Birthday with a bang!

Last year I happened to be in India for my birthday and spent the day with my college buddies. It was amazing. These guys made sure I had a great time.. even gave me birthday bum(p)s! 

To top things off, I had a nice glass of Mishrambu that was topped off, and it was the rangeen (colorful) type! Translation : it had bhang.. just enough to make me sing "happy birthday to me" by myself over and over again!  (Let it be known that, by buddy in the picture had the plain version)

 

After that, spent two days with my parents in severe weather conditions and miraculously made it out of Chennai before the heavens opened and shut down the airport! That was last year.. 

This year, the birthday was also celebrated with a literal "bang". On the whole, the day was full of ups and downs. It was one of those work days worth forgeting. Then things took a turn for the better and the evening turned out to be nicer than the morning. One mintue we were at Bhavikas having dinner, all smiles and we came home happy. Wrote a nice post about it, and while I was hitting the Publish button, there was another bang! This time it was an injury, which thankfully ended up being something recoverable. Went from happy to mad to happy to sad every 4 hours. 

We did manage to do a mini trip to LA to meet my sisters family. It was shorter trip compared to original expectations as my long weekend was reduced as I flew out sunday morning.  Spent a day at Universal studios and visited the Malibu temple on the way back home.

Was happy to see my sister and family after almost a year and a half and spend a day and a half with them!

The trip was worth it just for that one Photograph!

It was raining very heavily and we took 8 hours to make it back instead of the usual five. We were all glad to make it back in one piece after that drive. 

Was in two minds that night on going to Asia the next morning, but the family decided that I should be done with work travel for the year and they will manage with help from friends.

That morning my rudhraksha necklace broke and the beads came flying everywhere in the room. With construction going on, my odds of finding all the beadsl were slim. Also thought it was a bad omen of sorts. Given I like to challenge bad omens (pissing off my family and going against bad omens is a habit from childhood), decided that what has to happen will happen. So travel was on.

After searching for the beads everywhere, found 108 of the 109 beads. A rudhraksh is tied to your soul once you wear it for a long time and custom is that it gets burnt with you, when you are cremated.  Also wearing 108 beads instead of the 109 can make one dizzy, or so say spiritual gurus. I had no time to find the lost bead and rushed to the airport with a heavy heart.

There is something special about this necklace. It is made of seeds from the rudhraksh tree and is completely organic material in a silk thread, but it flags in the body scanner at the airport as metal, every time! The TSA agents always look surprised when I pull it out and they ask "is it on a metal thread and I go, NO! Silk thread". Somehow it must be absorbing millimeter waves or is magnetic. Either way, the fact that it absorbs radiation says there is more to it than I know. Maybe someone else who has the time can study the radiation absorbing properties of these beads!

The first thing I did after coming home from Asia, was launch a search for the missing bead, and found it! Tomorrow will be spent in remaking the necklace. 

There were many life lessons learned in the last week.

One : Should enjoy time with family, every chance I can get. All it takes is one mistep and things can go from happy to sad. 

Two: I might think of work as another home and colleagues as an extended family, but it may not be reciprocated. At the end of the day, work remains a means to an end and I should keep that perspective.

Three:  Should trust my gut feel on people and events. Even if my track record is not that great, at least I can own the fall out a 100%

Four: Should always remember Karma! It gets me, all the time!

Could write a chapter or mini book on all four of the above, but there are consequences which I am not going to be comfortable with. So will use the third and fourth lesson and leave it with this blog post!

Two birthdays.. very different experiences. A blog post that describes mood swings should end on a happy note. So here is a photo of the little one I took the day before my birthday which is as cheerful as the world gets for me!

That smile can keep me going to the moon and back.

This year(correction.. two years) I have travelled more than enough miles to go to the moon over hundreds of hours of flying and walking around airports and being driven to airports, hotels etc.    That smile can bring me back from any distance, in an instant!