Toys these days!

Recently Jr. received a "Barbie walking a dog" gift. I did not pay much attention to the whole toy after going through the ordeal of prying open the various pieces from the package and thinking "Kids that play with Barbie should all be geniuses, if just opening the package can be so complicated!"

The only other thing I noticed was that the dog was lifelike and somehow they had managed to make the surface of the moulded plastic have a skin like feel to it. It was amazing from a materials science standpoint!

So imagine my shock when we read the "manual" which came with Barbie and found that the pellets that were part of the package were supposed to be the dog food and dog poop!!

Confused ? See the video! It is self explanatory...

If there are parents out there who need to teach their kids that food becomes poop or poop comes from eating food, you can use my video as an educational aid!

What will they think of next ?

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Guru Shishyai (Teacher and Student)

Jr. has been attending Indian dancing classes(Bharatanatyam which she calls Indian dancing class), for the last few months. She really enjoys it.

What she enjoys more than the dance classes or practice is the new devotion her baby sister is showing her, after she shows off her dance moves.

The little one will be a year and a half old in a few days and she has really taken to dancing and is also her akka's biggest fan!

Jr. has been complaining about too many videos of baby in the blog. I was recently babysitting the kids in the evening for a few minutes by showing them old videos from the blog. Jr. said "Why are there no videos of ME when I was a baby, in the blog? Daddy, I want you to put some of my baby videos in the blog also!".

I had to explain to her that she was probably the most videoed kid in history, but I just hadn't started blogging then! Don't think she understood.

Now I have to be careful and make sure I give them equal "media coverage" or I will go down in history as a biased dad!

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Counting in Tamlish

Most of you have read this post from a year ago!

Since then Jr.'s grandpa taught her how to count 1 to 10 in Tamizh on the last India trip. She remembered it for almost three to four weeks. Then things disappeared from her memory and now she is back to square one!

Funny thing is, she did this once, did not even realize what she was saying was wrong and counted again for the video, and still did not realize her mistake! So innocent! Finally we had to remind her of Onnu, rendu , moonu!!

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Another game

No, we are definitely not talking Cricket anymore !

The latest game between the girls is "touch your tongue" or the extreme sport version called "pull out your tongue"! The trick is show your tongue, wait for the other one to try and touch it, but pull it back in, just in time.

Initially I thought this game was gross, but now that I have gotten used to seeing them play this game, it looks cute!

Note how good daddy has gotten at taking these secret videos. Once they found out they were on camera, I had to oblige them by saying Hi to the video!

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Traffic

Saw this cover story in the latest Businessweek. The article was jointly written by a person in the USA and one in Mumbai, about Bangalore. So, I am sure there will be debates on the post.

After my recent experience in India, I have started proof reading my posts. Just to make sure that anything that I write that has even a slight tinge of negativity is explained fully in context!

While I was in India, I had mentioned the traffic jam caused by a dead body procession during peak time (5:30 PM!). Had also promised the video clip as part of a long video of the entire India experience. Have to disappoint the readers on that mega video. I recently changed jobs and it has been a very busy month. Posting photoblogs takes only a few minutes but editing 60 or so video clips and making a mini movie is a time consuming exercise. Hope it will happen sometime next month!

So here is the video of the traffic jam by itself:

I wanted to post this because, we typically blame Politician's motorcades, public utilities digging up roads or religious gatherings for Traffic problems. This is a tricky one though! You have to get the dead body out and it has to be at a certain time (after consulting the stars etc.) and the guys have to carry it on their shoulders! That means they need a pedestrian route that does not impact traffic!!

There is a pedestrian walkway on either side of this subway, but it is not wide enough for four guys carrying a body. Guess this is one thing the city planning guys have to take into consideration as part of their overpass (flyover) building strategy!!

Normally, I would have been very pissed off with the whole proceedings, while sitting in that auto, were it not for Jr.'s questions for which I didnt have any answers!