An alternative to depressing actions

Two weeks ago, given the negativity in media, way too many lies to handle on a daily basis, friends who show their true colors when it comes to divisive topics.. lets just say that it was just plain depressing.

As chance would have it, a friend shared a person reciting the Shiva Thandava stotram with a damroo(it is an instrument... a hand held drum of sorts) in some temple in the himalayas. It was mesmerizing.. 

Decided to try and learn this stotram instead. My original thought was that given the complexity and intricacy of the lyrics and the convoluted word structure, any attempt to understand the pieces to memorize it would be too difficult for a person like me who is not that fluent in Sanskrit. 

First two days was spent in doing some research, getting printouts of different versions of pdf files from sites with different fonts (Sanskrit letters which are run on have different ways of writing combined letters and that alone can be a big deal for learning something this complex), trying to check out more youtube videos etc.

There was a great story explanation of how this stotram came to be, thanks to Aarsha vidhya varshini, and the most amazing breakdown of this by the Sanskrit channel. 

Took the breakdown from that channel, color coded the entire stotram by main idea, sub ideas and sub sub ideas etc.. Ravana should be considered the orignator of nested loop programing!  The whole thing reads like a bracketed C program! 

In 12 days have managed to memorize the first 10 stanzas. Most sites show 14 total. Some have added 4 more which are explanations or appendix of sorts on the benefits of reciting this.. My goal is the first 14 for now!

As a student in Varanasi, I am pretty sure this could have been memorized by just taking the printout and sitting outside the tree in Birla Mandir on two or three evenings and the whole thing would have been entered into my hard disk drive with backups. Right now, it looks like there is a I/O issue.. there is hard disk space because I am able to memorize it.. but the quality of the memory is not good. Have to constantly keep refreshing it to push it into permanent memory and the memory bus seems to be damaged. What used to be a 64 bit I/O seems to be acting like a 16 or 8 bit I/O in just 30 years! 

At this rate of memory degradation, in another ten years, my ability to memorize anything will be severely impacted. This stotram is not easy to memorize based on what even the teachers are saying and it is a decent challenge to recite. 

My friends conferred the title of "star maggu" on me during my BHU days when memorization came in very handy for studying metallurgy. The star maggu is now struggling to keep the title. I am sure my classmates will be amused to see this post. 

The lesson in this for everyone is this... keep testing and pushing your memory periodically with something, anything. That will give you some indication of how much additional work is required to bring things back to some reasonable performance. Once you remember it, keep going back to reciting it and it will help keep your brain sharp.

My grandpa used to tell me "keep reciting the slokas from memory. it will help you keep your brain active when you are older". Somewhere I stopped exercising the brain as much as I used to in the last few months, thanks to the new COVID lifestyle. 

This was a good exercise. It also helped me be happier over the last two weeks by skipping social media. Other than wish friends and relatives for their birthdays, I have been news free. There is always the news about work or work related things that one gets in emails, which also happens to be only negative. 

If I can recite this, anyone can. So if anyone out there is thinking or on the fence and has starting trouble with reciting the Shiva Thandava stotram, take heart.. you can do it! 

31 years later...

31 years ago, I went to college. Being the first grandson on my mothers side and given most of my social interactions were with my maternal grandparents and uncles and aunts who raised me, the entire family was participating in a social experiment.

"Sundaram has never been outside this small area all his life. Sure he can read write and speak Hindi enough to be the official translator for 20+ people crowded in front of the TV every Sunday before Mahabharat starts,  but that doesn't necessarily mean he will survive up north by himself in college!" 

Yours truly was the real life version of Jim Carrey in the Truman show... and I went to Benares to study.. The Hindi didn't help and first year was not what I expected. There were a lot of mistakes mostly on my part which made my first three weeks a crash course on life.  It took a phenomenal effort from my parents and classmates to help me through that year. Something for which I am forever grateful. Being intelligent and being smart are two different things. If anyone needs to understand that in your house, send them to me. Will gladly explain. 

The more time I spent in Benares the more I loved it. Was actually sad to say bye after 4 years. That experience at 16 did help me later in life multiple times as I moved to US for grad school and went from place to place, apartment to apartment and moved to the west coast.  My worldview is all the more supportive when it comes to dealing with people and events thanks to some rude awakenings in my freshman year. 

This weekend, Jr. goes to college. She is the first grandkid on both her mother and fathers side of the family but she has seen more of this world before college compared to me. Hoping she is smart and not called intelligent. This blog has seen her grow up right in front of all our eyes. Time flies because they are mostly good times.  She is a good kid. She is the type of person who will go run towards a problem to help someone when everyone else runs away. I hope she stays that way. 

It was decided by the family on a 3:1 vote that daddy will not be the one to drop her off in college. The logic was that I will cry in front of Jr. or make her feel sentimental and it won't help while saying bye. The little one's words I believe were "Appa is a drama queen! Don't send him. Let him stay here with me and I will manage him".  So San did the college visit. 

The best part of this was that my classmate and chai partner drove 4 hours to help. That is the real blessing.

She now knows a lot more about our college going days than I would have wanted her to know.. but that comes with the territory when uncles share stories.

My sincere hope is that she makes friends in college who will be her lifelong friends.. friends who will help her kids move to college when the time comes! 

After leaving for college I never got to spend more than 2-3 weeks with my parents at any time till to date. If history is any indicator, it will be something similar with this girl unless she comes back to the bay area to find work. 

As a parent, one can always hope. 

Have started a countdown to when she will be home at the end of the semester...

as long as daddy is working on counting something, tracking things in spreadsheets, etc. things will be fine.. cleaned up her room and sorted things out. It will take me a few days to get used to the fact that she is in college, but I am confident of getting through it. All I need to do is go every morning and change that number to a smaller number and take it one day at a time.

All that yoga is going to help! It already is.

Gokulashtami 2020

This year we are celebrating Gokulashtami in a much simpler way. 

Made some seedai in the morning with some help from San who also made some maladdoos and looked lovely today..

We did a small pooja and did neivedhiyam and deeparadhanai. 

did I mention she looked absolutely lovely today?

This year, one more person dear to us has reached Krishna.. San's grandpa is one with Krishna now! Was thinking of him, even if it was for a brief moment while doing the deepa aaradhanai. 

The kids have stopped dressing up for functions, but their motivation for dressing up is when someone is going to see them dressed up. Parents don't count on that list. Given COVID times, I understood and gave them a pass. There are a few functions they look forward to.. especially when the star of the show is a cute crawling baby, a cute looking elephant, lighting lamps and bursting fire crackers or simply the excuse of "I cant study today because all my books are with Saraswati ummachi". 

We have passed on what we could to the next generation. Feel happy that my kids are aware of traditions. Right now there are kids growing up in Tamil Nadu as well as a lot of young adults who have managed to develop so much self loathing for their own culture and tradition in the name of secularism that is being pushed in their face. The marketing machinery that has gone into over drive in recent times to do this to so many kids at this scale is mind boggling. 

You can accept another's faith without having to show you gave up on your own! This is so much easier to do and understand, especially when you have a concept of god being in every form, shape, size, color, nature and being open to acceptance. I can understand it being a lot harder for religions where the concept is "my way is the only way". 

"Sarva deva namaskaraha Keshavam prathigachathi" is something we say as part of doing Sandhyavandhanam every day.  When you prostrate yourself in front of any god, it all eventually goes to the same god. It is a beautiful message. 

On a totally tangential note, I have been wearing the same 5 "pocket vechcha T-shirts"  in rotation since the lockdown when going out. Inside the house it has been the 60-day challenge shirts in rotation.  Using Krishna's birthday as an excuse, finally put on a new T-shirt from the collection of unopened gifts. 

This one was courtesy of my FIL/MIL or one of San's uncles. Feels good to wear new clothes every now and then! Apparenlty after eating everything I do look like a blue whale. 

A very happy Gokulashtami to everyone. I know that given the technicality of the calendar a lot of folks celebrate Krishnas birthday in early September this year. An advance Gokulashtami wish to them!