From 2012 to 2013

2011 had its ups and downs but overall it was a year that saw things turn around for us in a good way! 

2012 came and went and we can sincerely say it has been a great year! There were challenges but the good stuff made up for it!

At the end of the year one thing that stands out is the support of family and friends and the people we interact with throughout the year who make a difference to our perception of the previous 365 days.

We had my parents visit for almost six months and we had an "uneventful" visit. They got to see their grand daughters in the natural habitat and enjoy the interaction which is very different from the dazed jetlagged kids they get to see once a year for a week. The kids enjoyed the interaction as well. If we had to summarize their trip in one photo.. it would be this..

My dad constantly chiding the little one and she responding the way she does. Unforgetable moments!

We visited a lot of friends, attended birthday parties, celebrated Navarathri, Janmashtami, Halloween, 4th of July and visited places like Joshua Tree National Park and a host of theme parks in Florida during the 5 1/2 months. They attended the kids birthday party before leaving and it was Jr.'s 10th birthday and that made it all the more special!

Shortly before they left, Daddy Narayanan's company imploded and there was a job change which can only be described as a positive. All things happen for a reason and while we never understood fully how the company imploded, it was taken as a sign in this family to "move on" and "move on" we did.

One of the biggest drivers for Daddy staying at the old job was not the money or the position. It was truly the people. That said, the people in the new job are great! Going to work every morning is refreshing. There are changes when you go from a 250 people company to a 25 people company and in this case they are all good! The new job is great and brings a different type of challenge.

The travel to Austin has been replaced with travels to longer distances but so far no major sickness! Also feel like I work for Master Yoda of Air travel and he gives me the most amazing travel tips which are great! Someday, when I have tested these tips time and time again for myself (read that as "when I have enough miles to me a Travel Yoda myself), will share those tips in this space.

We wrapped up the year with a fantastic trip to Death Valley to celebrate my 40th Birthday, a lot of quality time with the extended family during the Christmas break, a lot of local trips to round up the year and a nice 60th Birthday celebration for my MIL last night! 

San switched groups within IBM again and is happy with her new gig. The kids are a handful and have become more addicted to electronic devices like the PS and the iPads but we expect apple to roll out a new App to detox kids in 2013. Daddy is searching for programs that will automatically cut the wifi network in the house between certain hours or have the iPads black out automatically at set hours .. kind of a severe version of parental control...

2012 is over and we can look back and say "It was a great year for us! We took things in our stride and made the most of what was handed to us!" 

Have also realized that in today's world of facebook activism, all those "social minded posts" don't make a difference. While the two places in the wolrd we love the most are fighting gun control and men control respectively in opposite sides of the globe, we are internalizing it differently and will do something.. but something that actually counts!

A big thanks to all our relatives, friends and well wishers for making 2012 the year it was! 

 Here's to a great 2013! 

Learning

Yesterday I was trying to teach the little one Chess after she saw me playing a game with Jr. 

So we tried to start with placing the pieces on the board. Before the first sentence was out of my mouth, she said "I Know daddy. I know.." and started placing the pawns in a row.. after that she was stuck. 

Jr. does the same thing. She knows everything! If they do not listen to any instruction completely how will they ever learn anythign?

The google generation defintely has a challenge when it comes to developing listening skills! 

Given that, seriously think that teaching Yoga to this generation will be a lot more challenging than teaching the previous one.. and that in itself is a challenge. 

A yoga teacher knows what his brain is telling his body to do and how it reacts. Given every body is different slightly but has the same features, he has to take that thought and transfer it into your head so it can make your body to the exact same thing.

In geek terms, this is like taking a piece of code on a windows machine and putting it in a Mac which has almost the same processors, memory, logic etc.. and making that code do a similar thing on a different machine.

The instruction has to be very clear and specific. As in an earlier post Jim Kallet managed to pull this off for me. 

Also there is a picture on the BYSJ site. Someone had taken a cell phone photo. Thank you! 

Somehow my body trusted his words better than it trusted my own brain and that is interesting. Why? 

Will figure it out in time!

Had signed up for six months of Unlimited visits. Today is the last day of the six month period. My attendance was not that great for the last six months. 64 classes here and 7 in Austin. That is 40% attendance. The travels continue with the new job and manage to go 4 times a week these days. 

Have never been able to beat the attendance that my MIL and me had last year. We went 91 days in the first 100. 

All said and done the deal with San to renew the commit was "at least 50 classes in 6 months" to keep this going. Passed that test!

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.