Thank you!!

The traveling Narayanan's went on one of their most adventurous and eventful trips in recent memory over the last four days.

We went to Alaska.. saw Glaciers, Grizzly's, natures beauty and wonders at its finest and to just round it off.. we encountered another one of natures anomalies on our return flight from Anchorage to Portland enroute to San Jose.

A guy for reasons we don't know decided to open the exit door while we were still way above the cloud line. We heard a hissing sound and a lady screamed "Someone please help.. someone help now!" and a bunch of passgengers set about securing the door and tacking the guy. 

After a few tense moments the guy was on the ground restrained and we made a speedy landing and watched as the cops took the guy away. He seemed to be calm and collected as he was taken out. 

Why someone would want to do that is beyond me.. why want to take a bunch of others with you if you have a death wish?!

Like a fellow passenger told me after we came out "the good news is that we are all still here!" 

To the alert lady (as most of us were sleeping!), and the folks and crew who held the door and restrained the crazy dude, many THANKS from the bottom of our heart. 

There are heroes all around us! There are 10 heroes for every idiot! At least that is the lesson we are teaching our kids today after this experience. They were both disturbed, as were the adults for the second flight.. they kept watching the exit rows for action. 

This puts a lot of things in perspective!

The rest of the pictures and videos can wait. Time to get some much needed rest...

There should be an App for that!

Okay, it has been a rant here that the kids are more interested in watching hours of Tamil Variety TV programs or nail polish videos on Youtube. 

Wile checking the history recently, had found that the two of them had watched more than 7 hours worth of Nail Polish videos on youtube in just one week! 

So when all other attempts to steer them to subjects like Geography and science during the hours after they just make it back from school had failed... there was only one thing left to do!

Find Geography quiz and science quiz apps on the iPad and play with them. It has been a very successful program, if one can call it that! The Geography rehabilitation program.. 

Today I watched with pride as Jr. correctly identified the Capital of Azerbaijan as Baku and the little one said Brunei's capital is Bandar Seri Begawan... Life has its little moments! They are able to identify capitals and flags reasonably well. 

Next step, they have to actually be able to point to them on the world map. That is a work in progress. 

All this app business gave me an idea, given there is no App for making them eat a quick breakfast. 

We should have an App that shows them a mish mash of nail polish videos, my little pony, good luck charlie, an occasional geo quiz question, and every 90 seconds those should be interrupted by a video of daddy saying "take another vai (mouthful)!" or "another spoon" or "chew and swallow" or "why is the throat not moving!" .. the App should let me pre record 3 or 4 such 10 second videos which the kids have to hit with a snooze type button (or we could rename it the "I ate" button. 

That app alone has the potential to improve the quality of our life 347.5%! 

Sometimes I wish my day job was to write apps.. would at least write some for my kids. Unless there are some crash courses for old engineers whose last programming exercise was with Fortran 77 or C++ in the late nineties. 

Let me know if there is a weekend course for app writing in the local area or online.. 

The evidence is damning..

Tonight the bedtime quiz started with me playing songs from my Youtube favorites and asking the kids to guess the singer. Not the song or raaga.. just the singer! They got 2/10  on videos they helped favorite.. That was disappointing. 

Then Jr. suggested instead of videos, I just show them images of the singers and they guess who the singer is... so I played along.

Showed them old photos of GNB, MLV, MS, etc. and they guessed better... 4/10! again on pictures they had seen before..

Then on a hunch, I showed them pictures of movie stars.. Tamil, Hindi movie stars.. They guessed everyone from Rajni, Kamal, Sridevi down to Vivek, Vadivelu and Sivakarthikeyan! they even guessed Shahrukh, Amitabh and Aishwarya!

So there is nothing wrong with their memory or their willingness to remember things.. the what to remember is being molded by all the TV watching they do with mom in the evening. 

So the solution to my problem is to make mommy watch educational videos with kids and maybe spend time on Khan Academy. No wonder they don't like to spend time with me when I show them "cool stuff".. I am competing with the entertainment juggernauts of Bollywood, Tollywood and Kollywood!