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.

"Man on Wire"

Man on Wire is a 2008 documentary about the Frenchman Philippe Petit who in August 1974 walked on a high wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Apart from the obvious dangers of such an act, it was a most daring escapade - it was not officially approved and had to be pulled off almost in the manner of a bank heist.

Philippe had set his sights on walking between the towers pretty much from the moment the plans for the towers were announced - almost seeing it as his destiny to do so. He had already pulled off some spectacular high wire acts before - between the towers of the Notre Dame in Paris, across the top of the Sydney harbor bridge, etc, but walking between the WTC towers was unparalleled in scope and scale. First there was the meticulous planning for stringing a cable across the two towers that were 140'apart and 110 (more than 1000') stories high. Then there was the small matter of doing all this in secrecy - they had to sneak in with almost a ton of equipment (the cable alone weighed 450 lbs, the balancing pole another 55) and setup on the roofs with nobody catching them. It helped that the towers were not actually finished and there were no occupants above the 86th floor. This part of the story is itself so incredible and to Petit was far more challenging than the walk itself. There are numerous near misses and it is a near miracle that Philippe gets to step on to the wire at all. But step he does and in glorious fashion: He is on the wire for 45 minutes completing 8 crossings in all. In between he lay down, genuflected, and ended the walk by running across.

The documentary, which is based on Petit's 2002 book "To Reach the Clouds" tells the story of the planning, execution, and aftermath of the walk through interviews, actual footage of the walk, and staged recreations of several key moments. All the key people are interviewed and the recreations often bring home the point very effectively. He and his friends were obviously arrested after the performance, but were unconditionally pardoned and Petit was even given a life time pass to the observation deck of the WTC. Indeed, his high wire act is credited with popularizing the towers themselves which at the time were not well liked and struggling to find tenants. His instant fame brought him plenty of offers for movies, book deals, and endorsements, but he declined them all. He settled down in New York and makes his living by doing a few paid, high wire acts each year.

The documentary won a number of awards last year and is nominated for an Oscar. It is an extraordinary story - what drives a man to such extremes? It takes an effort of will to even grasp the enormity of the challenge, let alone understand it. In the documentary, he summarizes his philosophy of life thus - to push all boundaries and challenge all conventions. At which point, all of life becomes a high wire act.

The police sergeant who was dispatched to get him down from the wire said later on how he just had to stand by and watch and he realized that he was seeing something that nobody before had seen and that nobody in the future is likely to witness. They sound particularly prophetic today, given that the towers no longer stand.