All work and no yoga, makes me a ...

No. Don't bother filling up that blank!

Will tell you. Very tired is the right answer.

A light post to end the day..

Had worked on this picture over the weekend. It has potential for more editing..

Behold, Gotham.. err. Pittsburgh! 

More Pittsburgh pictures over the weekend.. 

Enna Vechchu comedy kemedy pannaliye ?! (Not making me a comedy piece right?!)

That is a popular punch line of Tamil comedian Vadivelu (one of my favorites).  That seems to have already happened to me.. have become a comedy piece, literally!

Many of my friends and family who watch Vijay TV, have told me that they have a program called Comedy Starz where they used my picture as a "prop".. 

Got the whole thing on video here..

There is some good and lot of bad in this.

Good : Yoga gets some more popularity

Bad : Yoga is still seen as some kind of magic, illusion or rope trick (you see the way the compere ends it? that is the way illusions and rope tricks are presented by street performers).

Also, there is a way to get in and out of a yoga pose. When Jim Kallet was at BYSJ to teach a special class he told the teachers "never get into the pose in the beginner class using an advanced way. I saw this teacher do it in the front row. A football player was behind her in the second row. He was new. He copied her and we literally heard his knees go pop .. pop. He permanently damaged his knee. You can mess with the gods, but you can never mess with your knees".  People do things the wrong way and Yoga gets a bad name. 

Someday will post a video of doing this toe stand, or if BYSJ has one, will link it here. 

There is another bad side to this. Everytime a photo from the blog gets used somewhere (remember 80 feet cut outs of Junior bursting fire crackers in Chennai?), the family is up in arms and wants to shut down all my social media accounts from Facebook, to the blog to twitter, etc. Some will comment and say "get some money out of those guys" to which my response is "the day Indian media companies actually pay anything to take stuff.. that day will never come". Others just go to all out fear mongering "now every terrorist knows about you and your family" to which my reponse is "so the terrorists are all going to start doing yoga? That would actually be a good thing because there won't be any terrorism after they start yoga and do it for a few months!".

If anything, Yoga helps you let go and move on.. so AaaaaUuuuuuuuMmmmmmmmm ! 

This too shall pass!

Ganesh Chaturthi 2016

Ganesha's birthday is usually celebrated in this house, except under extreme duress when we have cut a cake and sang a happy birthday song to celebrate it western style. 

Usually though, San and or MIL do the good eats, I do the pooja and we all eat and take a nice nap after being stuffed to the gills with Kozhukattai (dumplings)!

Today the long weekend helped with the relaxed atmosphere. I went to yoga class while San finished making the dumplings and Vadai.. which I will now present to you in HDR.. it was yummy. I say it in past tense because we were all digging in as fast as we could.

San has understood the concept of suppy and demand and recently she makes very small quantities of delicious stuff. The thing disappears off the kitchen table as soon as it is offered to the gods and she claims success! 

Some of my friends call this "sundar going into full Poojari mode"..will take that as a compliment. The apple did not fall far from the tree. . .  

There is a good chance this prayer thing might die with my generation. Will do it while I can to celebrate a certain event in a certain way. After that.. the world evolves with or without you!

For some reason, going off the philosophical deep end again. My dad used to do the prayer with such gusto and happiness. Last week I was told by my mum that dad's hands are shaking so much that he doesn't sit for prayers anymore. 

Was physically here doing the prayer, but my mind was in Chennai hoping that the new medication they are giving him will stop the shakes or at least slow it down so we can have long coherent conversations on the phone again. 

Happy Ganesh Chaturthi to everyone! 

Hope you had a dumpling filled day!

Cucumber Falls

This is going to be a short post as far as travelogs go! After finishing the tour of Falling Water we had one hour before heading home. SIL suggested we visit Cucumber falls, a place 20 minutes away. We made it to the falls and all of us trekked down to the water level. 

Then we realized that there was some steep climbing over slippery rock and fallen trees to get to the falls. 

Only four of us made it. Me, the kids and my athimber. We got 15 minutes in the falls, but could not take a lot of pictures as a young couple kept photobombing us. After a 15 minute wait we decided the photo op was not going to get any better.. 

I photoshopped them out of the picture above.. but it was too much work to Photoshop them out of the one below.. Thanks to Athimber, at least got a picture of the three of us! 

The place was really nice and cool. We spent the hour at Cucumber falls and moved back towards Pittsbugh..

 A family portrait that will go in our gallery for 2016!

If you decide to go to Falling water, don't miss this place. The water was not as cold as we expected. You could actually bathe in the falls! 

We will take that chance, next time!

Falling water

On our second day of the Pittisburg trip over summer, we raced from Laurel caverns to Falling water. The reason for the race was that we had tickets for a fixed tour appointment. 

First, about Falling water. This is the house that made Frank Lloyd Wright, famous. The Kaufmann family commissioned him to build this house over a waterfall, with money that in today's equivelent if ~50M $. 

It is an architectural marvel that was nominated to be on the 8 modern wonders of the world. You have to see it to believe it. The whole thing is a layer of cantilevers hanging over a vertical concrete structure, above a waterfall. 

HDR processing has some advantages!

There was one problem. No cameras allowed on the trip. You could take pictures outside the house. We were asked to switch all cell phone camera's off as well. Given we had not heard about this place before, they could use the publicity is what I thought.... 

All the pictures were taken with the iPhone 6 and processed in Photoshop! 

The tour guide hyped the cost of repair and how badly the place was crumbling. The little one did not like the guide. She said "we have eyes, we can see how beautiful this is without him having to tell us".

The place speaks for itself. It is a true marvel. The attention to detail in every door, every window, every corner and how the furniture is built into the house, the views, the privacy and open ness where it matters, I could go on and on about this place.. 

Frank Lloyd Wright was way ahead of his time! Wish he was alive now... we would be seeing a totally different class of buildings! It was a good thing my sister-in-law picked this place for a vist. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

If you happen to go to Pittsburgh area, this is a must see! 

If you are an architecture buff or into engineering, you will love this place.