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.

My 2 cents to save the planet

Most of us use liquid soap in the washroom to wash hands and throw away the bottle once we think the soap is over. But last week when my wife poured water to the bottle closed the lid and shook it vigorously, I was amazed with the amount of soap still left in the bottle that I was about to throw away. Yes the soap was very watery but trust me there was enough soap in a small amount of soap water to clean my hands perfectly. From the little experiment we did last week, the extra water+soap mixture has lasted more than a week in our washroom.

So, next time when you think the liquid soap in the washroom is over, think again,

Friendly Canadian freeways

Driving along freeways in Canada I noticed these "NEW" signs on speed limit changes near road construction areas. Either the Canadians are really fast in building the roads or they are really gentle and want to be nice to their people. Eitherways I loved these signs.

Mysore Anand in Austin

Austin Kannadigas were completely blown away by standup comedian Mysore Anand. He gave a 2hr program last Sunday in Austin. He danced, he sang, he performed mimicry and he performed his trademark cricket commentary. We were greatly amused when he performed his own version of evolution of dance. Most of us were pleasantly surprised when he sang a song. I don't have a background in music so can't comment on the raaga and all but all I want to say is it sounded really pleasant. All in all it was wonderful and one of the best shows for kannadigas in Austin this year. At the end of the program none of us wanted to leave and we had to be kicked out by the organizers.

The program was organized by Austin Kannada Sangha, kudos to them for organizing such a beautiful event. I only wished there were more people in the audience.

Niagara - water everywhere

As noted in my previous blog entry we made a trip to Niagara Falls. Here is a travel log of the same.

We flew into Toronto, Canada; the flight was cheaper to Toronto than any place near Niagara Falls inside US. After some delay in the flight at Dallas and some confusion regarding location of rental car office we reached our hotel at 11:30PM on Saturday night.

 

On Sunday we had our breakfast at A&W burger place and that gave the first taste of Canadian way, unlike US the fountain drink and coffee were not unlimited but were rationed. There was a 13% sales tax and the food in general was expensive.

 

After breakfast we started driving to Niagara Falls, thanks to our GPS we took the toll road even though there was no need for it, the weather was pretty damp and it was drizzling. I was hoping the weather would clear away and there will be sunshine but no such luck.

 

Once we reached near the Niagara parkway I was amazed by the number of people, I have never seen so many people at one place barring Time Square NY. There were all kinds of people from all over the world. As it was drizzling one of the first things we did was to buy an umbrella and then we started walking to the falls. The view of the falls was quite amazing, the gorge wasn't too tall but the amount of water flowing was phenomenal The drizzle and the water sprinkling from the falls made our Canon camera malfunction a bit but it got better over time.

 

We first took “Maid of the Mist” tour, we all got dressed in blue rain coats and we climbed into a big ship. The ship took us near the American falls first and then headed towards the horse shoe falls. When we got near the falls the water was no longer a mist but pouring on us from all over the place and needless to say we could have been completely drenched, thanks to the blue uniform just our shoes and trousers were drenched. We couldn't keep our eyes open for more than a few seconds because of splashing water. The sound of the millions of gallons of water falling down 150ft or so is amazing. The experience was wonderful and worth every single penny we paid for it. We were hungry by the end of the trip and ate some crappy food at the restaurant near maid of the mist tour.

 

Next we went to the "Journey Behind the Falls” tour", this tour actually takes us 120ft below and gives us the opportunity to see the falls from the bottom. They have built a tunnel that is 650ft long and has 3 different look outs. The very first look out was the best which let us go outside to open air and watch the falls and we could see the falls from the bottom looking up. The other two are just name sake and not any view there. Again the experience was wonderful, I think we spent nearly half an hour to 45 minutes watching the falls from the bottom and still didn't want to leave the place. I came across some interesting facts while walking through the tunnel, supposedly the water flowing through the horse shoe area every minute is enough to fill a million bath tubs or so. The rate of erosion of the horse shoe was 10ft/year till beginning of 20th century and now due to engineering it has reduced to 1ft for every 10 years.

 

We were wet and soggy by the end of the trip and hence we decided to head back to the hotel and come back in the evening to watch the Niagara illuminated and weather permitted watch the fireworks.

 

We started from the hotel in the night after having dinner at place called Mucho Burrito (excellent Quesadilla), it rained, sorry it poured but we are optimists we drove with the hope that the rain will go away but it pretty much poured till we reached the falls. We lost our way and instead of searching our way looking for the falls we went to Skylon Towers (took us 775ft above the falls). The view of the illuminated Niagara Falls from the top was really gorgeous and to our pleasant surprise at sharp 10:00PM they started the fireworks. The fireworks were a coordinated effort between the Canadian side and American side. It was a short five minute one but was really great.

 

All in all day one was a great success.