SLR Buy update

After 6 to 7 months of waiting and deciding and all such, I finally bought Canon Rebel Xsi from Amazon.com. It arrived on saturday evening and there was no time this week end to play with it. I have managed to check that it works, will post some images soon.

10 things I loved about Rajima

I mentioned about Rajima in my previous blog entry but realized one blog entry is not sufficient for a great person like her. So, here is another one dedicated to her.

• She was always on time, even for the satsang she was on time. Senior/traveling teachers coming to satsang on time is pretty much unheard of. Also, she spent the whole time from beginning to end in the satsang and participated every moment.
• She was very graceful; she was literally oozing with grace
• She paid attention to the whole class, even the last benchers
• She was strict with her rules and showed no mercy and no excuses. Even the assisting Austin teachers were not spared
• She followed the rules she put in place for the course. When she asked us to cook and bring food the course, she herself had done the same
• Her simplicity
• She was natural and in "SELF" all the time. Her energy levels were always high
• She spent a lot of time talking about prevention of animal cruelty, all other part-1 courses I have attended there used to be restriction on non vegetarian food only during the course but Rajima spent lot of time on why we should avoid animal products (not only for food).
• She never in the course mentioned about her guru but referred only to her master. On the last day of the course she mentioned presence that of a "satguru" is one of the essential things for higher "prana" or life force in life
• She is the first Art of Living teacher (atleast from what I have seen) who expressed concern about environemt and is doing a lot of efforts to save the same. I remember the email going around talking about making the course eco-friendly, I was skeptical, but she proved me wrong.
  

The 10 things aren’t in any order, just a list.
In the end it was wonderful spending time with her.

Eco Friendly Art of Living Part-1 course

Yesterday in Austin we concluded the most eco-friendly Art of Living course in my remembrance. The course was a fairly big one with 70 odd people. For those who do not know, the course spans over 6 days and on the weekends lunch will be provided. If it were any other time we would have bought Styrofoam plates, cups and plastic spoons and forks and served food with that. But this time around it was different, thanks to the wonderful teacher Rajalakshmi Ratan aka Rajima, the participants were forced to bring their own re-usable plates, spoons and forks. When she announced this in the class, I thought the idea was ridiculous and it is not going to work. There will be long queues to the restroom to wash plates and all sorts of logistics were running in my head. But much to my surprise it worked like a charm and it was wonderful to see that we didn't have trash bags filled with styrofoam plates and plastic spoons. We repeated this act for both days of the weekend. All in all, in my estimate we prevented couple of hundred plates and spoons from entering the landfill. I agree that she is the most wonderful and eco-friendly Art of Living teacher I have met in my life.

The teacher quoted that whenever she is invited to a party or to somebody's house, she refuses to eat in the disposable plates and insist on being served in reusable plates. If the host refuses to comply with the request she would refuse to eat.

Hats off to you Rajima, you were wonderful and we all eagerly await your come back to Austin.

HillCroft Avenue, Houston

The place in Houston where almost anything and everything Indian can be found is HillCroft Avenue. It is a collection of four to five big strip malls filled with Indian stores. There were plenty of grocery stores, Jewelry stores, clothes stores, restaurants, electronic stores and we managed to spot one bakery too. Here are some of my impressions of the place

• The stores are organized in strip malls and hence no parking problems.
• The grocery stores were pretty much identical to each other and there wasn't anything unique about them
• The Bakery seemed well organized, they had some good pastries. But unlike India they were selling both vegetarian and non vegetarian
• We visited a couple of Indian Electronic stores and it was amazing to see how in one of the Indian store the guy was pushing the product he was selling on us and not listening to what we wanted. We visited another store, I have to say this store owner was a decent guy and didn't try too much to push things down our throats.
• We encountered a clear example of some things never change when we visited a grocery store asking for leads on Indian electric stores. The grocery store owner said with a straight face that the brand “PREETHI” is not available in Houston at all and the only brands available are the ones he was selling.
• The clothe stores were doing business half Indian style and half western style. Western style because they had lot of the clothes displayed and ready to be picked up. Indian style because they had the expensive dresses folded up neatly and a sales girl was displaying those one by one to the prospective customers.
• The jewelry stores looked completely Indian, once inside it was tough to make out whether we were in Houston or India.
• There was only one south Indian restaurant and most rest were all Indian buffet
• We found a place to get Indian Mixers/Wet Grinders repaired.

All in all an interesting place, will probably go some time in the future to try out some of the restaurants there, one in particular I am interested is the India-Chinese restaurant which had a buffet for lunch.