Nostalgia and comfort food (music, movies and more)

I think comfort food has got more to do with nostalgia than with anything else. Comfort foods are almost always traditional to that culture, the food people grew up eating, the ones that are easy to prepare and bring back fond memories of the family kitchen and warmth of a family meal. As much as I love fish, it is funny that my best loved comfort food does not include fish. It is warm steamed rice mixed with boiled eggs, boiled potatoes and clarified butter. A bowl of hearty chicken soup would come second and the ubiquitous "Maggi" (instant noodles) would come a close third. I am deeply indebted to Maggi for saving me from starving on great many evenings when I was a student. I think warm dishes are more common comfort foods than cold ones. It gives me the same feeling as getting home from work on a Friday, taking a long hot shower and getting under warm blankets (with a nice story book). Isn't that a fuzzy feeling?

Just like comfort food, I have comfort music and movies too. Here also nostalgia plays a big role. A sudden encounter with a Kishore Kumar song on YouTube or watching a Felu-da movie would give me a better glimpse of home than talking to an unknown Indian. Those things that we relate our childhood memories to are the ones that give a comforting feeling when we are sad, sick or simply need a break.

This is one of my most favorite songs ever!

Stop me before I volunteer (again)

Introverts have been writing articles after articles in trying to explain why that personality trait is good and that people shouldn't confuse introverts with shy people. In the Jung test too you'd find a number of famous thinkers who are introverts. Arnab being of that group explained to me why you need to be an introvert to be a thinker - "you need to not talk while you think. Simple!"... Yes, I understand. But the thing is while introverts were thinking of stuff, extroverts were actually talking to people and getting thinks done! Hehe, just joking... :D Well, we need both kinds of people (example: Arnab and I) to balance the world, but what I am trying to say here is that life is not easy for extroverts either.

When I was small, I was a branded chatterbox. I talked too much...in school teachers complained that I disrupted the class. My art teacher couldn't think of any ways to make me keep shut while I scribbled on paper. "Keep quiet" was perhaps the most common thing I heard at that time. Followed by that were explanations why talking too much hampers my concentration and as a result my studies. Another big thing was why I always jump up and start fights with the least provocation, why I am always on the front to argue with people, "why you?" was another common thing I was asked. To be very honest, I didn't pay attention to either and made complete use of "through one ear and out the other" when I felt arguments would be a waste of energy.

Now when I think back I find that it is my type A personality that is to be blamed. I can't help it, I am made that way. Once out of the stereotypical role of a student who always patiently sits in class (the chalk-and-talk classes I mean) without asking anything or a young woman who should not be heard, I started to feel more comfortable in the big world as now I can be "myself". There are so many things to be done in the world and we have so little time that I don't want to waste that by not being proactive. Be it claiming to fix a defect or to volunteer for the animal shelter, just count me in! Why I was saying that life is tough for the extroverts? Because they tend to take up a lot of responsibility and then have to handle them all. Also, type A people are bubbling with energy and they don't like damp blankets, but they still have to motivate those damp blankets. Type A people get very upset when things don't work out they way they planned (I do, very much) so that's another reason why they have to stay motivated all along in spite of all these stupid things.

Introverts and type B people are good, they are easy going relaxed people who enjoy things in a slow pace. They are never agitated, they can easily unwind and relax. But I am happy to be a type A. The life I am leading now is giving me every opportunity to be what I always wanted to be - the person that I am! I can meet new people, talk to them and learn cool stuff, look at things from different perspectives, try my hand at new skills, speak my mind (argue if needed), think and provide solutions both at work and home, volunteer for causes I support and just talk non-sense and laugh when I want to for the most silly reasons ever!

I am grateful for what I am... :)

Antiquity

Jerome has said the ultimate thing about antiquity. I don't have anything better than that, nor can I add anything to what he has already said:

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.  I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.  The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

[Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=39&fk_files=1881315]

Year 2000 and odd!!! How funny it seems today, but whatever Jerome said is so very true. Arnab got a 1955 Kodak camera last weekend and we were marvelling over it. What would those people who actually used these cameras say about our recent DSLRs? Those people who had telephones without dials and had to ask a telephone operator to connect them to somewhere? Will they look at my BlackBerry Z10 with wide eyes? How funny that we can't even imagine our lives without stuff which were non-existent just a few decades back.

Going to the other end of the scale, how would this very Z10 model look after fifty years? I think teenagers or college students would say, "haha, look at that! You had to actually drag the text and flip it on to the email! Poor millennial people, they had to live with that?" The antiques of today are the cheap trifles of yesterday and the most marveled at new invention of today will become an article, may be cherished but totally unused when tomorrow dawns....

Just a thought... we humans live in our little bubbles of space and time and think how smart we are. Yes, we are smart, but we show off a lot more than what we actually are :)

Teenage

"Half wit poems, stories wild, April letters warm and cold, diaries of a willful child"... this is a line from one of my most favorite poems ever. And the poem is from a very favorite story too. Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and "Good wives" are not just good reads, but also I would say, kind of a companion for girls. Even though the plot ages for more than two hundred years, I still think of the four sisters and especially Jo as a friend I had from my growing up days. Simple things that girls go through, yearning for nice clothes, wanting to go for a dance, massacres in the kitchen, simple longings, pleasures and pains of growing up, bittersweet incidents of first love and the inevitable heartaches that follow... are all so real in the book and all so similar to what I have gone through that I can't help not loving it!

Just like Jo's trunk where her name was carved on the lid by a boyish hand, my old cupboards and cabinets also contain wild stories (with plots copied from Saradindu's historical novels or any story that was my latest favorite at that time) and totally half wit stories too, not to mention the poems...well, I haven't written too many poems either in my life. I have read some of my old diaries last time when I was at home and how I laughed! In eighth grade we bid farewell to some friends for we would be separated into different sections and that farewell seemed such a sorrowful affair! Now I can't remember when I last saw them but sorry to say I don't miss them at all! Then there was the obvious part of "first love"s... I very well remember which boy in our class liked which girl. That was still the time when as a rule girls hated boys. It was considered bad if you let boys give you gifts and all without telling them that - "you know what? We don't like this." The boys kept on saying how much they love the girls and how they will suffer if those girls don't love them back. Those "boys and girls" are almost all on my Facebook but they are all happily married to different people, some even have kids of their own!

Oh how I love my teenage days! Yes I know I have done quite a lot of foolish stuff at that time but those were the days when my personality slowly started to take on its own course. I threw tantrums, I fell for cricketers (well, I was too tomboyish anyway) and movie stars and that was the time when friends started to play a big role in my life. It is not bad that we argue with parents and take sides with friends. That is the first step we take outside the walls of our families. Friends are the first people of that outside world.

Teenage days are the stepping stones of life. Things may not work smoothly, but that's how life teaches us new things. Every phase of life is so important that missing out on one would leave a gap in the experiences of life. I so cherish my foolish teenage days...and I am so happy that those memories make me smile :)

WFH

When I started this blog, I had no intention of writing anything of a technical nature. However, today I will kind of write about technical workplaces and work culture a bit. I think by now everyone has formed his/her own opinion about Marissa Mayer's policy of banning working from home. As a woman, my first thought was the same as almost everyone else as I exclaimed "what?!" but then I have thought about both sides of the debate.

It is very easy to brand someone as "trying to show off how tough she is" or say "she might be fine with a two-week maternity leave but she can expect others to do that" with a shrug. Yes, it does look like she is pushing the company backwards in time, but wait...don't jump into conclusions.

I know there are many people who telecommute, working out of their home offices. Some people say that is great, for some professions it might be really good or for some people it might be the only solution for some time. I have a friend who is a technical writer, for her job it was totally ok to work from home office, but she didn't like it that much. I mean yes, you don't need to sit in traffic and can work from 8 - 4 very easily, you can walk the dog and finish your grocery shopping on a Tuesday afternoon, but still, telecommuting is not for everyone, neither is it for every job.

There is still no alternative of being physically present in an office and working with a bunch of people whom you can see and talk to (not virtually). I worked with remote teams for almost a year and that was really bad for our productivity. First of all, there was a time zone difference ranging from three to ten hours and then there were cultural issues, language issues and what not! When we finally created a local team you should have seen the relief on our faces. It's not just work relationship, but team events, lunches together, jokes, funny things, all contribute towards a team. Moreover, the better you know a person, the more effective you will be when communicating with him/her. That can't be achieved over the internet!

Telecommuting, however, is totally different from working from home (WFH). WFH is not really a practice, but a temporary solution. It is not just for family and spouses and kids, I think single people might need it more than people with families. When the cable guy gives you a vague window of "I'll come some time between 10 and 2" or there is a sudden snow and roads or blocked, there are no better alternatives than WFH. There are those days too when you are not really down with high fever but not well either to drive to work and sit there for 8-10 hours. You can finish some pending things from home too. I love the option of WFH. That should not be banned. However, that doesn't mean WFH is a synonym for taking a day off. You should still be available on IM, respond to emails and WORK. Checking work emails doesn't count for "working" from home.

Some people say that you have kids doesn't mean you get to leave work early. It sounds rude, but well, in a way it is right. When we were working with the remote teams, we had to attend meetings at 6 in the morning. People with school going kids had a real hard time but they still had to make it just like everyone else. Darting off from a meeting at four o'clock by saying "I have to pick up my kid from daycare" is not good for productivity either. Women have a tougher job. Even today, not everyone can delegate household chores to their husbands and taking care of the baby is still, primarily the mom's duty. There are so many women who don't have the luxury to work from home, I mean most professions don't, but they are still managing. So I am not saying that WFH is the only solution, but I do think that wherever possible, we should definitely keep that option open and not put a ban to it.

A cosmic voyage

Rabindranath wanted to see his country elevated to a situation where knowledge will be free. With "Google-it" becoming a common action and Wikipedia at our fingertips (quite literally so) and an access to the Internet taken for granted through smartphones and tablets all over the world, Rabindranath's dream might be fulfilled.

Those who try to sound intellectual by saying that the Internet is a bad thing don't have any idea what they are saying. It is through the Internet and only through it that we are achieving true globalization. Globalization isn't about wearing the same branded clothes all over the world or drinking Starbucks coffee, it is about living in a global village where "distance" isn't an impediment to attaining something you had always wanted to.

Thanks to the Internet for letting me have my dream come true!

It was probably in 1995-96 when I had a dream (I mean an actual dream that I had while sleeping) where I saw I was working on a computer which had a telescope attached to it. I could see the stars while doing some calculations. That dream came true this month when I enrolled in Coursera. From time immemorial, I wanted to be an astrophysicist but different reasons (not all bad) stopped me from pursuing a career in physics. I was beginning to forget that too amidst the craziness of a demanding job, learning new technical things (might not be physics, but interesting nonetheless) and definitely a busy life in general. Sometimes when the Seattle sky is clear and the Big Dipper shows up or when I read Carl Sagan's work I think about physics. That is when Coursera came up.

Arnab found the site and registered for some technical courses. Then he told me to register too. My intention was to find some computer science stuff, but then I saw this "Introduction to Astronomy" course and promptly enrolled there.

In the outer space

What have I learned so far? Well, it is an eight week course and I am just at week 3, but I learned about finding the positions of stars, mathematical formula to calculate those positions, brushed up my knowledge on  gravity and Newtonian physics, got fascinated once again by light (and the electromagnetic spectrum) and have got into the depths of Solar System. For the second time in my life someone is actually teaching me quantum mechanics and I get to see familiar pictures of M-42, Pleiades and images coming from spectrometers. It just makes me take a deep breath and smile. The deep breath is to open my mind to learn new things and the smile comes when I realize there are SO MANY things that I am yet to learn!!!

There are some other stuff I learned too from the professor apart from astronomy. One is, how patiently he explains things to students he hasn't and would never see in his life. Secondly, teaching an online course, that too for free amazes me. Spending so much time and energy talking in front of a video camera to enrich the minds of people scattered all over the world. These students would never bring any fame to the professor, nor would they come to thank him, but he is still teaching them. I am so grateful to the teacher and his assistant for keeping knowledge free. The final thing that I have learned is - if you really, truly want to learn something, no one in the world can stop you! That's why they say in Buddhism when the time is right, the master shall arrive.

PS: I was walking Bebe in our neighborhood park a couple weeks back on a clear evening. I looked up and saw the sky full of stars and Orion chasing towards Taurus the bull as always with his two faithful dogs following him. I said to Bebe, "now I have you just like Orion has his dogs!" I am friends with Orion once again, he is my favorite!

Abid Hasan Safrani

I already wrote an article on Netaji last July, so people know by now that I am a Netaji-enthusiast. I have heard about him, his policies, strategies, political ideas from when I was a baby so it is but natural that I will have some interest in him. His disappearance and our Government's attempt to make us forget all about him is a different story though. Talking about Netaji, other than what I heard at home or read in his autobiography, there is another man who showed me the colossal character that Netaji was, from a totally different perspective. That man is Abid Hasan Safrani.

If you haven't yet, please spend some time reading "The men from Imphal". It is 18 pages in total so shouldn't really take a whole lot of time to read. Read it, ponder over it, and I am sure you will understand what our country could have been if only we had a leader, just ONE leader worth the name.

The book, if I may call those 18 pages one, starts with The Retreat, the torture our army had to bear after hoisting the Tricolor at Moirang in sickness and hunger with allied forces bombing them from above. Even then, our army men, the first army of our nation, those men had in them a grim resolution to fight and win, to see India liberated. Abid says that is was not just hurrah-patriotism, nor were they fanatics hallucinating about a victory, they knew they had lost the war but they were still resolute on fighting the final battle. Why did they do so? Why didn't they just surrender and run away? Only because they had a leader to look up to.

Netaji, the word that means revered leader was the man who was their Supreme Commander. A man who had sacrificed a plush life, his political status, his home and family all for the country and he led his army by example. He was the one who taught the men and women of INA to be first an Indian and then a Punjabi, Bengali, Assamese or Tamil. Who taught Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men to eat sitting in one row next to one another sharing food from the same kitchen. It was Netaji who had girls don the uniform of a soldier, with rifle in hand fighting at fronts as Rani Lakshmi Bai. He told them that Indian girls have always chosen death over dishonorment. But why would they choose death by jumping into the pyre? Why not choose death as a valiant soldier?

And he was the leader who gave us a National slogan - Jai Hind!

I have always known that the best way to know someone's character is to see how he behaves in adversity. Abid Hasan showed me that side of Netaji. The one who even when defeated did not surrender, who showed the world how Indians can organize themselves into an army and fight. Netaji wasn't defeated in 1945, Netaji's values are getting defeated everyday now. In a country where corruption reigns supreme, the sacrifices of our heroes are being mocked at, the strength of character shown by Netaji, the values he tried to imbibe in us are lost, they are dead.

Abid Hasan was one of those people whom I say have a bubbling fountain of unending happiness somewhere inside. They bubble with enthusiasm and nothing can make them feel sad for long. There's just no way stopping them. I had the feeling when I read the book and saw his character being portrayed very well by Rajit Kapoor in the movie "The Forgotten Hero". I don't know much about Abid Hasan. Wikipedia couldn't tell me either, but all I know is those few years he spent with Netaji, and the nice little document that he has kept for the future generations is a great piece of evidence of what we could have had for our country that we would no longer get.

Refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abid_Hasan