Zest for life

A quick grab of the water bottle, a natural twist of the cap and ice cold water going down my throat was such a pleasure especially in between runs. And today, the same old bottle, the very same cap and the same me-- but the way I felt when I gulped that sip of water this morning during my workout was way different than yesterday, last month or 6 months ago. For some strange reason I felt thankful...

A bunch of people came in through the double doors at about half past 9. Some of them were physically challenged in some way or the other, while most of them were afflicted with down syndrome.  Youth was at its best and in particular there was this young boy, probably the youngest of the lot who was in a wheelchair as well. All of them were dressed in gym clothes, nice and fresh and so excited that it showed on their faces.

There are so many things that we take granted for in life. Talking, touching, waking up, able to brush our teeth on our own and many trivial actions which happen on a day to day basis. The first realization of this hit me was a couple of months after my son was born. A simple task as holding a cloth in your hand-- so easy for an adult was way too difficult for a baby and I watched with amazement as he mastered it with the cloth, ball, spoon & paper in tow. And, this morning I was amazed at just how much zest these people had for life. They were there at the gym trying out each and every possibility and more importantly, were having fun. 

Bless this country  for making living as friendly/easy as possible for physically challenged souls. I did feel really bad when I thought about how India still having to go a long way in making it accessible to physically challenged people. A person I know who's physically challenged still is not able to go to movies back home since it's not disabled friendly. 

My 4 miles was up and on my way out, I saw the youngest of the lot propped on the rowing machine. He was rowing with his hands while his coach/trainer helped him move his legs with her hands. The little fella was grinning from ear to ear, smiling away to glory. I stepped out into the morning sunshine. It wasn't until I saw myself in the rear view mirror did I realize that I too was grinning like a jackass, and actually had been for quite a while.

Wear Sunscreen!

The lines are amazing.....

N'Joy

Green, Grey & Blue

A low rumbling sound at a distance...

Well, I know what that is. Friday morning-- same routine, same rumble?  Is Ayush going to wake up? I wait...........

The baby monitor flickers and makes a whimper, Jr is raising from his beauty sleep. 

Long live the garbage truck *sigh* 

The sounds fades into the distance... all is well again & the baby monitor decides to go into snooze mode again and incidentally so does Jr. Daddy dearest is oblivious to these things, what a blessed soul!? 

This is exactly what happens every Friday morning, week after week, month after month for the last year. When we moved into this neighbourhood last year around April, I quickly learnt that those really giant sized garbage tubs that every house sports is actually to be wheeled out every Thursday night by people living in the home. 

First week that we were there, we received a small booklet in the mail explaining how things worked with the garbage pick up schedule. 

Green bin is for soiled wastes, garden wastes......

Grey bin is for recyclables-- now you should pay attention here. Only recyclables approved by the city code can be dumped into that (Where do we dump this ? Manu asks. "Oh that doesn't fit into the other bins? dump it in the grey" I say!)

Blue bin is for our good old garbage bags with the usual trash in it

Please note: Please place your garbage bins about 5 inches from each other facing outward from your curb.

5", 5", 5", 5" I memorized...

Oh and the booklet said: PLEASE WHEEL IN YOUR CARTS WITHIN  24 HOURS OF GARBAGE PICKUP!! 

Ok-- that is pretty easy, it's a pain I understood but it's not like NOT doable or something, just wheel them in on

your way out or way in. SIMPLE...

Our neighbours next door are from Philippines, very nice folks. Pretty elderly couple, well atleast compared to Manohar & I. I should admit that the neighbour man is very very handy around the house. A day hasn't passed when I haven't seen him meddling with something or the other. It's either weeding, laying new grass, cleaning his car inside out and the list goes on and on. Apparently the couple are very serious about their garbage collection schedules as well.

Their garbage bins are out in the cold wintry California weather only for a span of 24 hours or so. No more, no less. They are out by the time Ayush goes into his midmorning nap Thursday morning until Ayush's midmorning nap again on Friday morning. So essentially from 10 AM Thu to 10 AM Friday!!

3 weeks ago:

I saw the friendly neighbour. Waved a hi and went on about my job of see if any weeds had come up in the front lawn. He quite didn't return the "hello, how're you?" as chirpily as I would have liked. But hey.. probably he was having a hard day. He started brushing his dog's hair while I started cutting the extra weed like things that looked downright ugly. Once done,I brought out some trash bags and placed it inside the blue bin standing majestically in our front driveway-- there you go.. I thought and felt immensely proud that I had cleared my house of some trash.

Life was nice, sunny day.. all was well

Sometime between one of those Thursdays and Fridays:

I heard the calling bell and hurried down to open the door. The friendly neighbour was standing there with rather dirty hands. Was that.........? Why was he standing with...............? 

Oh hi...he said

Hi...

Actually, I wheeled in your carts for you this time since they have been out in the cold for the last week-- probably the longest I have ever seen anyone leave it

Gulp-- oh! that's really sweet of you neighbour-- thanks a ton

You know what-- why don't I do this? Let me wheel the cart in for you every Friday morning once they are done. How about that??

That would be really nice.. I said but I couldn't really impose...

"Nawh nawh.. I like doing stuff like these.... Don't worry, it's my pleasure to help you guys out" he said

I bid him good bye and thought-- Isn't he the nicest man ever??

The same old familiar sound and I woke up. AAhh-- Friday morning it is. My sleep was a goner, so got up and went to one of the bedroom windows to see the world outside. Saw the friendly neighbour outside with his labby doggie. He was just wheeling in his bins. The green went... 2 mins, the grey wheeled in gracefully, that man sure has class-- just, just see the way he wheels in those bins waaah!  2 more minutes and the blue one finally went in. 

My bins are going to be set free next. I waited patiently.. 5, 10, 15 minutes passed. Finally, I came down and went out so I could see what was happening. Neighbour was brushing his dog's hair and didn't smile at me. He looked in the direction of the bins and then again at me, a look of utter contempt

Darn those early morning dreams!

And, my garbage bins complete 15 days of successfully being out in the california cold tomorrow (thank you, thank you!). No cracks, no discolouration, strong like Dalmia cement... 

Again, within how many hours am I supposed to wheel back the bins?

:)

Olympic Torch

Morning:
Today I get to witness the Olympic torch relay in San Francisco! I am so excited seeing the crowds milling on the street with flags, and the crowded trains. There are loads of buses carrying police forces from nearby Richmond and Oakland areas. I feel slightly disturbed by the protests - to me, the Olympics is the human unifying spirit, and should not be marred by anything political. I already feel slightly dumb at not having brought my camera - but, my friend has, and I am sure we can take some pictures. I feel this is the closest I have ever gotten to anything "Olympic", and I am filled with a strange sense of excitement.
Hope the event passes smoothly!
Afternoon:
I went out with my friends - I was so excited. The streets were milling with people - protests in different hues and flavours! Some people got up in the morning, and put on their protest hats, and began randomly protesting. I think they just forgot that the protest was against the Olympic torch. A majority of the protests could be classified against China, pro-Tibet, pro-Human rights etc. But there were some protests to 'End the war in Iraq', 'Darfur' and 'Free Burma'! Free Burma from whom?! This protest took the cake though : a bunch of stark naked guys turned up, apparently calling for legalizing nudity in an Olympic Torch relay ceremony!

Of course, by the time I post this, you all would have known that San Francisco city officials changed the route, and actually had the torch bused to another route, and had the relay pass the torch every fblock or so. The closing ceremony was cancelled citing the protests, and the whole episode was all-in-all a dampener!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/09/MNDS102IIM.DTL&tsp=1

The olympic torch hid behind the police, and was safely moved by bus from one point to another, and only made it out in the open to streets heavily armed with police as spectators, and did not even mark the event with a closing ceremony - this for the only run in the North American continent.

Evening:
Hard to describe my feelings since I did not actually see the torch - a once in a lifetime experience for sure, and was snatched away from the thousands of people waiting patiently for the torch to appear!

What is so Divine about Divine Equilibrium

I was reading some material in game theory and came upon a particular group of related concepts termed as "DIVINE EQUILIBRIUM" and "UNIVERSALLY DIVINE EQUILIBRIUM". Why in God's name is a particular technical concept DIVINE? Self Aggrandization is probably an understatement!

Load Shedding

Kerala is notorious for its positives and negatives. Let's dwell on a particular negative. Load Shedding is/(was) a popular concept in Kerala. Load sheeding is the mechanism designed to deal with the perennial shortage of electricity in the state. Each energy consuming unit in the state is deprived of the utility for a fixed period of time. The timing varied across the state. But the proportion of electricity rationed for each consumer was equal across the state.

Think of an alternate mechanism. Suppose there existed a market for trading electricity rights. Here we make the implicit assumption that power is more valuable for certain people at a given point in time as compared to others. Hence the marginal benefit of power could be different among different consumers. To crystallize the idea, let us look at a hypothetical example.

Consider the following situation: The uniform power cut across the state is for 1:00 hr. It is 10:00 Am in the morning and at point A a doctor is in surgery working on a patient. At point B a clerk has just locked his home and is leaving for work. Both point A and point B are in the same locality, where load shedding begins at 10:30 AM and ends at 11:30 AM.

The marginal benefit of power for the doctor is far greater than that of the clerk (assume his wife works too and kids go to school or that he is single). Hence, there can be a trading mechanism where in return for no power outage in the hospital, the clerk bears a 2 hour outage from 10:30 to 12:30. In return, the hospital pays the clerk a monetary compensation. The government stays unaffected as its optimal load shed does not change. Effectively, the government, doctor and the clerk is better off.

In this situation clearly the consumer with highest priority and the consumer with the lowest priority are better off with this arrangement. What about consumers in the middle? It is not always the case that we can find consumers at two extremes. Can they be made better off too with trading rights?

The hair and the blade

I see the way my son, who is all of 9 months old, watch mesmerized when I shave and it takes me back down memory lane. My earliest memory of seeing anybody shave was probably class 4. But it wasn't until class 9 that I decided to put the blade to the skin (so to speak). No, it wasn't to my non-existent beard-- It was to my eyebrows. 

You see, I have always hated that my eyebrows join in the middle. It just took me a very long time to realize that, thats also hair that can be shaved. So I snuck into my parents bathroom, took my dads razor blade (about 2.5 inches wide). Centered it with extreme concentration and gave it a nice pull along the center of my eyebrows. Voila!! it was off.... except it took 2.5 inches of eyebrows with it. Which made me, for lack of a better way to put it, look like Captain Spock, from Star Trek that used to Air in DoorDarshan in 1986.

This was during my 9th exams (mock public exams as they used to call it). So my mom had to paint my incomplete eyebrows with whatever black believable eyebrow colored stuff she had and sometimes that meant cosmetics :). Yes, I said it. I used cosmetics. So there!!!

My fascination with the razor (btw, razor, unlike what I used to think is not the blade- but its holder) and its blade never stopped. I was fascinated by the barber shaving his clients next to me, while all I got was a measly haircut. I would see the men sitting next to me, with their eyes closed and their face like birthday cakes-- piled up with cream. In my early childhood,  the barbers used to use straight edged razors (without disposable blades). So between each shave, I  would see him artfully strop his blade on a leather strop. Ah!! the sound that made was magic.. mingling with the singular song on his radio. Singular, because I haven't heard that machine spew out any other song... it was one tune on an infinite loop. I can still hear the melody.

When my first facial hair sprouted, I declared at home that I needed a haircut. Which raised one to many eyebrows- afterall I hated haircuts and such promptness was to be looked at with suspicion. I walked proudly to the neighborhood barber, waited my turn, and plonked myself rather proudly on the seat and declared I needed a 'Shave' and a 'Haircut'. 

The particular barber in question, an arrogant son of a gun, who has probably seen my since I was an inch high, declared with a lot of amusement that a Haircut was easy, but to 'Shave', I needed facial hair. A slap in the face, nonetheless, without missing a beat, I said I had changed my mind and I needed only a haircut.

A year went by, before I stole my Dad's razor and a new twin blade and shaved for the first time. When I came out, I think I really felt like Clint Eastwood swaggering out of a saloon after a Pint of beer. Nevertheless, I felt I had finally joined the Men's club. With at most casualness in my voice, I warned him- the blade in the right side of the cabinet is mine and the one on the left was his. My dad, one not to be easily perturbed, didn't look up from his newspaper.. as he acknowledged. I'm sure he was tickled pink.

Many a years later, I saw my friend shave with a double edge razor (A' La topaz blade). By now I was using Gillette's triple blade system or something and was kind of getting disillusioned with the whole thing. Shaving had become a drag.. something one really drags against their skin. 

I tried the old shaving methods of brush, cream and regular blades. It was refreshing. I went a step further and bought myself a regular shaving knife, saved for the weekends. As I strop it on a sunday morning, with steaming hot water running down the wash basin and the smell of my shaving cream wafts from my brush. For a moment, I'm transported to that Barber shop in T.Nagar, who refused me my first shave. Aaaah nostalgia, I can still hear that singular tune blaring in his radio......

Another poem from PROF

43. Is it yours....

Why do you cling,
to everything, as if,
you created something out
of nothing, in defiance of the
universal law;
Why do you make an
exclusive property,
of not just things, but
people and emotions too;

Can you just tell me,
one being who brought
Something along before the
first cry; or at least one
who took something along,
at the last breath;

This sun, moon, breeze,
stars, space and time
Is it yours exclusively
to mix and match?
If only you see the truth
and let go of the ghosts
instead of wrapping yourself
like a touch-me-not
to enclose your small world,
you will see the world
without a blindfold!

One of the best

hello folks...here is an off beat video...well this is one of the best live rock performances i have seen...especially with the vocalist...it is sooooooooooooooooooo close to the original and the way he gets the crowd involved is amazing...this song really kicks up the adrenaline level..even if one is not a big fan of thrash metal, i would say it is worth a watch just for the atmosphere (maybe just the intro part till about 1 minute into the song)...well if not for the present, this was certainly my first choice profession....N'Joy