What is in a resolution?

Last years resolution was to go do Bikram Yoga once a day! Within a few days the resolution had been given an amendment that said "exclusing travel days" and that meant the goal went down from 365 already.

The plan was to also document how this resoluton was taking shape over time in hopes of seeing trends. It is very hard to kill my inner nerd! 

There was also something else at stake. Made a deal with Sangeetha that if we paid for a "one year unlimited" pass, will get at least 8$ or less a class to justify the pass. That was the lowest cost on any deal with BYSJ in the previous years when you bought class cards based on number of classes (like a 30 class card or 100 class card). If If I did better than $8/class, it would warrant buying the same thing for 2014!

So between 12/26/12 and 12/26/13 here is what happened..

56% attendance, far from the 100 dream. There were 80 travel days. That still makes it 68% attendane.

The green line shows number of classes without a break. It was great going with the 60 day challenge at the beginning of the year and then it was always a break here or there. 

Looks like that funny graph on exercise patterns that criculated in Facebook, doesn't it? Well most of September and early October was a rout because of the misdiagnosed tooth infection and Jaw locking which ended up pretty badly. Made it a point to get back in the hot room in November all weak after taking powerful antibiotics.  

Also started tracking how many complete poses I sat out in each class because of feeling dizzy, nauseous or for losing my breath or not being able to control my heartrate. There are 26 poses in class. So technically, 26 is like missing an entire class. I had missed the equivalent of almost 6 classes out of the 194 just by sitting out. There are trends within this by teacher, by time of class, by number of people in the room, etc. But that is not going up in the blog.

To say I like all my teachers classes the same, would not be fair. Definitely have my favorites, but this list is not represenative of that. It just reflects times of day I happened to take classes at on certain days of the week.

Somehow the teachers who have themselves gone through some adversity and have used Bikram Yoga to change their lifes appeal to me more than the ones that have been lucky enough to discover Yoga in their teens!

Also recorded my weight after coming home from yoga class. There is definitely a trend there between summer and winter and it will be interesting to see how this goes on continued tracking. Weighed myself only on days of Yoga class and that is why it is not a smooth line. The weight is stable no matter how much I eat and that says a lot about Yoga and "weight control"!

Last but not least, the Sangeetha challenge..

This graph is 950$ / number of classes as the number of classes increased. In other words, if I had been hit by a truck after class 1, it would have been one expensive class!  I got it down to $4.90/class which was way better than the goal of $8/class. 

All is well that ends well or has a new beginning. In this case it is a new beginning. Got the next one year annual unlimited pass started as of today! 

Now if you are wondering if Bikram Yoga made a difference for me in 2013, the answer is an emphatic yes. I had less than 5 sick days in the last year (minus the tooth episode, which could have been fixed with a visit to a good dentist in a day) and inspite of all that travel, managed to keep my sanity and was able to get back on my feet fast. 

There is one complaint from San all the time and that is "If you do Yoga why are you getting angry?". As far as I have checked, there is nothing that says people who do yoga cannot get angry. I can go from zero to angry in 4 seconds, but I can also come back from angry to zero in the same 4 seconds. That is the only difference after doing Yoga and that is a big deal! I am able to go on long hikes with ease and in general my ability to handle difficult situations has not become any worse. So all that credit goes to Yoga.

Wish me luck in bettering last year's attempt!

We are nothing but caricatures…

Another year rolls by fast. The usual "IBM Childrens party" is enjoyed by the family. The kids and San dress up and Daddy Narayanan wears the same sweater yet again for the 7th year in a row for this party. Given that this is his only sweater, that is no surprise! 

The kids have this routine down nicely to the point where they know which lines are easy to get to and which ones need strategy. Feels like we are doing Fastpass lines in Disney at times, the way they race back and forths..

As usual, here are pictures..

Well, that was a picture of a picture. The original is one of our best Santa Photos and is definitely going on a frame!

Jr. picked an angel with a Halo

The little one picked a Reindeer. It came with a Jewel.. and her mole on the cheek nicely blended in as a spot on the reindeer!

This year, we went to BigAl yet again and he looks at me and goes "How many years is it, this time?" and I said "7 in a row!". The line at the Caricature stands are long and usually you have to go to the next artist open. Thanks to this blog and the pictures, I pull up the previous years collage, show it to the Organizers and go "Can you please let us go to BigAl? The first two years was coincidence. The next four was not.. Please ?!" and they warm up to us and go "fine! we will let you wait for BigAl"

Jr. saw this and went "Are we using this like the ruler on the wall to see how we are growing up?! That is crazy!"

Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday to all of you!  

Nelson, my man.. my mai'Man

Last week after what can only be described as a long and ardous work day, came home, made some tea, sat on the couch and logged into Facebook. 

The news feed had at least 25 references to Nelson Mandela passing away. If I were to plot a histogram of the number of letters on the post (including forwarded or attached links) it would look something like this..

Granted I rounded off the letters, but still this is a fairly accurate picture. Where was I? Yes, it appeared as though my main man Nelson had carpet bombed my Facebook feed through my friends.  The one long post was a cut paste job of how the US as a country was actually trying to keep Mandela in prison as long as they could, call the ANC a terrorist organization, supported the South African government in his initial capture, etc.  and pretty much stopped short of saying "if you are American, don't bother talking about Mandela". 

After digesting the news feed at the end of the long day and doing some Googling, Twittering, etc. I came to the following conclusions:

1. Nelson Mandela had definitely passed away, and given the outpouring, had already rested in peace. It was a sure thing for the man.

2. On that day people all over the world probably said "RIP Mandela" instead of the usual "Jai Ram Ji ki" , "Allah o' Akbar" or "Praise the Lord" .. Hell even the Namaste in the Yoga room was probably replaced by "RIP Mandela". 

3. There was a clear trend of certain articles related to Mandela, but the surprising ones were the US is no friend of Mandela variety which were getting more rounds than the "did you know his middle name was Troublemaker?" type articles.

Given all this Mandela, I asked the kids "Do you know why Nelson Mandela was?" and the little one, crackerjack (mundhiri kottai translated wrong) that she is, said and I quote verbatim:

Yes. I know! Mandela was a good guy who fought for the freedom of "Africans", then they put him in jail for a long time and when he finally came out he won and helped the Africans, but the guys he fought didn't like him and so they shot him"! 

I was like "Wow".. Someone just rewrote history and mixed up MLK with Mandela. I know there are parallels with respect to fighting for black people.. but seriously! So, I broke the news to her that Mandela did die "peacefully" in his bed at the ripe age of 95. San may have had a hand in this history lesson is my guess.. 

Now where were we again? Ah, yes! Mandela had passed away. We went to Jr's winter concert band performance at her school and guess what ? The conductor is dedicating "Mozart's last requim" to Mandela as a fitting tribute. Irrespective of how he was remembered while alive, Mandela had definitely touched anyone and everyone for 24-48 hours at least, in an all pervasive way by dying.

My initial rant at seeing all the forwards was "Why are people melting icebergs by forwarding things in the name of showing some respect to a dead world leader?" Ok, I know there are folks going "what? Melting icebergs?". Let me explain.

In my day job, I make a memory. All of you use memory all the time without realizing it. When you do that harmeless "R.I.P. Mandela" post on FB and send it to all your friends, it gets written in a lot of places on a lot of memory chips, disks, solid state drives etc. Now it takes energy, a very small miniscule amout to write and read this data. However, this adds up. Just do the math. A few picoJoules of energy multiplied a few Qunitillion times is already in Mega Joules.. again crude math but you get the picture!

Was just thinking aloud "what is the piont in making a better memory and giving it to people if they don't use it wisely.. the more memory you give, the more RIP posts are going to go around. More folks will instagram their dinner. . still more icebergs will melt etc. etc." Did I say it was a long day?  Did come around eventually to accepting that irrespective of what I thought, today the world is more connected than ever and it is okay for everyone to connect in whatever way they want. Trying to regulate how someone uses something like memory was a stupid thought in the first place. Probably ranks on snobbery! So I stand corrected. 

That said, my kids did ask me what I thought of Mandela or what I knew of him as though I was supposed to know him very personally. So here is what I remember of Mandela ..

It was the late eighties. Prannoy Roy had a wonderful program that aired late night on Doordarshan (only Indian channel at the time) called "The world this week". In that we would get glimpses of world events. We got to see video clippings of Mandela and Apartheid. It was like watching the caste system on steroids running out of control and one man who was the voice of reason. I didn't give him even 50/50 odds at the time of repealing Apartheid. 

Early nineties. I come to the USA as a student to Philadelphia. Back folks don't have the same status as white folks when it come to financial equality but it was heartening to see the US as a true melting pot of races. In a way it was great that my entry to the US was in Phili that gave me this rosy view of the US. If I had gone to some place in the mid-west, my outlook on the country would have been very different. Mandela becomes president, Apartheid is no more and we are now discussing real important issues in the grad student lounge on what this means to Cricket, Allan Donald, Alan Lamb, Gary Kirsten.. etc.   Most of you won't understand, but some of you will! This meant the Indian team would be one more down in the world rankings after yet another country, "South Africa" now kicks its butt in Cricket. It was too much to bear.  On the bright side, there was one blackish looking dude in the South African squad. It was kind of like a precursor to watching Obama become president.

Mid nineties. Remember having a conversation about Mandela with another student at RPI. "why would she divorce him after going through all that?". It was a conversation on divorcing at 70+. At the end of the conversation it was clear that I did not understand Mandela, Winnie, people in general or the concept of divorce.

Then things changed in my life. Mandela was mostly forgotten as was cricket. There was the occasional news that he was sick, dying or both and a potential backlash if he died. Never got that. Given that it has been almost 20 years since Apartheid was lifted and things have improved slightly, why would South Africans suddenly erupt in violence if a good man died at a ripe age after accomplishing something so phenomenal. Unify two races after hundreds of years of animosity and oppression? 

The answer came to me in a flash! Why did people in Tamil Nadu go vandalize shops and disturb law and order when MGR (an actor turned politician) died ? He was no Mandela, but the crowd went into a frenzy. So maybe the press was right in their thought process? 

Well, the good news is that the man and the country whose people he unified, are both resting in peace almost a week after he passed away. 

If anything, that is the true legacy of my main man Nelson!