Reality check!

On teaching and learning

It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and after a nice lunch I was reminded on why Coimbatore was so special to me. The mild afternoon breeze, a little bit of sunshine and cotton dust filling your nostrils. Except that I was told that its just regular dust now after the death of cotton industries. We strolled into a deserted school reminiscing everything we loved about school. The trees, the basketball games, lunch under the peepal tree, monkey ladders, choir room, parlor meetings, class masses etc the list was endless except it did not include studying. Being neighbors and going to the same school helped practically live in each other’s heads. We strongly remembered the “pit in the stomach” feeling we used to have right before school reopened. While for a lot of people it may have been what grade or where they stood in class, for us if we were going to get across the failing grade at all. I hated studying to be plain. I hardly had a favorite subject. English maybe but that was only because it wasn’t really a subject. Looking back now studying and learning were two independent things never tied together at school. The ‘want to learn’ was never there or instigated. But now wanting to learn is what keeps us going helps in climbing up the ladder or even live life better. As an educator, it is important to not take that away from a child. As an adult I can see myself being critical and judgmental more often than appreciative. I swore I would never become that. We are ready to criticize, compare and comment but never take the extra minute to engage someone in the subject or thread him or her in to get into our thinking zone. Hardly ever put on the educator cloak. We somehow do a better job of it when we want to sell a product for our company. Several children including me turn out to be bird brained hopping from one subject to the other struggling to stay focus because they are not into it yet. As an adult now, I empathize with the child who doesn’t get good grades or who hates completing a project. She just needs someone to engage her, to make her think with him or her. I agree it takes a lot of effort and time but it maybe worth it.

My first Article!

You guys have to read this artcle, because I wrote it! Since all of you have been encouraging me to do some serious writing, I started this with a Science news magazine. Please let me know how you'll like it!

A healthy neuron

A healthy neuron looks exactly like a tree in spring - NPR. A healthy neuron is the vital happy hormone. A healthy neuron is essential for being smart and happy by making the essential synaptic connections. Depression is a medical condition that happens when the "healthy neurons" cannot make strong synaptic connections. Depression is a medical condition, but what induces it is not - stress. Stress is majorly societal. Manmade. What we put on top of one another in every small and big way. Societal stress leads to depression leads to non synaptic aging neurons leading to not achieve the goals that society puts in front. Irony of life. Moral of the story: Live like "The dude" from Big Lebowsky Brainwave on friday morning.

Complaisence

At several critical mome

I can hear you say, another eulogy is all we need now...

..but I am going to give it anyway otherwise these words in my head will start chewing on my nerves.


I swear I will keep my kids away from the story of Steve Jobs and the Stanford commencement speech as long as I can. I will tell you why.

When I was 18, I was lazy enough to google all my college assignments and then type in one line in the bibliography page - "GOOGLE". more like one word. Thats when I was introduced to Jobs by the prof who caught me guilty. She told me a story of how she did her research. It seems, in those days, you have to sign up a sheet, wait in line to use the mainframe computers that filled entire basements of Universities to do your thesis work (And this advanced facility was available only in select premier places). Steve shrunk them to their desktop and today you have google. The moral of the story delivered to me at that time was, think outside the box. People have raised the bar, that delivering plain information had no value. That was my first encounter. Now I have reached a stage where I can keep my socialistic ideals outside for a moment and argue that global economic growth is highly dependent on innovative product development and I come home to find out steve jobs has passed on.

When I connect his dots, I wonder what he was smoking. How can someone think up these products? Now why I look at the "i" devices I have, it feels perfect. From the material, to the weight, to the brightness, to the text. It fills me with awe. This guy introduced technology especially for people like me who stubbornly ignored it. He gave me things that I absolutely need, things I can probably live without and things I absolutely do not need. An innovator and a marketing genius all in one person.

For the average person I am today, I need such a living inspiration. I can look back and say that till 18, my hormones kept me going. Through my twenties an ambition and naivety kept me going. But slowly as we start living the life we carefully chose fully aware of what we can and cannot do, waiting for fridays, planning vacations, India trips, mortgage, trying to be a cook+career woman+writer+photographer all in the same person, raising kids, turning thirty, etc then we notice the monotony that has sets in. The lackluster of everything you run behind. Thats when we need to rekindled. To be told you have nothing to lose, so live this day like your last. Someone to tell us to do that one thing you love and give it your all. To help us revive those college dreams, to help us think out of the box and to work with a passion. Because really none of us want to be the average monotonous man.

Thats when I will tell my kids. When they reach that wall, when they need a fairy tale. A real one. When I tell them then that everything will not be just "OK", it will be perfect I will have the garage entrepreneur to back me up.

Theratti Paal

I am not a big fan of everyday tedious cooking but I love to cook. Contradictory as it may sound, I hate cooking tedious vegetables and lengthy protocols because between me and the husband, only half enters the pot. We eat everything from half baked paruppu to pachai kai gari, good only! So no cooking for almost smashed veggies. On an everyday basis our food consists mostly of dhal, roti, karis, simple sambhar rasam rice, grilled veggies, quinoa, pasta, wraps blah - all simply made, no extra spice/masala, cheese, bake or time to it. Thirty minutes straight, its done including the cleaning part. But atleast one or twice a week I get the cooking veri inside me. My husband has innumerable names for that mood and I cook kanda menikku. It peaks when there is external pressure, like my mom for a week was bugging me for not doing varalakshmi nombu properly (Yes the black sheep I am!). So I decided to go full fledged for Krishna's. I had this elaborate lay out for thattai and therati paal. Therati paal - my absolute favorite. Just the combination of milk solids and sugar can create this wonderful texture, like grated condensed milk all over. It also reminds me of all nice ocassions. Like my perima would always prepare this transfer it to a clean ever-silver dabba and hand it over to the samandhi family. That would be the single hand made thing amongst others on the plate. She claimed that it was the easiest thing to make and all you need is milk (It is not easy, it needs constant kelarification for hours but great results). It reminds me of cousins sitting around gossiping with sticky palms from the theratti paal. So the time I met my sister after she was pregnant, I made this for her. Yesterday for Krishnar, I decided to make it with half a gallon of milk. (Way too much, it took me four hours to make and probably forever to finish eating it). But while I was making it the aroma of milk filled the air, I had MS singing giridhara gopala in the background, with white baby feet in perfect imprint and the husband trying his best to thattify thattai for me. That second I felt a sense of belonging. This is the home I have created from everything imbibed in me for so long. For that minute alone I did not miss anyone.

PS: I wrote only about theratti paal because thatai became pooris for dinner, and that too after extensive trouble shooting from Chicago to Dallas. Really nice pooris though!