A Tale of Two Birthdays

A few weeks ago RD was telling me about a Karaoke device that he had brought from India for some friends of his. Both of us agreed that this was a novelty and of limited interest to us. The experience of last Friday night might have made me feel different.

It was the occasion of Vanitha's BD party, organized slightly ahead of schedule by Prem. The party was going along in routine fashion - good food - pasta, salad, cake from Champagne bakery (although the Menage a Trois was questionable :-)), and kids running around helter-skelter. Poker was not on the cards in honor of the BD girl and instead the plan was to watch a movie streamed from Netflix (I picked Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). Before that could happen, Keerti started encouraging Sanjay to sing a song for the group. The rest of the group had to push him a bit, but eventually he got going. A couple of folks hummed along and soon folks were suggesting other songs to sing. Malini had heard MGD sing a Kannada devotional song (Gajamukhane Ganapathiye) in the temple and tried to get him to sing that one, which he eventually did with great gusto. Then Vanitha was prevailed upon to sing a popular Tamil song (Illaya Nila). One song led to another and very soon it became hard to stop. Sometimes we sang the entire song, but mostly it would peter out after the opening lines. Every so often, Latha would startle us by jumping into a high falsetto, but it was all par for the course. It was mostly old Hindi songs and there was a lot of shared nostalgia reflected our choices.

Antakshri was suggested and after some more general singing, we started a game of antaskshri and that went on till almost 1 AM. The game was a bit unconventional in that we did not stick to just Hindi songs - Vanitha contributed some Tamil songs and towards the end, Murali broke into some Kannada songs for the guys side. For some reason I was not allowed to sing any ghazals on the narrow technicality that they weren't 'movie' songs. The guys were a bit more into the songs themselves - between Sanjay, Rahul, Murali, and myself, we knew a good bit of the lyrics of our favorite songs and insisted on singing them all the way through, which caused some aggravation to the women who were more competitive and wanted to get through the songs quickly. Malini and Keerthi knew a lot of the newer songs which was a distinct blind spot for the guys, but we managed to keep pace. Through all this, Prem was a rather bored bystander, serving up two rounds of tea and desperately scouting for a cell phone to play some games on. He seemed truly bewildered that the rest of us knew all the same songs. To his credit, he tolerated us rather well. Hari must have had a long day - he was desperately trying to grab some shut-eye with Alekhya in his arms enveloped in singing of often sketchy pitch and tune. The older kids, who were still playing would come and stand at the end of the room and look on in some puzzlement before heading back to their games. Finally we called it a draw and an unusual evening had come to an end.

The first thing that almost everybody mentioned the next evening when we met for Murali's "surprise" BD party was that they had the songs running through their heads for a long time after we broke up the previous night. The strong hold these songs have on our collective conscious is quite remarkable. I am humming even as I type this!

Latha had organized a potluck dinner for MGD's (35+x)th birthday. It was to be a surprise, but mostly in that the first person to show up would yell 'surprise!' and that would be that. Not your traditional surprise, but much, much, easier to plan! The BD boy was in high spirits as usual and he was only more uplifted when Hari showed up with a bottle of 'Gila', straight from TJ. The food was uniformly very good (or maybe I was just really hungry after skipping lunch while playing golf :-)) - Malini had made potato bondas (with a secret stuffing of chilli pickle), there were roasted sweet potatoes (RD), fruit platter & bruschetta (Sanjay), daal (Keerti), Chicken (Keerthi), Eggplant (Vanitha) and of course Latha's outstanding cheesecake. She wanted me to compare that with the Bisibele baath, which also she had made. I never did give my verdict, so here it is - cheesecake by a length.

This being MGD's BD, poker was a given and we got started early. We broke up for cake cutting and then dinner. We played some more, but after some ups and downs, Latha went broke and we called it a night. There was no singing, but the tunes from the previous night were still, as the Eagles sang, "calling from far away." I wonder how long it will be before somebody shows up at the next quarterly with a Karaoke machine.

Another Triumph for Petit

A quick update to my post-Oscar post to note the best documentary win for Man on Wire. If you were watching, the guy who ran up to the stage after the producers was the man who pulled off the high wire act - Philippe Petit. He gave a short, joyful speech, did a little magic trick with a coin that one of his old friends had given him and ended with an impromptu stunt - balancing the Oscar statue on his chin. Doing street magic and juggling acts is of course how he paid for his various 'unauthorized' tight rope walks.

Slumdog Rules!

I have not seen "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and it is quite unlikely that I will actively seek it out. It is not the sort of movie that immediately appeals to me and its trailers and early reviews left me disinterested. However, as I watched the Oscar ceremonies last night (fast-forwarding through a Tivo-ed version), it was obvious that the evening was essentially a showdown between 'BB' and Slumdog Millionaire, which I wrote about. Any category in which only one of them was present was almost always won by that one - the significant exception being of course Brad Pitt (who was at most third-best - behind Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke). And when they went head-to-head, as they did in almost every significant category (except all of the actor/actress ones), SM came out the winner.

This year's Oscars had a predictable quality to them, with most of the winners being fairly obvious. Heath Ledger for best supporting actor, 'Jai Ho' for best song (the other nominees were another SM/Rahman number and a lukewarm offering from Wall-E), Kate Winslet for best actress, and Wall-E for best animation were all pretty much a given, with the only suspense perhaps being the presence of Meryl Streep in competition to Kate Winslet.

It was exciting to see AR Rahman win twice and close out his (decidedly tepid) acceptance speech with a dedication in tamil. His invocation of the "Mere paas ma hai" dialog probably left most of the audience mystified, but was intimately familiar as the recurring rejoinder to our poker-time banter. Equally heart-warming was the award for sound mixing that went to a well-spoken Resul Pookutty, who Malini informed me is from Kerala. It is probably safe to say that these are the first people from Kerala or TamilNadu to win an Oscar.

I attribute this clean sweep by SM to a couple of reasons: The lesser one is the conventional quality of the competition - it was hard to see any of the other nominees (other than BB, of course) winning. They just were not 'big' enough. And my guess is that even BB faded when pitted against the exuberance of SM. The greater reason I believe is that it is the perfect feel-good movie for these troubled times. While SM is not a Bollywood movie, it is very much in the style of one and Bollywood has been perfecting the art of feel-good escapism for many decades now. Of course, it could just be that it is a very good movie.

29 Palms - Winter 2009 Quarterly Outing - Pt 3/3

I opened my eyes abruptly at almost exactly 6am the next morning. I saw that sunrise was imminent and had to take some shots. I pulled on some warm clothing, went over to the other house to retrieve my camera and tripod and proceeded to take some photos. When I returned to the house, I was startled to see a head pop up from the sofa - where no head had been when I left. Turned out to be RD, who had heard me leave and had come down from his bunk bed (in the room he shared with the Biddanurs) to check out the sound. He decided it was too much effort to climb back up and just settled on the sofa.

I tried to sleep some more, but eventually got out of bed. Akshaj was up and about and Latha was watching him. We could have used one more restroom in the place. Akshaj and Latha were in the bathroom and I was pacing, waiting for them to come out. Suddenly mgd comes out of his room and makes a beeline to the bathroom only to realize that it was occupied. He sits himself down on a chair and then notices me pacing.
MGD: "Do you need to go? Is it urgent?"
Me: "I do need to go, but not super urgent. Do you have to go now?"
MGD: "That's why I am sitting down."
Me: "I can wait. You go."

One by one we headed to the main house. Most folks were up and about there. We got some coffee and a group decided to try volleyball. It was quite cold and rather windy. The ball seemed to be extra hard and many of our forearms and wrists were still sore from the game on Saturday. After some time we realized it just wasn't the same, we gave up on the game and headed in to play some TT and pool. After some of that, it was time for breakfast.

In all these weekend outings, I am usually on the hook for one breakfast - omelets. Prem tried to relieve me by offering to make fritatas, but the crowd wanted omelets, so I got started. After some false starts with the pans, I eventually got a handle on the process and started serving up breakfast. A game of poker was already underway and kids were watching TV. After breakfast there was some desire to start another poker game, but we decided to clean up first. Of course by the time we were done, folks were pretty much ready to leave. There was a plan to stop at an outlet mall on the way, so there was some desire to not delay much longer. So, around 1.30pm, we all headed out.

The wind had been howling all morning and as we reached the town of 29 Palms, the rain started and it was quite heavy all the way to Hwy 10. 10 West was crawling and while the conditions were unsuitable for shopping (it was an outdoor mall), we exited at the mall mostly because of the traffic. We got coffee and folks explored some stores. We gave up soon and headed back onto the highway. Luckily the traffic eased up quickly and we had a largely uneventful drive back home. We saw a couple of bad accidents on the way, but otherwise it was fine. We had dosas for dinner and after a cup of tea, hit the sack.

A sign near the main door of the house read, "Dedicated to Dignified Loafing" - an appropriate motto for life in the high desert. It had been a fun, relaxing trip. The setting and the house (even with all its shortcomings) were certainly part of it. I was actually quite sore from the volleyball and ping pong. Kids had had a great time - being able to run around in an unstructured place full of interesting things to explore, fall over, and run into was enjoyable to all of them. During the drive back Abhi kept campaigning to return to the house and after we got home, refused to come out of the car for a good 20 minutes for the same reason. Even now, he is quite ready to head back. And so are, I believe, the rest of us.

29 Palms - Winter 2009 Quarterly Outing - Pt 2/3

Prem, Rahul, and I were planning to go for golf early morning on Sunday, but Rahul dropped out in the last minute. Prem and I left around 6.30am, but had to wait till almost 8.30am to start playing because of frost on the ground. It was quite a nice course and being just the two of us with nobody in front, we played quickly and were done before noon. The wind kicked up for the second 9 and made playing quite challenging. In between we had received calls from the home front and we decided to sync up at the entrance to the park. We met everybody else at the visitor center and after some discussion decided to head into town (29 Palms) to get lunch. That turned out to be mini saga into itself. All the places we tried were either closed or unsuitable for some other reason. Denny's became the fallback choice, but Malini and I decided to just do a carryout from Little Caeasar's since pizza is one of the easier things to feed our boys.

After lunch, there was some loss of interest in visiting the park. A parking lot discussion ensued, and eventually the Anands & RD headed back home, while the rest of us went into the park. Much of the park is at a higher elevation and the temperatures were quite low. We stopped at the Cholla Cactus garden and then made our way to the Barker Dam 1-mile loop hike. It was in low 40's here, but we warmed up with the walk. I didn't have my camera and while somewhat disappointing (the overcast day provided excellent light for people photography), there was also a freedom to just look around and not worry about missing the shot. The vistas and landscape were familiar from our visit almost 8 years ago when we had spent a lot more time in the park. I was still fascinated by the almost moonscape and the abrupt rock and boulder formations that would rise up from the valley floor. These formations of course make Joshua Tree a huge draw for rock climbers. Sadly, many of the Joshua trees themselves seemed to be dying out and in many areas, it almost looked like a fire had swept through. After the hike, we returned back to the house. Interest in volleyball was low, so we just chilled.

Dinner was nominally tacos, but all kinds of stuff seemed to precede it - chilli bajjis from Mgd, Chilli tofu from Malini, Some tandoori chicken from previous night, etc. By the time tacos were actually made, I was quite full! A robust 'discussion' on LTE broke out, with MGD taking no prisoners in his stand that LTE was going to rule the world. His passion was admirable, although nobody was quite sure about the need for such fervor. I am sure the Cab, Zin, and Pinot had something to do with it! Eventually dinner was done, and the table was once again cleared for poker. This time the game went on longer, but a little past midnight folks started fading. MGDs, RD, and us headed to our sleeping quarters, but the tea we had had during poker kept us awake. MGD and RD soon had a game of ping pong going and Latha started racking the pool table. I also joined for some TT, but eventually was too tired to keep going. My early start for golf and golf itself had taken a toll. Even as I sank (literally) into the roll-away the pool game was still going on and the sounds of crashing balls faded as I drifted off into a deep sleep.

29 Palms - Winter 2009 Quarterly Outing - Pt 1/3

Much planning went into our Winter 2009 Quarterly outing, most of it futile. The initial choice was Palm Springs, but it never really had much traction. Every so often an alternate destination would be suggested - Big Bear, Mammoth, Las Vegas, Idyllwild - but nothing seemed to be panning out. Rd was almost about to make the deal for a Palm Springs house when MGD discovered this house near Joshua Tree National Park, located in the town of 29 Palms. Everything came together quickly and after the customary flood of email exchanges we had a plan for the weekend. It was a 3-day weekend (President's day) and we were going to stay two nights - Sat & Sun.

The drive was largely uneventful, although we had to pull over for a potty break for the little guy. We arrived a few minutes after MGD, who had just received a tour of the property and seemed rather skeptical of the place. We had known going in that we were going to be split between two houses but Murali thought that the houses were further apart than he had expected - his chief concern seemed to be that it would be too cold/too dark in the night when you had to go between the houses. Cindy, the cleaning lady (& her son) were rather accommodating and tried to address our concerns. To me, the place seemed adequate and more importantly, I didn't see that we had too many options. Eventually we took the keys from Cindy, but asked her to provide us additional room heaters and some flashlights (which they supplied, but we never used).

While we waited for the next group - Anands & RD - to arrive (they were picking up lunch for us), we explored the property. The main house had two bedrooms and a loft. Only one of the bedrooms had a door - in fact, other than the bathrooms, this was the only room in both houses that had a door at all! The loft was for the adventurous - you had to climb up a ladder affixed to the wall - but the actual loft was kind of nice with a good view. There was also a swimming pool and a hot tub (that seemed permanently on) on the property. The kitchen was well equipped, but the bathrooms and bedrooms were marginal. There was no issue with cleanliness, just somewhat below expectations. For instance, our sink would take forever to drain, although it always drained fully. The roll-away beds were as comfortable as roll-aways can get. The furniture in general seemed to be a bit thrift-store-ish, but nobody really cared much about it.

After lunch we generally relaxed around the outdoor fireplace until somebody discovered the volleyball court at one corner of the property. After some cajoling from Mgd and Keerti, we all headed over and a game of jungle ball commenced. Kids were quite taken in by this game and positioned themselves in various parts of the court.
We would routinely run into one of the kids or have to re-position them, but nobody seemed to mind. In retrospect it seems a minor miracle that nobody got hurt! Every so often Yuvi would drop his glasses and we would freeze the game while everybody scrambled to find the glasses. After some time, the last group - Prem & family - showed up and joined us. Skill levels were somewhat uneven and even though a couple of folks (I'll leave them unnamed here) tried to hector their team mates into better play, everybody was having fun and it was only after sundown that a sore, but happy crowd that headed back to the house.

Dinner was a combination of vegi burgers, tandoori chicken, corn, and salmon. We had the outdoor fire going and everybody was in a good mood. We had various snacks to supplement (incl mgd's spicy 'mix') and it was quite late by the time we were all done with dinner. In between I tried to take some pictures of each of the couples next to the fireplace. It was Valentine's day after all. Poker was the next order of the night and the table was quickly set up for that. The big winner this night was MGD, who is beginning to make a habit of winning big on these outings. We quit around 11pm since we were all tired and some of us planned to head out early for golf the next morning.

MGD, RD, and us were in the other house and after we got there, RD tried to deploy the sofa-bed, but discovered that the frame was missing on the lower half. We thought he would be ok if he put his feet on that end, but the mattress would just fall through the opening - it was quite amusing, really. There was a board whose purpose appeared to be to cover the opening, but we couldn't really figure a way to install it and eventually RDX settled for a bunk bed and we called it a night.

The Wisdom of Sashi

While I have been mulling over a series of blogs about the teachings of our yoga teacher Sashi, this particular post was triggered in direct response to this post from Vanee: time & money. Her basic thesis is that citing the example of highly successful (& hence busy) people taking the time out for exercise (or other seemingly non-critical tasks) to guilt people like us into making time for regular exercise is essentially hollow. I will circle back to this later, but for now I want to focus on the narrow point of exercise or more generally taking care of our bodies.

This indeed is the inspiration for the title of this blog - I am really ghost writing for Sashi here. One recurring theme in Sashi's class lectures is how we ignore our bodies. It has taken years of listening to him to actually start hearing him. The truth is that we are controlled by our brains/minds and don't always do what is good for our bodies. But our body is the only real thing that we have. I am sure that this argument can be extrapolated to all kinds of people, but I am speaking just to our demographic - highly educated and financially sound. We can find all manner of rationalizations to avoid taking care of our bodies (& I do), but that does not make it ok. I certainly believe that wealth makes a huge difference to our priorities (its been a running theme in my political blogs), but I also believe that all of us have sufficient money to avoid making that a constraint to regular exercise.

Ultimately it does come down to priorities, doesn't it? Human beings are a very smart race - we will find a way to medicate ourselves to longer and longer life spans independent of whether we treat our bodies right or not. But that is besides the point - the question is really whether you believe in the power of your body to heal itself and take care of itself. More importantly, do you have the discipline and self control to allow this to happen? This is hard - its far simpler to pop a pill or get a tummy tuck, but to the receptive person, the rewards are much greater. Unless you are a professional body builder, there will never be a time when there is nothing else to do but exercise. We can wallow self pityingly on the difficulty of waking up a bit earlier to get some exercise in, but that's all that really is - self pity. Or in the words of Sashi, "poor me", "why me?"

Actually, I think our use of the words "exercise", or "work-out" are a good hint about why we fail at this. This is not something 'additional' that we have to do, but the price we have to pay for our lifestyle. Stop using your car, couch, bed, and start growing your own produce and you can safely avoid what we call exercise. Hardly possible today, is it?

Back to the success story examples - my thesis is a bit different than Vanee's: My contention is that the reason they are able to devote time to exercise or other mundane tasks is the very same discipline and drive that made them successful in the very first place.

The Parenting Instinct

It is kind of fun (albeit sometimes disconcerting) to see Arjun playing the parent with Abhishek. He will use the same reasoning and sometimes the exact same words that we have used with him. I guess this should give us some assurance that he has indeed been paying attention, but sometimes its bit like, did we really say that?

Their bedtime ritual is pretty simple - drink a cup of milk each, brush their teeth, read a book, and go to sleep. The other day Arjun drank his milk quickly while Abhi had drunk only about half and for whatever reason Arjun decided that he had to get Abhi to drink up the rest. Neither Malini nor I had said anything - Abhi is fond of milk and he will drink what he wants without any prompting.

Arjun (in a very mature tone): "Abhi, you haven't drunk anything. You should finish your milk."
Abhi: "No, I don't want to."
Arjun: "Why are you doing like this Abhi? Here, finish it." Abhi is not budging. Now came the admonishments:
Arjun: "If you don't drink the milk, you will be hungry. And if you wake up in the night hungry I am not going to come down and bring you food." The funny part is of course that this has no connection to reality - there is no way Arjun is waking up in the night to do anything, let alone bring food for Abhi - but this is exactly what we have tried on him a million times, futilely of course.

That has no effect and instead Abhi starts playing with a little truck. After all, he has got his pride to consider. Arjun tries a new tack:
Arjun: "Abhi, give me that truck. Aeta will show you a game." But of course, Abhi was going to have none of that and ran away with the truck.
More parental channeling on Arjun's part: "Abhi, I am not going to chase you. I am going to count to 10, if you don't give aeta the truck by then, aeta is not going to play with you."
The counting starts and now its a game of chicken - who is going to blink first? I sense that Abhi is really in no mood to give in, but I don't want Arjun to lose face. So I step in and encourage Abhi to give the truck to Arjun, which he just manages to do as the count reaches 10. So, now the "game" begins:
Arjun (balancing the sippy cup on the truck): "Aeta will push the truck to you. When the truck reaches you, you drink some milk and push the truck back to me."
I am thinking, yeah, sure, this is going work, and what do you know: As soon as the truck reaches him, Abhi happily picks up the cup and starts chugging away. Clearly, we are better role models than we thought.....:-)

Bone Chicken & Chocolate Cake

We celebrated Abhishek's 3rd birthday last Friday in a low key manner, partly by design and partly due to circumstances. We realized just over a week ago that we had not planned anything and instead of scrambling to do something more elaborate, we decided to keep it small. We also had the idea that we would do something jointly for Arjun and Abhishek, since Arjun's BD is only 4 weeks away.

Malini told Arjun that the two of them would go shopping for a gift "when Abhi was sleeping," the idea being that it would be a surprise to Abhi. The concept was not entirely clear to Arjun. As soon as I got home, he described the plan in detail in full earshot of Abhi, who seemed to be very much part of the plan. He went, "I will be sleeping and aeta (i.e. Arjun) will put the gift on my night stand. When I wake up in the morning, I will open it." To both of them, the surprise part was the identity of the gift and not the fact that Arjun was getting Abhi a gift. Anyway, we all ended up going and we had a cover story for Abhi (Arjun had to be restrained from revealing the true purpose). Malini took Abhi elsewhere while Arjun and I went to the toy section. Arjun was eager to give Abhi the 'surprise' right away (this was still 2 days before his BD) and I had to do some convincing to make him wait.

The day before his BD, Malini asked Abhi what he wanted for breakfast on his birthday. He promptly replied, "Bone chicken!" This is his term for any chicken piece which still has the bone in it. Malini: "You can't have bone chicken for breakfast." Abhi: "Ok, then I'll have tofu soup," which is of course his second favorite thing to eat.

I hadn't been taking too many photos lately and wanted to take a few before Abhi turned 3. So, we did that before they headed up to sleep and then I had to distract Abhi while Malini and Arjun could go wrap up his gift. The next morning, Abhi was up early (as usual) and I went to wake up Arjun. Normally this is a herculean task, but on this day, I just had to remind him that Abhi was waiting for his 'surprise' and he was up in no time. The gift was handed over, the wrapping was ripped open and Abhi was thrilled.

Later Malini asked Abhi what kind of cake he wanted. Chocolate cake, of course (both boys are absolute chocolate fiends - the darker the better). Arjun then asks him what kind of toppings would he like on his cake? Abhi, after some thought, "Blueberries and tomatoes." Needless to say, we skipped the tomatoes, although we did seriously consider options for putting tomatoes on top without causing the cake to go soggy.

Malini picked up Arjun and me just after noon and we all headed to the "New Children's Museum" which is in the downtown area.
It is not a very big place, but there were lots of things for the kids to do. They started with some clay working, and then moved onto some paper crafts, riding manual segues, climbing walls, blowing bubbles, making shadow puppets, and of course pillow fights! We were there for about 3 hours and then headed back home (with a quick stop at REI to get him some sandals, which was our gift).

Tandoori chicken ('bone chicken') and Tofu soup were soon being consumed and after dinner, Prem and family joined us for the cake cutting. Kids were soon running around, fortified by cake and a simple, yet satisfactory birthday celebration came to a close.

"Tare Zameen Par"

Movies like these irritate me. They offer facile solutions to complex problems while trying to pass off an essentially commercial venture as high minded social commentary. Now that I got that off my chest, I can settle down to a less strident discussion.


Malini was watching Tare Zameen Par (TZP) last Saturday night and I sat through it as well (albeit with partial attention since I was working on my computer at the same time). It is the story of a kid with dyslexia and the attempts of a caring art teacher to rescue him. It is a fairly decent directorial debut for Aamir Khan and quite watchable even if entirely predictable. What drew me in was not the story telling, but the performance of a wonderful child actor (Darsheel Safary) and the emotional tug of rescuing a young boy who is unable to speak for himself. Now that I have two sons myself, I find such stories to have a much stronger pull. Most of the characters are caricatures - the father who is unable to see past his beliefs, the mother who is sympathetic, but unable or unwilling to stand up to her husband, school teachers who are en masse unable to detect any problem with the boy beyond laziness and truancy. There is the handicapped smart kid, who has the heart of gold, the over achieving older brother, and finally of course the character of Aamir Khan - the idealistic substitute teacher who coincidentally had the same life story as the child at the center of the movie.

The story and characters all have a fairy tale quality - everybody is sketched in black or white until the resolution when everybody is redeemed and all is fine and dandy with the world. The climax involves a group painting contest to which most of the teachers arrive reluctantly, but, to a person, love the whole thing and leave with the commitment to take further lessons. I use the word 'climax' loosely since it is obvious from the moment the contest is announced as to what is about to happen. In a transparent ploy to add some tension, they even have the kid arrive late to the contest - there is much "Where is Ishaan?" "Has anybody seen Ishaan?" etc, but nothing much comes of it. The boy shows up eventually and starts painting and we learn nothing about his prior absence. There is at least one bothersome factual error - the character of Aamir Khan cites Da Vinci's use of mirror writing as another case of a creative mind who had problems with the use of language. This is bogus since Da Vinci wrote plenty of stuff in straight text and while theories abound about his reasons for using mirror text, none of them border on dyslexia as a cause. This is pretty poor for somebody (Aamir Khan) who has the reputation of being a perfectionist.

I do recognize that the making of this movie has cast more light on the insensitivity to "special needs" children and in general, it is better that this movie has been made than if it were not. However, there is no excusing the fact that the director took the easy way out in delivering the message: the story would have been that much more powerful if the child did not have such obviously above average talent and was not surrounded by such a cast of uncaring family and teachers. But then, he also wants people to watch the movie.

End of Season

Another NFL season came to an end yesterday with Superbowl 43 and a party for the same at the Reddy residence. There were fewer than 10 adults in attendance, what with folks being away for different reasons - India, Skiing, other parties, etc. The party itself was planned and announced in typical Hari fashion - strictly word-of-mouth with no use of electronic media whatsoever. The plan was to have a potluck dinner after the game with some snacking during the game.

We had gone to the Wild Animal Park in the mid-morning and arrived about 10 minutes after the game had started. Under pressure from the crowd, I setup the 'squares' game and after roping in the missing Kamaths (they arrived shortly before the game ended), we had 10 participants one of whom was SivaP. This is noteworthy because he only stayed for the first half, but managed to win 3 of the 5 available prizes. Geetha who showed up about 2 minutes before the game ended won the other two prizes. The rest of us were left holding the bag.

The game itself had its high and low points with some very dramatic changes of fortune. The Steelers led almost throughout except late in the fourth quarter when Arizona rallied to actually take the lead. Pittsburgh then had a late drive for the winning touchdown. RD, as the sole Steelers supporter, should have been pleased but was more distraught over missing out on one of the prizes when the Steelers came from behind to take the decisive lead. Ads, which are the highlight of Superbowls, were on the whole pretty disappointing. I can recall Hyundai's ad; GoDaddy had its usual nonsense while Pepsi, Sobe and a few others had some mystifying ones. Coke did a couple of their usual fairy tale style spots along with a reprise of their 'Mean Joe Green' ad, but with Polamalu. NBC had more than the usual share of ads promoting their own shows, with several being fairly inane.

Given that we were in the Reddy residence, there was the usual smack talk about 'royalty.' There were gleeful reminders of what was in store for the folks who spilled drinks or caused damage to the custom built toys. In between Hari got a call from Keerthi asking him to measure some photo frames. I was pretty sure that the tape measure was made of platinum - surely it couldn't be steel. There were similar comments about what sort of frames were being ordered. I learned about the following exchange that took place elsewhere: Rd mentioned that on his recent trip to India, he had some 'people' to receive him at the airport - you know the kind that whisks you past customs and immigration. Latha responded - "you mean the kind of people that wait for Keerthi when she arrives in India?" Rd: "No way! Keerthi has people waiting for her at the airport even when she is not arriving." To which Sanjay chimed in, "Yeah, what if she shows up?" I must say I was cracking up over the vision of a couple of guys waiting patiently outside Hyd airport day in and day out....

We even played a few hands of poker, interjected by one of the fastest dinner breaks. It was past 9pm when we left and the fans amongst us were left to ponder the 8 months till the start of next season.