It marks the end

They say all things eventually have to come to an end, doesn’t matter if it is good or bad. After nearly 4 and half years, my gold fish aquarium has reached its end. The last of the 4 gold fish died on Sunday (April 29 2012). May its soul rest in peace.

What amazes me is that I thought this fish will not survive the move and will die during the transition, but this one was a strong one and it survived the move (most unplanned ever) and also lived for nearly 6 weeks or so. 

As is the case with the other gold fish, I do not know the actual reason as to why this one died. It feels sad to see an empty aquarium at home and I do not have the heart or the courage to populate the tank with new fish right now. May be it is time to shelve the aquarium for now.

smart or cheating?

This was at an Exxon gas station in Austin, typical order is Regular, Plus and Supreme. 

Its all Newton

Long long time ago, Sir Isaac Newton proposed 3 famous laws, one defined inertia another one defined momentum and the last one, I don’t know what it defines but it is pretty famous too.

When I learnt it first time and re-learned it again and again (adding more complexities each time) during various phases of my school/college life I thought the law only applied to inanimate objects. It was only couple of days ago it occurred to me that it applies to my life more than anything else.

Here are a few instances where I can relate

• In the years 2010 and 2011 I was pretty diligent about my blog and was posting an average of 3 to 4 posts a month. The momentum of posting kept me looking/thinking about new things to write and comment on. But in this year inertness has taken over and I am so far in that inert momentum that I am finding it hard to come out of it (Inertia).
• For those who know, once a week I compile the news and events listing for Art of Living Austin and send out to an email list and till a few weeks ago I was diligent in compiling and sending, now its been more than 3 weeks since I compiled the news letter.

There are quite a few instances like this I can post about and if I want more all I need to do is ask my wife .

The crucial point about inertia is that it takes an external force to change the state of being and then momentum takes over. While writing this post, It occurred to me that the real force for me has to come from within and not from external sources. You can call it self motivation, I would like to call it satva and the only way I am aware of is to get regular with my Sadhana.   

Iphone Home button

Iphone users can tell you how important the home button on the phone is. Time and again it goes out of calibration (it did it twice for me in last year and half). In my case It got so bad that some times I had to click multiple times before the click got recognized and the ,more frustrating the behavior was random for it sometimes would treat multiple clicks as multiple clicks itself. I would have taken it to the Apple’s Genius bar but the phone was out of warranty. 

While looking for solution on the web, I came across a simple one. The solution was to turn off the phone and stick a vacuum cleaner or an air blower to the place where stick the charger. Since I had nothing to lose, I decided to give it a shot. Instead of air blower, I used the vacuum cleaner and vola it fixed the problem.

I have repeated this step twice so far and have gotten good results both times, so give it a shot before tearing apart the phone or driving up to the genius bar.   

ps: There is one more software solution, I came across. I haven’t tried to see if this works, but you could try.  

Kids and hi-tech gadgets

We usually let our daughter play around with some of the hi-tech gadgets at home (TV, computer, Iphone, Ipod and so on) but do it under fairly close supervision. The reason is 2 fold, on 1 hand if she can break the system then it is not worth to be around her and on the other if at all there are a few things she manages to change and make it unusable there is always Dr. Google to help us bring things back to shape.

Surprisingly, there is a 3rd reason too. Thanks to her and her out of the box thinking, I have learnt a new thing or 2. For ex: I was not aware that my Samsung TV had something called “Store Demo” mode which can be turned on by clicking a few buttons in the front of the TV. In this mode the TV over rides any display settings you have and shows pictures in high brightness with 100% contrast, of course can’t watch for too long in that mode and since I am not that as savvy with the buttons as her I had to use the graphical UI to debug the problem. On the other occasion after she had played around with my computer keyboard, all it was doing was to print special characters and upper case letters only, this time around the fix was to ask Dr. Google and solution was to hold both “shift” keys simultaneously for a few seconds. My favorite is when she showed us that Windows 7 allows for screen to be oriented in 4 different ways (landscape, portrait, straight and reverse) and that the DELL laptops have a keyboard shortcut to achieve the same (CTRL+ALT+ Arrow key). 

The one equipment/gadget I am scared to let her play around is the IPhone, for its easy to use interface is so easy that she has accidentally deleted couple of pics and videos recorded on the phone. Of course that hasn’t stopped me from letting her play with it, I am more careful with her around. There is another side effect of letting her play with the Iphone, she thinks any screen of that size (like the camera) is touch sensitive and she can can go to the next pic or video by just moving her fingers across the screen.

I don’t know how long we can let her play for she is getting bigger and stronger and now getting in the mode of learning to throw things.    

Sri Sri Yoga with the best

Every course I have attended with the Art of Living foundation so far, started with a disclaimer “all sessions are mandatory, miss one and you are out”. But here was one course that was a complete exception to the policy. This course had the policy, ”if you feel motivated and would like to come, please do. Else, not a problem (we already got your money :))”. At the same time here was the course that I was so motivated to attend and I wouldn’t mind waking up at 5:00AM on a Saturday just to be on time and not miss a single moment. Wondering what I am blabbering about, it was the Sri Sri Yoga with Dr. Sriram Sarvotham.

If you can, imagine a perfect blend of a yoga practitioner, an Engineer and a gifted teacher with an amazing sense of humor then you will probably get somewhere close to Sriram. A yoga practitioner who can bend and twist his body as though bones only exist for mere mortals, a genius who recites the yoga sutras of Patanjali and offers commentary on the same, a teacher who leads by example and can make you do asanas for nearly 2 hours and in the end you would wonder was it really that long?. I can keep talking about him but can’t do justice. I think Sriram should be called (Dr.)^2 Sriram Sarvotham, one for his PhD in electrical engineering and other for yoga studies. 

Now to the course itself, I was apprehensive when I found it was a “yoga” course and split over 2 weekends. The impulsive reaction and the follow up action so far had been to avoid the same. This time around I acted differently and I am happy I did the same. The course was a complete package and had everything for all the layers of existence (want to know more, do a YESPLUS or an Art of Living course). The postures were not new but what was new was the sequence and what kept it fresh was the teacher. The discourses were very original and I was blown away by the way (Dr.)^2 was putting the knowledge across to us.

By the end of the course, I now have a clear understanding of the Gunas(Rajas, Tamas and Satva) and the Doshas(Vata, Pitta and Kapha). I now know a few more pranayamas I have also become very aware of the importance of rest period after an intense yoga session. I loved the way Sriram led the yoga sessions and how he would indicate that some poses as pre-requisite poses for the next level tough poses. The answers to the questions would come out spontaneously and the knowledge flowed effortlessly. On the last day, most of us had sore muscles but all of us had soaring spirits.

Here is a piece of free advice, next time when Sriram is in town and teaching the Sri Sri yoga course, don’t think twice, free up your weekends and just jump in.

On a lighter note, wonder when will the name of the course will change to “Art of Yoga”, hmm . . . we will wait and watch.   

ps: if you thought yoga does not build body/muscle strength, next time when you are around babies/kids observe them carefully.

The secret ingredient is salt

Sandhya does not believe in getting ghee from the Indian store but prefers to get butter from the local grocery store and make ghee out of it. She has been doing for a while now and is an expert in the same.

Couple of days back I decided to giver her a break and embarked on a project to make ghee out of butter. I thought, I have seen her do it and it is just a matter of patience and no magic involved.

Thus after nearly 2 or so hours of waiting to generate ghee from butter, I figured I have accomplished the task and asked sandhya to help me filter the ghee to a different container. For those novices (like me), butter after being heated on a low flame for so long should leave out a solid substance which needs to filtered out to get ghee. In my case all I had was a colloid and no solid. So, when filtered I had the ghee and the colloidal substance together.

I kept scratching my head wondering what must have gone wrong, in my mind I blamed every possible thing. Meanwhile, I noticed that Sandhya’s face was beaming end to end and I figured I must have missed something very elementary. She said add a few grains of salt and a bit of turmeric and re heat the ghee + colloid for a few minutes.

Once I did that, bingo! the colloidal substance became solid like and was easy to be filtered out. I had finally made ghee from butter.

In this case, one can argue that salt being the catalyst is not completely proven, but my gut feeling is that it is the salt and not turmeric.