madrasi_in_mo

And my non-desi friends - you might find this refreshing (?!!) if you have been hearing too many Christmas songs each time you step out....

Punjabi "Jingle bells".... :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5egq7QNCXY

Here's what I have discovered (!):

Condescension (towards others) comes from a feeling of insecurity.

Speaking of clippings from youtube.com, here is one that I enjoyed watching: ((Oh well, this is from the dancer's website):
http://mythiliprakash.com/videos5.html

Apparently, Sahana is done with baby food - the mashed up, ground stuff, that is. She does not have any molars yet, but seems to want to eat exactly what we eat!
Last night, she did not eat much of her food (some tofu bits, a bit of avacado and some kanji+ground walnuts). I reminded myself that toddlers are like this - they eat reasonably well on some days and on others, just don't want much food. But later, when Hari was having his dinner, she kept going to him and eating a bit of what he gave her and what was it? Tomato masial with rice! And it wasn't bland by any standards!

So Hari and I will have to finish up all the kanji (porridge) that I made for Sahana. :)

Hari was rather surprised to note that I have a cousin who is very career-oriented. Well, she is actually my cousin's daughter (my mother's older sister's grand-daughter). She used to live in San Diego but recently got a job in Wisconsin and has moved there. The job? CFO in a multi-million dollar company! (and she is only 31 !!). I am impressed. And she has TWO small children - one kid who is Sahana's age and an older one who is 28 months old. Her husband is in SD now and will join later, (once he is sure that she is going to stay in Wisconsin in spite of the cold weather).

We invited them home for Thanksgiving and yes, they are planning to come over. Her parents too will be joining us as they will be in town at that time. So....the Samrat family needs to get ready to welcome four adults and two small children to our house for four days! I had better plan the menu much ahead, write it down and stick to it. This CFO's mother - my cousin, is a talented person - I remember her gorgeous vegetable carvings and her Tanjore paintings. But what I am most impressed with is the fact that hers is the only house that I remember as always being tidy and clutter-free. During our last trip in 2007, Hari and I went to their house for dinner and he too was impressed. So...my point is, we gotta clean and clear the house and get started NOW!

A friend of mine wrote this on his blog recently: "When you have one child, you become a parent; when you have two, you become a referee". :D

Am rediscovering the joy of eating fruit. Just fruit, nothing else.

Right now I am unable to decide whether a ripe nectarine is better than a peach or a strawberry or a pear.....
(Not that I *have* to decide, heh!).

This is my entry for the low-fat baking event in Madhuram's www.egglesscooking.com.
Look at:
Low Fat Baking Recipes Round Up

Please skip if you are not interested to learn how to make vegetable upside down casserole. :)


( VEGETABLE UPSIDE DOWN CASSEROLE )

(From www.bobseal.com)

Please do not look down upon other people's choices ....just to make your own look good.
We are, each one of us, at this point in our lives due to factors we cannot fathom or comprehend.
And so...it makes absolutely no sense to be condescending.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/nyregion/15babies.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&emc=eta1

I am surprised, very surprised that there is a bias at all! And the surprise is not pleasant.
The US consulate in Madras repeatedly communciated (back in the late 90s, when I was scouting around to apply to univesities in the US) that it was interviewing each candidate to ensure that only the best/really good ones would reach the US, a sort of "quality control" according to the then Consul General. Everyone who applied was a student or someone who had a professional degree and wanted to work in the US.

Hmmm...the people (at least from India) who came here earlier, in the late 60s and 70s were all either doctors or professors, mostly. But what about their spouses? And what about those people who set up hotels or motels? How educated were they?

Not that education helps a person very much, though!

Personally, as someone who has been through more than one miscarriage, the thought that someone would go in for an abortion specifically because they wanted a son, is just so...hurtful. When people get and stay pregnant very easily, they feel they can make that choice, I suppose. *shrug*. Their argument would be that this is their life and they are making the choice that matters to them.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm..

Ultimately, it boils down to what we want - to what makes us happy. We put in our time, effort and money in what we thinks makes us happy. Whether notions of such happiness come from within or from conditioning, is a different question, though I suspect that most, if not all of our desires are a direct reflection of our conditioning.

Conditiong from the world around us and from our parents. And that scares me, when I think of what a role I play in my children's lives. How I handle situations, what my goals are, how I work, what I think, what I feel.....everything is being watched and imbibed. Scary thought!

--------------------------------
Here is one reader comment that I found interesting:

Sometime ago, I wrote about how "we love turning up our nose at anyone else who, in our perception, falls below us!".

Observe yourself and come up with one aspect - one quality of yours which you feel distinguishes you (and makes you look down at others) from everyone else around you. It should not be a physical attribute/something you were born with - it should be something that you learnt/became an expert at or something that you feel you have a natural talent for.

I'll go first: For a long time, I used to feel superior (yeah, this now seems crazy!) simply because I felt that I could write (in English) without any glaring grammatical errors!

I have many more, of course...!

We all want to be different; we all want to be unique....and we love turning up our nose at anyone else who, in our perception, falls below us!

And just how many of us are strongly convinced that we know better, that we are better?!

Smug, smug we go on in life, convinced that we are somehow, somehow superior.

And then comes someone who is condescending towards us. What happened? Isn't it our right to be so?!

Sleeper Sofa, Loveseat, Audiman.. Matching set ..

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Reply to: sale-955941891@craigslist.org ^[?]
Date: 2008-12-12, 9:01PM CST

For those of you who keep saying "I do not like organized religion" (it seems fashionable to say so, doesn't it?!):

"Every religion, when it started, started out as a spiritual possibility. Slowly, as the number of people increased and generations of people passed on, it became more and more organized and more and more distorted. What used to be a spiritula process just became a set of codes and modes to follow. A set of beliefs to believe in and slowly lost all its original significance. This is bound to happen to anything in the world.
To a large extent, today most of the world religions are run on either guilt, fear or greed.
Look at all the prayers on the planet:
"Dear God...give me this...give me that..." --which is greed;
"Dear God....save me, protect me..."--which is fear;
"Dear God....forgive me..." --which is guilt.

We constantly nurture these things. Are they wonderful emotions? Most unpleasant, isn't it? Guilt, fear and greed, all of them are most unpleasant within you. Anything that comes out of it cannot be good".

--Jaggi Vasudev

Ever wondered why one person inherits so much wealth that he/she probably cannot even fathom just how much money they have, while another person has problems finding the next meal...............?

Hindu thought has an explanation - karma. Karma is, at its simplest, all about cause and effect. The theory is that with our limited perspective, we can only see our actions in this life, whereas our past and future extend (indefinitely?) and so does our karma.
IMHO, this is a good theory - explains things satisfactorily (the Vedas get into the details).

BUT.......do we know that?

Drop aside everything that you have been told. Everything that you have learnt. Everything that the religious background you are from tells you. Basically everything that you have acquired over the years.

What do you really, really, REALLY know?

As a friend of mine often asks, "do you know that in your bones?" or, as I'd like to ask, "What do we know, for sure?".

What is the Mind?
What are memories? Events of the past stored in our Minds? And what is the Past?? What is Time?

No, don't try to answer what you read in a Physics book or what you read in a Philosophy book. What do YOU know?

To me, it seems, increasingly, that we are all put here (by Whom? for What?) and we just go about our lives like automatons. Automatons. That has been my buzz word for quite some time now.

Where do our desires spring from?

Why do some of us pursue those desires with a perserverance that astounds others so much?!

While some of us sit back and say: "Eh, whatever" to most of our desires and whine about what happens (or does not happen) in our lives.

Why do some of us complicate our lives unnecessarily while others manage to keep it simple?

Why are some of us endowed with some qualities/talents that make others green, while some of us lack even basic limbs/organs that allow us to go through life in a normal, somewhat easy manner?

With the feeling of being an automaton, it follows that....the automaton has no real choice! Everything has already been determined. Even the questioning. :)
This is what my mind tells me. But of late, I suspect that my mind itself is not to be trusted to answer these questions. So where do I look for answers, then??????

And here is an article that triggered some of today's thoughts:

( Richest Royals )

*Slept from 11.30 pm until 4.15 am. I thought I'd eat and get back to sleep, but nope, I could not sleep again. This is tiring. :(

*Since I am awake and can do work, you'd think I could do lots of work around the house; or just read. No, I end up not being too productive, given that I do not feel rested at all. Sigh.

* A friend is planning a baby shower for us next weekend. The Evite responses are slowly coming in. Somehow, a few people I was certain would not make it, have, indeed said they won't attend - it does not surprise me at all. One couple, in particular, I was sure would not attend. These were the people who cold shouldered us when we visited their home last year. Their explanation is probably that while we visited the home of another couple close to their house a couple of times after my long trip to India, we did not visit them and so they got miffed. Alright, but when someone has actually taken the effort to (finally) do visit you, what is the reason to be cold? I felt very insulted and irritated. And slowly, we have drifted apart. Not that we have much in common anyway. Except that we have children the same age and it would have made sense to keep in touch, but even early on, I got tired of the comparisons, the "competitive" feeling that the woman was so proud of, etc that I gave up.

*It is nice to have different types of footwear but....I think I have way too many right now, most of which I cannot wear anyway, thanks to the slight swelling of my feet and also because some of the sandals have heels. I have put them away, but....need to make a note not to buy new stuff. (well, in any case, I do not want to buy ANY new stuff for some time, until I have done some de-cluttering around the house). I can quite understand how Imelda Marcos ended up with a ton of footwear! :)

*I look forward to the weekend as it means time with Akhil. However, I must remember to take breaks now and then and ask my mom to take care. Last weekend, by Sunday evening, I felt tired. Not Akhil's fault for being buoyant; mine for getting exhausted soon. And this when we did not even go out on both days!
This weekend we are going to have a visitor on Saturday afternoon - a friend who used to live here but moved to San Diego. Will be interesting to meet her - she is an Indophile and by now has probably accumulated a TON of knowledge about Indian thought, Hindu philosophy, religion and customs. Funny thing is that most of her learning comes from a Nepali Sanskrit teacher!

*Lightning McQueen (in the movie "Cars") says to himself, "Speed; Speed" as he prepares for a race. I am not preparing for any, but right now this is my mantra: "Sleep, sleep".