Name-onic..

If you have a name that is not so common in the country you live in and anything more than a Jack or John is given up as "too complicated", you tend to start giving folks a mnemonic just so they can get your name right.. at least the spelling part!

This moring there was a yoga teacher who taught class. Apparently she has been teaching at BYSJ for a few months but this was my second time attending her class. Asked her for her name after class and she said "what is your name?"

So I gave her the mnemonic "It is Sundar. Sunday with an R" and she smiled. The real issue is that most of the folks who are told "Sunday with an R",  forget the R part and call me Sunday which is worse!  

Flashback to the early nineties..

Having spent precious rupees just spelling out SUNDARARAMAN NARAYANAN to various university admins to find out that they cannot find my file or GRE or TOEFL scores and going over the name over and over again, a strategy was deviced.

Had gotten tired of making AT&T richer and my parents poorer by the day..

Thanks to one of those admins who recomemnded she asked me to spell my name on the ISD call with a word for each letter. She had asked me "N as in Nancy or M as in Mary?" and I went "Voila! that is it. I can now spell my name to these folks who are unfamiliar with long names and get it right the first time!"

Still remember talking to Judy Trachtman who was our Admin head at Drexel shortly before I came to the USA for the first time to check on something about my I-20.. She goes "Spell your name for me kid!" and I go "Sugar Uncle Navy Dates Alpha Rainbow..." and she just started laughing and said "Oh my. You are special. What a colorful picture we paint!" Will always cherish conversations with Judy.. again, I am digressing.. 

Coming back to the name.. Sundararaman was too complicated for anyone. So came down to Sundar and my thesis advisor asked me "Can I just call you Sun?" and my jaw dropped. Not because of the additional 50% discount that was being asked of my name that had already been cut in half... but because there was a Chinese dude by the same name in the department roster! 

That is when I came up with "My name is Sundar. Sunday with a Rainbow at the end!" 

The ones that do get it right based on that mnemonic say it "Sondaar" which is as close to it as they will ever get. The short sound for the u and the a?

Have given up on it, a long time ago!

You should hear Jr. and the little one introduce me to non-desis.. they introduce me as "my dad soondaar!" 

I laugh on the outside...

Smart enough.... but not smart enough?

A conversation earlier today that centered around some of Jr.'s classmates who have signed up for one week courses at Stanford and Berkeley for summer. Yes! You read that right.

Ten year olds attending special "educamps" in everything from Java program skills to Creative Photo editing and publishing... at a cost of ~ 1000 bucks for a Mon-Fri class which is 9AM-3PM.

My first thought was "How can I teach a class like that and retire soon?"

Anyways, we were talking about the correlation between the kids grades in school today to see if they are super smart.

Jr.: I don't know as we are not allowed to look at other kids report cards.

Me : when I was little the whole class knew what everyone got. The teachers would read out our scores before handing out our test papers!

Jr.: Well, it is different now and I did get many "O's" this year! (O is for Outstanding)

Me : (looking at little one) Did you get any O's?

LO : Appa, (yells) HOW CAN I GET O'S IF I GOT A MINUS FOR "LISTENING AND FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS" ?! YOU TELL ME.

Me : !!!!!????

Seriously, how can I tell her anything after a rhetorical question like that? You tell me!

Resistance is futile..

Had sent an email to both kids a few days ago after someone forwarded me this article on healthy food vs. unhealthy food.

My mail to the kids with the subject "Why I don't want you to eat outside" :

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Dear (Jr. and LO),

please read this report.

outside food is not nutricious. lunchables, school lunches, packaged foods etc. are all bad.

http://cspinet.org/new/201303281.html

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Jr.'s reply :

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Not true! You can eat out once in a while but never always!

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Little One's reply :

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appa it is kind of good to eat bad food then your body will get energy.

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Obviously, they know everything and they also have an answer for everything.

We made the mistake of letting the kids pick what they want for snack time in school and that has slowly gone from granola bars and brownies to things called skinny cow, ding dongs (!?), Pirates booty !?

I am pretty much tired of fighting the system. My personal advertisement budget for health foods is not as good as these companies and I also don't have the equivalent time of a few hundred people marketing department.

No amount of effort in me packaging a banana or idly will appeal to these kids like the "ding dongs".

Jr. wanted popcorn. We have a popcorn maker at home. So I picked the bottle of popping corn the other day thinking "this is probably some genetically modfied stuff that will slowly turn into poison if left in her intestines.. but this is the best option in this aisle". She quickly insisted on putting that back and picking up the Orville Redenbacker Movie Theater butter flavored popcorn saying "Daddy, this one tastes good. I have had it in my friends place. We NEED this!"

That one had fat and sugar ratings (even if that was a conservative estimate to con consumers.. for who is to know if they are the real values given the type of money they spend to rig the system) were over the top.  I had to fight to get plain corn to pop!

The only good thing that was done? Told her that if she takes the box of things called "skinny cow" which was clever advertising but creates a fat kid in all probability, she has to buy some fruit. So she picked not fresh fruit, but Dole's pre packaged fruit bits in guess what ? Sugar syrup!

As a dad I feel frustrated trying to mandate these things in the house. Pretty soon we will have to start showing them what happens to folks who eat too much sugar with gory pictures and videos. 

We don't need North Korean nut jobs to threaten our country. We have our own guys who put these sugary processed foods on the shelves, threatening our very future. Our kids!