Pumpkin Pumpkin

When my daughters school put out their fall Halloween party wish list, the easiest one I found was a bag of small pumpkins. How hard would it be to find a bag of pumpkins? or that’s what I thought.

Thankfully due to other priorities amongst other distractions, it totally slipped my mind that I was supposed to get the pumpkins till the day it was due on Monday morning. Even then, I am used to such things and I figured I would walk to the nearest HEB and pick up couple of bags or that's what I thought. In the end it took me close to an hour with stops at 3 HEB's, 2 Randall’s and 1 Whole Foods before I could declare victory. Yes I picked up the last 2 bags from that store. In the process I learnt a lot about pumpkin sizes, they are almost like dress sizes XXL, XL,  L, M, S, XS and XXS (my search was for XXS) of which XXL and XXS are hard to find. 

Moral of the story, Halloween and pumpkins especially the small ones go fast and faster so plan ahead.

Sri Sri yoga – a honest experience sharing

Two of my dear friends recently became Sri Sri Yoga teachers and have decided to organize a course here in Austin. I thought what better way to publicize to an event than to share my own experiences practicing the same. 

What is Sri Sri yoga?
In my humble words, it is a sequence of poses that would take around 30-40mins to complete and if done on a regular basis can improve the quality of the day and life in general

What makes it different from others?
I have explored other yoga studios in the past and none of them offered any take home practice and everyone wanted me to come back to the studio to practice in the studio. With Sri Sri yoga, we have a take home practice. The best part, in the 2 weekends (format could be different now), we were given enough knowledge to take our yoga practice as deep as we wanted to, essentially saying one can tailor the practice to their needs and time availability.

Can I elaborate on it’s impact?
I did the yoga course almost 3 and half years ago but never ever practiced it, let alone regularly. What was the excuse?, very simple, it is hard to find that 40mins of alone time to practice.

But, in 2013 when I was in some sort of low phase (relatively) and wanted to get out of it, upon a friend’s suggestion I took up the challenge to practice Sri Sri Yoga for 40 days and I saw the difference in my energy levels on the very first day.

Ever had the feeling of “floating in the air” or “things are getting done more efficiently” or the feeling of “I can handle this”, yes that is my state of mind after completing the practice and I carry that throughout (most of) the day.

Since then, every time I become aware that my energy levels are not up to the mark than what I expect them to be, I know the trick to get out of it.

If my memory serves right, somebody had asked the question as to what is the difference between this Yoga practice and Padmasadhana and SriRam-ji had said both have similar set of postures but one is designed for a healthy and happy state of mind while other is meant for deeper meditation. I have no knowledge about Padmasadhana but yes Sri Sri Yoga will help you to have happier state of mind. 

The blog post won’t be complete without thanking Sandhya, who pushed me to do the course. Rewind 4 years back, my excuse was, what is the point of learning something when I do not have time to practice?, but she proved me wrong and showed me that one needs to learn when they can as one never knows when it would come handy.

At the outset knowing your Ayurvedic body type and tailoring the yoga practice accordingly would make the practice better and enjoyable. More about that in a later post.

So, good luck friends and have fun co-teaching the course. 

ps: I was told the course has been renamed to Art of Living Yoga and no longer advertised as Sri Sri Yoga

Rangi Tharanga

I had heard a great deal about this movie called Rangi Tharanga and when Sandhya told me that the director Anup Bhandari was her classmate once upon a time, I definitely wanted to see the movie. In general I would Google the movie before hand and would have had an idea about the plot but this time around I made an exception to the rule and went to the theater blank slate.

So, what is the movie about? 

• A horror, romantic, suspense thriller with slight amount of action
• A movie that throws curve ball after curve ball towards the audience
• A movie that keeps you on the edge of the seat from start to end (no, not like Bourne series) 
• A movie that re-defines suspense thrillers
• A movie with some wonderful songs
• A movie which doesn’t add songs for no reason
• A movie that has the fewest technical and logical flaws
• A movie that has the best cinematography along with best story and best direction
• A movie with the original story, last one with this level of intensity was Kahani in hindi
• A movie that for the first time ever in my life-time in Austin had 4 shows in a theater and almost all shows were packed
• A movie that had a good blend of old and new talents
• A movie that had brand new artists who performed like veterans
• A movie that is definitely not a family (I wouldn’t recommend for kids) entertainer
• A movie that in my ratings would be a PG-13    

Great job Anup Bhandari, hope to see more work like this in the future.

If you haven’t seen it and there is a chance to see in a theater do it, its worth the money and time. 

Doggy camp and boarding

Recently when we had to go on our vacation, most of the stuff related to vacation like tickets, accommodations and attractions were done in advance. But this time around unlike last time we had a family member who wasn't going to accompany us on our trip and of course she is not able to handle herself by herself either, no she is not old or bed ridden, in fact she is young at heart and in body too. Yes you guessed it right, it was our pet daisy.

Thanks to our Circle C Ranch Facebook page I found a few dog highly recommended dog boarding places that I short listed to checkout

In general

• There are a lot of dog boarding places in and around our neighborhood
• 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the busiest times and
• The cost of boarding is in the range of $30-$35/day
• I can’t comment about the business side but almost all the places I visited had decent number or a lot of dogs
• Most dog boarding places are plain boarding places and that means they provide a semi private indoor place for your pet and let them out every 3 to4 hours for 10-15mins and put them back inside
• They in general won't allow group play for dogs or more than required time outside the kennels
• Some places were ridiculous, they were quoting extra $15-$20 for 10-15mins of group play in a day.
• One of the places even offered a doggie massage and also human time instead of group time, that would be $10-$20 for 15mins
• The same place also offered nature walk for the pup but 10mins walk would cost $15, considering I take my dog out for 40minute walk in the morning and something similar in the evening, 10minutes sounded ridiculous
• After seeing the other places out there, day camp and boarding at our neighborhood petsmart looks very primitive (no outdoor space and cramped play space)
• Of all the places I visited best I liked was Dog Camp in Dripping Springs and next one was Bobby Colorado training camp

Since I couldn’t get Dog Camp, I had to board her at Bobby Colorado. At the end of 10 days, my pup looked happy and I admit had lost some weight but nothing to worry about.

International Day of Yoga Celebrations in Austin TX

Some came because Narendra Modi, PM of India had called
Some came because Sri Sri Ravishankar called
Some came because it's adventurous
Some came because they were organizing it
Some came because it is probably the one and only event they were looking forward to (for personal reasons)
Some came for they were tasked with documenting the event
Nature said, I can't be left out and it rained and poured before and after the event

Yes, I am talking about the first ever International Day of Yoga celebration at our city Austin, TX. In case you missed it, it happened on Capitol grounds on Sunday June 21st at 10:30AM.

75 odd yogis from Art of Living, Bea Love Yoga and more importantly from Austin showed up to celebrate the very first ever International day of Yoga here at the lawns of the Capitol of Texas.  

We have a saying in Art of Living, “from chaos comes creativity” and this yoga event was no different. On Thursday before the yoga event scheduled for Sunday we were not 100% sure of the logistics and with rain in forecast didn’t have a plan B, to top it off nature wanted to do some rain dance for the event and on Sunday around 10:00am it started raining cats and dogs.  

But, when 70 odd yogis decide to do yoga on the first ever International Day of yoga, nature had to listen and give way for yoga. Come 10:30, the rain turned to drizzle and the lawns started to drain out just enough for us to get on with the yoga. The parking was free and plenty (I guess the rain turned some visitors away) and all other finer logistics, didn’t really matter. Can you imagine the state senator joining us at the yoga event.

The yoga was beautifully led by 3 senior yoga teachers from Bea Love Yoga. I have full respect and regards for Bea Love for if there was 1 person who was 100% sure they will be doing yoga that day, I would say it would be her. Once the yoga started, the event moved on with clinical precision, the teachers taking turns to lead the yoga and before we knew it was time to do the chanting of om and final resting. At which precise time, nature decided to join the party and started to drizzle and it poured again.

Later the party was moved indoors where folks from our own Art of Living band filled the rotunda with ancient chants and hymns.

It wouldn't be fair if I don't speak about the precursor to this event, it was called the sun never sets yoga which happened a week ago Saturday as a gearing up event for the international day of yoga, around 20 odd yogis gathered on the banks of town lake in the morning at 7:00AM and an hour long yoga was lead by our own graduate yogi Ritesh Seth.

All in all, a grand successful event for the Art of Living Austin. Kudos to the team for pulling this off in a very successful manner in true Art of Living style.

ps: yes, picture speaks 1000 words and yes I will be posting them soon 

pps: here are the pics 

With age does creativity . . . .

One of those blogs, that I am not sure of the content completely but still feel it is worth posting. This one is coming from my 4 odd years of interaction with Avni.

Off late I have concluded that structured education or molding the brain is to an extent detrimental to creativity. I have examples from my interactions and Avni's side to prove the same. In the end I am not advocating anarchy and a believer of structured education system.

Observing Avni, she doesn’t fret about color combinations, her approach is free spirited, a creative venture of mix and match of colors, in her own words, mixupitis is always fun. One can call it as festival of holi played on the paper. Can you imagine a princess face being painted tri color and still looking pretty.

From my side, an example is children books, specially the ones for the kids in range of 1-3 years old. They have large pictures and barely any texts and as parents we used to spend lots of time creating stories for those pictures and now as she is growing up we have graduated to more verbose books and end up reading what's printed rather than fitting creative stories.

I wonder if this is part of growing up. The free out of the box thinking that we as adults try to ignite in ourselves (every now and then) is already present in us as a child. If you are still not convinced, try convincing a child through logical statements (not arguments). One can argue that those solution are almost always impractical, but that's what being creative is, right?.

Last but not the least, the creative solutions moms come up to either feed their kids or to pacify them is clearly unique to every single mom. 

Future animals rights activist

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, Sandhya was trying to feed Avni. Both were sitting on the floor and as usual our pet Daisy wanted to be near  them and I was holding Daisy’s leash back and asking her to stay back. Suddenly,  Avni who was doing some art work stands up with an angry face and the following happens.

A: Manju, say sorry to daisy
M: why?
A: because you are mean to her
M: no I was not
A: not leaving the pets is mean
M: I was just trying to hold her back
A: not leaving Daisy near amma is mean, say sorry to her
M:sorry Daisy

Avni then comes near me and says “leave the leash now, do what I say”.

Her last statement was,

"Being nice is to let everyone to play"