Conversations with the little one

Recent happening in our Kitchen. San is getting ready to make a special dish for Tamil New year (Vadai's, a spicy south Indian donut) and the little one tells her :

"Amma, please give me the salt so I can put it in the batter"

San : Why?

Little one : So eveyone will know "I cooked it"!

San : Why do you get to say you cooked it just because you put the salt in?

LO : Madras Paati (her grandma .. my mom) told me that it doesn't matter who does the cutting, mixing and other things. The "real" cook is the one who puts the salt! 

We were laughing out so loud after hearing that. She had completely missed the point. My mom had told her that the real skill was in judging how much salt and spices to put and that is where the true cooking expertise is. The little one intepreted that literally as "the person who physically puts the salt in". She did get it after we explained the devil in the detail of Madras Paati's words! 

Now she is working on guessing the right amount of salt for various things and she is not far off. This one is going to be a great chef! 

Over the weekend, we visited the Great Mall and as usual we shopped for the kids when there were no plans to buy them anything. Spent 2 hours buying unplanned things and 10 minutes at the store in the last minute on the intended purchase! 

The little one lobbies the parents individually over a space of 30 minutes and gets herself a pair of Converse shoes. Apparently these ones have a special name as the shoe has a small piece of canvas covering the ankles. I already forgot what that name was. Anyways, she goes "Appa, these are the best shoes. Everyone (lists 10 friends) wears them at school and they have a STAR on them and by the way, they last longer".. The last longer part was added for my benefit so it would clinch the argument. She knew the price tag would not allow the "it is less than 20$ limit" arugment and played it safe. 

Me : These are canvas shoes. They were like "economy class" shoes in India when I was growing up. We used to wear this from 1st grade to 12th grade in school as part of our uniform. They are the same as Bata shoes!

LO : NO! They are not. That is CANVAS. This is CONVERSE!

Me : Look, this IS made of canvass.

LO : No, canvass is what I paint on in art class.

Me : Same thing. Look, we used to put white polish and paint our shoes. It is the same material, just not hardened wiht starch on the back.

LO : I have been to the Bata store. Those shoes don't have a STAR on them that says converse. Anyways you don't get the Bata thing here you know! 

Me : by the way, when I was in Europe, I saw that every street corner had a Bata store! Next time I go, can buy one for you from there.. 

By now she was worried of losing some argument somewhere and did not want to walk out without the shoes. I could see it in her eyes. So we got her the shoes and made her day!

I still don't get why a pair of canvass shoes should cost 25 bucks. Anyways, they have done a good marketing job capturing the 8 year old third grader market.

The little one always amazes me with the way she tries to reason with me. We used to watch Jr. go through this phase. Now we watch the little one. Just a question of time before this innocence will be lost to cold hard reasoning! 

The photo is courtesy of Jr. who is now into this Sketch art thing. Starts taking random pics in the house and works on a software in the iPad and makes them into sketch drawings. Some of her work is very good. We might even end up framing a few!

The girls are growing up too fast to my liking. Sigh! 

Gender profiling hits closer to home..

Friday evening. Mom asks dad to stop by the Indian Grocery store on the way home from work. She gives a long list of things to get.  

The kids come back from evening class. It is time to unload the stuff from the trunk and given how the stores don't give plastic bags anymore and also given that daddy is not the default shopper, there are no big bags. All the individual items are just spread across the trunk. So we need as many hands as possible to do the unloading fast.

The kids are helping and Mommy says "I asked for beans. I expect you to buy beans for making curry for the four of us for one meal. Not for two. This is waaay more beans than I would have got"

The little one decides to join in the bashing "If you thought he got too much beans wait till you see how much Vendaikaai(Okra) he got!" which turned out to be a false accusation. When Mommy saw the quantity she thought it was too little.. Nevertheless, you folks get the picture..

Jr. decides to chime in "See, this is what happens when you send a 'boy' to get vegetables!" . This 'boy' is the one making them their special sepankizhangu curries etc. and suddenly this 'boy' is not to be relied on for buying vegetables?! 

It is not easy living with three girls.. When they decide to pile things on, it comes big and deep. Daddy has decided to stop doing a few things around the house till they come around. 

They are watching too many serials on the iPad that designate daddy as the person who takes out the garbage and plays with power tools in the garage. Time to unplug the internet connection in the house. 

Nelson, my man.. my mai'Man

Last week after what can only be described as a long and ardous work day, came home, made some tea, sat on the couch and logged into Facebook. 

The news feed had at least 25 references to Nelson Mandela passing away. If I were to plot a histogram of the number of letters on the post (including forwarded or attached links) it would look something like this..

Granted I rounded off the letters, but still this is a fairly accurate picture. Where was I? Yes, it appeared as though my main man Nelson had carpet bombed my Facebook feed through my friends.  The one long post was a cut paste job of how the US as a country was actually trying to keep Mandela in prison as long as they could, call the ANC a terrorist organization, supported the South African government in his initial capture, etc.  and pretty much stopped short of saying "if you are American, don't bother talking about Mandela". 

After digesting the news feed at the end of the long day and doing some Googling, Twittering, etc. I came to the following conclusions:

1. Nelson Mandela had definitely passed away, and given the outpouring, had already rested in peace. It was a sure thing for the man.

2. On that day people all over the world probably said "RIP Mandela" instead of the usual "Jai Ram Ji ki" , "Allah o' Akbar" or "Praise the Lord" .. Hell even the Namaste in the Yoga room was probably replaced by "RIP Mandela". 

3. There was a clear trend of certain articles related to Mandela, but the surprising ones were the US is no friend of Mandela variety which were getting more rounds than the "did you know his middle name was Troublemaker?" type articles.

Given all this Mandela, I asked the kids "Do you know why Nelson Mandela was?" and the little one, crackerjack (mundhiri kottai translated wrong) that she is, said and I quote verbatim:

Yes. I know! Mandela was a good guy who fought for the freedom of "Africans", then they put him in jail for a long time and when he finally came out he won and helped the Africans, but the guys he fought didn't like him and so they shot him"! 

I was like "Wow".. Someone just rewrote history and mixed up MLK with Mandela. I know there are parallels with respect to fighting for black people.. but seriously! So, I broke the news to her that Mandela did die "peacefully" in his bed at the ripe age of 95. San may have had a hand in this history lesson is my guess.. 

Now where were we again? Ah, yes! Mandela had passed away. We went to Jr's winter concert band performance at her school and guess what ? The conductor is dedicating "Mozart's last requim" to Mandela as a fitting tribute. Irrespective of how he was remembered while alive, Mandela had definitely touched anyone and everyone for 24-48 hours at least, in an all pervasive way by dying.

My initial rant at seeing all the forwards was "Why are people melting icebergs by forwarding things in the name of showing some respect to a dead world leader?" Ok, I know there are folks going "what? Melting icebergs?". Let me explain.

In my day job, I make a memory. All of you use memory all the time without realizing it. When you do that harmeless "R.I.P. Mandela" post on FB and send it to all your friends, it gets written in a lot of places on a lot of memory chips, disks, solid state drives etc. Now it takes energy, a very small miniscule amout to write and read this data. However, this adds up. Just do the math. A few picoJoules of energy multiplied a few Qunitillion times is already in Mega Joules.. again crude math but you get the picture!

Was just thinking aloud "what is the piont in making a better memory and giving it to people if they don't use it wisely.. the more memory you give, the more RIP posts are going to go around. More folks will instagram their dinner. . still more icebergs will melt etc. etc." Did I say it was a long day?  Did come around eventually to accepting that irrespective of what I thought, today the world is more connected than ever and it is okay for everyone to connect in whatever way they want. Trying to regulate how someone uses something like memory was a stupid thought in the first place. Probably ranks on snobbery! So I stand corrected. 

That said, my kids did ask me what I thought of Mandela or what I knew of him as though I was supposed to know him very personally. So here is what I remember of Mandela ..

It was the late eighties. Prannoy Roy had a wonderful program that aired late night on Doordarshan (only Indian channel at the time) called "The world this week". In that we would get glimpses of world events. We got to see video clippings of Mandela and Apartheid. It was like watching the caste system on steroids running out of control and one man who was the voice of reason. I didn't give him even 50/50 odds at the time of repealing Apartheid. 

Early nineties. I come to the USA as a student to Philadelphia. Back folks don't have the same status as white folks when it come to financial equality but it was heartening to see the US as a true melting pot of races. In a way it was great that my entry to the US was in Phili that gave me this rosy view of the US. If I had gone to some place in the mid-west, my outlook on the country would have been very different. Mandela becomes president, Apartheid is no more and we are now discussing real important issues in the grad student lounge on what this means to Cricket, Allan Donald, Alan Lamb, Gary Kirsten.. etc.   Most of you won't understand, but some of you will! This meant the Indian team would be one more down in the world rankings after yet another country, "South Africa" now kicks its butt in Cricket. It was too much to bear.  On the bright side, there was one blackish looking dude in the South African squad. It was kind of like a precursor to watching Obama become president.

Mid nineties. Remember having a conversation about Mandela with another student at RPI. "why would she divorce him after going through all that?". It was a conversation on divorcing at 70+. At the end of the conversation it was clear that I did not understand Mandela, Winnie, people in general or the concept of divorce.

Then things changed in my life. Mandela was mostly forgotten as was cricket. There was the occasional news that he was sick, dying or both and a potential backlash if he died. Never got that. Given that it has been almost 20 years since Apartheid was lifted and things have improved slightly, why would South Africans suddenly erupt in violence if a good man died at a ripe age after accomplishing something so phenomenal. Unify two races after hundreds of years of animosity and oppression? 

The answer came to me in a flash! Why did people in Tamil Nadu go vandalize shops and disturb law and order when MGR (an actor turned politician) died ? He was no Mandela, but the crowd went into a frenzy. So maybe the press was right in their thought process? 

Well, the good news is that the man and the country whose people he unified, are both resting in peace almost a week after he passed away. 

If anything, that is the true legacy of my main man Nelson!