Kannada and its uniqueness

Few weeks ago I saw a video on Facebook that was meant for promoting usage of Kannada in daily life by telling us Kannada names for vegetables and fruits that we use on a daily basis like Tomato, Beets, Carrot and so on. When I learned from the video that the common Tomato is called Goodhe hannu (ಗೂಧೆ ಹಣ್ಣು) in Kannada, I was super elated, I was proud of the fact that while present day scientists were debating till recently whether to qualify Tomato as a fruit or a vegetable, we kannadigas had already done the classification long long time ago and called it a fruit. 

Then came the hard hitting realization, in the language of Kannada, no fruit or vegetable has just names in 1 part (barring a few exceptions), they always have 2 part names. The first part is what we in other languages call their names and second part determines status of the fruit of vegetable like its ripeness (ಹಣ್ಣು , ಕಾಯಿ ) or whether it grows above of below ground (ಗೆಡ್ಡೆ , ಗೆಣಸು ) or its status of lentil (ಕಾಳು ) and so on. Examples are numerous to name a few ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು  (banana), ಬದನೆ ಕಾಯಿ (eggplant or brinjal), ಆಲೂ ಗೆಡ್ಡೆ  (potato),    

Why is such a big deal, it is some what because other languages like English or for that matter our own Indian language Hindi doesn’t follow this rule.

Let me demonstrate with an example, take the fruit Banana 

English: banana it usually means a ripe banana 

Hindi: kela, still means a ripe banana 

Kannada: if you want ripe banana you will have to say bale hannu (ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು)

Unripe bale kayi (ಬಾಳೆ ಕಾಯಿ)

Leaf bale yele (ಬಾಳೆ ಎಲೆ)

Simply saying bale (ಬಾಳೆ) doesn’t mean a thing for a true Kannadiga. 

I am sure the closely related languages of Telugu and Tamil probably follow the same rules. Wonder if there are other languages which follow same rules.

Frozen vegetables

A while ago we had a discussion in our friends group on frozen stuff. We all were unanimous on prepared frozen food and the vote was a no. 

The votes divided when it came to frozen vegetables, some of us were all fresh and some others were arguing that if they are properly packed then they contain all the nutrients and hence what is the harm?. The discussion ended with Ayurveda says fresh is good. 

After all the time that has passed, couple of days ago I realized that when a fresh vegetable is frozen it is essentially dead. On the other hand when a fruit, vegetable or a green is plucked from the plant, it still has some life which is evident from the veggies ripening after being plucked or the evident fact that greens are able to fight off bacteria and other microbes for a couple of days after being plucked. 

Now my question or dilemma is, how important is for the plant to have some form of life left in it for our consumption? or rather does it make a difference apart from the taste? 

Pragathi and the slip ups :)

Yesterday I was attending a charity event of Pragathi a non profit organization that spear heads providing education in underprivileged areas of state of Karnataka. 

All great, hats off to their efforts and the scale of their work is just mind blowing, all was  good till they started talking about their new initiative. The initiative to teach English to underprivileged children along with Kannada and math is definitely an appreciative incentive. 

The narrator for this new initiative started with his and his partners journey to India and they visited a village near T. Narasipura in Mysore district and they visited a colony of “untouchables”, he  translated to Kannada "ಹೊಲೆಯರಗೇರಿ", the narrator mentioned that it was not all dirty but pretty clean, in that location lived the winner of the scholarship who is the daughter of a child bride whose dad passed away while she was young. The presentation narrated the hardships the mother faced after her husbands death and despite all odds how she has managed to bring up 2 well educated children.  The narrator ended the story with how the essay winner girl in question cannot achieve her full potential and that is solely because she lacks knowledge of English language and we can make a difference in lives of such people. 

Wonderful, I am all for this initiative and I have heard time and again from my dad about one of our own village boys who is unable to secure a job despite being an under graduate degree holder himself and reason being he cannot communicate in English.

The question I have is, what impact the presentation would have had if the presenter hadn’t mentioned the girls caste? The funny part is that the narrator failed to name the girls village or her name but was first to highlight untouchability.

Considering we are in 21st century India and we have had freedom for last 60 years and enough government sops in the name of caste, including but not limited to cement roads in their neighborhoods and affordable housing under different government schemes, are they really truly still untouchables?

To top it all, the girls brother holds an under graduate degree and is currently unemployed (I don’t understand how is it even possible, but that’s a different topic). Where and how did he study? or for that matter the girl who wrote the essay. is she being discriminated for being an “untouchable”? if yes how did she even write an award winning essay?

Considering the presentation was made here in USA in a 3rd country and mostly to Kannada people, could they have not used better words?

Is Pragati for all its forward and progressive thinking wants to go backwards by naming the caste of the person who is smart and intelligent?

Maybe I am over reacting but considering I have lived in USA for last 18 years and have attended multiple such charity events be it from AID or ASHA or Art of Living among others, I have always heard words like underprivileged and economically backwards but never the blatant mention of ones religion let alone caste. I always look at politicians from India specially from Congress party and call them pseudo secular's but this small incident yesterday made me realize such people are not 24 hours by flight away but much closer than I imagine.

I am hoping it was just a slip and no special intent behind mentioning those words.

Printer Cartridge update 2

Remember my post on refilled cartridges back over a year ago, shortly after I published the post the ink went dry and this time in month of August I went ahead and bought new cartridges. 

I am happy to say, they lasted almost 14 months, they went dry couple of days ago. In the end of this experiment, my conclusion is refilling a cartridge is worth while once, twice or max thrice beyond that one is better off buying new cartridges. 

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in Kindergarten . . . .

No, not me saying but my daughter’s class sang in their end of year graduation party. Yes it was a sweet and sour moment, sweet for the 22 kids spent almost 10 months of their lives, 5 days a week and 7 hours of their day together as part of a class with the very wonderful Ms. Andrea Bredl (Ms. Bredl for short) and they are ready to move on to next level. 

I am amazed at the transformation Avni has gone through the school year, besides academics (reading, writing and math), she made lots of new friends, performed science experiments, attended field trips and plays, performed in a play, played in Kinder Rodeo and so much more. Oh did I tell you, she pulled off a very successful surprise mothers day party in 2017? and more importantly it was meticulously planned over a 3 week period.

I am thankful to Ms. Bredl for making my daughter a science enthusiast and more importantly a gardener. Evidence, here is the crystal she grew using borax powder and the lima bean plant she grew from seed at school and now thriving in our backyard.

Congratulations Avni on your graduation.

School uniforms . . . .

Back in India during my school years, we always wore uniforms to schools and there were special occasions when we were allowed clothes other than uniforms. As much as the uniforms were a great idea for it showed "equality" among students (not mine, some teacher in my high school days had portrayed it) . On the contrary, parents had their ways of showing their affordability even in the plain bland uniforms and of course it didn't bother us kids at all.

Looking back the school uniforms had both strengths and weaknesses

• It always was a night mare right before the end of summer and a mad rush to the special stores selling school uniforms or rush to our favorite tailors to get them stitched right before the school started.
• If by any chance you made a mess of that uniform, you essentially had nothing to wear to the school next day (who would keep multiple school uniforms)
• It made discrimination much easier than you can imagine. For ex: between 2 kids one with a random school uniform and another with "good" school uniform any misbehavior the "good" school uniform attracted harsher criticisms and if needed punishment or viceversa
• When we have multiple schools within walking distances of each other, for teachers they served the purpose of identifying our kids and other kids
• It did serve as an economy booster and kept the tailors and cloth merchants/makers in business
• The school density at some point became so high in Bangalore that the schools were finding it hard to differentiate their uniforms from others and were playing all sort of tricks to keep it that way (like adding a tie, changing shoe color, making the shirt to a tad different shade)

One can argue, the economics of the day demanded school uniforms for it was easier on parents pockets. I argue differently it wasn't the economics but the ability to differentiate between schools is what drove the school uniforms existence and the reason they are still thriving in urban India.

Now the question what prompted this post? Today was second round of  Lemonade play at school and for that all kids from kindergarten were dressed up in blue and white while the teachers were in blue and black. So, Kiker elementary had some uniform for kindergartners today :) . 

Kejriwal and EVM tampering

For the elections in UP among other states, AAP claims the polls were rigged with the EVM (electronic voting machines) and they even had one of their nerdy MLA to build up a mock EVM and demonstrate in the Delhi assembly as to how it can be hacked. I was very keen to understand the modus operandi and did watch the video on NDTV. For starters media got it wrong, he never said swap the motherboard. His contention is “there is a code that can be programmed to any EVM that will make sure all votes balloted will be counted in favor of one party only and no others”, he further goes to say “depending on where in the ballot list the party to be favored is listed the code will be different” and to quote his own words “tampering happens on election day after 10:00am and code will be entered by one of the party workers and not 2 days before when the EVM’s are mock tested in front of all contesting parties” .

I appreciate the MLA taking his time to build a mock EVM (sad, he didn’t get a loaner from election commission) and his effort and eloquence with which he explained the whole process. I am sure this is just a hoax and here is my data to prove it.

Assuming all above said is true, let’s take UP elections there were 403 seats and close to 2095 candidates from 20 odd parties contesting. For the whole of UP, there were 306 polling HQ’s and each had an average 400 or so polling booths and if I assume 5 EVM per polling booth it would be a total of 612,000 EVM to be tampered with.

So, I would need at a minimum 500000 (assuming some will vote multiple times) men/women (registered to vote) who are extremely disciplined, trusted and can be handed the code to enter to each EVM to be tampered. Again from the MLA’s own words the code is different depending on the serial order of your party on the ballot box and hence I cannot blanket distribute a code for all of them. So, we would need a minimum of 100-200 different numbers to be circulated among these folks.

For sake of argument, any party needs to win half the seats to be in majority. That could cut down the requirement to 310,000 add to that the collusion with the election officers in each polling booths and the hierarchy needed to maintain this many people in line and to expect not a single one of them come out to the media or threaten to come out on media. 

Are we kidding ourselves, even the Indian army cannot handle this kind of massive effort stealthily. One can argue the election happened in phases even then the number of people required to pull off a scam like this is truly mind boggling, I don’t understand why no one in the media is raising this question? 

Parking and parking

The Indian store on William C near Walgreens in setup in a real tight and heavy traffic area. Good for them for they seem to be getting great business and at the same time bad for us for the parking limited and those available are meant for extreme compacts let alone minivans. But that tight parking doesn't seem to bother lot of us for more than once I have witnessed a minivan trying to fit into a compact space, one time some guy parked his Odyssey so close to my sedan that there was literally 4 inches between the cars.

Yesterday was the peak when a lady squeezed her minivan between 2 cars hoping to avoid hitting one car but in the process got herself jammed with the car on the other side. She got so badly stuck that there was no way for her to getout without causing considerable damage to either her car or the other parked car.

I think the problem is 2 fold, one is our in built greed to park right in front of the store and walk the minimal distance to get in and out of the store. Second is the banning of one time use carry bags by the City of Austin. More than likely people forget their multi use carry-bags (like I do 100% of time) and our local Indian stores unlike HEB doesn't sell either.

So, solution to the cars getting damaged is for the Indian stores to start selling multi use carry bags :).

He came and we meditated

I remember during the last days of my tenure as Secretary for the Austin Steering Committee, we all were furiously working on a proposal to bring Sri Sri to town. At that time when we thought we almost had him coming, it got cancelled and then it changed again.  In short it was very chaotic at the micro level but with all these chaos came the much needed visit of Sri Sri to Austin (almost a decade later).

Yes he did make it to Austin this time, he addressed a gathering ~1000 people; with his usual innocence and charm he won over many more hearts than we ever imagined. There was chaos at the registration desk, there were concerns of “we need to usher in 1000 people in 25 minutes and make them comfortable”, there weren’t enough water mugs for the guests and all such small things. But there was one faith in me that kept saying, “this event is for Sri Sri, an enlightened soul, people will come, they will have a good time and this event will be long remembered” and I can have my registration lead to vouch for it, everything from the registration and ushering went as smoothly as it possibly can. All were seated, comfortable and ready to listen. The live music by Austin’s own Vishaal Sapuram was divine and while the MC’s were doing their best to keep the people entertained and engaged, the sun shone through when Sri Sri walked on to the stage. 

The meditation, the talk and the Q and A was addressed to an audience of close to ~1000 people yet the message felt as personal as though I am having an 1-on-1 conversation with him. He truly has the skill to bring spirituality down to a common man and make us feel we all are one with the bigger self. The lightening moment for me was when he said “make me a promise to look at everything from a bigger picture view”, at that moment I dropped all the complaints I had about the chaos, confusion, need-to-know information sharing and all negativity in general. It didn’t matter at all, it was all good and always good. The other best one was answer to an audience question “what is the sign of maturity to you?”, he said when all questions disappear that is sign of maturity.   

The best part for us was when his flight developed mechanical issues and he had to stay an extra night in Austin. I did get to witness him in a very personal setting and in an even more personal space when I was awarded the opportunity to drive with him to his hotel room. Since I am in the mood, one major take away from the intimate car ride were his words “you can’t put your hand in the fire and expect it not to burn you for you are a good person”, I will leave it to your interpretation.  

What is Focus

Focus, is to have your very good friend working out with you in the early morning hours and she repeatedly tries to greet you (3 times specifically) and you don't even notice that, let alone acknowledge her, for the only thing going on in your mind is, "will my left knee hold up till the end of the workout, was all that rolling worth it?". 

How easy is it to get hacked?

The below incident happened to me and is true

Other day I was getting back to my office from lunch break and my phone rang, the number that popped up was a 1-800 number. I usually ignore these kinds of calls, but to my bad luck I answered. The caller on other side had a very very thick accent and said he was calling me from AT&T and they are conducting a survey for customer satisfaction and so on, he also mentioned that there is a bill credit of $x per line for taking the survey. Considering I have been with AT&T for more than a decade and have been happy with their service, I was more than happy to answer a couple of questions. Towards the end of the “survey”, he mentioned I would be receiving a message with a number and I should repeat the same back to him to process my credit. I did receive the number and faithfully repeated the same to him. He said thanks and good bye and I did the same.

Once I came to office, I saw a series of emails that my account has been locked and need to be reactivated before I can use my phone. The idiotic me thought this was a hoax and when tried to call my wife it went to “AT&T Fraud Department”,  I cut the line and re tried with the same result. At this point I didn’t have a choice but to talk to the AT&T fraud department who explained to me the following

• Some one was trying to hack into my account and buy a phone on my account
• There is a pin number that is established between me and AT&T which should never be given to anyone at anytime
• There are apps out there that can make a phone call to have come from any number of your choice
• AT&T never calls people for a survey
• I have to go to the AT&T store with 2 forms of ID (DL and credit card would do) to get my account re-activated. Which I faithfully did and got my account back.

In retrospect, there were lot of red flags that should have triggered my defense mechanisms. For starters, the call came to me, I didn’t make the call; the guy on the other side had an extremely thick accent (even for outsourcing, it was bad), the bill credit of $x/line is ridiculous considering I have had to fight tooth and nail to get even $4.99 back from them. 

Of course all of these are hindsight, which in most cases is better than 20/20.    

More than one way to show and tell

A very good friend of mine recently pointed to me that our pet Daisy is getting featured on my blogs more than Avni. Not that anything is wrong with it but it means my focus is probably becoming lopsided. So, here goes one for Avni without Daisy.

As part of her kindergarten vocabulary builder and associated show and tell we had Avni do the word “Satellite”. Explaining the concept to Avni and her ability to reproduce were both easily achieved. Now came the challenge of the show and tell. We figured since moon is a natural satellite of earth, we can do moon as the show and tell. But the question still remained how would we show the satellite aspect of moon or in other words it wouldn’t make sense to just show picture or toy for moon without showing that moon goes around earth and that’s why it is a satellite.

Avni had a clear idea in her mind, she said she would make a moon and earth and hold them in each hand and rotate moon around earth. I wasn’t convinced with the idea and asked Dr. Google for help which came up with some sort of kit to show this. Needless to say, Avni wasn’t convinced with Dr. Google’s idea either. So, we decided to implement on our own.

After almost half hour later we had the following, 

Even though the pirated version was more representative, we let her take her own creation for show and tell. 

Even Daisy knows . . . . . .

Every weekday morning after dropping Avni to school, Daisy knows its her walk time and to an extent demands it as though it’s her right. She patiently waits till Avni has gone to school and won’t make a single peep till I am back after school drop off. She patiently watches our morning rush to get Avni to school, but the moment I am back, she keeps wandering around me and I guess in her language asking me “Can we go now” or"isn't it time yet".

She is patient and waits by my side as long as I am doing real/actual work like using the bathroom or drinking water or running laundry. The moment I take the phone and start staring at it, she loses patience and starts vocally showing her impatience.  Trust me she won’t stop till I keep the phone down.

I wonder if she is saying “please keep the phone down for in not doing so, you are wasting your time (which is ok) and you are wasting my precious time too” :) 

Science meets Spirituality

Ok, to put the disclaimer this is not the end and all is well but felt a great step. Other day I was driving home from lunch and on air was the program Think from Kera, Texas. I am usually not enthusiastic about this program but this time the interview was with Ian Roberstson, clinical psychologist turned scientist from Dallas TX.

At the time I tuned in they were talking about how people can perform better just by saying “I am very excited” to themselves even under extremely stressful situation, this truly caught my attention. For this was one of the mantras we had chosen almost more than a decade ago (when I had just finished my first Art of Living course), it went something like “Fake it, till you make it”. Essentially meant keep tricking your mind and retraining it to think positive and enable to achieve bigger things by keep telling it you like what you are doing. In those days it was usually related to Art of Living things. As I listened further it went on to how athletes can perform better by keeping the mind in present moment and not thinking about the very recent failure.

I was so excited with these snippets and tidbits and for the first time in my life I Googled the program and listened to the whole interview. he talks about importance of stretching out of our comfort zone, setting up small achievable goals and going at it and most importantly importance of breathing. People who have done Art of Living course will be able to relate to lot of things Dr. Robertson is saying.

I got so excited I even ordered the book in kindle edition. I am sure I will be posting one more post when I am done reading the book. 

http://think.kera.org/2017/01/10/stress-yourself/