History is cruel

History sometimes is cruel. It repeats itself as some say.. and you think back and go "wait a minute. Wasn't I supposed to learn something from the past and build on it in the future?"

Well, the little one is now at the same stage as Jr. from a few years ago and we are now watching the breakfast saga as though is a slow motion rerun of a bad Law and Order episode!

The only good news is that Jr. outgrew the custom of "chewing the cud" and behaving like a Camel after two years. The little one amazed me by doing something two weeks ago. She looked at me around lunch time and said "Can I spit this out?" to which I said "fine!"

She spit out something in the wash basin that pretty much was hard and simply would not wash down to the drain. I had to literally smash that stuff and push it into the drain.

Further interrogation revealed that the two hard objects she spit out where the breakfast cereal she had stuffed into her cheeks that morning. After having stored it in her mouth for almost 4 hours she spit it out because she needs the space to store parts of her lunch.

This kid is getting very good at shortening our lifespan significantly. Her sister was a saint by comparison. So we are creating new history here!


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7am Arivu (Seventh Sense) - Tamil Movie

Friday night.. a last minute impulsive decision to go watch the new movie staring Surya in the theaters with MIL and Cousin..

Off we went with some lowered expectations as the movie got mixed reviews.

Came out thinking "damn, what a different movie! This is definitely a new for Tamil cinema these days. Has been quite some time since we came out of a Tamil Movie thinking.. "

Consider my General Knowledge to be above average, what with being on Quiz teams from a young age but one thing I did not know was that Da-mo, the patriarch who is credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to China and also reshaped Shaolin Kung Fu to China was actually a South Indian Pallava prince! Somehow that part was never taught to us in our history books. Neither was the fact that today's Kung Fu had its origins in Kalaripayattu (which was the original martial art form that this Da-mo or Dharuma (or Bodhidharma as he was referred to) learned in India. Did know what Kalaripayattu was! That needed no introduction.

It was an interesting movie, simply for bringing to light, the lack of interest in self promotion in India and Indians alike.

If you are interested in knowing more watch this video series. This guy did an awesome job of explaining BodhiDharma. Do not know if he ever completed the book. If any of you know kindly drop a note. Should be worth a read!

Every twelve years or so my life encounters something that is beyond my grasp. Something that I have found a new respect for that teaches me that "just because we do not comprehend something, we should not dismiss it. There is a lot we do not know and cannot explain with our limited mental and physical capacity".

The first one was Siddha medicine. When allopathy left me for dead at 12, a 97 year old chain smoking bearded Yogi (who was always in Padmadsana when he treated me) cured me by looking at me, feeling my pulse, looking at my eyes, mouth and feeling my skin and then declaring "this kids blood is not pure. we have to purify it" and went on to give me some heavy metal cocktails that purged my system and brought me even closer to death but revived me. At that time my parents and relatives thought it was nothing but magical. Everything he did has an explanation in modern medicine. Arsenic in small doses can be a cure! Bismuth is used in pepto-bismol ! All said and done he did with baspams, legiyams and thailams (powders, gels and massage oils) what the antibiotics of the early eighties could not do.

My post on that aspect is here. The movie literally echoes my sentiments in the conclusion. (It was funny with the reference to turmeric!. should have started writing movie scripts last year!)

Another 13 years later, there was an encounter with Nadi astrology. Indian astrology is dismissed as gobbledygook by westerner scientists. Don't need to say more. If I can tell you that by analyzing a hair root, I can tell the persons ethnicity, eye color, diseases they are prone to etc. etc. 50 years ago it was laughable. Today we call it genomes, bio-markers, etc. and to the educated few it is not laughable. If it is possible to believe that so much information can be gleaned from a hair follicle, why not a thumb print?

Old posts on this topic Here and here..

Thirteen more years later when physiotherapy said "this is as far as we go!" Yoga has come to the rescue. Initially hesitant that sitting in a hot room at 105 F and 40% humidity would do anyone any good, have seen what can happen if only you believe! Again, it is magical. Folks who are seeing me after a two or more year gap say "you have become younger".

It is a crying shame that there are more Yoga studios in the San Francisco bay area than in Chennai. If only they had taught yoga in the schools in India instead of teaching us "march past" to the beat of a drum maybe my bow legs would be straight by now!

My legs are bowed like my fathers. Maybe it is genetic, maybe it is a vitamin deficiency of sorts but when I bring my thighs together and me feet together, my knees separate. Asked one of my yoga teachers, "how long do you think before this corrects with yoga?" and she said "usually it takes only 7 years".

Will let you all know how it goes in "only 7 years"!

What else is there to encounter another 12 years from now?!

Do watch this movie for the documentary aspect..


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History

History comes from "Historia" or Knowledge acquired by studying the past!

I seriously have doubts about History, History students and Historians, not just in today's world but the whole concept, be it past, present or, even the future. It sounds like an oxymoron, a concept of future history, but let me elaborate.

The last week has seen me spend significant time with Jr. for her project, a speech she has to give with another student to celebrate Black History. The person she has to talk about is Elijah McCoy. Now this guy was a black inventor with over 40 patents when Slavery had just been abolished, but discrimination was still around. Pretty amazing stuff considering the term "The Real McCoy" which means "the original" or "the dependable" product refers to an oil lubricator that McCoy invented.

The assignment gets complicated because different sources give him different birth dates!? different mother's names, etc. Either a lot was left out and no one cared because he was Black, or people tried to resurrect his image long after he died in the name of Black pride. In either case, history has failed or is failing us by either not telling us the facts or by deliberately misleading us.

If you use the most common search engines for Elijah McCoy, you will see the same few pages come up.

Most of my knowledge/information/history comes from Google news these days and articles get pushed to the front page, simply because more people are reading those articles in specific categories, be it world, politics, sports, science and technology, etc. etc.

Certain concepts reiterate themselves in these search engines. In other words, an article will gain momentum if it catches the public eye. Correlation of that happening because the veracity of the article would be pretty abysmal is my guess. Most of the articles that get pushed in the "recommended" category all seem to be polarized.

a. it is an article that resonates with what would be "common sense" or the "duh" or "stating the obvious"

b. it creates controversy and attracts the flamers and provides an "anti" viewpoint

There seems to be very minimal moderation of ideas or a balanced view. (those articles are a minority), which brings me to some instrospection. What the hell is a balanced view? A neutral view? My view? My biased view? A view with pros and cons or cons and pros?

and the thoughts wandered to a hypothetical..

50 years from now if a kid had to do a school project on George W. Bush what are the odds that he /she will probably see GWB as a peace loving man and how many articles will flag GWB as a warmonger? It all depends on what gets pushed across screens over the next 50 years would be my guess.

Maps of the world conveniently show what each country wants to show its kids in the classroom, you do that for a few decades and you have given millions of kids an alternate reality. Take Kashmir for example.

Kids in China were taught a distorted version of India in the late seventies for sure (know this for a fact from Chinese friends) and kids in India were taught an untrue version of China in our history books. What we read, memorized, regurgitated for 10 marks/100 is not even close to what Chinese kids were told by their parents or what they experienced firsthand.

That said, history is all about screening the information you leave behind so that the suckers who come long after you, believe in something that never happened.

Worse, let us tell them that History teaches us how to shape our lives by learning from the past. If the learning from the past is all based on corrupt data, then the future is going to be very very bleak.

In corporate America information goes to employees on a need to know basis. The country runs the same way with wire taps, extraordinary powers for the state, unwritten laws, etc. etc. with the citizen being the last to know or given little information on how his tax money is spent wisely or unwisely.

If the information that is given by the have's to the have not's is so filtered, then we can be guaranteed that when Google Search replaces our history books for good, our kids will find out things about their parents that will make them shake their heads in disbelief!

I can almost imagine Jr. typing "Sundar Narayanan" into a google window and shaking her head and saying "But I was raised by this fellow and he was nothing like this search result shows!"

One thing is sure.

Jr. will get her 10 points out of 100 for her understanding of Black History.




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Blast from the Past

No. we are not talking about my childhood here. We are skipping a generation.

During the recent India trip, my dad handed me some old photos which I had mailed him 16 years ago. Photos for which there were no negatives left because like an idiot, I had sent the negatives to India also and they were lost.

As a bonus he also handed me something from his shaving box (metal box which was his equivalent to my shoe box) and gave me things which he had preserved. Thought I should have it, because of my being internet and media savvy, this might be preserved in some form somewhere. Felt honored to receive his box!

One of those things in the box, was this old postcard he handed me, the only sample of his father's handwriting in his possesion. A letter written by my grandfather (who I never met! he had passed away when my dad was a teenager) in 1957.

It is tough when you lose your mother at 4 and your dad at 18 and all you have is a photo of your mom! My dad did have a tough hand dealt to him as the youngest of 12 kids but he made it through to lead a good life.

Now, here is the letter..







That is one bad handwriting!


Here is to dad. The letter has been pieced together to the best of my ability and is now digitized.

Tomorrow will be spent in zooming into the letter and trying to read it.


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What does one say?!

Adengappa is on the receiving end right now. I completely understand what he is going through!

He is receiving condolences, sympathies for being Indian, amazement that every Indian in the USA made it out of the Indian slums, etc.

This is not a new problem and it goes both ways. Eastern perception of the west or the Western perception of the east (trust me, my Chinese grad school buddies have told me similar stories and this is not just and India USA thing) have the same issues.

In case you are not following this yet, let me give you some case studies.

Mottai or Mundan : We went to India to celebrate my daughters first birthday. As is the south Indian custom, we had our daughters hair shaved off just before her first birthday. We do not give haircuts till sometime before the kid is 9 months old and the first hair cut is a total shave and the hair is offered to gods (usually done in a temple). Grandpa says this actually helps hair take better roots and there is some hair health secret behind this. Nevertheless...

We come back to the USA after the celebration. The kid is a little tired after all the travelling. A woman at the local grocery store is all sympathetic to her. I didn't get it initially and finally figured out that she thought my daughter had cancer and was going through some kind of Radiation treatment! Why else would a kid get its hair shaved off ?!

Women who don't believe in pre-marital sex : This might get me in hot water and you might say this is generalizing, but based on the limited sample size that I have encountered, there are a lot many desi students who show up in the USA who belive that the average American woman accepts pre-marital sex as the norm and are genuinely surprised to find that to be not true!

There are Indians who don't know English : Yeah, seriously.. there were a lot of Americans I have interacted with who thought that all Indians were fluent in English, were we well "versed" in Madonna and Michael Jackson Lyrics as they were with Vedas and Upanishads. After all, why wouldn't they?! All the Indians they encountered in school spoke fluent english. One professor even thought all Indians wore a "poonal" or sacred thread. That really was something. That meant all his previous grad students were Brahmins and no one told him that it was a very small subset of the population.

All Americans are well educated : Even beggars in America beg in English and by extension, they should all be well educated! If you think this is a joke, go take a survey in the potti kadais and barber shops of Chennai and you will see that this image holds true. Truth is far from it. In India speaking English is a sign of education. Here everyone speaks english (or American) and there are people here who cannot read and write fluently but they only speak the language. The public education system here today is no different from the state of "corporation" schools in TamilNadu in the early eighties and people are just about to start chanllenging and changing this system.

Every Indian has visited the Taj Mahal : Just like the Eiffel tower shows up in the window in every hollywood movie that is supposedly shot in Paris, every desi is supposedly been to the Taj. This is almost something taken for granted by Americans. I am yet to visit the Taj Mahal and it is something to be "rectified". I also happen to have travelled the USA a lot more than the average American! Know a lot of Californians who have never visited New York or Washington DC! Seriously, I kid you not! Both India and the USA are large countries and not everyone in these countries has visited every national monument, tourist attaction, and yet.....

All Indians write software,

All Americans own guns and are trigger happy,

All desis are cheap and go to India everytime they need a root canal

etc. etc.

and the list goes on...

All Americans are war mongers : This one joined the list in 2003 after the Iraq invasion.

All of India is a slum : this has just recently joined the list, after Slumdog

There will be many more additions to the list over the coming years!

What does one do though, when faced with these situtations?!

Here is a tip. Do not laugh it off or try to be very witty. It usually does not go well in any situation in any country. Stereotyping is not something that was invented in this century. It has been happening for millenia!

Fifteen odd years ago, I made a remark that went something like "let me do the Indian rope trick or get on my elephant and go find out for you.." and it really rubbed the other person the wrong way! When I found out that the other person really believed that sterotype and the history books in China actually teach them stuff about India in a certain way, I was horrified.

Today's history and geography books in the east and west are probably teaching the kids a view of the other side that is not entirely true. Recently heard on the radio that there is less than 18 pages of total material in history and geography texts in the US about China. That is right, 18 pages for 3000+ years of history! Equally sure that the 200+ years of American modern history is seen as something that doesn't count as history in the true sense of the world. Yet an American very close to me taught me that it is not the number of years of civilization that matters, but what has been accomplished in those years. We would have arguments and he would come up things like "it took you guys almost 400 years to get Independence from the Brits and we did it in 200" and that would send me scurrying to the history books.

The best way to deal with it is to explain in a short sentence that their belief is not supported by real data and leave it at that. Remember, if you are visiting another country, you DO represent your country. Even if you have changed Citizenship, this still happens and you constantly end up reminding yourself and others of your nationality, and it doesn't get through!

As the world shrinks and communication is supposed to shrink it further as the years go by, we grow farther apart with myths and the blurred lines between real and real life which give us more organized sterotyping!

We can only hope for a better world, where more people are eager to learn about other cultures and do get to learn the truth, by traveling as opposed to a jaundiced and censored lesson provided by the press, governments and movie houses!

Happy monday folks!


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