The kids were leaving for Lucknow. Surprisingly, it turned out to be emotional just when I was busy pushing on the suitcases being closed up!

The moment they left, I ate atleast 3 katoris of murukku and atleast 10 milk bikis. I then proceeded to collapse with sleep and couldn’t get up when the kids called from the airport.

On the other hand, I’m glad to have been maintaining the WeightIn30 logs as writing that I have not done the last CrossFit session, in fact, pushed me to do it.

Performance:

1. fiber: pushed for high fiber despite having Sunday poori. I’m proud of having fiber consistently for lunch and dinner.

2. IF: Suddenly it’s been tough to manage 14 hours. Day 14 ended with me eating dinner at 9:30 pm! 7:30 pm is being a hard goal to track for last meal.

3. Steps: 9000 steps done

4. CrossFit: 3/3 done! 50 burpees.

Today is a classic day that I did everything right with respect to fiber, steps and CrossFit but the diet was screwed. And it’s not going to help with the weight loss. All the other 3 things are ON TOP of the diet, specifically, not binge eating.

Hopefully this sets in soon.

Day 12: we bought some food from outside the previous day and I had gorged on rice and roti with some junky masala paneer and dal makhani. Tried to eat less but the dal makhani was so irresistible.

It showed next day. Even post the gut cleaning, I didn’t feel hungry. That must mean something. Hunger is a sure shot sign that the process of toxin removal has started, I think. The mind beseeching us to eat seems to be pointing in that direction.

Mom made some cake. I tried a bit of it but somehow cakes have become extremely carby and unable to eat more than a couple of bites. Maybe good for me. No sweets eaten, so that’s good.

Performance – Day 12:

Food: One of my huge weaknesses is chegodilu. I simply cannot stop at 1 or 2. So I must have eaten about 10 of them through the day

Fiber: fiber eaten at dinner only

IF: maintained at 14 hours because I didn’t feel hungry. I wouldn’t say it was successful from a fasting perspective.

Steps: 9k steps done

Day 13

Finished the junk food with roti but ate much more fiber. courtesy Komala, who kept the grated carrot ready in a huge container by 11 am. That’s one key, to do this in the morning itself. The texture of grated carrot helps massively to eat it, given all the teeth troubles.

I went for a walk in the evening, 10k steps done AND the highlight was – I stopped myself from eating momos by recollecting the bad IF from the day before. Success, brain persuaded! Instead, I ate a chappati, matar paneer and carrot (and a few chegodilu ).

Gut cleaning today was painful, I can see how long that junk food stays, I can still feel it. Fasting definitely doesn’t seem to work with hotel food.

Performance:

1. Fiber: met the lunch milestone, yay.

2. Steps: 10k done

3. IF: 13:59 hours done. Even one minute not done is that hour not done.

4. CrossFit : need to do 3/3. Pending.

What has it been, 14 years?!

I intend to write everyday now, and I need a reliable friend! And here we are!

So before we start, let me tell you I’ve been on this journey of finally writing down about my weight loss exercise, after nearly 25 years of struggling with extra weight. It has been the center of my self esteem and I will paste the earlier posts shortly so that we have better context here.

Day 12:

I have a feeling I am going to put in weight. I’ve understood why now. Over the past 2 days I’ve been unmindful of what I was eating at lunch. That meant ‘reckless abandon’ into carbs, leading to some pulihara on day 11 and yesterday a brownie!! It was waaay too sweet, but I kept eating and didn’t bother to even compensate with fiber.

And that’s it. I was feeling hungry again at 3. This is the very vicious circle I need to avoid, which can simply be met with a small amount of fiber like cucumber or a fruit afterwards. This is easy to fix. But not so easy to be mindful of.

Performance:

1. IF: it was very hard to continue after 13 hours, I was unable to concentrate at work. My focus now is on extending that torture from 1 hour to 1.5 hours. Usually it doesn’t happen before 14 hours but yesterday was different. Cleaning the guy (aka pooping) seems to create a massive difference in tolerating IF. Undecided on how I should feel about guy cleaning.

2. Fiber: bad bad bad. No fiber at afternoon == no weight loss. Rule of my life.

3. steps: only managed 4.8k steps. This is a good reminder that even a 20 min walk while on the phone can get to 6.5k steps, it’s not hard at all, just mindfulness required to make a choice.

4. CrossFit: leg workout done. Hoping the back is ok for burpees on Saturday.

All comments and brickbats welcome. Will leave a forwarding address, but I seriously wonder if anyone reads this blog anymore.

After two years, my amalgamation here has been so complete that only when I see telugu movies (which is rarely the case these days, what with the dry spell since Happy Days) do I realize that I am in a foreign land. But this incident struck a note, an interesting one at that.

So there I was, at Costco, on an early Saturday morning at 10 am (yes, it’s early!). For those of you  new to the Costco culture, it is the equivalent of an Indian wholesale godown, only that the humongous bags of rice or dal are replaced with purple boxes of raisin bran cereal or 3 pound nets of potatoes. The pyramidal arrangement of watermelons or oranges is replaced with small 2 or 3 pound packages of ready-to-carry apples imported from China. The familiar jute bag Indian families use for shopping are substituted by railway cargo style ‘shopping carts’ and new age polythene bags, often packed using double their numbers to ensure that they don’t tear.

And there I was with my buddies, pushing one shopping cart in front and pulling one from behind after a friend of mine apparently got lost between the colossal racks, trying to look for a shaving kit (When he found it  ultimately, he didn’t take it because not only did the economies of scale not allow him to grab just the blades, but also forced him to buy another razor). On the numerous rounds we had already taken inside Costco that day, there were two old ladies, peering about excitedly in the medicine section.

As it happened, one of them approached me while I was red in the face trying to both push and pull two carts. With bright eyes and a Sunday smile, she said, “Excuse me.. you  seem to have done a lot of shopping.. could you tell me where.. oh, excuse me (bending forward), do you speak E-N-G-L-I-S-H?”

It was then that my enthusiastic Indian head waggling abruptly stopped. My eyes became wider and I shrank and inflated at the same time, and shortly, after a brief two seconds, I was able to look into her eyes, bend a little and could hear myself replying with an over-emphasized ‘YES.’.

“Oh, that is good. Would you know where Claritin is available?”, she asked, her smile being ever so genuine and respectful.

“I believe that you would find it in the thirrrrd aisle from herrrre, though that’s one thing I haven’t bought.”, I joked in an unusually bad imitation of an Indian accent that I seemed to have put on instantly to convince her that I did know the language, although not with the same accent.

“Thank you very much. Have a great day!”, she said, and trundled along.

For all my two years here, it was the first time when I was asked if I knew English, and rather than being mature about it, I conjured an image of myself being an ape, scratching my ears as if I seriously wouldn’t have been able to comprehend if she would have continued to talk. There are  many Spanish speaking folk, a lot of Indians and more Chinese, who stay here, probably getting by without using this ubiquitous language, it seems.

Although not a wee bit racist, not one bit condescending, and in no means disrespectful, it did remind me of my colour in a foreign land that I was foreign.

Coming from tropical countries like India, one is inclined to think that spring is all about chirping birds and flowering trees and in general, quite some sun. One usually celebrates either the harvesting time or Holi, with lots of colour and smiles being the theme of the season.

That’s just a tropical thing, I guess. This year in America, spring is.. well, not.

March is here, and it snowed twice in the last 20 days. It feels really odd (of being in a land far, far away¹) , when I find myself walking to school in three layers of clothing, and Ma talks about the sweltering heat and 3 hour power cuts in Hyderabad.

Spring break’s here, and it’s as gloomy and depressing as a december evening. Sometimes I wish the sky would open up like a big blockbuster movie and give an apt reason for calling it ‘torrential rain’, rather than just drizzling like a very sad and long running soap starring Alok Nath².

I just miss you, Sun.

1 – Shrek was the inspiration. Donkey helped too.

2 – Please god, spare us the agony of another ‘Thoda hai, thode ki zaroorat hai’.

It happened about 9 years ago. There was a new guard hired in mom’s school.  He seemed to be the quiet and understated types, the ones who worked silently. And as usual, all the kids (read us) were creating a racket on the basketball court this particular evening, bickering over a foul and penalty.

Enter a small something. A ball of scraggly white with ears too big for his age. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, apparently having been scared away by a band of others in the neighbourhood. If he were clean and brown, I’d have mistaken him for a puppy version of my labrador.

Now as far as I can remember, everyone wanted the pup to shut up and asked this shy guard to do something about it. And guess what, mounted by all that pressure, he picked up a rock twice the size of that creature, walked towards it and from 6 feet away, hurled it with all his strength.

The howling stopped instantly.

We were all there, dumbstruck. We hadn’t done a thing to stop him as we watched him find the stone and throw it like a pitcher. I vaguely remember a friend lifting that dog and putting him near the trees.

No, I’m not recalling this memory to gain sympathy for that poor creature. Yes, I am scarred. No, I’m not looking for empathy either. Yes, I’m trying to ask why we keep shut when something matters to us.

Have we, as an Indian society,  really changed? How can an entire country be held ransom by some men who follow utterly untrue aspects of a religion and beat up women? How is it that when some ‘juvenile’ rears up his head post 26/11 and asks certain artists to get out of our country, nobody (not even the police) stops him? How can others stand it?

Have we truly become civilized?

Alright, alright.. bad joke.

Hmm.. so I’m back. From a fabulous vacation. I did not open one book, did not send one useful email and hardly talked to anyone I knew professionally. Instead, I ate like there’s no tomorrow, gallivanted around the country, fed stray puppies and took 500 photographs from my new camera. Ah, bliss!

When you know what they mean by ‘coming back to the real world’, you realize that the experience is akin to having been flying in the sky and then feel someone tug at your leg, saying ,”Hey, babe.. are you gonna come down the high post or what?”

The journey back was indifferent, the experience after, listless. Man, there’s no variety! There are no orange coloured shops saying ‘Sripullareddy Ghee Sweets Shop’ and the roads are looooooonnnnnggg and wiiinndddddiiiiinnngg (you get the picture). The trees are bare, the snow is just a tad bit comforting and the freaking heater won’t work!

Talk of hangovers.

All I can see is the degree of knowledge you have about these terrorists and their exact locations. All I can make out is the fact that when the time comes, you CAN do what is needed, but mostly, you don’t.

And you still call them ‘stateless’?

What a fucking joke. *

* The White Tiger – by Aravind Adiga

Fast forward 2007. Mothers in America want their army sons back. Wives and children still wait for their dads to get back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Future soldiers leave, with their family in nervous resignation.

Come 2008. A group of highly intelligent men draw an elaborate plan to create panic and resurface themselves. And who do they find to be their softest target? The one country they could very well use as an easy pawn to get to the King.

This one pawn has the word corruption written all over it. It attaches itself to a bright middle class that has the capability to adjust very well to any laws of the world, but its own. And for good reason – its law enforcement is rotting.

And every time this pawn is pushed back (sometimes tragically), it points its dirty fingers at its neighbor, someone equally helpless to carry out any effective restraint. This neighboring pawn’s last queen was blown up in full public view, and was forgotten just as easily.

The problem is with me. I could not find the right kind of education, so I walked away to get some. I couldn’t find law and order, so I went away where I could feel safe. Even when I was there, I paid a traffic havildar 100 bucks when I was caught riding triples, and did not take the receipt knowing full well where the money would go.

I am responsible for the systemic corruption I have fed into my country. I am the cause for choosing a bunch of ignorant nincompoops called ‘my leaders’, who resigned their positions by force, not by choice. I am the reason why these so-called-ministers did not even deign to come down and talk to the victims, let alone say sorry.