Kauai Humane Society

With Scout

You surely know how one can check out books from a library, but did you know that you can check out dogs? I call it borrowing some love. 

Kauai is a beautiful island, with unspoiled nature, great hikes through lush green forests, the mighty Pacific Ocean, and it is also home to the Kauai Humane Society. They let you take a dog out on a day-trip to beaches or parks. You need to return them by 5, that's it. When I first heard about it from my co-worker, I thought that was a great idea, so this time when we were in Kauai, we went to see what it is about.

For people who have dogs at home, they know how much those dogs are missed when we are on vacation. To let these people play with dogs for a day greatly makes the vacation a whole lot better. And what does it do for the dogs? They get socialized, a skill very important for them to help get adopted. They also get to come out of their little places and play outside. If they go out on a day trip, they wear their "adopt me" jackets which means other people get to meet them too. And who knows who may have a place in their hearts for which dog? It is of no surprise that a lot of the Humane Society dogs get adopted by visitors.

Scout and Magnolia playing

We got to play with Scout on the first day we were there. Scout is a 9 month old airedale who came to the shelter as a stray. He left front foot was fractured and it healed by itself, but the bone didn't set properly. So she has a funny stride, but that doesn't let her slow down. When we took her out to the yard, first she just ran around, a little shy to come to us. Then within like 5 minutes she came to me when called and soon after sat on my lap. 

The second day we found Scout with her roomie Magnolia. Magnolia is a three-pawed 7-month old pup but she was jumping real high. Scout recognized us from our last visit and while all the other dogs were barking excitedly, Scout gently wagged her tail. That day we took both Scout and Magnolia out to the yard. They chased each other and played a good game of tug-of-war. It was so nice to see some happy doggie time there. This is what happy and healthy dogs do.

It is difficult to not adopt anyone from there, especially when they look up with the trusty, dark brown eyes. As we already have a full house, so it will not be a good idea to get some more. But it is also true that love is the thing that you can give and still have a lot more to give to others. So I'd say that I left a part of me there with Scout, Magnolia, and the rest of them, and also brought back with me a lot of love and trust that they gave me. 

"Mocha'r ghonto" - thoughts on cooking banana florets

I have posted a few times about food in my blog here, but I am not going to post any recipes because I don't want to make this anywhere close to a food blog. I have seen how contents of food blogs are copied from one blog to another, actually word to word, but both (or multiple) authors claiming that her recipe is handed down in her family through generations!! 

Anyway, I have found a lot of joy in re-creating traditional Bengali foods in my kitchen far-away from the rivers and paddy fields of Bengal. There are certain dishes, though, which can be called, in simple language, "advanced". It is like learning the butterfly stroke after you are comfortable with the other three swimming strokes. This week I handled the thing called "mocha". Don't confuse with the coffee stuff, this is what we call banana flowers in Bengali. And heck yes, they are edible.

A whole mocha

This is how a raw whole mocha looks like. The flowers are concealed within layers of purplish firm and smooth skin. As you separate the layers, the florets will be seen. This is the hardest part of cooking this thing. The florets can't just be separated and chopped, they need to be cleaned and sorted individually, by hand. 

Rows of florets

Every floret has one stamen and one small covering along with the petals. That stamen and the covering are not edible. I was wondering who first came up with this. Maybe they cooked it and it tasted bad? Or it was too hard and they couldn't chew or swallow it? Who knows the original reason now? But this method of cleaning and sorting has been passed down through generations in the Bengali kitchens from mother to daughter (or mother-in-law to daughter-in-law). Nowadays we also have YouTube to our rescue.

Before starting the process, we need to rub a little oil on our hands so that the juice doesn't stick or stain them. Traditionally it has always been mustard oil that is used for this purpose, so I chose that. Also, we need to keep a big bowl of turmeric water handy. Once the florets are cleaned and chopped, they are soaked in turmeric water overnight. A little salt is also added to that.

See the big bowl of turmeric water to my left and the small bowl of golden mustard oil to the right.

After an overnight soak, the next morning the whole thing is boiled for like 10-15 minutes before it is ready to be cooked. Generally the other ingredients needed are - lightly fried potato cubes, bengal gram (that is also soaked overnight and boiled later), grated coconut, ghee, daler bori*, and general spices like cumin, dried red chillies, and bright green or red chillies for garnishing. 

The dish has a huge prep work but as all the ingredients are pre-cooked, the actual cooking process is quite easy and fast. It needs a little water to boil all the stuff together and a quick stirring for few minutes. Finally, you can add a teaspoon of ghee for flavor, garnish with some more grated coconut and add a few green or red chilis to make it look good! The best thing is you can serve the dish on one of the purple skins of the mocha itself. 

The finished product!

*PS: Daler bori is a conical shaped thing made out of lentil paste that is dried in the Sun. Dal means lentil. Once dried, those are deep fried till crispy and ground up to add a little extra crunch to this vegetable dish.

Kolkata Metro incident and a retrospective of our culture

Talk to a random Bengali bhadrolok (gentleman) for over five minutes and he will remind you why Kolkata is still considered as the cultural capital of India. You'll hear about Rabindranath, Satyajit Ray, the role of Bengalis in the Indian freedom struggle and will also get a dose of left-liberalism. So when that city shows its ugly side, the shame we feel is twofold. The recent incident at the Kolkata Metro (subway/tube) is one such.

A young couple in their mid-twenties were beaten up by a group of older men because they were "standing too close to each other". Some people said they were hugging, some other witnesses, however, mentioned that the young man kept his hand on his female friend's shoulder trying to shield her from the crowd. That enraged the frustrated older men and just shouting "get a room" or "go to a club" was not enough, so they decided to be the moral police and beat them up.

"Do not express your affection, express your perversion instead" - my friend said it looks like this is the mantra in India now. In a society where rape has become a news that people just skim through, kind of like mass shootings in the US, I think we need to spend some thoughts about how we are bringing up our society, what are we expecting from people?

Kolkata used to boast of the humanity. We heard of foiled kidnap attempts because of local slum dwellers chasing away the kidnappers, we saw an abandoned baby being rescued by local people from a street side dustbin and then numerous families showing interest to adopt her. We knew girls are safe in public, maybe that's the reason I still prefer to take a bus, or metro over a cab while in Kolkata even now. But it is not the same anymore.

Our society on one hand is very progressive, but on the other hand, medieval mentalities still exist. A guy and a girl, if seen in public, are assumed to be a couple. And that means the girl's character is compromised. Parents of girls still proudly say, "my daughter doesn't have a boyfriend" or that "my daughter is so shy, she can't talk to boys properly". But in most of these cases, those girls have relationships that their parents don't know of. I still fail to understand why a healthy relationship is looked down upon. Isn't it normal for a healthy 20-something to physically feel attracted to someone else? But one cannot make out in their house, because you live with your parents and of course the parents should not know. Then the whole thing is done on the sly. You can't even tell your doctor if you are sexually active, because he will tell your parents and judge you. If that is your old family physician, then you'll get a scolding and a lecture at once. Guys are ashamed to buy condoms. Even if they do, they'd have to buy it from stores which are not in their neighborhood. What results from that? Unhealthy relationships and dangerous decisions! 

Coming back to the point of "my daughter doesn't have a boyfriend", parents still take responsibilities for getting their kids married, and arranged marriages still happen. If you send your daughter to a girls' school, then a girls' college, restrict who she can talk to, ask 10,000 questions if a guy calls her and have the whole neighborhood be on watch to see who she is talking to, then how would she ever find a guy she may like? And then she has no idea what to expect in a relationship. Neither would her husband, if he never had a girlfriend or a close friend who is a girl. I can't emphasize enough the reasons of having co-ed schools only. It teaches kids to grow up normally, it opens different perspectives. Now when I look back at my teenage days I see how well brought up were my guy friends in school. We never had to hide the fact that we have got periods when we were with them. We felt safe when they walked us home. No wonder now I see them as great husbands, and some as fathers also. 

In today's world we cannot and should not keep boys and girls separated. It is unhealthy to think of a girl's purity or character, or what. Girls and boys both need to know each other and work together towards a better society, a balanced society devoid of gender roles. The elders should support that, or if they can't then they should just step aside. Their time is over, with their frustration, old narrow mindset, they need to just leave and let the new generation step up.

Learning to Let Go

Earlier this week, on Monday, my beloved feisty firebrand cat, May Kitty crossed the Rainbow Bridge. This is so far my first real encounter with death of a beloved soul. It is true I have seen my grandfather moments after he passed away, but to be honest May Kitty's death has impacted me much more than that. It has even touched me more than my own miscarriage.

I was wondering what is it about a pet's death that affect us so much. I think it is because how ever old they may get, since we take care of them as our kids, we never really sense that age. To us, they still remain our little kids. May was almost 16, which mean more than 80 in human years. So we should really say that she had quite a long life. Her chronic kidney ailment was under treatment but that is what finally gave in. She withdrew from the world on Saturday, but we still tried to get her back. After 2 days of fight at the ICU when she did not respond to any antibiotic or even human dosage of pain killers, we decided to bring her home and let her go in peace. At the hospital however, they said that she wouldn't even make the trip home. Then we decided amidst loads and loads of tears that we have no right to prolong her suffering just because of our selfish needs. We decided to let her go. Lying down on my lap, like she did every evening, she breathed her last. I saw that it was in peace.

It felt like my heart was shattered in pieces. For days afterwards, I literally had this heavy feeling in my chest. That pain is physical. On top of that, with the hormone injections doing their work, I thought I would be a teary mess for days. But I did not. I chose to celebrate life over death.

First of all, in Hindu philosophy, we believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is such that can't be burned by fire, torn by swords, or blown away by the wind. It is always at peace. So I know May's soul, which theoretically has no bearing with May's mortal body is free now. She left her mortal body like we change from an old set of clothes. We decided to cremate her and scatter her ashes in an apple orchard because we did not want to hold on to the remains of her mortal body through a burial or even keeping the ashes. We need to let her go.

Secondly, we have our other two fur babies to care for. They knew that May has gone and they were depressed. So we kept our normal routine around them and also play with them, be in a good mood so that they pick up on the positivity. It is difficult, but we had to do that.

Thirdly, we also believe in reincarnation. I was telling Arnab that May was in a hurry to leave because she has to be present when my ova are fertilized. She has to come back as my human child :) Who knows, maybe the one who went over the Rainbow Bridge will come back as my Rainbow Baby!

Cricket Club

Not too long ago, in July, I wrote an article about girls who play cricket. I mentioned that it is a topic very close to my heart. Twenty years back, when I was in my early teens, I desperately wanted to play cricket. I don't understand how or why no one in my family ever paid any heed to it, or that why they didn't even buy me a cricket bat, (I have the same dilemma about chess, nobody ever bought me a chess set) even though I got lots of thoughtful gifts quite a few times a year from my close knit extended family. Anyway, after I finished college and came to the US, I basically gave up all my hopes of ever playing cricket. Nobody cares about cricket here, I assumed.

But, thanks to globalization, I saw changes.

the first one was watching cricket World Cup at home in 2011 and also at work! The Software Industry is full of expat Indians, and with them they brought cricket over to the Western Hemisphere. The second big thing was the All Stars match in 2015 where the "boys we grew up with", namely Sachin, Rahul, Wasim, Steve, Shane, Kalu, Murali, Jonty, Shoaib, etc etc came all the way to play here. At the Dodgers Stadium where we saw a blending of cricket and baseball, it opened a new horizon. We bought a cricket bat here and I anticipated a new era of playing cricket in the US.

Fast forward to end of 2017. Many things are going on in my life right now and all of them are pretty stressful. I did not want to add another stressor to it. But a few days back I saw a post on our neighborhood web page saying "Play Cricket". There has been a talk of opening our local cricket club (again, thanks to expat Indians) and the person who thought about it has been asking people to join. I immediately sent a note asking if women can join too. He said that I can't joint he team, but I can play/practice with them. So be it! My most handy male ally, aka Arnab joined the team and I found my way in. Initially I was not added to the Whatsapp group but like a friend of mine says, I don't have the problem of ever feeling neglected because I don't let people neglect me. I asked this guy specifically to add me to the group. I attended the first match yesterday, the first ever of the club, played miserably, because I have not played in years and lost my reflexes, but I captained the winning team and kept wicket for the first time in my life!

The ball has started rolling, and I have found my ground. If I did not take this chance, I would never be able to tell my future daughter that she can be whatever she wants to. Also, I owed it to myself, to make sure that I can fulfill my dream. I don't have to worry about "if I were a boy" or "if only our society let us play". Now the control is in my hand. I don't have to ask anyone to buy me a bat, nor do I have to worry about upcoming exams. Yes, so far I am the only girl in this club, because sometimes we don't have an option but to be the first :) Hopefully, I will be able to inspire a few more in my lifetime.

Some serious batting practice is coming up soon!!

PS: Marry wisely, because a good partner can not just enrich your daily life, but also immensely help in making your dreams come true! 

A glass of eggnog

It is Friday, pretty cold even for the middle of November. We have fallen back from daylight savings, so in Seattle with the perpetually overcast skies, it seems to get dark at 2:30 in the afternoon. I came back home on a day like this and as I was going over my machine learning course, I poured myself a glass of eggnog for comfort. As I sprinkled some cinnamon powder and took a sip, the creamy sweetness filling me with goodness, I wondered from when did I start associating eggnog with this kind of comfort? I did not grow up relating eggnog to Christmas, or winter. The first time I had eggnog ten years back, I wanted to spit it out. It smelled disgusting, and the flavor of raw eggs in them brought me close to throwing up. The same happened with apple cider. Some of my other Indian friends and I were looking for places to spit it out and we finally emptied the cups down the drinking water fountain in our department.

I found telling a friend whose house we generally go for Thanksgiving, that I like it being dark and gloomy as we gather round the turkey. If it was sunny and warm outside it would be so incongruous. What happened in the time during the last ten years which has brought such changes in me? Things that I had no idea about are now normal facets of my life.

I think it is because I let myself absorb new things, and that I love talking to people, ask them details about how they spent the summer holidays, what are their memories of Christmas, and slowly get myself acquainted with the new culture, or cultures because as everyone knows, the US is a salad bowl of cultures around the world.

On the other hand, here's the chance to share mine. Last month, for the first time, I hosted a "Bijoya Sammelani" or get together after the Bengali festival of Durga Pujo. The fun part was other than one friend (just him, not his wife) was Bengali. The others were not Indians. They came to this gathering, asked a lot of questions about Durga Pujo, how we celebrate it, what we eat, how are we supposed to behave, and they ate all Bengali food. They even picked out bones of the treacherous fish ilish. There were fun conversations around, no gossiping, no uncomfortable jokes, just a lot of laughter over good food and good company.

It feels nothing different when you compare one day to the other, but when you look back a few years, you see stuff changing. The more new things we learn, the more new things we open our hearts and homes to, we just pave the way for a more enriched life.

On Machine Learning and my realizations thereof

I promised to myself that this will not become a technical blog, so I am not going to talk about the details of machine learning. Just to let people know the backstory, Artificial Intelligence is a subject that interests me and there was a time when I planned a career in academics and thought that is the subject I would pursue. But then things turned out differently and I went towards a career in software. However, Coursera has shown me time and again, that if I want to learn something, the Universe would help me do so. I took courses in Physics from there too. This year after listening to Dr. Fei-Fei Li's keynote speech at the Grace Hopper Conference, I decided to start studying machine learning. The course I found is from Dr. Andrew Ng and without any exaggeration it is so far the toughest course I have ever taken, physically or virtually!

The first week was overwhelming. After a whole day at work, in the evening I started the course and I felt like my brain would just explode. Without any fluff, he dived straight into math. Algebra had never been my strong point so I gasped when I saw a lot of linear algebra sitting there. And it just wasn't algebra. Literally all the math I had learned, including geometry, co-ordinate geometry (also 3D), trigonometry, and even probability and statistics are being used everyday in a matter of fact way. One thing I must admit, even though I did not realize it when I learned these in high school, I actually did spend a lot of time practicing these. My parents would still say I should have spent some more time studying, but now I know these stuff has got firmly etched in my brain somewhere that even though the surface may accumulate some "dust" over the years, they would not be forgotten. It has become like muscle memory :)

The second part of the problem is programming. Thing with math and programming both is unless you get it right, it won't work. You can yell at yourself, or at the code (or math) but it still won't work. (Cursing in Bengali doesn't help either, I have tried.) So when I had to solve equations and put them in MATLAB (a language I barely ever touched in undergrad, and then never after) I was initially in terrible shape. For a few days I just scratched my head and tried to remember why exactly I decided to take this course. But there is one thing I did not do. I did not give up. This is an unpaid online course which just takes one click to give up. I told myself if I cannot do anything by Sunday, then I will stop taking this class, but until then I will try. That Sunday morning, I had cold hands and I was frantically going over the mentor's notes to understand the problems. Slowly things got better, programs compiled, they showed expected values. Then I ran test cases on them. Those gave right answers as well. Then I submitted my work, and as science is supposed to work, I got full points!

Nobody saw my happy dance for five straight minutes after that!

From the next week, things got better. I understood approximately how much time I need to allot for the programming assignments. I also decided to tackle the problems each day rather than keeping everything for the end of the week.

There has been another realization about the thing called impostor syndrome. As the society we grew up in is silent about achievements but vocal towards failures, we have been conditioned into thinking that failures are our direct responsibilities. Like, as students, if we did poorly on a test it was because we didn't study enough. But if we did well, it was received with a "that's ok, try to do better next time". So we still generally undermine ourselves. As this course is tough and it is from Stanford, to be honest, I initially felt very stupid. Then I felt that maybe the problems are not very tough, it is just taking me time to figure it out. Finally after submitting them, I looked at the Github repos of some mentors and saw that their solutions are less optimized than mine (it would take more time to run their programs than mine) and that they have not used the concepts like vectorization which was taught in class. That made me realize that I actually got the concepts, and I know better than some others! Being able to work in MATLAB also boosted my confidence that we don't really have to learn a new language now, we just need to learn the syntax.

Difficult challenges are a treat to the logical brain! Need to start reading about Neural Networks now... happy learning :)