Follow that tag ....

I have recently been watching the tagging phenonmena on blogger.. many of the blogs I read have the now familiar "I have been tagged, so here goes ..." blog.

Guess, fate finally catches up with everyone. Mitr_bayarea tagged me.. actually found out who she was after she tagged me!!! Have been asking her in person for the last two months for her blogsite and she kept it a secret. In return for her revealing her blog space, I will go and honor the tag ..

So, here goes..

Seven things I plan to do before i die:

1. Dance the waltz, foxtrot and tango with my grown up daughters
2. Play with my grandkids
3. Win a Nobel Prize (or at least a significant technical award at an international level)
4. Visit Banaras once more with my wife and kids
5. Take that perfect photograph
6. Own a little hill (with a cute little house on top of the hill of course)!
7. Build an engineering School in Chennai which is way too cool even for IIT standards

Seven things that i can do:

1. Dance with my daughters : Have a daughter, will have another one soon, most likely they WILL grow up, I already know how to dance, just need to encourage them to dance..
2. Win a technial award : I am good at what I do at work. Just a question of time..
3. Visit Banaras - IT BHU campus (maybe on my next india trip !)
4. Keep taking photographs (now that I have a Digital Rebel XT - yes.. got it just before the crater lake trip.. that is the secret of the great photos !)
5. The hill with a house on top may not be just a dream and who knows, there might be a little creek behind the house ?!
6. Continue to balance work with family the way I do it now. Granted, I might live less if I sleep less (according to my friend Michele Gatto, if life is proportional to waking hours, she put my life expectancy at ~50 !!), but it is a onetime chance and shouldnt lose sight of family.
7. Swim the entire length of the pool before stopping. I can do this damn it !! Just give me another month.

Seven things that i can't do:

1. Keep my mouth shut when I am supposed to at parties
2. Keep secrets from my wife ( I try, I try.. but i just cannot !)
3. Hit my daughter (She does tempt me a lot to just give her a spank.. but so far I have resisted)
4. Be as clean as my wife wants me to be (Cleaniness is next to Godliness.. but doubt if even god will be clean enough for my wife!)
5. Stop the kitchen sink water from running while I wash dishes. The water has to be running all the time. I havent figured out "why ?".
6. Say "No" to anyone who asks me "would you like a cup of tea?"
7. Watch SUN TV mega serials !!

Seven things that attracts me to the opposite sex:

1. Looks (I am not going to be dishonest and put feelings above looks !! After all the first thing you see in a person is the physical appearance, then they talk and you hear their voice and your brain comprehends the person for who they are based on what they say.. this with the exception of phone call /email relationships , which I am not a big fan of!)..When you mention Looks, you can say facial features, figure , whatever.. I used to have a thing for the round and plumpy Irish woman types.. It might still be in the back of my mind somewhere! Sure that comes in handy when your wife is towards the end of her pregnancy!)
2. Honesty - no secrets
3. Brutal frankness - tell me to my face if I am full of it !
4. appealing voice - even when the voice is yelling "I hate you !!"
5. Cute smile - especially if it comes with a dimple in the chin.
6. A dainty walk (not a manly thump thump)
7. Great dressing sense (show what is worth showing, hide the best !!)

Seven things i say the most:

(these days)

1. Basically..
2. C is for cookie, that's good enough for me
3. what the &*$#@ ?
4. just a minute
5. wassup ?
6. Why me ?
7. I did it !!
   

Seven celebrities i want to meet:

1. Emeril Lagasse
2. Wendy Johnson (Yes, she taught me to dance and I dont know when I will meet her next)
3. Arnold
4. Steve Jobs
5. Craig Barett
6. Salman Rushdie
7. Abdul Kalaam

Seven people whom i would like to take this seven tag:

Personally, I hate chain mails. I usually treat them like a baby treats a diaper or much worse.. Just because I got tagged and I honored the tag doesnt necessarily mean, I should tag people. (and most of the bloggers I visit have already been tagged !). So , the tag stops here !!!

Ashland Trip - Yummy Indian Cuisine !

On our recent Crater Lake trip, we stopped at Ashland (a town 13 miles from Medford, Oregon). It was amazing. The place is famous for the Shakespear festival held there. There are plays going all year round (we didnt plan on going to a play, not with a toddler anyways).

The place ranks among the cutest places we have visited, like Carmel, Calistoga or Carpentaria in California or Boron in Nevada, just to name a few.



The small downtown was a few streets around Lithia Park with a water fountain that had aromatic water in it! We also happened to see this huge indian restaurant called "Deep" (means light in Hindi , not to be confused with Depth!).



The place had the look and feel of a British Indian Restaurant.. you can always tell these places by the decor and feel which reeks of the "Raj" influence. The aroma was wafting towards the river bank and it lured us in.. Before we knew it, we were comfortably seated ...Mmmm... the naan, the malai kofta, the samosas.. still cant get it out of my mind. Couldnt help but think "have the bay area indian restaurants really gone down in quality because there are too many indians who flock to these restaurants anyways ?".

In the middle of nowhere, in a small town, an amazing Indian restaurant which had the bay area tandoori places beat in every department : food quality, quantity, service, ambience, music.. just amazing.

In case you ever visit Ashland in Oregon, try Deep India Cuisine. The river runs right behind the restaurant (it is on river street !) and the experience is worth it.

It was kind of weird that we were the only indians in the place and the rest of the crowd was all either white families (most of them with a British Origin) or Flower power crowd (wearing psychedelic T-shirts and Bob Marley style hair-do's), but they probably found us as weird as we found them.

Try it next time you visit!!

Ganesh Chaturthi - American Style

Came back from work after picking up my daughter at daycare.. tired after long, odd working hours for the past few days. Wife had already come home 15 minutes ahead of us and was watching TV.

To my amazement, a Tamizh Movie "Run" was on. Asked her what the special occasion was and she says "today is Ganesh Chaturthi".. I try to find a correlation between Ganesh Chaturthi (the indian elephant god's birthday which is usually celebrated with prayer, sweet dumplings - great eats and a visit to the local temple) and the movie that was playing ("Run" is a violent movie where guy and his love are on the run from her gangster brother!). . My brain started aching and I said "oops, we forgot to celebrate". All of us showered real quick, put on some nice clothes and celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi, American style.

Told my daughter that it was "pulliyar ummachi's birthday" (her slang for god ganesha a.k.a pulliyar). We lit the traditional indian lamp instead of a candle and sang :

happy birthday to you
happy birthday to you
happy birthday to pulliyar ummachi
happy birthday to you.

we clapped, sang some songs in praise of the god and enjoyed our usual dinner..

we will throw you a better party next year pulliyar ummachi !!

Crater lake - Gods gift to mankind..

We went to crater lake over the long weekend. Covered Ashland (cute little town where shakespear festival is held), Medford (a place with no attractions that happens to have nice hotels and is close to Crater Lake) , Crater Lake and Klamath Falls , Upper Klamath Lake.

1200 miles travel spread over three days. Needless to say, we took lots of pictures.
The secret of the great pictures will be revealed later! On the way we saw many interesting places..

When we saw the sign which said "Weed : Next 3 exits" we were confused.. We knew the stuff was legal in California.. but this ..

Here are some shots including panoramic stitched photos.. (we take 10-12 photos in sequence and stitch them digitally with software)




It was absolutley breathtaking. We drove around the entire rim of crater lake for almost an hour. It used to be a volcano 8000 years ago. Blew its top, got filled with water and subsequently volcanic activity developed another little volcanic top within the water. You get to see a little volcano in the middle of a lake which is on top of a big volcano.


A view from the far side ..


The happy family at crater lake..

Our daughter had some quality entertainment at crater lake, thanks to a Mayan lady and her talking parrot Guacamayo!! She was explaining to us that Guacamayo literally means parrot in mayan language and he was the smallest of the andean macaw's. He said "hola" to the little one and she was thrilled !

Finally, the highlight of the trip was watching the pelicans at Klamath Lake. We have never seen this many pelicans in one place. They were so graceful when they flew and landed.. looked like Pterodactyls in the Jurassic park movies.

Raa Raa . . .

We had just finished giving our daughter her dinner and come into the living room. My wife was watching Satyaraj in the Pepsi Uma programme on Sun TV. I was making some tea and the little one decided to get cozy with mommy and watch TV too.

That is when Satyaraj decides to play "Raa Raa.." from Chandramukhi.

My daughter got so scared after seeing the normally pretty Jyothika in her scary role in the song..
that she started crying. Had to take her to the other room and hold her for a long time to calm her down!

Way to go Jo !

ps. we couldnt find a single photo of the scary Jo. in Chandramukhi. If anyone has one, point me to it. (so we can scare my daughter at will!!)

pps. this post was written up last week.. havent posted because of work and our crater lake trip.. (will post photos soon!)

ppps. updated this post with the scary pic of Jo.. thanks to swapna.