The Rava Dosa of Asanas..

This blog always tries to cover multiple interests at one go.. today it will be food and Yoga.. I know those two don't mix well, as it is best to do Yoga on an empty stomach and thinking of food is the last thing you should do while attempting Yoga. 

That said.. please bear with me.

When this blog writing started a long long time ago, we used to go to every Indian restaurant and a week later, would write a review of the place with my own rating scheme. Half those restaurants are now gone. But the memories remain. On second thought, should start writing those reviews again.. Those were pre "Yelp" days. Once Yelp came out, the idea of putting out an elaborate review for like minded readers disappeared.. Once Trip Advisor showed up, the thought of trying to make the Travelog useful for others disappeared.. it started becoming a "writing for memory sake" journal.  

One way to rate restaurants, was to order multiple dishes but have a common denominator item to do a fair comparison. For North Indian restaurants it was Malai Kofta and butter naan and for South Indian places, it was Rava Dosa. One restaurant owner even named me Mr. Rava Dosa! 

If you are not familiar with a Rava Dosa, it is made with batter that is freshly mixed. It takes at least 20 minutes to make from the time you order it, and it is a real test for a south Indian chef. You can guage a lot of things about a south Indian restaurant by the Rava Dosa. If you go order it and don't hear "Sir, it will take some time compared to the other items? is that okay?" .. then you should seriously doubt the dosa quality. The crispiness of the Dosa is another thing.. too short on the stove, it sticks to the plate. Too long and it has a slight burnt taste.. you have a very narrow process window to make this one right!

Where am I going with this?

On Friday and Saturday PST, there was the World Yogasana Championship, held this year in Beijing. If I had a business trip, would have gone a day earlier to catch it on Sunday local time, but there were other plans for me that the higher powers had divined so stayed put at home.  Did manage to watch parts of it, thanks to a live feed on Facebook from the China Yoga Federation (which is real, and I hope they open more Yoga studios in Shanghai and Beijing).

The way the competition works (yes, yes.. yoga competition ? that is an oxymoron.. have heard that before.. have explained it also before.. ) there is 3 minutes per person. You get to do 4 mandatory poses in the final round and two optional poses. 

The Four mandatory poses are not the same asansa but rather picked from a certain category. The first is a forward bend compression, the second is a back bend compression, the third is a forward stretch, the fourth is a twist, then two optional poses. Within each category, you have different difficulty levels for different poses. If you do a Rabbit pose, which is a forward compression sitting down, it has a lower difficulty level than a standing head to knee pose which is a forward compression done standing on one locked knee..

I am not the expert here and you need to fact check the above, but think I got most of that right. If you fall off a pose, you can start again, but you lose points. Everything is marked by 3 judges and they give you points on a 1-10 scale. The poses have to be held for at least 5 seconds at the height of the pose (maximum). There are certain basic elements in each pose like a locked knee, or forehead touching knee or locked elbow etc. etc. which define the pose. So if any of those basic definitions are missed, you lose points. 

Basically, you start with 10 points and before you know it, you have lost it all!!! At least that was  my experience the one time I went to a yoga competition a few years ago. Just kidding. It is a lot more fun..

Now what has Rava Dosa got to do with Asanas? 

Well, there is this one pose that I have written the most about in this Yoga Journey, over the last almost 8 years. It is the Standing Head to Knee pose. Experienced Yogis (especially desis) who can do all kinds of complex poses like:

put their leg over their shoulder and stand up on the other leg,

get into lotus pose standing upside down on their heads in Shirasasana,

do a wheel pose effortlessly,

still falter when it comes to the head to knee. 

Why?

This pose is not about strength or flexibility or a tradeoff between the two. There is a third ingredient to it that takes time to develop. . . balance! Incredible physical and mental balance.!! You have to be able to tighten a select set of muscles while simultaneouly relax another set of muscles and breathe right or you cannot pull this off. The intense focus required, takes a lot of practice specific to this pose. 

There is also 4 parts to it (or so I thought, till Joseph Encina showed me there are 5 parts to it) and so far I have never gone past step 2 to successfully finish step 3 in the last 6 years.  Recently though,  I am consistently getting to step 3 which is a good sign. 

To me the six poses and all the rules in a competition are great, but mostly filler. They are like the other half dozen items we order to get an idea of the restaurant. If you have to judge all contestants with the least amount of effort, just look at how they do standing head to knee pose and you can pretty much get to the final ranking. 

It is the Rava Dosa of poses for me.. 

Really enjoyed watching the competition, although only for three or four 30 minute stretches. The best part of this competition was that my teacher and mentor Michelle Vennard won the Adult womens group.  My Yoga guru is a world champion! She smiled through the entire three minutes and was grace personified. I also got to see my friend Lee compete live and he did an amazing job. Have seen him on the mat next to me, have stared into his eyes during Yoga demonstrations, but to see him try his best the way he did gave me goosebumps. When you see folks you know transcend their usual, it is truly inspiring!

Have been very fortunate to be around champs in my life. My ballroom dance teacher was an International champion and I still hear her voice while doing Yoga, especially when the teacher says "breathe" with an accent. There are two things I still remember from my dancing days that she taught me. 

1. Sundar, you don't have to have your partner hang from the Chandeliers to win this one. You need impeccable timing and have a smile on your face the entire time.. even when you screw up

2. the trick to dancing effortlessly for round after round is to breathe right. If you know when to take a breath, you can dance for hours without any huffing and puffing

Same rules apply in Yoga! 

After watching the competition, it was time to do real Yoga..

There was a lot happening in the house over the weeekend and I was glad that there was no Asia trip. Our water main broke (service line) and San Jose Water came and shut our water down till we got a plumber to find and fix the leak. It was an interesting 36 hours. Brought back so many memories of  growing up in India when the Metro Water lorry would not show up.

Having to make some amends to schedules, using the handpump to get water from a borewell and rationing water for everyone in the house etc.. All those experiences came in handy. The inspector from the water company gave me a compliment "Sir, I am really going to do my best to help you because you are calm and not irate like most customers in this situation. Will try to jumper water from your neighbors garden hose back to your house".. He tried, but it didn't work. So we just adjusted till we got water flowing again.

It was a good experience for the kids as well, and a reminder of things we take for granted, especially when we are in a routine. 

All that said, seriously thinking about giving the competition another shot next year. For that to happen, one has to understand Rava Dosa.. I mean.. Standing head to knee..

On a side note, my beard experiment has crossed the one month mark. I am getting used to it, as are people who see me every day. The patches are gone, the gray looks dignified and as an unintended side effect, I am conscious of my breath .. every freaking breath, if I chose to be conscious of it.. because my moustache picks up the breathing. 

Even if I am not making loud noises or breathing loudly by previous standards, the breath going through the moustache literally whispers loudly. Trying to minimize that movement or sound has added a new complexity to breath control during asanas. You can't see it, but the faintest movement of those hair, makes me stop or slow down.

Even while lying down in Shavasana, the whiskers tell you the truth about how you are breathing. It is like an external meter that can give you a feed back loop.  It is interesting the way I am using it as a regulating mechanism. Maybe if I had whiskers around my knees that would do something everytime they came unlocked??? Was thinking along those lines today.

Think it is obvious that I am too eager to do that one pose which keeps evading me, but having waited all this time and seeing that  sometimes progress comes at the least expected times, will keep at it and see what happens.  My goal every year is to do yoga at least 200 times. The spreadsheet says I have done 212 this year and 1648 classes to date.. that is almost 6600 attempts at Standing head to knee (we do two sets on each leg)!

You can say "something is wrong with you", if I attempted something 6600 times and still failed at reaching the end result. While that is one way to think of it, the other way to think of it, is that this pose is not for everyone. That is why it is a mandatory pose in a Yoga Championship final.  

The yoga journey continues to be interesting..

ps. My house photographers are all on strike. So Yoga photos over the weekend..

Yoga competition - No it is not nonsense

In a funny twist of fate, I ended up in a Yoga competition. There is no other way to describe it.  Bikram Yoga San Jose, where I pretty much live outside of the house, turned 14 over the weekend. To celebrate the anniversary, the teachers were asking some of the regular students who kill themselves trying to outdo their reflection in the front mirror to do a demonstration of their good poses. Raised my hand and said "I will do it".. 

Think Revathi in Mouna Ragam movie saying "I will identify the guys" without realizing the consequences... (not all of you will get that one, sorry). 

Last Saturday there was a "practice session" to co-ordinate the demonstration. So I stay back after class to see that there are a lot of teachers and two or three students and they are all practicing a 6 poses in 3 minute routine. My turn came to demonstrate and I did 4 poses from the usual sequence we do every day and then there was a blank stare. The coaches looked at me and I looked back at them going "what?"

They said "do you know any poses other than the ones we practice?" and I said "no. I have been doing the same thing over and over again for 6 years now and havent really tried to do more". They said "no problem. can you sit in lotus pose?". Answer was yes. Their eyes lit up. Can you now do a peacock pose in lotus position? 

Being a good sport (I have not tried a peacock pose since college days when we would do that pose on the edge of of writing desks in the lecture halls) did try that and failed. Finally after a few other options were tried, I also had 6 poses to show. We practiced that 3 times over 2 hours and just before I was about to go home, the teachers tell me "by the way, there is a competition in the afternoon, same day as the anniversary party. the same three minute routine, but in front of some experienced judges and an audience. why don't you do it there as well? it will be quite an experience!"

I said "will think about it. I have a Asia trip the day after the anniversary party. so it is going to be a hectic week.". What I didnt tell them was that Pongal festival was this weekend and I really wanted to eat a lot of pongal, and one cannot do demonstrations, leave alone compete with a stomach full of pongal (rice, lentiles, jaggery and clarified butter are the main ingredients.. the key ingredient being the ghee). 

Did try that routine every day after class was over and was not doing very well on the special poses. They had to be held for 5 seconds minimum and was able to do only 2-3 seconds. Had also bruised my knee in the process of trying the options during the coaching session and it was not making things any easier. 

Thursday rolls in. I am at the yoga class at 8:30 in the night. One of my coaches asks me "are you ready for the competition" and I give him the spiel about the bruised knee and not wanting to embarras myself in front of a large crowd and esteemed judges when I cannot hold things for more than 2-3 seconds. He goes "See, I see this all the time. On that day, you go up on stage and the adrenalin kicks in and you go an amazing job. You will have to try it for the experience. Why don't you try it in front of your classmates tonight?"

It is close to 10PM and teacher told the class at the end "please give Sundar 3 minutes of your time. He is going to do a bunch of poses in a competition over the weekend and he could get used to an audience!". 

After an exhausting day at work and having done yoga for 90 minutes, gave it a shot in front of 30 odd people and surprisingly my coach was right. He is usually right, and is even more correct when he doesn't make any sense. Somehow was holding things a lot longer in front of a crowd. Guess the human body is very good at making chemicals that help you in certain situations! I did it in 2 minutes and 40 seconds and the teacher said "you have time. you should hold poses longer, but ok job!"

So went home and signed up for the competition. Initially was thinking "who am I competing with?", what does this even mean? etc. etc. To me the only competition is with yesterdays Sundar, when it comes to yoga. Still, this promised to be an interesting experience. 

Yesteray afternoon, went in front of a knowledgeble yoga crowd and some big name judges and gave it a shot. It was an interesting experince. I had zero expectations of winning anything. All I wanted to see was :

1. Not fall down

2. Hold the poses for the minimum required time

3. Manage the time so that I don't rush and finish too fast or go over the 3 minute time

4. Smile through it all and have fun

Did accomplish all 4! Did it in 2 minutes 59 seconds. Used every bit of time and held poses for more than 5 seconds on all poses. They were not my best poses. Sometimes I do a better job in class, but it is interesting what happens when you are put on a spot. Your brain and body, mostly brain start doing tricks on your confidence. Muscles that usually don't shake during the poses start acting up.. 

It was the longest 3 minutes of my life. It was like that guy in the Wanted movie who has his heart beat slow down to the point where he can start seeing the wings of the fly and he can shoot their wings down.. 

For a few seconds I could not hear anything, see anything. It was just me and a point on the judges table in front of me. Everything else faded away! 

Once the three minutes was over, I felt the same thing that we feel at the end of a 90 minute class. Your body is in bits and pieces and your mind is a blank. The reset button was hit! 

Yes, why a Yoga competition? is a good question. Why not? is a good answer. If you are a regular yoga student, you should try this competition thing. It is a new "rush" and a new "high"! 

and if I can do it, anyone can do it! 

ps. I did not have my cell phone with me in the room, but BYSJ has pictures and videos on their FB page.. you can check it out there. 

NASER

The Past : NASER 

NASER, an acronym I am coining stands for  "News Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rubbish". Till the morning of the election everyone, even the guys at fivethirtyeight who has predicted things very successfully in the past wrote a post that said "no matter which scenario we pick, Hillary Clinton comes up the winner". Today the US stands where it is because people are disconnected with reality.

There is the Fox news watching folks who believe that all muslims are terrorists and the Chinese are taking their jobs or that Obama is after their guns.. the list goes on. Then there is the coastal mix that has no idea that there are folks who are born and raised in the Midwest who have never crossed their county borders and have lived to be past sixty and their aspirations for the rest of their lives and their children look very bleak. 

There is probably one dude who is going door to door and collecting some info. This then gets amplified and mirrored multiple times with some embellishments and gets called news. We live in a country where 1$ was shown as collateral 31 times to create a debt crisis. Same thing happens to polling?!

Three weeks ago, spent 4 hours voting.

(Put the sticker on my phone instead of my shirt.. it lasted three plus weeks! now it is a bitter reminder of my pass %...)

Today we have the results, but I have to check across different sites to find out if I got an A or a D.  When we wait at airports, Jr. plays a game on her phone called family feud and she keeps bugging me to help her with answers. There when you answer something it goes "you said the answer is Hillary.. the audiene said Trump".. wish there was an answer key to the election that shows the correct answers to all the things you picked and gives you a score and it gets mailed to your home after the exam, err. election is over. 

This time majority of my choices were not the winning choices. Usually it is 50/50. This time it is more like 30/60. Chances are I am way too disconnected with the folks around me. We should all get a disconnect score at the end of an election, be it within your city, county, state and the nation. 

Last night I went for a yoga class and for 90 minutes forgot what was going on outside that hot room. The fact that my hand was sending pain signals every 10 seconds was making it more challenging than thoughts of the election. Came home to find out that Trump was very close to winning and there was a general doom and gloom scenario in the house and neighborhood. There was also a lot of disbelief that this could acutually have happened. 

I did predict a Trump win and got yelled at for it three weeks ago. My prediction was based on two things. The first was related to how Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The media world over said he had no chance or he had only a fighting chance, but he came roaring with an absolute majority. The reason the pollsters were not predicting that right? A lot of folks did not tell everyone who they were really voting for but came out in droves to vote for the BJP. At that time, voting for the BJP was associated by mainstream media as a Hitler vote! In my mind, the same thing was going on in the US. Folks who want to vote for Trump, but have a problem associating with the stigma (there were Republicans endorsing him who would not mention him by name) weren't going to advertise it loudly!

The second thing was our own dissonance with what is happening in a large part of the country. In this year I have made one trip to Ohio, one aborted trip to Ohio which ended in a Denver airport sleep in, one trip to Seattle, Austin and Pittsburgh as fas as domestic travel goes. The Ohio and Pittsburgh trip were eye opening. There is a overwhelming sense of despair for folks who have a problem and sincerely believe their problem is because of a,b,c thanks to what they see and hear. The fact that they associate the root causes of their problems to things or countries or folks, that are so far off the mark, does not make their problems unreal. They are vey very real. Folks who were able to screw the same nut into the same bolt for 8 hours a day, five days a week for 20 years and get paid a decent salary to raise kids, put food on the table and pay a mortgage are suddenly jobless. A lot of such jobs were also military jobs making tanks and other things we may not need. If we closed those plants, they all have to make something else or have some other skill. The roof, the food, the kids, they don't go away. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement for some because of their race, but the folks I met or spoke to were not showing any entitlement. They were just lacking a job matching their skillset. 

The Present : Day After Tomorrow

That movie keeps coming to mind. Yes, Trump is now President elect. We did have a tough time explaining to our kids what was going on. It is true that we have a democracy and the we accept the system for what it is.

If someone tells you "Clinton won the majority vote", that is an excuse. The rules of the game is the electoral college and everyone has known the rules for hundreds of years, so both campaigns were playing for the electoral college. If Trump won, it was with the same rules. That part is easy to explain.

If someone tells you "the third party vote is what cost Clinton the election", that is also an excuse. We always knew that Johnson/Weld were going to do better in this election because they were a compromise for people who used to vote for establishment Republicans and the Libertarian folks were not going to vote for Hilary anyways. That was a constant that wasn't new or unexpected.

We are not ready for a woman president. Even that part is easy to explain. There are so many nations out there with women leaders, but the US is not ready for it. Maybe some other woman will be President some day. The fact that Hillary came so close is something to rejoice. Someone asked me during the Primary, why are you not coming out in support of Hillary explicitly. My answer was "I don't like women who stand by their husbands in front of the press to show their support after said husband has just been caught cheating with a girl old enough to be his daughter. She should have castrated the bastard or separated from him, not stand by him and take that crap for the sake of politics". I was lectured on that statement by many of my family and friends that in spite of that she is where she is. I was Hilary neutral.. let's put it that way. My reason for not being enthusiastic was my perception that she can be pushed easily. She did prove me wrong in the debates. 

The hardest part to explain to the kids? A guy who said and did what he did, managed to get elected to this office. If your kids aspire to be the POTUS someday, the value system that you need to instill in them are not ones of family values, compassion, responsibility to fellow citizen and country but whatever Trump stands for. That is a new low as a parent. It is a growing up lesson as a parent. Our kids have to grow up to a new reality and wake up to a lot of concepts a little too early. Forget the tooth fairy or Santa.  Jr. was getting nightmares after reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is mandatory 9th grade reading. Maybe it should be mandatory 6th grade reading! but I did have a spin for it.. 

The greatness of the American electoral process is not that a black man was our president for 8 years. It is not that a woman managed to stand for this office and come close to winning it. It is that a man like Trump can be President if he perseveres. That is a very American thing to do. You ignore anything anyone says about you and still manage go grab America. Okay, looks like the cynic in me is staring to come out again. Deep breath. Deep breath. Where were we?

We told our kids this morning that the only thing no one can take away from them is their education and knowledge and the more they share that knowledge the more valuable it is. The little one looks up at me and goes "what I learned in this election is that if you have a rich daddy, you can be messed up and still become president!" and she gives me a look that says "if only you were rich..."  Definitely not the value system conversation you want to have.. but ... 

The Future : A big ship vs. a jet ski... I am thinking Hunt for Red October

A dictatorship is like a jet ski. You can change direction very fast with your hands and the craft responds. It can go fast and there is a good chance to crash and burn. A large and complicated democracy with electoral colleges, senate, house of representatives, city councils, governers, etc. is like a ship. You can be the captain and say "set course for this lattitude and longitude" and that gets conveyed to a first officer to another guy to another guy and finally by the time it gets to change, it is not fast or perceptible. The US is like that ship. There are social experiments that have time scales in the decades. 

Trump is a social experiement. We thought we were going to get golden spangles by mixing potassium iodide with lead nitrate, but were surprised to see an orange sediment in the test tube. The lead was there.. but the iodide was missing! If my daughter reads this, please note that I still remember this from 30 years ago. I will do a pop quiz on this sometime soon. Get ready.. where were we again? This whole election thing is making me go all over the place.  This social experiement has to be supported and accepted. We still do not know how the world will react. I am not expecting wide spread riots like the ones that happen in third world nations when an election is close. There is a lot more tolerance in the US than the world gives us credit for. Trumps words during his run up to this office definitely do not project him as a President for everyone and he is most likely going to be pushed over by the likes of Putin. 

If there is one thing that any President has always focussed on irrespective of managing the way we are perceived by the world, it is the strength of the USD. Trump will not do anything to damage that. If anything that is for sure. That will be the first reassuring thing. 

His biggest challenge is to bring jobs back to the US. Sooner or later the good folks in the midwest will realize that robots took a lions share of their jobs, not the Chinese, not bad trade deals, not Mexicans and immigrants. Trump can make tanks that no military would want to use and stock pile them if that is what it means to put food on the table for that vote base or he can try and line up with the world and realize that good jobs will mean energy jobs and Information technology jobs. Those are the engines for the next decade. Making his constituents happy and getting jobs back automatically involves certain other compromises. That will keep him busy and away from his hate rhetoric.

When I first became a manager, I realized that it is easy to be an individual contributor than a manager. It is not easy to herd cats. Trump has a government job for the first time. Moving from the private sector to the government, he is going to have a massive transition. First they are going to take his phone away and give him one of those kid phones (you should watch Obama describe it in one of the late shows) and that might mean, no tweeting at 3PM.  That is just the first adjustment. 

There is an expecatation from the POTUS from everyone here and abroad. At the least he should meet the expectations of those who voted for him. Let's hope he does that. I am all for a happy midwest where folks prosper again. Hope that hole in the US donut becomes a cream filled solid one. 

On a side note, a majority of my Indian family and friends who are US citizens are sad that Trump won. There are a few who voted for Trump because of one or both of below reasons :

a. He will lower taxes

b. he will put the muslims in their place (they are still friends or family and they took this stand because of things they encountered in their life.. we continue to have an active dialogue on that)

A majority of my Indian family and friends who are NOT citizens are overwhemingly happy that Trump won.

They are happy for one or many of below reasons :

a. He will fast track green card process which has crawled under Obama

b. H1B visas will be a thing again and we can see IT folks come to the US to work

c. The US deserves to have Trump as President as he represents the real US (read it as "you are not any better off than we are")

Everyone has their reasons and biases.

Today was as interesting as any other day on the road (same or slightly more traffic), at work (interesting challenges), at home (sheet rock guy lights a cigarette inside house) and life goes on. My taxes are unlikely to change. Given we live in California, we are likely to continue to show our kids a pro immigrant, pro LGBT, equal opportunity lesson. Sure, I have some explaining to do as usual on my Asia trips where everyone asks me why as an American I got Trump elected ! Folks, was already asked this when he was a nominee. That will pass soon. 

It is possible that my kids will have a heavier debt burden with more wars and unnecessary spending on things that are no good for the world as a whole.. but that is a long term thing that can course correct. Barring a few downsides, this does not change things for us here. There is a fear for certain minorities in certain areas of the country and one does worry about President Trump's ability to control a mob and restrain it given his rhetoric. Most likely nothing like that will happen. The few crazies will act up much like the few RSS groups acted up after Modi won in India, but other than that, life will go on.

There is a mandate for jobs in the US. We have to provide some service or manufacture something for those jobs. Finding what service to provide or what to make in a cost competitive way is going to be the challenge and it is to be seen how Trump will solve that problem. We also have a mandate for a non politician to be in charge because folks think the current establishment politicians cannot get things done. That is true only to a certain extent. The rest is the impact of globalization which most of the population does not understand or refuses to accept. Trump is unlikely to reverse that process.

Given he was unlikely do a lot of things and he did, hoping that he does manage to reverse it.. 

Time will tell. . . 

ps. a humble request to my democrat friends. Do not distance yourself from the process or the participation. Continue to engage in the debate. talk to people who do not share your point of view. if anything my travels have taught me, it is to sit and hear things you don't want to hear, but dig deeper to find why and what drives others to do or say what they say. you can actually learn a lot. if anything go listen to Positively 4th street and imagine putting yourself in another shoes.. that is not a good start, but at least a start. 

pps. It is safe to say that the media world over is lazy. No one actually goes talks to people and collects real data. Indirect references, copying other peoples snippets has become the norm. I can talk to my grandma on the phone over five days, call it a statistic and publish it and chances are, if it fits the story, it will be amplified, embellished and repeated over and over again. Do your own research where possible. Travel if possible. Watch the travel channel, Discovery channel or National Geographic instead of FOX or CNN or MSNBC. Talk to people! Those folks who have never left their county in their entire life, go meet them if you can!