How was this even possible?

In 2005, I had posted this about Naadi Astrology and this unbelievable palm leaves that had poems that could accurately give all my details from my birth to the point those leaves were destined to be read. 

It is now your destiny to be able to hear this !! There was no easy way to upload just an audio to a blog then. Now we have methods!

There was no google in 1997 and even then, getting details about someone including their Indian Horsocope which needs date of birth and place of birth with an accuracy of 4 minutes, time windows, family details, names etc.. all in poetry.. not possible with even today's AI and computing power to write those as recitable poems. 

It was just amazing. A lot of folks reached out to me then and I did give them the contact to go find their palm leaves of destiny. However, not everyone who went there, could find their leaf. That is part of the deal. 

Some folks went multiple times over a period of years and managed to find it later! 

All that said, as part of digitizing audio tapes from years ago, found Naadi tapes from when my parents got my leaf and how years later San found her leaf on a visit to Vaideeswaran Kovil. She rushed it and was impatient as she had to come back to a hungry kid. Still you can see two data points.. 

Majority of what was said in detail was accurate. Then again, a lot of stuff was vague when it came to the future. We have two girls. In my reading, that was off. In San's reading it was right. 

If you have the patience, you can listen to this..  pretty impressive actually for a palm leaf that is a few thousand years old and preserved for generations in a temple! 

Maybe our destinies are all pre written.. or maybe there is some time travel involved here. In either case, the beauty of human existence is that we just go about our daily life with amazing selective memory loss. We all assume that we will wake up day after day and do things as we plan them. We put in for vacations 3 months from now, plan weddings, put 5 year FD's, etc.. forgetting that there is no guarantee for anyone for their very next breath! That is actually a good thing, so we can keep moving!

I usually forget this tape exists, except when someone brings up destiny in a conversation. Guess the readers of this blog can scratch their heads after listening.. 

Not sure if these places are still around and do the leaf readings. Have read articles that there are a lot of fake centers and copies floating around. Still not sure how any fake thing can guess this many details right and come up with limmerics in record time while the person is sitting in front of them.. that too in ancient Tamil script!

If any of you have had recent experiences with "meeting your leaf", do share in comments! 

This was out of sight and hearing and out of mind for a good 16 or so years. So it was interesting to listen to after a long time.. especially with Jr. listening in on every word  and asking questions. 

She was laughing so loud hearing my dad keep interrupting the reader about my wedding plans! 

This was way way ahead of Chat GPT !!! 

Happy thanksgiving! Time travel weekend...

This year, my birthday was a simple affair with both the kids making a flying visit for the long weekend. 

After the celeberations were done, jr. and me decided to have some fun. She saw an ad for a service that gets old tapes , negatives etc. and gets them digitized. We had a lot of audio cassettes and video cassettes to be digitized.. but after realizing that the service was ripping us off in shipping fees, decided against using it.

We did however find the old Cassette to MP3 converter and put it to good use. It took us some time to download Audacity app on the Mac and then set it up right so it could read the device! Once we figured it out, it was fun to check what was in those cassettes. 

Most of them were tapes I had accumulated to practice dancing.. one was full of Latin songs, one was all waltzes, one was a mix tape that simply said "To Miss. Smooth, with love, Part 1" and Jr.'s looks at me with raised eyebrows and asks "so I take it that it is a mix tape you made for your girlfriend?". Told her it was for a friend and she did take the part 2.

Then I found two cassettes from Sruthi, an organization in Philadelphia which had organized a Lalgudi concert with his kids in 1993. Remember setting up the mics for it and getting free admission to the concert. We also got to spend the evening with the artists at a professors house. In India, I could never think of being up close and personal with greatness like that! 

Brought back so many memories of how my association with music has always been touch and go.

There was a cassette with Tamil movie songs which my Chitti's had recorded and sent me as a gift. Even today my Chitti's (mom's younger sisters) are my biggest supporters when it comes to encouraging me to sing in Smule! I recognize my Lalli chitti's handwriting on that list.. she would write so beautifully and fast! 

30 years later have sang a lot of those songs.. the ones I missed, will definitely sing! Did not know this cassette was still around till today!

 

Used to get 20 cassettet tapes as a package at Sam's club (think Costco in the early 90's). Had the habit of recording radio stations while sitting alone in the lab doing experiments.. kind of a time capsuley thing.. 

Some of them were from 1993/94, then 96, 98.. It was wild listening to the commercials from those times (mostly beer  and car commercials!). Jr. was having so much fun Shazaming the songs and got a taste of what music daddy was listening to 30 years ago! There were multiple radio stations in PHiladelphia/ Wilmington Delaware, then Albany/Troy NY.. and some Latin tapes that were too rare for the Shazam app!

Then we found some old gold!  There was a copy of me singing Kandar shasthi kavasam at 4 years old. It was the first time my voice was recorded on the cassette player that my Ambi mama bought. The whole family was impressed with the ability to record and replay.. and my reciting slokas was used as the trial run!

My grandpa had saved that cassette and given it to me in 1995. It had made it through all the moving over the years and is now an MP3 .. better a Youtube video. 

Then we found my Naadi Josiyam tapes.. which was one of the reasons for starting this exercise. A long conversation with my friends mom yesterday on how things seem to be predetermined to a large extent in our lives and the best way to use this knowledge wisely to navigate through life.. even if it is all meant to be! 

A separate post on that later!

It has been a fun weekend so far, going back in time with my kid!

7am Arivu (Seventh Sense) - Tamil Movie

Friday night.. a last minute impulsive decision to go watch the new movie staring Surya in the theaters with MIL and Cousin..

Off we went with some lowered expectations as the movie got mixed reviews.

Came out thinking "damn, what a different movie! This is definitely a new for Tamil cinema these days. Has been quite some time since we came out of a Tamil Movie thinking.. "

Consider my General Knowledge to be above average, what with being on Quiz teams from a young age but one thing I did not know was that Da-mo, the patriarch who is credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to China and also reshaped Shaolin Kung Fu to China was actually a South Indian Pallava prince! Somehow that part was never taught to us in our history books. Neither was the fact that today's Kung Fu had its origins in Kalaripayattu (which was the original martial art form that this Da-mo or Dharuma (or Bodhidharma as he was referred to) learned in India. Did know what Kalaripayattu was! That needed no introduction.

It was an interesting movie, simply for bringing to light, the lack of interest in self promotion in India and Indians alike.

If you are interested in knowing more watch this video series. This guy did an awesome job of explaining BodhiDharma. Do not know if he ever completed the book. If any of you know kindly drop a note. Should be worth a read!

Every twelve years or so my life encounters something that is beyond my grasp. Something that I have found a new respect for that teaches me that "just because we do not comprehend something, we should not dismiss it. There is a lot we do not know and cannot explain with our limited mental and physical capacity".

The first one was Siddha medicine. When allopathy left me for dead at 12, a 97 year old chain smoking bearded Yogi (who was always in Padmadsana when he treated me) cured me by looking at me, feeling my pulse, looking at my eyes, mouth and feeling my skin and then declaring "this kids blood is not pure. we have to purify it" and went on to give me some heavy metal cocktails that purged my system and brought me even closer to death but revived me. At that time my parents and relatives thought it was nothing but magical. Everything he did has an explanation in modern medicine. Arsenic in small doses can be a cure! Bismuth is used in pepto-bismol ! All said and done he did with baspams, legiyams and thailams (powders, gels and massage oils) what the antibiotics of the early eighties could not do.

My post on that aspect is here. The movie literally echoes my sentiments in the conclusion. (It was funny with the reference to turmeric!. should have started writing movie scripts last year!)

Another 13 years later, there was an encounter with Nadi astrology. Indian astrology is dismissed as gobbledygook by westerner scientists. Don't need to say more. If I can tell you that by analyzing a hair root, I can tell the persons ethnicity, eye color, diseases they are prone to etc. etc. 50 years ago it was laughable. Today we call it genomes, bio-markers, etc. and to the educated few it is not laughable. If it is possible to believe that so much information can be gleaned from a hair follicle, why not a thumb print?

Old posts on this topic Here and here..

Thirteen more years later when physiotherapy said "this is as far as we go!" Yoga has come to the rescue. Initially hesitant that sitting in a hot room at 105 F and 40% humidity would do anyone any good, have seen what can happen if only you believe! Again, it is magical. Folks who are seeing me after a two or more year gap say "you have become younger".

It is a crying shame that there are more Yoga studios in the San Francisco bay area than in Chennai. If only they had taught yoga in the schools in India instead of teaching us "march past" to the beat of a drum maybe my bow legs would be straight by now!

My legs are bowed like my fathers. Maybe it is genetic, maybe it is a vitamin deficiency of sorts but when I bring my thighs together and me feet together, my knees separate. Asked one of my yoga teachers, "how long do you think before this corrects with yoga?" and she said "usually it takes only 7 years".

Will let you all know how it goes in "only 7 years"!

What else is there to encounter another 12 years from now?!

Do watch this movie for the documentary aspect..

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