Birds in our backyard

Few days ago we noticed that White-winged Dove’s had nested in both our front and backyard trees. We were so excited that we would get to see the young ones and all but the happiness was short lived. Within a few days both the birds abandoned their nests. My guess, the male was two timing both the females and they got to know about it :).   

Note both pics were taken by my Canon 18-55mm kit lens and the first pic was shot through a glass window with a black wire mesh attached to it. Now I have upgraded my lens to a Sigma 18-250mm lens and life is completely different after that. Below is the pic of a humming bird feeding in our backyard.

Funny part is, I ordered the 18-250mm lens to capture the doves nests from up close but by the time the lens arrived the birds had flown off their nests. May be next season we will have better luck. 

Naanu nanna kanasu

Naanu nanna kanasu (translated Me and my dream) a movie in Kannada by Prakash Rai. I had avoided the movie till last week when my wife forced me to watch the movie with her. I believed I had good reasons to avoid for I believed that the movie is a depressing and sad movie. Boy! was I totally wrong, and I am thankful to Sandhya for making me watch it.

The story is simple and I can positively say it is the story  of every parent. It is the life story of a girl from her birth till the day she gets married, told from the point of view of her loving, caring and devoted father. What captures the attention is the narration and the acting by the lead stars. One can relate to a lot of events described in the movie.  It has its tender moments and laughing scenes but doesn’t have much of forced comedy. Couple of scenes are worth mentioning, the scene of parents preparing for an interview to get their kid to the school and the way dad reacts when he finds out that mom knew about daughter’s love matter before him.

If I remember right, it has couple of songs which were ok, not worth mentioning, but at the same time weren’t bad enough that I couldn’t sit through. I was so sold on the depressing story line of the movie that through out the movie I was waiting for the mother to die, thankfully nobody died in the movie.  In the end it turned out to be a comedy than a depressing and sad movie. 

As with any movie, this has its sets of exaggerations, specially the story line of the son-in-law or the altruistic nature of the girl or the way that the family friends doesn’t age at all. Most of it can be ignored for the movie is really well done.

Definitely worth a watch once. If interested one can see it legally on YouTube. Sorry guys, no subtitles.

One word of caution, the movie as expected is dominated by Prakash Rai and there is not a single scene without him.

How honest are we?

Back in India, we keep crying “politicians are looting our country”, “we need selfless and honest leaders”, “Our country would be great if had good leaders” and so on. While all of the above are true, I wonder to what extent the common man is honest. You don’t get my thinking, here is the list I compiled.

• The property we buy in India gets registered to half the value and the other half is paid for in cash. This is so rampant that one will be hard pressed to find a seller willing to quote the actual sale price of the property and pay tax for the same. 
• We never believed in paying for the software we use, we believe in hacking an OS and pirating the same than paying the full price.
• We love our pirated DVDs of movies, practice is so organized that one can find an illegal camera print copy of a movie within a day of its release.
• I don’t remember the last time I paid full price for a musical CD
• We negotiate with the food caterer to see if he can give us a discount for paying in cash. Of course he does, deduct the sales tax from the order and offer it as a discount.
• We believe in registering properties and opening accounts in our non working spouses to save on taxes.
• We rarely believe in reporting rental income on our taxes.
• We believe in opening multiple accounts in multiple banks to avoid tax mans interest.   
• We blame the government official of not working but how many hours in an actual 8 hour working day we spend in doing “work”?          

The list can go on, I will be first to admit that I am guilty of quite a few items in the list.

The motivation for this blog post came from this Kannada song. 

Why is there less litter here?

A good friend of ours is visiting us from India and we are taking her around and showing the typical attractions of Austin and its surrounding. A curious incident happened during one of these outings.

Here is how it unfolded, my friend was eating a chocolate in the moving car and suddenly she opened the window and asked me “what will happen if I throw the chocolate wrapper out now?”, as typically expected I reacted saying the usual of “you are not supposed to litter and they may fine you if caught and so on”, she replied back “this is a long stretch of open highway, I don’t see anybody around and haven’t seen a single cop for miles together, so when will they find out and when will they fine me?”.

This made me ponder a bit, it cannot always be the fear of punishment that prevents us from littering on the road (it is to an extent an important factor, no doubt), then what is it?. Are the roads and premises so clean that we don’t feel like littering? Or, Our greater sense of civic duty prevents us from littering? or a combination of everything above. I am not convinced that I have stumbled on a clear answer yet.

Apart from the highway littering, the littering on the walkways is considerably less in this country than in India or other developing countries (I wouldn’t say it is zero here for I have seen cigarette butts being thrown without hesitation in this country also). This I attribute to a few reasons, one is lower population or lesser population density, second higher frequency of good, well kept trash cans and lastly less number of mom and pop stores selling items in loose (1 cigarette, 1 chocolate and so on). 

The last reason is the one that is making me think twice and thrice, is reducing the number of independent stores and replacing it with a super market kind of thing can make things cleaner and better for the environment in some sense? 

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.