Reminiscing CMU I - An inappropriate act

If it feels like life's moving too quick too fast,
It's time to slow down, reminisce the past,
Blog old memories, make them really last
So here I go, penning times passed...

First days on campus I was a simple student,
trying to be humble, yet very prudent.
Life in this land was still very new,
of the culture, people, I had no clue.

So many places, there'd be free food,
pizzas, colas, chocolates, oh so good!
Stopping by tables & stopping by stall,
picking up goodies, both big and small.
Cause? who cares! it's free? that's all!

One such desk of some campaign,
there were many sweets - free again.
As I passed by their busy stall lane,
someone gave me something colored very plain,
I kept walking - did not hear them explain...

Wrapped in plastic, it was an odd looking sweet,
Still in the walk, I tore it open to eat,
People looked at me like I was some cheat!
Some gave me looks of pure shock, defeat!!
One even glanced & beat a hasty retreat!!!
Whats so wrong? in eating a free treat?

But the rolled up ring, did not look right,
Somehow I did not feel like giving it a bite,
so tossed it in the thrash, out of eye sight.

It was only later when I went back to look,
did I realize what the campaign really was...
At those plastic wraps I blinked in cold pause...
"Global AIDS awareness" read the banner's cause!

:-P

Holi at Stanford II - Mein Kampf

22nd Mar 1989, Borivali, Bombay: A little boy was filling his plastic water-pump from a bucket. Hardly a preschooler, his tiny arms were working hard to fill the pump up quickly. After all this was his new pump and he wanted to impress his friends. There were many coloured up boys and girls of various ages that day celebrating Holi in the terrace of his apartment building. His parents were looking elsewhere when it happened...

A really naughty older bully kid, coloured all over in dark violet and green, barged in to fill up his own pump from the same bucket. The little boy gracefully gave way, a little intimidated looking at the older one's face. Without warning, the bully lifted his violet coloured hand and brought it down in a hard painful slap onto the tiny one's back. The Whack was so hard, the bully's hand not only imprinted the little one's white shirt in violet but also his skin below in pink!

Wincing in pain, the little one screamed out, "Aww, Kyun Kiya aise?" (why did u do that?).
Grinning in pure evil, the bully replied, "Isse CHAPA kehte hain" (This is called an imprint!)
Knowing he'll get into a lot of trouble if he were to hit back, the little one just gave the bully a cold fuming stare.
Bully knew this and smiled again before walking away, "Darpok log CHAPA nahin de sakte" (cowards can't slap imprints)
The tiny boy vowed then that one day he'll prove the bully wrong........
(If this were a bollywood film, it would have starting raining in torrents immediately with background music)

20 years later....

27th Mar, 2010, Sandhill fields, Stanford: A young man in his mid-twenties stepped into the Holi grounds. Asha Holi at Stanford whose proceeds are to fund education in India, relentlessly attracts the young and old alike. Flanked at the entrance were two angels, randomly smearing faces of unsuspecting new entrants with pink and yellow powder. Expecting (or rather hoping :P) to get smeared, the young man slowed down in front of one of the angels and closed his eyes. An embarrassing odd pause followed, to be broken not with gentle coloured palms but by a rather harsh slap on his back. Eyes opened, instead of the delightful angel, he met two of his grisly old time acquaintances, "HAPPY HOLI man!"... Greetings followed but when his acquaintances left, the young man couldn't help realize that his first colour was a pink imprint of a hand on his shirt!! Memories raced back 20 years! The CHAPA! The bully... The vow! It was time to pacify some very old demons, he thought :-P ...

Change is the only constant of time. A lot of time had passed by... a lot of things had changed... there was no bully around ... there was no little boy either! Just a sea full of colourful people gleefully smearing and dousing each other with sweet smelling organic powders. No one to take revenge on! Arms that can pump over a hundred and fifty pounds - quite useless in this context. The young man could only see one way to pacify those old demons. Just prove that he was no DarPok! (coward). Loading up his palms with green powder, he began...

No force necessary and no slapping either. Courage is all that is really needed. Some would appear a little annoyed, but "Happy Holi" would cheer them up. Some would colour him back. Most others wouldn't even notice! This continued for a while until our guy met up with his friends. The latter did not quite understand why this otherwise gentle person was going around imprinting the shirts of totally random people with his colour laden palms!! But by then, the task was more than done! Any direction he would look he'd see a dozen shirts imprinted with the green hand! No more a Darpok, his CHAPA demons were finally laid to rest! It was time to go home and blog ;-)

"Happy Holi"

Me versus the kid

Getting to play violin in at the Livermore temple auditorium this Saturday for a Purandaradasa event was a big thing to me for multiple reasons. First it was on stage and before my violin teacher - I had never done that before. Next it was in a raga called Behag which I had never played before. Lastly, I had just a week to prepare!

Naturally nervous, I was rather restless as I awaited my turn to go on stage. A little American born Indian girl, barely ten years old, wearing a green checked frock (pavadai), thick spectacles looked side ways at me with folded arms and smiled. I think I tried to smile back. "First time on stage?", she asked. A little taken aback, I replied, "No, No, I have played before, just been a while... that's all". Then hoping that I won't seem like a complete newbie, I went on to show off, "Yea, I used to play violin in my college's musical society". The little girl was hardly impressed, "Whose student are you?". I told my teacher's name. "How long have you been learning?". Now I was taken completely aback! This little juvenile mistress was actually sizing me up!! But before I could ask her back these questions, our turn to play on stage came and I had to leave to meet my fellow violinists. But It was ON! Little sister! "Sizing me up eh? We'll see who gets the better applause", I told her with my looks.

The trouble with playing in events like these is that every Tom, Dick and Harry in the audience might be a Carnatic expert. We were playing to a thisra nadai talam which was hardly very common and to my shock, there were folks in the audience who would clap along the correct tala! Now my rendition of the song on the violin wasn't really to flawless perfection. I played the swaras mostly right, but hurried up on the tala in at least 2 places. But I didn't care, looking daggers at the little girl, I finished my rendition with a rather stylish, Pa Ma Ga Ma Gaaaaa.. as if I had been playing Behag since the day I was born.
Well, for what it was worth, the audience applause was reasonable, at best.

Now it was the little girl's turn. A vocalist, the way she went on stage and sat down, she could have given Sudha Raghunathan a run for her money. Not a remote shred of fear, she began her Purandaradasa keerthana in Mohana raga slowly, then sang in second speed, then third. At the end of the stanzas, the way she would roll her eyes in a slow blink, it would look like she's doing the song a favor by singing it!! Ok, so it was admittedly immaculate, flawless even. When she finished the astounding audience applause rang defeat in my ears. Hey Cmon! I played Behag (much harder than Mohanam that she sang) and that too I did it with bow and strings! But No! The audience clearly loved her rendition way more than mine. I conceded defeat with slow clapping of my own, the good sport that I am :-P

From next time on, I have decided to shave my face as thoroughly as possible and look as much as a kid as I can. For in art, the older you look, the higher seem to be the expectations!

Context Sensitivity

Before I get to 2010, let me quickly pen down, in chronological order, three of my very small stories from 2009 that taught me an interesting lesson. They show how important it is to watch what you speak and how heavily our language relies upon established context. Context Sensitivity is the reason we don't have too many computers that can talk back to us. If you, like me, have spent a year or more writing a compiler, you'd readily agree that human conversations are true evolutionary marvels! Of course, when we don't watch our mouths, even we, make mistakes....

************ Mangoes and Girls ************

Early 2009, I went in a inter-team outing to the mountain winery at Saratoga for wine tasting. It's amazing how perfectly acceptable it is, in modern professional culture, to drink (read binge) in front of your managers. I don't drink, so hopped in a conversation with a group of desi folks with a can of coke. The discussion went on for a while on Alphonso mangoes. How they are small, yet very tasty and how many people own their own orchards. I felt there was this one new guy who was getting distracted (read high). Now the group had many older folks who had children and the conversation drifted to teenage daughters and how hard it is to discipline young girls etc. Perhaps this guy just wanted to impress his managers or he was just plain drunk, but he had clearly lost context. At a pause he decided to break the silence... still with the context of Alphonso mangoes, he boldly went to give his take on teenage girls, "Ya... but I like to taste them when they are young and not very ripe"

************ Donuts ;) ************

Sometime mid 2009 was our product release date. Typically on such occasions the director of one of our teams, a fair healthy looking lady, would buy sweets and send out emails to invite people to her office (on the thirteenth floor). This release date however, it was a manager from a different team who decided to place donuts in her office (on a different floor) and send out the email. Now I am in a team which knows both managers. Soon after the email was sent, I was talking with the fair director lady (the one who did not know about the free donuts yet) in her office on the thirteenth floor. A happy guy walked into our conversation. The director lady paused and looked askance at him. In the most sweetest of voices and with utmost humility and gentleness, but to the wrong lady, he requested, "Ma'am, may I help myself to one of your donuts please?" !!

************ Mental Snowboarder ************

For Christmas 2009, I went with friends to the Kirkwood Ski resort at South Lake Tahoe. Having skied before I decided to learn snowboarding. People say skiing is easy to learn but hard to master and snowboarding is hard to learn but easy to master. They are right! What they might not tell you is that it is an impartial sport -- every part of your body hurts as you fall, roll over, crash, and it's not just your butt or knee, as you might imagine. For the first few hours, to me, the snowboard was like a magic carpet. Not having mastered turning yet, I would shout out verbal commands hoping it would make my "carpet" move in the right direction, "LEFT LEFT, ok RIGHT ok RIGHT". Fellow skiers and snowboarders would mostly just ignore me with nothing more than sympathetic glances at my deranged state.

But on one such run, one little expert-snowboarder kid kept staring down at me as I went on my mostly useless verbal command spree. I wished he would go away but he kept staring at me. I wanted to say "Shoo!" but before I could, he suddenly shouted, "You are coming loose". Thinking it was rather rude of him to make fun of my pitiable mental state, I found myself sarcastically snapping back, "YA, I KNOW, BIG THANKS!" It was only after my next fall, did I realize that the poor kid was merely pointing out that my back leg's snowboard strap had, indeed, come loose!

**********************
(Lesson to self - Be context sensitive or risk being insensitive)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Kids n Kalahari - A Wonderful Thanksgiving

This thanksgiving holidays, I flew to Chicago to meet nearly all my relatives residing in the US. Four families with seven kids in total were to spend thanksgiving at Kalahari water resort at Wisconsin Dells. It had been a while since I had been near both theme parks as well as little cute kids. So it was easy to predict correctly that it would be one of my best thanksgiving vacations till date.

****** Confusion at Kalahari ;-) ********

Kalahari is one of the world's largest indoor water parks and makes for an excellent family destination during winter. Complete with an indoor surfing setup, it has several awesome "rides" which are pretty much water slides that splash into a pool. The best of them was this one called the Tasmanian Twister... Meant for only "experienced swimmers", this fast water slide ends with a free fall into a 9-foot-deep pool out of which one has to swim out deftly before the next rider can enter the tunnel from top.

Since sometimes inexperienced swimmers end up trying this ride and nearly drowning, there was a lifeguard stationed at the free fall deep pool. Now I am relatively good at swimming underwater and had tried this ride twice. So for kicks, the third time, I thought I'd free fall head-first and upside down instead of leg-first and upright into the pool at the end. Unfortunately, as I dived below head first into 8 feet deep water, the lifeguard stationed on top thought that I was one of those inexperienced swimmers and jumped in to rescue me! He flung his lifeguard rescue pad which hit me hard on the head. Not knowing what was going on, I assumed that the next rider had entered the tunnel too soon! So while I was trying to swim deeper and away from this guy, I did not understand why he was trying hard to catch me!! A nice game of hide and seek went on underwater for some time before the exhausted lifeguard finally caught and pulled a confused/angry me out of the water :-)

******* Learning with Kids *******

I totally love kids. Surrounded by not one or two but nearly seven really cute adorable children, I could not have asked for more. At the waterpark, I would happily volunteer to watch over the kids while their parents would go for rides. Of course they would cast their suspicious eye on me first wondering if I was some kind of a nut case. Kids say the darnest things. My 2 year old cute cousin went to sleep in the van on our way back and woke up in the van after nightfall. She looked up at the night sky and informed her mom, "Amma! Look someone turned on the Moon!"

Of course I learned a few lessons after being with them for five days...

Lesson 5: Don't try to play proper piano in front of 2 year olds, they will often jump in and add their own sound track.

Lesson 4: If you want to role play star wars light saber with 4 and 7 year olds, it's a good idea to be one of the good characters. Playing Darth Vader simply means they are all going to gang up and hit you.

Lesson 3: If a one year old lady likes to grab your nose, picking it up and trying to teach it other parts of the face might just be futile. She is going to keep pinching your nose no matter which part of the face you mention.

Lesson 2: "TIME-OUT" is a disciplinary mechanism for kids 7 year old and lower only. If you are over 20, you do not have to sit on the floor with them and count till 30.

Lesson 1: If a little one says either "Poo Poo" or "Pee Pee" don't bother trying to clarify which. Better to just take it there asap. Otherwise chances are the kid would have already completed the job in-place.

Of Gujjus, Dandia and Sanedo

I, like many many Mumbai brought-ups, have known gujjus for as long as I can remember. A lot of important people in my life have been or are gujjus - my project partners from my undergraduate era, my cool dude roomies from cmu days and some of my best friends here in the bay area. Now, although I am very familiar with several Gujarati traditions, customs and can even understand parts of their tongue, back in India, I had never really been able to pass off as one of them. I can recollect how some new folks I would meet during my college days would automatically shift to speaking Hindi or English, from Gujarati, when they would talk to me in the group. Something about my tam-bram-ness I guess was involuntarily forthcoming. I thought this could never change... until I went to attend bay area's biggest dandia event - SEF Dandia 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention center.... Well, almost!

Dressed in a red kurta-pyjama and armed with two bamboo sticks, I stepped, prepared, into the super huge Convention center hall. Throbbing and pulsating with live music, there was an ocean of multi-colored Ghaghra Cholees, kurtas, salwars and sherwanis. Following a durga puja, was a series of garba and dandia numbers. Garba being the harder of the two, joining a garba dancing group takes a little getting used to. It is a rhythmic sequence of steps and rapid turns that I had taken some time to get familiar with last year. So this year was much simpler. I was in-sync with doing garba with a bunch of true blood gujjus. Here's the fun part ... whether it was my ability to move with them easily, or perhaps because I appeared prepared with dandia sticks, I could not tell, but the gujju dude next to me assumed that I spoke Gujarati and started giving me instructions in Gujarati. I followed what I could understand, and by his response I think I might have guessed the meanings right! Finally, after long years, I felt happy -- I had managed to pass off as a gujju!! :-P The feeling was exhilarating!

Alas, everything was good, until Sanedo started! It's an interesting "game", where the song is divided into 4 poetic lines, now for the first three, following gujju instructions from the singers, the whole ocean of dancers all across the floor sit down low on the floor and beat their sticks to the ground making one hell of a racket. Then on the last instruction, they jump high up into the air throwing their arms about, yelling, "SANEDO SANEDO" and dancing furiously, until the singer instructs everyone to sit down again!! We could barely understand what the singers were saying, so just followed the crowd and jumped up after they jumped up. This repeated a number of times.

Still pretending to be a gujju, I asked the dude next to me if he understood the commands, in the best Gujarati I knew. He responded saying its too noisy to hear. But there was too much excitement in my head created by my feigned gujjuness. For some who-knows-what reason, I ended up thinking that I could decipher the singer's instructions on my own in the next round of jumping and dancing. I wanted to be the leader and not a follower! Alas, I so wish I were lucky. Instead of jumping at the 4th instruction, I started off at the third! While the whole hall of dancers were low on the floor, only I was high up in the air, yelling "SANEDO SANEDO" like a crazy maniac. Time slowed down as I felt a thousand eyes turn toward me, several with sympathetic glances, others with sinister HA-HA smiles. All cover was blown. A cocktail of embarrassing emotional currents coursed through my spine. I held time with frozen breath until the singer's last instruction brought up everyone else into the air with the same din I had started off with earlier. Phew!

The cool thing about dandia is mistakes are easily forgotten and forgiven. Back to being myself, I was glad, my fellow dancers feigned, if not truly felt, short term memory loss and continued to dance with me! Sanedo after-all means sneh or love.

Happy Navarathri

Labor Day Weekend at Catalina Islands

What started out as a pointless hey-what-are-you-doing-for-long-weekend type phone call on the Friday night, became a let's-leave-right-away plan in less than an hour. Shoving down chapatis, dosas, we hurriedly packed and left house Friday night itself to the car rentals at San Jose airport. Our insta-mix plan was to spend 2 days and a night at the beautiful Catalina Islands!

Pulikachal (Tamarind rice) in a convertible at LA

Fortune favors the brave. Four mavericks reached the car rentals at 2.30am Friday night only to discover that Hertz had run out of regular economy cars to rent and ended up giving us a free upgrade - a Ford Mustang Convertible! YEAH!

We drove to LA all through the night, taking turns. By morning, it was show off time -- with the top down and AR Rahman tamil songs in full volume, we scoured the streets of Beverly hills, as if we were kewl dudes who have been doing this since ages. Perhaps the only contrast came when it was breakfast time. My friend's wife who was with us, had made delicious pulikachal rice or spicy tamarind sauce rice. Now the very scene of us, four desis, eating pulikachal in paper plates from a ford mustang convertible, with its top down in downtown LA, amidst curious onlookers, is something I am not going to forget very easily.

The Enchanting Catalina

It is truly a pity of the human condition that although we have two eyes, we can only see one "item" at a time. At Catalina, this condition sorely gets exacerbated. Even a simple walk to our cottage became a problem of economic choice. Let's put it this way - when looking at a scene with a rose, the moon and some pigeons, the wise thing to do is to look first at the pigeons, since they might fly away, then at the moon, since clouds could block it and later at the rose, since it probably isn't going anywhere. If one looks the beautiful rose first, one could miss out on the pigeons!

However, our hearts went out to all those poor island inhabitants -- while we all had good clothes to wear, several members were dressed in nothing more than the very bare essentials. If Kofi Annan had walked there, I suspect, he might have had UN air-drop clothing relief packets to these poor island dwellers.

Snorkelling and Scuba diving

Snorkeling is probably one of the most fun things to do on the island. The water was just warm enough and the fish, colourful and plenty. Many thanks to our hotel manager who gave us this idea of carrying bread with us. One handful of bread crumbs into the water and the whole marine ecosystem came alive in an eye-candy feeding frenzy!
It takes a little getting used to breathing through the mouth via a pipe, but once comfortable it is just pure fun!

After spending the morning snorkeling, we headed out to the main highlight of the visit - SCUBA DIVING! Two divers are accompanied by a scuba diving instructor. We being four in number, made perfect pairs for the dives. My instructor Frank, was a very experienced professional. He helped us with our air tanks, the breathing regulator, the wet suits etc. He also gave us instructions on equalizing pressure in our ears as we descend and the most important under water hand signals.

"I am OK, why do you ask?"

The signal shown to the left means "I am OK" and Frank told us to show this when everything was good and we could descend further. Now, since we were first timers, Frank started out by holding each of our hands and guiding us lower and lower. Me and my roomie started out ok, but soon my roomie started experiencing some discomfort in his ears and decided to go back up before coming back down. I, on the other hand, had already reached down. Frank was with me for some time, but suddenly shot back up, asking me to wait. So I spent my time trying to touch some beautiful bright orange fish. After a while, I saw the familiar green oxygen tank and so quickly swam up and grasped his hand. To my surprise, he turned and made a hand motion as if to ask "What". Wondering what Frank meant, I responded with a "I am OK" signal... A few confused moments passed between us. It was only after I saw his underwater video camera did I realize that this guy wasn't Frank!! The poor cameraman's look was as puzzled a look as a scuba diver can possibly make :-)

After nearly an hour of under water fun, it was time to head back. A beautiful 1 hour boat cruise brought us back to the mainlands. What started out as an unplanned outing, became one of my most memorable trips till date!