and these are a few of my favorite things!

Birthday draws to a close. I am close to getting AARP membership. Another year whizzed past. It has been a good year or I have started seeing good in everything. Either way it is good.

Went to work bright and early. All my colleagues sang happy birthday as part of lunch and that was very touching. 

A visit to BYSJ and giving it everything - Check

A visit to Bhavikas and giving the stomach and taste buds everything - Check

A trip to the movies watching superheroes - Check

Must have good karma to be able to go do all these things that made my day with family and friends!

Thanks to everyone for the wishes!

Birthday with a bang!

Last year I happened to be in India for my birthday and spent the day with my college buddies. It was amazing. These guys made sure I had a great time.. even gave me birthday bum(p)s! 

To top things off, I had a nice glass of Mishrambu that was topped off, and it was the rangeen (colorful) type! Translation : it had bhang.. just enough to make me sing "happy birthday to me" by myself over and over again!  (Let it be known that, by buddy in the picture had the plain version)

 

After that, spent two days with my parents in severe weather conditions and miraculously made it out of Chennai before the heavens opened and shut down the airport! That was last year.. 

This year, the birthday was also celebrated with a literal "bang". On the whole, the day was full of ups and downs. It was one of those work days worth forgeting. Then things took a turn for the better and the evening turned out to be nicer than the morning. One mintue we were at Bhavikas having dinner, all smiles and we came home happy. Wrote a nice post about it, and while I was hitting the Publish button, there was another bang! This time it was an injury, which thankfully ended up being something recoverable. Went from happy to mad to happy to sad every 4 hours. 

We did manage to do a mini trip to LA to meet my sisters family. It was shorter trip compared to original expectations as my long weekend was reduced as I flew out sunday morning.  Spent a day at Universal studios and visited the Malibu temple on the way back home.

Was happy to see my sister and family after almost a year and a half and spend a day and a half with them!

The trip was worth it just for that one Photograph!

It was raining very heavily and we took 8 hours to make it back instead of the usual five. We were all glad to make it back in one piece after that drive. 

Was in two minds that night on going to Asia the next morning, but the family decided that I should be done with work travel for the year and they will manage with help from friends.

That morning my rudhraksha necklace broke and the beads came flying everywhere in the room. With construction going on, my odds of finding all the beadsl were slim. Also thought it was a bad omen of sorts. Given I like to challenge bad omens (pissing off my family and going against bad omens is a habit from childhood), decided that what has to happen will happen. So travel was on.

After searching for the beads everywhere, found 108 of the 109 beads. A rudhraksh is tied to your soul once you wear it for a long time and custom is that it gets burnt with you, when you are cremated.  Also wearing 108 beads instead of the 109 can make one dizzy, or so say spiritual gurus. I had no time to find the lost bead and rushed to the airport with a heavy heart.

There is something special about this necklace. It is made of seeds from the rudhraksh tree and is completely organic material in a silk thread, but it flags in the body scanner at the airport as metal, every time! The TSA agents always look surprised when I pull it out and they ask "is it on a metal thread and I go, NO! Silk thread". Somehow it must be absorbing millimeter waves or is magnetic. Either way, the fact that it absorbs radiation says there is more to it than I know. Maybe someone else who has the time can study the radiation absorbing properties of these beads!

The first thing I did after coming home from Asia, was launch a search for the missing bead, and found it! Tomorrow will be spent in remaking the necklace. 

There were many life lessons learned in the last week.

One : Should enjoy time with family, every chance I can get. All it takes is one mistep and things can go from happy to sad. 

Two: I might think of work as another home and colleagues as an extended family, but it may not be reciprocated. At the end of the day, work remains a means to an end and I should keep that perspective.

Three:  Should trust my gut feel on people and events. Even if my track record is not that great, at least I can own the fall out a 100%

Four: Should always remember Karma! It gets me, all the time!

Could write a chapter or mini book on all four of the above, but there are consequences which I am not going to be comfortable with. So will use the third and fourth lesson and leave it with this blog post!

Two birthdays.. very different experiences. A blog post that describes mood swings should end on a happy note. So here is a photo of the little one I took the day before my birthday which is as cheerful as the world gets for me!

That smile can keep me going to the moon and back.

This year(correction.. two years) I have travelled more than enough miles to go to the moon over hundreds of hours of flying and walking around airports and being driven to airports, hotels etc.    That smile can bring me back from any distance, in an instant!

Happiness is...

One of the traditions in our house is for the entire family go go have dinner in a place that is chosen by the person on their birthday.. 

People asked me "any fancy plans? going to some big name restaurant?" etc.. 

My family knew what my choice would be and promptly took me there..

The very first place I had food when I first came to visit California, a small family owned restaurant, that is still one of my favorite hangouts!

Still go there once a week almost to eat and say hi to the uncle and aunty there. 

Eating fresh rotis there with the family digging in.. and uncles heartfelt "ashirwad" made my day! He said "stay healthy" and repeated it thrice in case I didn't get the message the first time. 

Yes, that is a big part of the plan.. staying healthy!

Fourteen years fly by

Feels like yesterday this girl made me feel different about everything!

when the nurse handed her to me, my whole world changed.. everything started looking different.. like it was being seen through a pink filter! 

She continues to make me realize how wonderful this world is on a day to day basis!

That was her, all of 10 days old, giving me that same challenging look that I was already trained to receive, thanks to her mom!  I knew right then it was going to be 3:1 in the house with San, her mom and Jr. joining in "giving me that look!"... little did I know that it would become 4:1 over time...

My darling is now 14 and two weeks ago Darling 2- the sequel turned 11 ! 

The sequel has had more air time given I started blogging just before she was born. There are a few pictures that never made it before.. thanks to the Sankara Sastri in me, thinking those pictures were not blog worthy.. so here are some photos even the kids have not seen (dug them out of old Memorex CD's in some cases)

 

The sum total of prettiness of the family is a constant is what I used to say.. 

After revisiting that photo from two weeks ago, I stand corrected.. 

The sum total of "prettiness" of the family is increasing.. they are all looking prettier by the day!

Here is to many more years of the kids making me go "awwww"..

When the skies cleared just for us..

During the Thanksgiving week, which seems like ages ago, I got to visit India. First stop was Varanasi for our class reunion for two days. Then I got to spend the next 4 days in Chennai.

The trip was interesting from start to finish. When we landed in Chennai from Varanasi, the airport had 600+ stranded passengers with the access roads to the airport being closed and a "no taxis" sign greeting us. Luckily my friends dad who had started 6 hours earlier to get to the airport made it past the closure on one side. We went through waterlogged roads and a very interesting route to get back to my brothers place. 

But a miracle happened. It had rained for 17 days before that. The next 72 hours saw only slight drizzles. We did not even use an umbrella. And on the one day San and the kids came to visit Chennai, the sun came out! 

They are really lucky angels.

We jumped from one auto rickshaw into another and were pretty much on the go that day. It also happened to be my star birthday and the previous night we had celebrated Kaarthigai deepam! You can see the contrast between celebrating this in Cupertino and Chennai. 

The highlight of the trip was to see my grandma, who is not doing well after her surgery. I was glad that the kids got to talk to her, sing for her and get to take a selfie with Grandma.

I also got to spend 4 days with my parents after almost a year and a half. It is very difficult to see my dad's physical abilities deteriorate over time. His hands are constantly shaking and so are his lower jaw. The docs say "it is part of old age"... I was quoting Bikram and saying "never too old, never too sick..." but don't think it registered with my parents. 

We also got to visit San's granparents. They got hit with the rains a lot worse than my brothers area. It is amazing how resilient they are. Hoping some of that resiliant gene has transferred to our kids in case they need it some day!

This photograph was taking on Kaarthigai deepam. 

The one day that the sun came out, the schools reopened. We asked my nephew to bunk school on that day to be with us and he obliged. The next day he did make it to school but what happened after that was epic rains and the city was badly hit.

A day after I left, there was so much rain that the airport was flooded and shut down. There was some real luck guiding me through this trip!

Do not know when the next trip will be, so till then we look back at memories.. here is those 4 wonderful days crammed into 7 minutes of video!

Still missing everyone in Chennai, more than ever after editing this video! 

It has been a month since this trip already. We have to make it to India on a more regular basis for longer times. Maybe we will have a better shot at it in 2016?!