West and East

Jr. gets to practice saxophone over the weekends. Her teacher is making sure an email goes out saying she practiced and Jr. knows she has to, if the email has to go out!

I am also making her practice Carnatic music when we get a chance. She knows the songs by heart and it is a question of being able to follow the notation in the paper and translating instantly in her head from a different south Indian classical notation. 

She does a great job of both and has improved a lot.

Next week, Nagumomu in Raga Abheri.. at least the first few lines!

More than her practicing, these videos end up with some funny outtakes. Hope the kids have fun watching this years from now.

Thanga Bhaspam, Velli Bhaspam, Legiyams - The irony

Recently, some of my friends were discussing the role of Gold/Silver and their impact on the environment and what was considered safe levels in our systems.

When I mentioned that as a little kid have taken a few grams of gold and silver powder as part of medicines over a period of years to cure a weird infection, no one in the audience believed me and they actually thought my "credibility" was taking a hit with a statement like that.

That is really sad because I am reasonably sure (and my parents have confirmed) that it was Gold containing powder (Thanga Bhaspam) which was always mixed with Honey and given to me and Silver containing powder (VeLLi Bhaspam) which was given always by mixing in Ghee (clarified butter). Why different media were used to dissolve the powders, we do not know. In addition to that was given a Legiyam (or viscous solution) that would clean out my bowels in record time and literally purged me.

Distinctly remember the old Siddhar( telling me that my blood was impure and he was purifying my blood (Raththa Suddhi was the word he used.. ie. blood purification) using the combination.

When mentioning this to Allopathic doctors (at least the western medicine doctors were referred to in our family as Allopathic doctors), they would comment on how these treatments were known in the western world but were avoided because of the "poisonous" nature of the cures and they used heavy metals like Arsenic, Bismuth, etc. to get to the digestive tract and attack the system using a "mild poisoning" method.

The way the body tries to fight mild poisoning, it kills the real poison also and that helps recover the system. It is not totally true that western medicine ignores these elements now.

You can see Bismuth in pepto bismol like stomach restoring systems. Chemotherapy uses heavy elements, kind of like the "raththa suddhi" used by Sidhhars.

The thing that would always beat me was the labels on these medicines from the sidhdha vaidhya saalai which would say "Used in curing the following with other medicine combinations... and Putru Noi or Cancer would be in the list"

Being in 7th grade and having limited exposure to Cancer as a "cureless disease" in those days, would ask my parents if this whole thing was bogus and can be believed. They recommended that since there were not many other alternatives, might as well go with the flow and believe! Their point was "Siddha medicine has been around for centuries. People won't go back to a doctor if they don't cure a high percentage of patients".

Now some dude in China actually goes and proves using western science that old eastern medicines have a reasoning behind them.

My personal take on how this type of thing evolves over time (again, note my very over simplified explanation) is..

In the good old days(thousand or two thousand years ago) there was a huge gap in the knowledge base of the people. There were many smart people who probably weren't famous or well documented but left their mark by passing on their knowledge in spite of not having media. Today we have a population of 6.9B instead of an estimated 170M in 0BC (a forty fold increase) and Information technology has come a long way from stone tablets to bluetooth. We only question the information from the past and want validation with current methods of understanding.. But as a % of people with higher knowledge levels have we come far?

Is information really leading to improved knowledge? What use is all the information if you do not act on it? Can knowledge be useful if it did not have a Ph.D behind it?

Does everything from the olden days have to be proved and understood in a doctoral thesis to be accepted? By who? why?

Should we confer Ph.D's to all our grandma's who tell you that using turmeric powder when boiling vegetables or adding turmeric to food that comes from the ground is safer or applying turmeric on baby girls is good for their hormone cycles? Or should we have research papers like:

Choi, Hyunsung; et al. (July 2006). "Curcumin Inhibits Hypoxia-Inducible Factor-1 by Degrading Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor Nuclear Translocator: A Mechanism of Tumor Growth Inhibition". Molecular Pharmacology (American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics) 70: 1664–71.

Aggarwal, BB.; Shishodia S. (May 2006). "Molecular targets of dietary agents for prevention and therapy of cancer". Biochemical Pharmacology (Elsevier) 71 (10): 1397–421.

Hatcher H, Planalp R, Cho J, Torti FM, Torti SV (June 2008). "Curcumin: from ancient medicine to current clinical trials". Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 65 (11): 1631–52

etc. etc.

Maybe if there was a Journal of Grandma Society and it had papers published every month and we could have references like

"Effect of kasthuri manjal podi on long term hair growth" , R. Saraswathi, K. Vijaythaammal, et. al. J. Gram. Soc., Vol 23, 2010, pp1023-1025

would more people be inclined to take it seriously?

Will the use of heavy metals to target poisons be taken more seriously now that we have this news?

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Trouble in Guitarland

Was practicing "Samaja Vara Gamana" which is in Ragam HindOLam using the cheat sheet, and Jr. asked me

"How can anyone sing in that hollow voice to match your guitar?"

It did seem strange that when spanning two octaves, the lower octave below the one I had chosen as reference "C" was a too low!

Then the nerd in me went on a web surfing spree (followed by a lot of practicing) and found that:

a. most folks misquote the Center "C" in the keyboard to be 240Hz.

b. Actually the center "A" or "A4" as it called is at 440Hz exactly (round number). The Center "C" or the "C" key between A4 and A3(which is at 220Hz) is at 261.6 Hz and not at 240 Hz.

c. Guitar folks deliberately moved everything on the notation up by an octave! Apparently this was done to facilitate the notations (on western sheet music) to appear in the middle lines on the music sheets.. Now that is a bummer, and wish I had paid more attention to fixing the base scale.

d. No harm done. Now that I have been practicing the notes for the lower octave, just have to reset everything in my head and go up one.

Based on that, the advice for other guitar players trying to figure out Carnatic notes to play songs or "swaram RIF's" (that is what we are calling it in our house) is to practice in the "green" color coded octave on the cheat sheet.

The Hindolam reference example is here..
Hindolam is S G2 M1 D1 N2 S S N2 D1 M1 G2 S

If you are trying to play the song, play the S G2 M1 on the green and the D1 N2 on the Orange and your 4 to 7 year old's will be impressed!

If you are not interested in guitar playing, what I wrote may not make sense.. but if you do, you might be happy that the mixup was cleared up.

Better late than never!

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The year that was 2009...

The title of this post was wishful thinking.

Sometimes I just wish, that we are already into 2010!

The last eight months, has not been easy. First it was my dad's heart problem. Next it was my flying visit to India, where I got my foot contused, and had to go through different treatments including acupuncture, followed by some really hectic and crazy schedules at home and the last one month of pain because of the broken arm.

Two days before I fell down, I had a phone conversation with my brother. The end of the phone conversation was about how Saturn (Sani), was in a bad position in the horoscope for almost every member in the extended family. But my brother ended that conversation on a positive note. He told me that out of all the people in the house, I had the most favorable Sani because of my Guru Dasa. For those of you who are not familiar with Hindu astrology, that would be the good effect of having Jupiter shining his grace down on you.

Apparently in the giant struggle between Jupiter and Saturn, trying to bestow their grace or calamity on me, Saturn won!I wonder if Jupiter did a hard fight and maybe that's the reason I'm still alive, because if goodness is what I'm going through right now, I fear to think of what badness might mean!

But then again, the last year has been bad for almost everybody across the globe compared to the previous years!

Everybody I know, who still has a job is working harder than ever.

It is hell for everyone who has lost their jobs.

Then there was the swine flu, or should I say "there is the swine flu"

We don't even want to go into the percentage negativity in the daily news, be it economic, social, you name it.

I do not know how to read a horoscope. I do not want to live my life by what people tell me about my horoscope, but at the same time, I have a very healthy respect for people who are able to tell me things by looking at my horoscope and are right, time and time again. Astrology, maybe more art than science, and I find it pretty amusing when people mock astrology.

In today's world, you could go pick eighth-grader's from India or United States or any other Western country and ask them a few questions about how a tiny seed can grow into a big tree, or how would a tiny sperm and egg have enough information to grow into a full-fledged human being, and they would probably give you answers that would be along the lines of genetics 101.

Thanks to Western science and its widespread propaganda machinery, with good help from what is considered Western scientific thought, the general message out there is that it is okay to believe:

1. Sperm's and eggs contain DNA

2. The DNA is very complicated and different pieces of DNA have different information encoded in them, which contradict the specific traits and attributes of the organism the sperm and egg are going to create.

3. Out of the millions or billions of pieces of information contained in the DNA, select parts can be identified as contributing to specific features by scientific experimentation.

4. It is possible using complex experimentation that a cause and effect can be established for particular parts of the DNA causing particular diseases or haircolor, or height or girth, etc.

If a similar method is adopted to explain certain events in a person's life correlating to certain planetary positions at the time of conception of the same organism, it'll be ridiculed as arcane, esoteric or downright absurd!!!

There are a lot of things that are beyond the comprehension of the average human mind. If a sequence of proteins that is considered to be the basic building block, for the human organism determines the height of a person, or the diseases that this person has (or is predisposed to get), maybe the cosmic rays that deflect from various planets at the time of conception irradiate the sperm or the egg in a way that alters the protein for all we know!

I was thinking about all of this,because I had plenty of time to think about all of this over the last month, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling fan.

A few years ago, I had posted about Nadi astrology, which accurately tells the past, but left the future a little bit sketchy, and for good reason. At that point, I had compared the ability of reducing a person's life history from a thumbprint to particle physics in the context of sample size. Maybe our ancestors had small sample sizes, where correlation was easy and obvious.

Think about the following two experiments...

1. The scientist studies a family of Italians. The entire family has been marrying within Italians for generations. The scientist studies three generations of the family, and finds out that there is one person who has married an Irishman and that family has Irish Italian kids. The scientist proceeds to study the genetic makeup of entire family and tries to see how the genetic code in the kids compared to the genetic code of the family and the contribution from the Irishman to the gene pool.

Eventually, the scientist claims that they have isolated the Irish part of the gene contribution. An ethnic stereotype, may not be the best example. But you could switch it to an entire family of obese people and a single skinny person, or an entire family of short people and a single tall person, etc.

2. A different type of scientist, studies thumbprints of everyone in the same families and cross correlates select features on the thumbprints and finds the one pattern on the print that differentiates the contribution from the odd man out!

The entire irony is in the fact that the thumbprint itself may also be genetically transmitted information, which is a visual representation of the persons genetic code. After all, there are millions of ridges and troughs and loops in every thumbprint!

This post started off somewhere and is ending somewhere else...

In the last month of pondering and soul-searching, with and without the aid of narcotic painkillers, I have come back to the same conclusion, yet again!

It is always good to have a healthy respect for things that are beyond our comprehension. It is also good to keep an open mind when it comes to scientific experimentation or scientific curiosity, and removing a bias that complicated experiments with billions of dollars and millions of samples, along with computerized correlations are in some way superior to similar correlations established by astrologers going back a few millennia!

It is a crying shame, that Hindu astrology or thumbprint reading gets compared to fake things like rope walking or levitation, which are tricks and can be proved to be nothing but tricks.

Where is your Saturn?

ps. my apologies for the multiple posting of the same post. For some reason, the voice recognition software decides to hit the publish post button every now and then.

It is possibly mistaking some of my words as commands instead of text!

I still find it incredibly amazing. I may be typing faster than you can read this, thanks to the software.

I will be back to blogging regularly...

Needless needles?

The story starts with a Vaastu expert in Chennai advising the family that the bedrooms should be above the rest of the house and the bathrooms should be below the rest of the house. Hmm, so what is the big deal?

In the USA, you will never get a final permit for any house constuction if a tile is more than 1/8th of an inch higher than another tile. The idea of two different rooms being above or below automatically implies a "brain step" of 8 inches. But these kind of Vastu alterations seem to be a free for all in India. So the guy who was retiling the floor decided to use thicker tiles to meet this "vastu" requirement (which could be part of the official approval process for all I know).

It is 3:50 AM and my brother is driving me to the house after I have just landed in Chennai. Word is that dad is still awake waiting to see me.

Now we have a familiar house with new tiles, except there are these subtle height differences between the rooms which yours truly is not aware of. So, off I go, wheeling the suitcases to a corner and towards the room where my dad is and just as I enter the room, there is a blinding pain in my foot as it strikes tile. My dad thought that the tears running down my eyes were happy tears on seeing him before realizing that stuff like that happens only in Sivaji movies.

The next seven days went on with a lot of Ibuprofen, limited walking, no removing shoes even during a temple festival and only one visit to the inside of the temple on barefoot (which made it much worse) and a trek from terminal 70 to terminal 2 in the Hong Kong airport with carry on luggage, which is like a walk from Mylapore to Adyar!

The foot got so sore and the pain was unbearable. The wife who was already alerted to the situation that hubby might go straight from Airport to Urgent care was not (is not, and will continue not to be for another 3-4 years) thrilled.

After spending close to 200 bucks on co-pays, x-rays, special shoes, inserts, metatarsal pads, etc. etc. the podiatrist said

"look, what you have done is to take a hammer to the softest part of your foot. the nerve endings are contussed. you have to rest that leg for the next ten days and give mother nature a chance to heal this. you can also take these extra strength painkillers"

When this was mentioned to the employer and family, no one was pleased. Some suggested wheelchairs, some crutches, others a trip back to India to spend those ten days in the company of Vastu experts. Let us say that all options seemed to be divorce petitions for mother nature.

While being wheelchaired back to the parking lot in the hospital, the nurse and another kind lady patient in the elevator (who was a friend of the nurse, which implied she visited that department regularly) suggested Acupuncture. Nerve issues get faster resolution, she said, and as added incentive mentioned "it might even be covered by your insurance".

There were many who were trying to scare me from going for Acupuncture saying it is only a placebo, fake, numbs nerves, has side effects etc. etc. but many who also said it really helps.

So took a chance and went to the local Acupuncture clinic.

The expert (who is a Ph.D, MD) put six needles, wires to put a voltage through the needles, a hot lamp around the feet and 40 minutes later the pain was gone! GONE! Just a little soreness around the needle points.

(grainy photo courtesy of cell phone)

There were two more sessions, one two days later and four days later which were for shorter durations with one of the pins moving locations. The pain and soreness were nowhere. I had stopped taking the painkillers as well. As an added bonus, the visits were covered by insurance!

Now that I am walking again, tried to run a little today and it does not hurt.

So much for dismissing a technique just because Western medicine cannot grasp it!

In a way this is weird. We have Vastu (Feng Shui) which is an eastern concept of energy flow which is being abused to create the problem and Accupuncture, which again deals with energy flow bails you out!

If only we can acupuncture the brains of Vastu experts, we might avoid the problem in the first place, no?

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