I think

Kid's blog

The kid blogs here.

She narrates as one of us types it out for her. I maintain that blog and manage comments.

Email Posting

Trying out the "post via email" tool so that I I can do all my net-related activities from one place.
Ignore post. Oh, but you already read it.

Reposted from - Vox Again Vox Again Jiggity Jig

Hey former Voxers: Want to make your blog into a book for safe keeping? I just found this link to a site that's doing that. Haven't tried it myself, but thought you'd like to know. http://www.feedfabrik.com/blog/2010/09/vox-now-live/

via www.pattymitchell.com

---------- Vox shuts down today. So hurry.

Facebook-Disclaimer

It appears that all the people I know and their neighbours, friends, family and pets are on Facebook. 

I reactivated my FB account for a brief few hours to track down a long-lost English teacher through her daughter, whom I googled and found on Facebook, and what do you know, the world, it seems, is rejoicing at my ressurrection.  To be honest, I am not sure if it is celebration or panic ("oh no, LG is hounding us here as well?"), but whatever it is, here is my stance.

I will not be active on facebook ("thank heavens"). I don't want to shut it down again, because, heck, I DID track down my most favourite teacher there, didn't I?  I will just connect the feeds of my and dude's blogs there (if and when I figure out how to do that, of course).  That's where my facebook activity will stop.  

I still believe that facebook is very impersonal.  I prefer writing to my friends by email (or snail mail, if Ihave their postal addresses).  And of course, this blog is an open window to my world as well. So between these two avenues, my need for communication is met, without eating up on all my spare time.

So there, please, stick no bills on my walls, poke me no more, don't shower me with flowers or throw brickbats at me.  If you are a long lost friend trying to get back in touch with me, leave me a note with your email id, and I will write back to you.

Thank you.

 

Gifts

Handmade birthday card from the kid. Image from cover of Secret Seven.

 

Handmade paperweight

Gifts from V's friends, Sruthi and Sathvi.

Random Photos of Chennai

Roadside fruit vendor

Random gift shop

 

 

 

Navarathri

Last year, my big deadline ended the night before Navarathri began, and so I could not prepare much in advance.  This year, I've been more lucky.  The big deadline is over. The next one is not for another 20 days and so I can actually help my little one gear up for Navarathri.

Thanks to two bags of "cotton snow" sent by the aunt, this year's side-show theme was easy to decide.  Last year, I believe it was a park/jungle/garden.

Due to the deadline and lack of time, we used ready-made plastic animals.  This year we got more ambitious.  So, we are making the Tundra landscape with home-made animals.  We started making the models yesterday. These are little puppet type paper animals with a toothpick to fix on to a (probably thermocol) base.  I hope they stand.  Little V painted the animals.

Excuse the half-clad eskimo.  He still needs footwear and I just figured out (in my sleep) how to make them.

Pretty thrilled with how the other animals turned out.

Still have a lot more to make - an igloo, more eskimoes, more animals...

We also need to figure out how to make a sled.

More as preparations get underway.

Update on 29/9/2010

Eskimo friends

Career Worries

"Appa, will there be something left underground when I grow up to become an archaeologist?"

-6.5 year old

Youth

I recently heard about a  young (~mid twenty's) man (boy?) and his alcoholism. This guy is apparently a very smart and successful professional, in a good job, wins awards and so on, during the week, but come weekends, he is sozzled.  His family (parents/siblings; he is not married yet, as far as we know ) is very upset about the fact that he has to be literally scraped off the bar and brought home, only to be showered with blasphemeous verbal garbage until the next week begins. 

I understand that there must be elements of hyperbole in the above news, especially since it climbed a few grapevines before it reached me, and it could be just the case of a spirited young man who believes that youth is being NOT sober on weekends.  Or his family may be right in presuming that there is more than alcohol that meets the eye, since it seems long after the hangover should rightfully have passed, he is still in clouds.

However, the point of this post is not his situation.  It is just an extension of my recent ruminations on my own life; youth in particular.  As each day passes with, what appears as, no time or energy for anything other than turning the wheel like a mindless hampster, I realise that I have criminally squandered my youth, with all its glory of energy and time, and lack of responsibility, doing things that mean not a thing now, or as I think back, then either.   I realise that all my struggles to "conform" and "be accepted" in the hip college "gang" should have been productively spent, at least figuring out what I needed to achieve in life.  The many "culturals" attended as part of the light music group in college, could have been replaced by activities that fueled my passions.

It is not like I did not know where my calling lay.  I knew I wanted to write when I was in high school. My English teacher, Ms. Renuka Paranmand (where are you ?) fueled my love of writing and I remember filling up notebooks after notebooks of essays of everything under the sun (those were aeons preceeding the web2 era), and Ms. P patiently reading them in her spare time, giving me a hint here, a nudge there and lots of thumbs up and back slapping.

And then this whole hormonal messup started, ably aided by college and my own uncertainty of purpose. Three years of what must have been my most productive, most spirited age, were wasted on unnecessary, irrelevant activities and right now, I'd give an eye to get those three years back to do things that I should have done instead.  To start with, I should have taken up a course in English, perhaps a creative writing programme.  Given that my college had a strong literature department, it wouldn't have been too hard to find a niche.  Instead, I wore kurthas that colour coordinated with those of other equally confused college kids, obsessed over my plain-janeness, tried to find my identity in the soprano of the choir and just losing what little I had in the "groupness",  culturals-hopped, felt guilty about feeling bad about not being the "sight-able" type, and so on and so forth until the teens passed, and it took me a further few years of course correction to straigthen the three years of voluntary meandering.

So now, when I see young people spend time and energy on what I KNOW is irrelevant and unimportant, but strikes them as the most important thing in life next to breathing, I feel like putting them across my knees and giving them a good hairbrush treatment to make then understand that the years they have now would never ever come back and that alcohol, or drugs, or women (or men) are just passing fads, not important enough to lose the rest of life over. There is so much splendour to life and it is nothing short of criminal to waste precious moments of it on such garbage.

But then, life cannot be taught.  No amount of sermonising will teach truths that one simple experience will.  I only hope that, like me, it happens soon enough and what is lost is minor in the large picture of life.

Farmhouse

A few pictures from our farmhouse, in a small village called "Rathnamangalam" about an hour's drive from downtown Chennai. I wish this house was closer to the city, I'd love to visit more often.  If there are people seeking to invest in land in and around the Chennai area, I'd recommend this area.  This is on the Kelambakkam-Vandalur road,  and is surrounded by upcoing landmarks - IIIT, Vellore Institute of Technology, Tagore Engineering College, if you are the kind that is big-time into Kollywood, Rajini Kanth's ranch and so on. 

 

Front view of the house

 

Kitchen garden

 

Plucking bottleguard

Spinach patch

 

Another spinach patch

Grandmom inspecting kitchen garden.

 

Bird's eye view of paati. Photo shot from terrace.

Lots of spinach and beans for lunch tomorrow.

 Plucking flowers

Carving on the main door.

 

There is a small hillock called Gajagiri ("elephant hill") about 5 miles from this village, on which there is a tiny, but cute temple for Hanuman.  You can see the ocean from atop.  A beautiful spot.