With all this fear of Swine Flu going around, one is forced to hear and see a lot of information about pigs. I first saw a pig, when I was a few years old. I used to travel to school via the Kodambakkam high road and at the large dump yard which is now right across from the new Onyx dump yard, I used to see dirty pigs comfortably rolling in filth. I abhored pigs. Having seen those pigs, I wondered how people ate pork. But then, I saw this movie – “Charlotte’s web“. It’s kind of hard to not love a cute pink pig, that talks so sweetly and seems so innocent. So while I still abhor pork, I am now in a better position with respect to tolerating the pigs themselves.

Now that I have established my position on the interest in this animal, you can imagine my reaction at listening to this piece on the radio.

At the end, I was saying aloud.. “Do you guys even listen to yourselves?” This last section just drove me crazy..

“They had a spring in their step. They played in the sunlight and nuzzled each other in the mud. They made a lot of healthy noise. And Ermine was, well…delicious.”

I’ve been mulling over this for the past few days. I argued it, and counter-argued it inside my head.

Nri Maami (me):  Firstly, how can they kill an animal and eat it.

The other Nri Maami (my head): Get over it, everyone does not think like you. They have been brought up eating meat and liking it, so they tune out the history of their food, just like you tune out the fact that ice-cream puts on more weight even though it tastes good.

Nri Maami (me):  Hmm.. true, see Americans oooh and aaaw over silly things. There was a guy on Amazing race that saw cows eat out of garbage and almost started crying. How come, they don’t react that way when it comes to slaughtering the same cows and eating a cheeseburger?

The other Nri Maami (my head):  In India, I’ve seen the butcher’s shop - it would have a big chopping block with an axe stuck on it, not to mention the buzzing flies, goats or whatever it is they sold hanging from hooks dead and upside-down. If you got close enough, you could even see blood. In America, I believe most people see meat only after it has been cleaned and packed and weighed and frozen. Americans may be a sympathetic lot, but it’s because they have been so carefully shielded from all that bloodshed, do they continue to eat so much meat.

Nri Maami (me): Whatever.. How could any person describe how happy those creatures were, how they skipped  and played, and in the very next  sentence talk about how tasty they were.

The other Nri Maami (my head): If you were growing Spinach, wouldn’t you take great care planting it, watering it, protecting it etc etc.. and in the end pluck it all out and wonder if you should make Palak Paneer or Keerai Sambar?

Nri Maami:  Somehow, I cannot equate plants and animals. Yes they are both living things as we were well taught in school, yet there is a difference. Animals are higher up the list – they move and they think, so they aren’t quite the same as plants.

And so.. I continue to find an explanation that will shut at least one of the two NriMaamis up, but haven’t so far.

So, before I go on further about this and end up either converting a few of you meat-eating folks to vegetarians or I end up antagonizing the few readers I have, all I can say is

Poor happy pigs, apparently they taste better !

Hello everyone. I would have loved to make a grand announcement saying that I am back but then I don’t quite want to jinx myself by doing that. So, let’s just say I am making a serious attempt to get back into the habit of blogging.

A lot of things have happened since my last post almost two months ago.

• No – my hair did not all turn black, it’s continues down the expected dreaded path of fading and falling.
• The seasons have changed (for the better I must add). The grass is green, the sun is brighter than a tube-light and birds are constantly chirping (and building nests in my grill).
• I am a year older (boo hoo) and so is my daughter (boo hoo again for she has moved on from terrible twos to more terrible threes)
• I was almost relieved to not get a surprise birthday party this year, but guess what? I now own a Wii, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Guitar Hero World Tour and the Wii Dance Party 2.
• However, it’s very unfortunate that Wii Fit describes me as being obese and wonders how I don’t trip over myself when I walk!
• And I am not loving my Wii male gym instructor – he has no name but has a perfect body and balance and can do push-ups as easily as one could swallow ghee dripping badam halwa .
• I am no longer a desi-consultant and relax folks, I am not out of a job (yet?) (P.S: Prem, please no potentially negative comments on this line and the one below with your “thiruvaay”)
• I have a job that I am really liking (at this point in time)
• I most certainly do not enjoy the annoying production support pager which knows no night or day.
• I managed to celebrate the Saradu pandigai (a.k.a Karadayan Nombu) minus the Adai and falling at my husband’s feet (which I offered just in case he was so inclined but thankfully he was not)
• We also celebrated Sree Ramanavami. I made everything + Neer mor + Paanakam + Vada Paruppu. As always, I pitied poor Lord Rama for having such modest demands in comparison to Lord Krishna who makes everyone slog all day for a more delicious meal.
• We then welcomed the Tamil New Year (even though some atheists seem to think that it is not the new year) as well as we possibly could considering it was a Tuesday morning and I had to leave home at 8:00 for a 9:00 meeting.
• We have decided to do as many 1 day road trips during the weekends as possible. We’ve already done the local zoo, Starved rock state park and Brookfield zoo. Next plan is St.Louis.
• We managed to get some family portraits in which we look like ourselves.
• And finally thanks to the wonderful search engines and your blog rolls, my daily hits have stayed respectable.

So, that’s the roundup of events in the past two months. I  hope to be back as often as possible, until then “Iniya Puthaandu Nal Vaazhthukkal”!

I have always been a true believer of aging gracefully. Of course I am not talking about being mature and pardoning and all that. I am talking about letting your hair fall or gray at it’s own will with no interference from you. My parents did that for most part – my father quite helplessly got to his present semi-bald state, and my mother interfered minimally with her graying thinning hair with irregular mehendi treatments.

Being so miserable at any means of self-maintenance myself, I’ve always wondered in awe at women who always dress impeccably and have manicured nails and perfect makeup. I also wonder at people who keep their hair colored perfectly, but I am mostly shocked by those who make very shoddy attempts at trying to keep their hair black. I have an uncle, who tried very hard with regular die, kali mehendi, herbal treatments, ayurvedic treatments and homeopathic treatments. His hair colored varied so wildly that every time I saw him, he looked very different from the last time I had seen him.

Some of my friends, have been coloring their hair for the past few years in shades of brown and burgundy. They’ve always envied me for having perfectly black hair, and attributed it to me being younger, which brings me to the story of my hair.

My hair had low self-esteem for a very long time. As long as my mother was responsible for my hair, I think I did fine. She did regular oil baths with shikha podi and oiled my hair all through the week. Once I became an obnoxious teenager, most of that stopped. I stopped oiling my hair, because I thought bouncing hair that didn’t stick to my head looked much cooler, I started using shampoo because that smelled better and was easier to wash off. Over a period of time, I realized my hair was growing where I didn’t want it to, and falling where I didn’t want it to fall from. My mother of course, told me in as many words as possible that it was because I did not listen to her. Once I landed in the US, and went for my first hair-cut, the hair dresser “wow”ed and “aaaw”ed so much at my hair, that I realized it was probably a lot better than I had imagined all these years. Hence my only regret since then has remained that my husband was not so awed by my beautiful locks and in general didn’t care if I had any or not.  

All was fine in hair territory until last week, within a period of two days I spotted three strands of white hair, and I am not even 30 yet! I am torn between not interfering in my natural aging process and having my hair colored. Clearly I am not old enough to age! Now I might end up having to be one of those women, who make hair coloring appointments, show up on time and have someone spread gooey stuff all over the head. I would have to sit there and pretend to be relaxing, while my mind would take off contemplating all the impossible things that could happen to my life, have a competition between my brain and the clock to see how accurately I can count time, read boring gossip magazines and learn useless pieces of information about people I don’t know or care about.

To dye or not to dye – that is the question, and the answer is as tangled as my hair can ever get!

Vratham Varuthams (Worries) plague me from time to time. My mother does this Tuesday Vratham – no particular God she says, just good for the system and pray to all Gods. Few years ago, my husband had applied for a US H1B visa, and control freak that I am, and chronic worrier that I am, my imagination conjured up a bunch of likely depressing scenarios if his visa was rejected. So, I decided since I could not personally interfere in matter of USCIS, the only option I had to feel in control was to start my own Tuesday vratham.

So, my mother’s version is that she eats oats or fruits for breakfast and eats tiffin at night. I decided to mimic the same version – well almost. My mother-in-law who was quite perturbed by the fact that a 23 year old newly married girl should put her health through such religious tests, suggested that it was ok to have “paitham kanji” (which is a porridge made of moong dal and jaggery) for breakfast, and fruits and other liquids for lunch and any kind of tiffin (including pongal) for dinner. So, I kept going and my husband got his US visa (much to my amazement). I instantly attributed that to my vratham. My next issue was that I had to join him soon – what if my H4 got rejected. So, I continued on until I reached the US and having happily settled with my husband in a new country of promise, it took me a few weeks of Taco Bell temptation to give up my Tuesday vratham.

Every time I gave up and happily ate guilt-free on Tuesdays, a few months down that path, something I didn’t want happening or something I wasn’t in control of happend. Immediately I would attribute it to my giving up the Tuesday vratham and would promptly restart it.

After many such iterations, my version of Tuesday vratham as it last existed came down to oats for breakfast, any number of bananas during the day, soup for lunch (provided it was onion-garlic free) on tiresome days and any amount of tiffin at night. Yes yes.. don’t laugh.. I know it’s hardly a vratham. But, coming to think of it for someone who is so in love with food as me, having to be on such a schedule even once a week can be very trying. Besides that, it is the thought that counts isn’t it?

Until yesterday, there were a bunch of uncertainties lurking around that were driving me crazy. This morning as I showered, I thought to myself, I should start my Tuesday vratham again, that’s probably why my life is so confused right now. Guess what, things miraculously got sorted out today.

I really have to start my Tuesday vratham again, before too many good things come my way and I lose focus again. What a  maami I am!

Happy Pongal everybody! I had a fairly satisfying Pongal this year. For one, I steered clear of making any kind of Pongal for almost 2 weeks before the festival, just so I would not get lazy and bored of eating Pongal. My husband is still in India, so this year it was just my daughter and me.
Bhogi was a working day, yet in the evening, I decided to treat my daughter (and myself) to some Poli. I made about 6 or 7 polis in all, and we ate most of it without too much trouble.
On Pongal day, it was snowing outside so much that I decided to work from home. I put on her new cotton embroidered pavadai and boy! was she excited! Managed to find at least one “Ponga paanai” shaped vessel in which I boiled milk while my daughter made the ceremonial Pongal “a” Pongal (she somehow couldn’t get pongal o pongal) noises. Soon after, we had some delicious Ven Pongal and Chakkarai pongal ready to be offered to God and then eaten.
Yesterday morning, was the coldest day I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Yet, I decided we would do a quick Kanu tradition in the garage (like last year). So, it was Kanu on aluminium foil. We were both fully dressed in boots, sweater, jacket, hat and gloves. Quickly tossed all the colored rice balls I had made yesterday night, and we were good to go. My daughter asked me, if these were for the crows, where the rice for the pigeons were, to which I replied, the crows would take the food to the pigeons.

So Happy Pongal to all of you. Hope all of you got your share of Chakkarai pongal!

Happy New Year everybody! I promise to improve the quality and quantity of posts that I make this year.

Last year ended with a visit back home to India, where needless to say I had a ton of fun, did loads of shopping and ate an unimaginable quantity of yummy food thus adding to my already heavy weight.

If I started writing about all the stuff I did, I could go on and on and so to spare everyone the misery of a mile-long post, I will aim to make is short and sweet thus:

• Visited Bangalore, Chennai and Ahmedabad (first time).
• Took a few minutes to get accustomed to the number of people who looked like me once I got off at the Bengaluru international airport.
• Weather was just perfect!
• Traffic in Bangalore was horrible horrible and more horrible!
• Cornered several times by my non-existent Kannada skills.
• Enjoyed pre-wedding get-togethers with my cousins and wedding celebrations of my cousin to the maximum possible extent.
• Loved mehendi, pattu podavais, malli poo and dressing up my daughter for all three sessions.
• Watched (and almost relished, I dare say) my husband get a typical madras bashai dose from a taxi driver as he tried his hand driving in nungambakkam after 4 years.
• My daughter loved the attention from the thathas, patis, kollu thatha-patis and innumerable uncles, aunts and cousins.
• Suprised that I enjoyed my Saravana stores shopping experience – I had a personal shopper and all that. Apparently there is a group of folks there who watch out for NRIs and the like and assign shopping assistants. Wondered how they identified me as an NRI when I was in a salwar and had malli poo in my hair. May be too much English to a 3 year old.
• Scared by the utter lack of time to enjoy life by my IT counterparts in India.
• Bought a small baby oil bottle, one mysore sandal soap and a bottle of shringar “chaandhu” at a Naadar kadai for Rs.97 and felt stupid for pulling out Rs.50 note.
• Celebrated a very traditional Karthikai at my in-laws in Madisar and everything. Ate a lot of kadalai urundais – don’t really care for the pori urundais.
• Went bonkers shopping for handicrafts in Ahmedabad.
• Ahmedabad is a nice city – no crowds, bearable traffic and easy parking.
• Shamelessly bought a lovely hand-embroidered diwan set for Rs. 500, then bought cushions, and now hunting for a diwan on the Ikea website. All “thalai keezhai”.. ya I know.
• Provided daily menus (not healthy ones, only tasty ones) and made my mother dish out everything I wanted to eat, thus adding several pounds
• Changed an unbearable number of yucky diapers because my daughter got a Rotavirus infection.
• Found a new hobby – playdough!
• Made sure I packed all 4 bags to the maximum possible extent and now struggling with trying to find a place for everything I bought.
• Bid reluctant bye-byes to everyone back home.
• Successfully answered the question – “I see a lot of H1Bs adjusting their status to Green card. Why do you think they do that?” asked by the immigration officer by saying “Everyone has their own reasons!”
• Happy to be back home and still have a job!
• Damn it’s cold!

Here are a few pics..

Update:

And how did I forget this??  I spoke to Maami quite a few times and felt like I had known her all my life!

Laksh had this post that got me all excited. I thought it was one of those tags that would be fun to do.

You leave a comment on this post, and I’ll assign you a letter. You write about ten things you love that begin with your assigned letter, and post it at your place. When people comment on your list, you give them a letter, and the chain continues on and on. You can also leave a comment and not ask for a letter if you want. If you want to keep the chain going, let me know.

My letter was

And my list is:

1. G for God

While I am not very religious, I acknowledge God as being in control of my life to some extent and I take a second to pray before I do something important.

2. G for Grandparents

I love grandparents – all grandparents. I’ve come to realize lately how important they are to their grandchildren, and how different they are from parents.

3. G for Girl children

I love girl children. I think it makes parenting all the more fun, watching them watch themselves in the mirror and taking care to match their clothes with their clips and their shoes.

4. G for Girl friends

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t have some of my closest girl friends. They are always special - we exchange notes on husbands, cry on each other’s shoulders. Most importantly I know they are always there for me!

5. G for Gravel

 I love the sound of tyres on loose gravel. I like the way it shines clean just after a shower of rain.

6. G for Golgappa

 I love golgappas with anything inside them. I could stuff them with some potatoes, raw onions and ompodi and I can gobble any number of them. Slurp..

7. G for Greenery

I love greenery around me. I am a bit lazy about keeping them green, but I love looking at green fields, green plants. I don’t even need flowers.

8. G for Gifts

I love gifts. I love to give gifts as well as to receive them. In fact, I think I’ve been mostly succesful at gifting the right things (except in the case of my husband where my gifts usually bomb miserably).

9. G for Ganges

One of the most unforgettable memories of my life will be that of bathing in the Ganges. I was so overwhelmed by it’s power and beauty, that I was happy to ignore the others folks upstream who were scrubbing themselves away with soap and water.

10. G for Google

Last and certainly not the least, I love Google. Everything in my life would come to a standstill if I didn’t have Google. I search for everything from recipes, to technical questions to images for this post on Google, and I always find my answer.

So, those were my 10. Any of you want to take it up? Let me know!

So much to blog about and so little time. While I have been busy having a fabulous time in India (for most part), so many blog-worthy things have been happening. I will try to blog about everything in good time, but there were a couple of things that have been waiting for way too long, so first things first.

My blog received it’s first award ever. Laksh awarded me the “Proximity” award! Thanks Laksh!

yaaay.. thaaliyaan thaaliyaan.. thank you thank you.

What is this Proximity award about?
“This award is given to a blog that invests and believes in PROXIMITY – nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.”

And so, I was one of those selected by Laksh.

Here are the list of blogs (in no particular order), that I think deserve this award. I feel they are ones that propogate friendships.

1. Maami’s Weblog
2. Laksh’s Musings (Not sure if I am allowed to add her on but I still think she deserves it)
3. Padmajav’s Weblog
4. Maxdavinci’s Dappan Koothu
5. GradWolf’s Confessions of a magnificient mind
6. The weblog of Me
7. Suganya’s Tasty Palettes
8. Usha’s Ageless Bonding

It’s been four years since I left India. I’ve always wondered if there would come a time, when I came to India and felt I did not belong there anymore. I wondered if this trip would be it. I got here on Wednesday morning, and since then, I have either been jet-lagged or watching TV. Three days of minute by minute coverage of the worst terrorist attack on Indian soil, have made me realize I am more Indian than I thought I was. I felt the same frustration, anger, disappointment and grief that everyone in Mumbai did. I was anxious for my brother who worked a few buildings away from the Oberoi Trident hotel. I was waiting for him to get out of Mumbai and get to the safety of our home in Bangalore. Yet I worried incessantly about the route to the airport, the security at the airport, and his plane journey home to the point that I wondered if perhaps he should just stay at home in Mumbai and not come to meet me. For an hour on Thursday I was seized by anxiety as we heard about an uncle who was at the Oberoi. We were later informed that he had left from there earlier that evening.

While I would love to ramble on about the gruesomness of the despicable act carried out, I doubt if I can truly ever express what I feel. I am not sure if it is more helplessness or more sorrow at what has happened. It is good to see that we Indians who are usually an imperturbable lot, have reacted and in some cases quite strongly. People are openly telling politicians to go to hell and not talk to them about the Mumbaikar spirit and crap. For the first time, I am seeing little coverage of politicians on TV.

After this is all over, when the investigations have been completed and some terrorist group has been blamed along with Pakistan for it’s support of that terrorist organization, when the news media has moved on to more mundane and useless news like an actor getting married to an actress or the election spectacle in the country, when the fallen heroes have been honored, this day would either have been a turning point for the country or it would have been yet another terrorist attack.

I salute the security personnel who gave up their life or put their all at risk and saved the many hundreds that did get saved. To those hundreds who didn’t make it, may their soul rest in peace. I hope their deaths will change things around here.

I have been waiting for quite some time now to blog about this, but I didn’t want to jinx myself by saying something before I had my passport back in my safe hands.

Some of you might have read before (over here) about how much of a pain it was to get my tickets booked to go to India. Obviously I did not know at that time, what the “real” definition of travel-pain was. Happy to have gotten a good deal on my tickets to Bangalore from Chicago for $1100 on British Airways via London, I whiled away some time before I started working on putting together my papers for the U.K. transit visa.

So the British consulate has this esteemed opinion, that if you are an American citizen or permanent resident, or a person on a valid American visa, you can be considered safe to roam the waiting areas of Heathrow airport. However if you are one of those sorry souls, who lurk in between those two statuses, and are on your way from becoming a visa holder to a permanent resident, then somehow you are automatically not considered allowable on airport premises unless you hold this farce that is called a transit visa.

I started with googling (wow, that’s not a word yet?) the local British consulate, to see what I needed to do. After linking me to another site and another and another, I got to the site where I could start filling out my 8 page application. That used to be the first step, before getting an appointment with the UK consulate in Chicago. So, I started filling it up on weekday morning while at work. Then, it started asking me questions I had no answer for. So, I gave up, saved it and went back to work. Once my husband got me the answers to those questions, I went back to finish it. Of course, I didn’t finish it because, then they started asking me for my entire history, my families’ history, geography etc etc. So I gave up again and decided this was not something I could finish during lunch. So, I finally waited until the end of the day before I could complete answering all the questions they had for me and I clicked ‘Next’. So, it asked me to get an appointment, and gave me the option of picking a place that was much closer to home, not to get my visa, but to get my biometrics taken. Not knowing what to do, I picked the option. The next screen asked me if I wanted to mail my documents or take them over to the Chicago British consulate. Again, because that’s what we used to do, I chose the second option, and then that’s it, it gave me the links to download the application, the appointment letter for the biometrics and then said I should mail my documents to the British consulate general in Chicago. I was totally confused. So, I looked up the phone number for the British consulate in Chicago and called them. The message for those who are looking for information on visas was “go to the website”. After scanning the website from top to bottom, I found that the only number one could call to get any information was a 1-900 number that apparently went to the UK, and was charged at $3 a minute. My dear friend Fa, who was also in the same predicament as me, and who could no longer take this uncertainty, decided to make a trip to the British consulate where she was stopped by security who she confused into putting her on the phone with another guy inside the consulate. She was then told, that we needed to get our biometrics taken if the website asked us to, and drop off the application and the original passport, EAD, advance parole, photograph and itinerary at the drop-box outside the consulate. They would then process it in about 5 to 10 working days and send us an email once it was ready. We could then come back to pick it up. All originals! What were they thinking? No option now, because it was too late to cancel tickets and re-route. So we had to go through the torture.

I telecommuted one day and got my fingerprints taken. I wasted another half day driving to Chicago and dropping off my papers (they only accept them between 9 and 10 in the morning). After about 6 days, I got an email that said my visa was approved and my papers were ready to picked up any weekday between 3 and 4 p.m. Last Friday, my husband wasted 2 and half hours on I-90 trying to get into Chicago, while the clock ticked past 4 and took a U-turn back home. Yesterday, I wasted half a day taking a train to Chicago and picking up my papers. In all, I’ve lost about a day’s worth of billing at work, 86$ for the visa, and another 50 something on travel expenses etc. That money would have spared me the pain and torture of the process had I spent it on a more comfortable ticket on some other airline.

I’ve absolutely been “penny wise pound foolish” like the British say!