A fond farewell

This blog has not seen a post since May 26th. It has been a 100 days. I simply could not get back to writing.

My dad passed on 29th of May. After going to India and participating in his last rites, something has left me. Do not know what it is. That 10+ days of going through rituals has left some unexplainable void.

There are a lot of things to write about. Lots of songs to sing. Somehow could not get back to doing things I do normally with the same ease. The only saving grace was yoga. Somehow knew that going to a hot and humid room and spending 90 minutes without making any external sound, will help silence my inner voice and bring me much needed calm, and it did. Kept doing yoga as much as possible.

One of my Smule group friends threw a party to introduce his son and new daugher-in-law after the marriage. Many from the group had planned to sing at this meet and greet. Did not sign up, but once there, my friends pulled me in to sing and I did enjoy that moment. Somehow after coming home after the event, went back into a funk.

Work kept me very busy. A young co-worker ended up sick right after I came back and that left another lump in my throat. Kept all my focus on just work and yoga. The writing and singing, taking pictures and hiking went sideways.

Then came the long weekend and we went on a trip as a family. This might have been the one chance to go as a family given the kids are adults now and their schedules are no longer under our control. It was a good week spent but still took me some time, to just log back into the blog site.

This is my online farewell to my dad. I have to write about the man and his influence or the buffer block won’t clear in my head.

Here is to

Shri Hariharan Narayanan of Pudukkottai, Chennai

1939-2025

My dad lost his mom at a very young age and that pretty much left a scar that carried through his life. He got married late and had kids late. He was extremely intelligent and smart. Had a phenomenal memory and ability to connect dots. He was also an emotional idiot with a penchant to romanticize tragedy and nostalgia.

His only bad trait was a short temper, a blown fuse that took its toll on me as a kid. Still when there was a time when no one stood by me, he was there for me. He was always the contrast to everything I looked up to in my grandpa. My grandpa was the biggest influence in my life. I always credit him for my value system, but my dad was there to shape it without intending to. Years later when my dad spent almost 6 months with us, I actually realized there were a lot of things that were common between my grandpa and my dad.

Then there is my reflection in the mirror, the things I do, my fear of going through Parkinson’s… which constantly remind me of him.

There were times I had a love hate relationship with who I was, who I am, but somethings I have not given up, like wearing my poonal, no matter what.. because he wanted me to wear it till I die, so sandyavandanam, change it once a year, so one day perform his last rites, give my daughters hand in marriage (in his eyes it was part of a rite of passage). He being who he was from a different time, was still talking to me about his sadness at me not having a son when I was already 50 and old enough to start thinking of becoming a grandpa myself. Over the years it used to annoy me, but as I matured, learned to laugh it off. There was no changing either one of us on certain things.

He mellowed out as he aged. It was easier to interact with him as the years passed. Not sure how much of that is a reflection of either one of us becoming more accepting. Maybe both of us!

As I write this, I can feel him right here next to me, reading this over my shoulder and suggesting edits, telling me I could do better than this. Wanted to write a fond farewell, only to realize there is no saying bye to someone who is a part of me.

He is definitely wishing me well from wherever he is.

Time is supposed to move things along and even if you sense a tinge of sadness in my writing and singing and overall mood, this too shall pass. We are seeing a steady improvement in my social interactivity coefficient already in 3 months. Maybe in another three months, will be back to being my usual self.

Here is to …

Numbers..

We go to war because of possible WMD's in a country and eventually justify the war by saying 140 people in a village were killed by chemical weapons and the tyrant who killed them must go and the country must be democratized.

All of you know my feelings about how Americans are taught (subconsciously) that their lives are somehow worth more than the lives of people from other countries..  My kids growing up in here somehow get that "holier than thou" attitude inspite of my working constantly to bring them back down to earth.

28 lives is not far off from 140 and if you factor in any mutliplier for the Chuck Norris factor, it is even closer! An automatic weapon that can put out bullets at that rate is a WMD. Cannot understand why we would let these weapons be so easily accessible to anyone be it a sane person or an insane person.. because you never know when it can get in the wrong hands. 

So what are we going to do about automatic and semi-automatic weapons?

On the day of the shooting rampage, will go through the following reactions:

1- I will write a blog post which will practically be a copy of what I wrote after the previous such shooting and will realize it after going through archives and ask myself "when will I get the courage to do something about this other than write a blog post?" and will console myself saying "next election I will vote for guys who say they will bring in gun control" and also get frustrated after realizing "wait a second.. that is what I said last time".

2- Indian friends will say something about "too bad. America still a great country? My heart goes out to an almost great country.. etc. etc." 

3- My  Desi US Citizen friends will write about how their heart bleeds, how we have to take a stand against gun control, forward a few standard facebook articles that somehow articulate an equal percentage of truths and untruths that will actually weaken a stand for gun control, send some chain mails that urge you to share a hallmark card of sorts which say "1 share = 1 tear, 1 like = 1 hug for the victims" or some such thing.

4- A few friends who actually do some fact checking and are the intellectual types will either write articles which put forward "why gun control never happens" and the real facts behind guns in the US, statistical correlation of semi automatic weapons vs. number of mass shootings, etc. etc. and will be critiqued by some other friends who out of fear of losing their rifles and pistols will accuse them of focusing on gun control while we should really be grieving. There will be posts about how not all gun owners are insane killer etc etc.

5- My kids will freak out. Jr. usually throws up when she gets graphic descriptions of violence and the little one will sulk for a day or two and be angry at anyone and no one in particular to a great predictability.

Just yesterday morning there were helicopters above our house because the local high school which is four blocks away had a bomb threat. They closed two of the four schools that are within a 4 block radius of our house.. (no, kid you not.. there are really 4 schools within a four block radius from our house.. two elementary, one middle, one high school) and we had to wait to see if our kids school was going to be open or not. The local roads were blocked by cops and TV crews and we were glad that the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm. The kids were already spooked by this yesterday. 

We had gone through a similar experience recently with someone killing a bunch of co-workers at the Quarry up the mountain and more folks in the parking lot of the same high school and he was eventually shot by cops the next day..

So it was difficult for them to hear that school kids got killed by some insane gunman. 

Yes, we have it easy compared to the parents who have lost their kids today or have injured kids today or have to explain to their kids why their friends are not going to be back in their class when the school eventually opens.

Yes, our hearts go out to those folks. 

Yes, I cried after hearing this news and came home and hugged my kids a little tighter. 

But NO. There is no reason to stop voicing our opinions on gun control policy out of respect for the victims. That is non-sense and it is not trying to sway opinions on gun control by "exploiting" this event.

While driving home NPR was interviewing three people who were experts on "such matters" and one of them said "schools in the US are extremely safe and what happened today while horrid is a rare event!"

Seriously?! It is rare compared to what? There are more mass shootings in the US than any other country in the world unless you normalize it with the number of automatic weapons sold and even that statistic might be beat by some other country for all I know. 

Every week some bozo goes on a rampage and while controling said bozos is not practical, the damage will definitely be limited if he had to shoot one bullet at a time or use a knife. 

If we cannot stop these rampages, the least we should do is make killing less easier.

To all those folks who tell me to hold off on voicing opinions on gun control out of respect for the victims.. 

go shoot yourself!

We all react to events and things like this that get no real action towards a solution, will get a voice only for a short time after the event till Paris Hilton poses naked outside the Louvre or Justin Bieber gets his next girlfriend. Things like this trend on twitter and facebook for much shorter times than trivial matters. 

The human brain is amazing in the way it selectively forgets bad things and moves on. We all die peacefully or tragically and our brain figures out how to move on amidst facing death. This too will be forgotten by the public except for the folks who are impacted and next year the media will dig that up to do an anniversary of the event and things will fade away.  

Nothing wrong in talking gun control NOW while there are still a lot of folks who want to stand up for it.

ps. I am planning to recycle this post after the next mass shooting rampage in the very near future, as my heart is filled with so much optimism that we the people will do something about it now all of a sudden, given the age of the victims. 

Cupertino blues

Follow your heart!

Something that is a cliched phrase in this world of self help books and in your face advertising. "What does it even mean?" asked my 5 year old a few months ago. The example I gave her at the time was inspired by what she was holding in her hand at the time. My iPhone!

Told her that this guy who started the Apple company was told by many people that Apple is not a phone company and they should not be making phones. He went and did it anyway and it is now the most popular touch phone. That is what we mean by follow your heart.

She got it. She understood the concept of "believing in yourself", "doing what you think is right" and "pushing to be successful" after my elaborate story. It is true that over the years I have told stories from the Ramayana or Mahabharata or recently quotes from Bikram Choudhury to my kids that try to instill values of dogged determination, believing in your own strengths, admitting your flaws and valuing life in general, but when you hold a product in your hands that you will swear by as a five or eight year old, the point hits home faster!

It has been a rocky week in the household. The hand started swelling and hurting the last 48 hours and apparently the simple trick is to just lift it above the heart level, take Ibuprofen and rest. Something that I did not do for two days straight because of my love for work and hope of getting back to the Yoga room. I stayed off painkillers, spent 12+ hours working and let my hand hang from the side all day for two days straight. Sleepless nights followed and the family refused to help me at home because of my "stupidity".

There were also some tense moments with the kids getting introduced to violence that hit closer to home with a shooter taking out 3 people less than a mile from our house and injuring more. The roads were blocked off and schools were in lockdown mode for a day. There were cops with guns in plain sight at busy intersections. Things that we have not seen in Cupertino in our last 5+ years of living in this city. The kids were visibly upset and shaken.

The news of Steve's death made us all sad. Have never shed a tear in my life for someone I have not met personally. Yesterday I did. So did a lot of folks I know. When you are a techno geek who prides himself on thinking outside the norm and you came of age in the late eighties, chances are Steve Jobs was an indirect influence.

He made technology hot. The internet and the WWW have changed the world and I was probably one of the first folks to test out Netscape Chat beta where the allure was to talk so some college girl in Maryland who opens her chat with "F/S/20, beautiful night in Baltimore" and things have come a long way since then. The Apple Quadra on which I downloaded that Chat application is as big a part of that memory as I typed "M/S/21 It is raining cats and dogs here in Philadelphia".. Drexel was a Macintosh school and so was RPI!

Still remember going to a theater in 19th street to watch "Mission Impossible" the day it was released, to catch a glimpse of what a Macintosh laptop with AV capability could do (they had dropped flyers in the University to advertise this) and our group of grad school buddies could not stop talking about the Mac that night. Tom Cruise and the action were a distant second as we walked back to our apartments. All we wanted was to find ways to convince our professors that the laptop was somehow a project requirement!

Today the little one came to me and said "Daddy, does this mean there won't be an iPhone 5 which we want to buy?" my heart sank. Told her "No. There will be an iPhone 5 and we will buy it when it comes out!".

She also asked me "why are you all so sad. It is not like Steve Jobs is like Kollu thatha (great grandpa) and family. When Thatha died and everyone cried, I cried too because he was MY thatha too. But Steve Jobs is not family and you cannot do anything for his family because you don't know them!".

My daughters schools use iMacs in every class room. They are so used to Apple products. They cross 4 Apple buildings every day at a minimum which are at the edge of our street. They know Apple is synonymous with Cupertino.

Still that was a tough one to explain, but explain I did.

Finally she asked me "So you want me to come up with something like the iPhone when I grow older?" and my response was "Try your best to.."

We also had a followup conversation on what she wants to be when she grows older and she had a clear well thought out answer which was instantaneous..

"I want to be a doctor, a teacher and also have my own Target store which does not have the pizza place in the corner!"

You could teach at a medical college, but owning a target and running a department store at the same time? why? All because you dont like the Pizza store in the target?

Well, we have things to work on and she is not yet six, but following ones heart does lead to complications for other hearts!

All said and done, Steve Jobs will be missed.

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