8AM to 7PM and Sunday 7:30 AM to 7:30 PM. Friday was a long talk by the mystic. Most of Saturday was spent on teaching folks preparatory exercises to get the spine in some shape, as well as the breathing to some sense of control before the Mahamudra was to be attempted. He taught the Shambhavi Mahamudra as the grand finale on Sunday. 

There were lot of breaks, good music and some dancing to keep the participants engaged on Saturday and Sunday, so that the food they ate made it past their stomach, before more exercise could be tried. It was a relaxing weekend for a lot of selfish reasons. For some strange reason I got visions of staring at snow out of a Days Inn window in Bloomington, Minnesotta after sitting in the same spot for a good hour listenting to Sadhguru talk.

Here was my take from the whole event.  I am going to review this, the way any "event" or "movie" has been reviewed in this blog. It was exactly that, if you looked at it as a participant in a self help workshop that my former employers have sent me to in the past. Be it a speed reading course, precision questioning and answering course or an interpersonal skills training management workshop, or for that matter a Hatha Yoga all day workshop aka Posture clinic, at the end of the day, you come out with some critical takeaways on how to do something and know what works and what doesn't!

First, the good part!

All those side effects I had experienced when trying to do something along the lines of Shambhavi, by following other Online Yogis, was to be expected! The white lights, the blinding flashes in the point 1/2 inch above the spot between my eyes on the forehead, body going through froglike convulsions, tears flowing on their own etc. wer okay and nothing to be scared of! My body experienced happiness and clam and these were initial physical manifestations of that and nothing more.

There are different teachers who have their own methodology for getting you to do this. Some folks ask you to lock your breath in after doing a series of breathing exercises (called Pranayaamas which literally means "to elongate the breath"), some make you do it while attempting to disengage all sensory organs and some folks expect you to just jump up like frogs to get you kick started into a "state of happiness".  Think of the last one as starting a car and then giving it some gas vs. pushing a car down a ramp and sparking the enginer. As long as the sparking and the movement overlap within a short time, you get to go places! 

The good news is that now I know one safe and tested way to do this meditation. So far it is working, as far as calming me down. It works especially if you do it after a 90 minute Bikram Yoga session, where your body is literally in pieces and your breath is clam after the class. Sadhguru referred to this as "Accumulating Ojas" or "Stealing from the earth". Have been doing this "garnering Ojas" exericse once a day and will continue to do it on a regular basis whenever I finish a Bikram Yoga class, travel permitting.

To express it in my own nerdy way, it is like formatting a section of my hard drive which has a lot of garbage files in it. The breathing and meditative part of the 21 minute routine (which is like a 11 mintue sub-routine) cleans up the head nicely of thoughts, positive or negative. It is a brain reboot of sorts. I am reasonably sure that western science will catch up to this and find out eventually which part of the brain gets a flood of oxygen and is subsequently starved of oxygen to get this whitewash effect. I will volunteer to be a subject on this study as well. 

Also learned a few interesting tidbits of information from Sadhguru during his two hour long informal talks to keep the audience engaged. Facts do not make knowledge but intellgience does, and Sadhguru seems to follow that. Nevertheless, there were lot of facts.  Some of those were :

- The three primary sounds are Aaa Oooo and Mmmm which are the only sounds you can make without a tongue. All other sounds are made of combining these three sounds just like all colors are made of primary colors. This is why AUM has a symbolic representation and is chanted in India as part or meditative practice. It is distored to OM in South India and that makes us forget the significance of Aaaoooommm!

- There is a reason why the number 108 is used in counting repetitive manthras and chants. The ratio of the distance from the Sun to the diameter of the Sun, ratio of distance from Moon to diameter of Moon are both 108! I did verify this to be a true fact and surprisingly it was never mentioned in any of my science or math classes. Still do not know if the 108 was to remind us of some astronomical facts or there was more to it but it was interesting. I tried to do a spreadsheet with distances of planets to the earth and their diameters to see other patterns and did not find any. So this was all the more of an interesting coincidence that people 4000 years ago had figured this out without modern day telescopes.

- There are certain foods that help you when you meditate and some that deter you. Now this part I could figure out by myself while doing Bikram Yoga. Having food allergies and doing my own tests to instinctively avoid foods that caused my breathing to deteriorate, had helped figure this out. Most of what he said in this part of the talk had already been put in place at home. 

So that was the good part. 

Now for the sad part!

With every person who achieves something special in his/her field, be it a movie star, a world famous scientist, a religious or spiritual guru, certain things seem to be inevitable!

First, the person ends up becoming a public figure, if he/she proliferates a message to a wider audience.

Next, they cannot do this alone. The thing doesn't scale without a pyramid scheme of sorts.

This is usually followed by an organization that is built around the person or the message.

Finally this organization then takes on a life of its own.

The seed that grew into a banyan tree is now taken over by many creatures and at some point what seemed to be a nice small tree that miraculously sprung forth from the seed, is now spanning hundreds of square meters and has rotting branches in places, that coexists with birds, critters and people who come to enjoy the shade. 

Be it a rabid SRK fan club, a bunch of scientists who hang on to some all time great's papers and research even if it violates the very principle of what true scientific enquiry is all about, the Crusaders, Jihadists or Hindu militia, they have a similar issue.  

When anyone who gets enlightenment (you can even take this down a notch and say accomplishes something extraordinary) wants to show you the light by holding it up, there are three types of interactions with that light. There are those who want to see the path the light illuminates and use it to go places. There are those who do not want the light and they go hide in darker places.  Last but not least, there are the moths! They are fatally attracted to the light and don't get anywhere. 

This phenomena is not restricted to godmen or spiritual leaders. Have seen this happen to athesists. A former TamilNadu Chief Minister and long time poet, scholar, screen writer and politician has my respect because he talked about believing in oneself and not in god. His ardent followers decided to call him "a god" at which point I shook my head and said "they will never learn"! It is not a problem with the concept or the person. It is a problem of scalability of any message and all the issues that come with it.

The crowd at the event, seemed to be low on IQ. There was a lot of "ooh"ing and "aah"ing at things that were not exactly "ooh" and "aah" worthy! Maybe I am not used to moving in such a crowd that is so bereft of any knowledge, that little things seem like a big deal to them. 

There was also another aspect of the event that was a little annoying. There were two messages that were repeated multiple times over the event. First,  "you are all not smart enough to know beyond this.. so just do as I say and you will be happy" followed by, "this is top secret stuff and in the wrong hands it will be devastating. This method has been dumbed down to reach folks like you so beware and behold.. " , talk that was simply insulting. Then again, maybe it was a good thing, given that the crowd was actually soaking that in! 

There is only one thing that is worse than organized religion and that is organized spirituality!

Spirituality transcends religion. We all have a body that is give or take the same and a mind that is capable of doing similar things. If this was an exercise in achieving one's full potential with this body and mind, there are many ways to get there with the end result being the same. This is one other map to the same destination with its milemarkers clearly defined and that is all there is to it!

Sadhguru is genuine when he talks about the body, mind and spirit. He has a higher intelligence which on a personal basis he is able to apply. 

There are places where he does blur concepts from Hinduism into spirituality which was okay by me, because Hinduism is not defined the way other religions are. It is open ended to the point I have created a god for "first silicon" and I pray to it in my own way. At some point I plan to get enough money to build a temple for the supreme godess "Siliconeshwari" somewhere in Silicon Valley with an idol made of pure undoped Silicon. Devotees need not worry, as there will be brances in Austin, Portland, New York, Dresden, Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore and Beijing, just to cover the prominent locations.

Any guru, self realized or otherwise, shoud not mock the people who come to learn something from him or her. I am told by many folks that Bikram Choudhury apparently does it in the teacher training sessions. So did Sadhguru. Maybe this is to appeal to the masochistic in the student to want to punish himself by going through a "tough" learning process? Maybe it is their way of playing to the inferiority complex in the "students"? I do not know. It did not feel good. 

Then again, there were too many moths that are attacted to Sadhguru's light. There are too many people who simply did not get the message. They were trying to buy spirituality at 100$ / hour and trying to transform themselves into spiritlandia by wearing bindis, chanting things they did not understand and wearing Rudhraksh garlands without understanding its significance.  Same things happen at Bikram Yoga class where I see folks on 40$ Yoga mats, paying 300$ for a three month membership and sitting in the last row on their mats watching others sweat it out over most of the 90 minute class. It takes a lot of hard work and sincere determination to effect any change in the body or mind, a fact in itself that is not something most folks realize or accept!

That was the bad part.

The whole thing could have been done in a day, but given the audience and the fact that he was trying to cover +/- 3 sigma in the distribution it was a tall order.  

It was a weekend well spent as I did do a lot of reflecting and focussing. Got to realize that there was no need to have been scared with those "side effects" in the past. If done right and regularly, this type of meditation works wonders for calming the mind. It was also good in another way.

I kept thinking "Are these people for real? These folks live around me? How could a person be in such a helpless state? Wow, these folks are really ignorant and they have no idea what they are talking about or gettin into!" etc. etc. There are lot of people around us who need help both physical and psychological and it is no easy task to help them.

How we help them is up to us, but help we must or looking the other way will come back and bite us. That part of Sadhguru's message was right on.  

On a final note... be aware of the moths!

Navarathri 2013

It has been a busy 10 days. Catching up on life after recovering from the tooth mainly involved ploughing through work, getting back to yoga at least once in three days and being on the chirpy side with the kids!

The weekend came and went and it was a blur. Partly because we visited golu after golu, and I managed to finish reading all three books by Amish Tripathi called the Shiva trilogy. The kids were just amazed by my ability to finish up 1400+ pages in two days. 

As usual the girls posed for photos before venturing out to visit the golus. 

Last year same time we did an experiment in merging their photos. To commemorate that, we did it again this year!

Last year it took me 6 hours to merge three photos. This year it took me 15 minutes. Practice makes perfect... or at the least practice makes you faster.

The golus continue till this weekend. Will post the actual doll display photos early next week.

Love the festivities. When the girls are happy, they leave you alone to read books and that, is a good thing!

Too early..

Me  to Little one : I don't think we can handle it if you both leave the house some day. At least with you we have to find a nice boy for you to marry who will move in with us...

Little one : I am in THIRD grade! why are we talking about my marriage now?! (and storms out)

In hind sight, I spoke a little early.

Bottomline, will lose it if I have to come home to a house without kids!