I am a Bright

Reader would have undoubtedly observed the use of the article "a". Allow me to explain.

Most people around me and elsewhere know where I stand on God and religion. Let us look up some of the words that could be used to describe this opinion.

Atheism, disbelief, godlessness, impiety, infidelity, irreligion, irreverence, unbelief, nihilism, skepticism, heresy, iconoclasm.

As you can see this list mostly made up of negatives. "theism" which is good becomes "atheism" which is bad, "belief" (good) becomes "disbelief" (bad). In short these are derived words, negation of purportedly positive attributes.

This is not restricted to atheism alone. Fifty percent of world population suffers from the problem of derivation. I am referring to Woman. Not only is the word derived, according to the three monotheistic religions, the woman herself is derived from man.

Another example is the word Homosexual. The rebranding of sexual orientations to being gay and straight was one of the best things that happened. No longer are gay men dishonest or crooked (not straight) nor straight men necessarily unhappy with their lot in life (not gay). The two words are not opposed to each other and there is no historic tension.

About three years ago I set out to invent such a word. As I have constantly bemoaned the fact, I am just not original. Several notable persons had already been at this and this leads us to the Brights Movement. Here is wonderful description from Richard Dawkins

Gay is succinct, uplifting, positive: an "up" word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer, faggot and pooftah are insults. Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal, we need a word of our own, a word like "gay". ... Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

In summary, I am a Bright. Are you bright too :-)

The early bird catches the worm

I was never one for getting up early in the morning. Sleep was my first love. Growing up, we were constantly told to get up early before sunrise and greet the rising sun. Indians even have a ritual called "Surya Namaskar". I did not like the rising sun. I cordially disliked it. I could not understand what people saw in it. It still looked round!

My parents not only liked rising early, they also associated early morning with studying. According to them if one studied in the morning, one learned better, retained more in memory; ergo good grades.

They would repeat the well know adage, the early bird catches the worm.

When I clarified that I was a vegetarian, I discovered that my father had strong knuckles! I still have a bump in my head as proof.

When your wife says - Jump

You would normally say, Why Honey?

Well I also used to ask such stupid questions for the first fifteen years of my marriage.

Needless to say, they were not very pretty years. Life was tough and miserable. I had to hear constantly how I just did not get it, how marriage was a team effort, how I constantly left things hanging, never followed instructions which even a child could follow, how other men would do all the chores in the house and outside the house, cook, clean, take care of the kids, read to them .....

I agree I am a little slow, I always make mistakes and sometimes more than once, but no one has ever said that I did not learn from them. I have reached a point in my education that I now can now follow the simple instructions really well. In fact I have actually improved to a point where I can take hints, also known in academic circles as non-verbal communications.

Let me give you a few examples.

The other day, I saw on top of my coffee mug, a few coupons for grocery items. Now someone who is a little slow would have simply thrown them as trash and finished their coffee. I understood that this was my wife way of saying hint hint (wink wink) nudge nudge.

Raag, you better go to the grocery store and purchase those items and used the coupons without fail, or else.

On an other occasion, when I woke up, I saw three laundry baskets blocking the way to the bathroom. I smiled at this subtle hint. I realized this was my wife's way of saying.

Fold these clothes you lazy bum.

After the morning shower I came downstairs and bumped my shin on something hard. I looked down and saw that the dishwasher door open. This non-verbal communication was getting too easy!

Dude, unload the clean dishes, load the dirty one, and start another load!

So now when my wife says "Jump", I say "How high honey".

Words of wisdom - From Manama

Last week when we were driving in India, Manama pointed to some dogs on the street and inquired about them. We told her that they were stray dogs. When she wanted to know what stray dogs were and we explained that these are animals without an owner and as a result they have to fend for themselves and that they do not have a home and have to look out for their own food; poor animals!

She thought for a second and asked us. "Rather than looking for food, why don't these dogs look for a master instead!"

Today as we were driving to the school, she pointed to a tree she usually points to and emphatically pronounced - That is not a weeping willow. The leaves on this tree is not the right shape and this tree is bent too low. I saw pictures of the tree in a book at school.

Now I do not know a banyan from a weeping willow but just to provoke her I said - It is!

Her answer had me in stitches

Trust me Dad, I know what a weeping willow looks like!

Figment of Imagination

This CNN article describes an extensive research using twins that debunks the myth of the G-Spot. The pressure is off me and all men. Henceforth we can focus on ourselves free of guilt! Just kidding.

I know, this is the beginning of a controversy; how does one scientifically debunk a subjective thing?

Sleep My First Love

I loved sleep. I would play a lot and somewhere in there I went to high school and college, but come 10PM I was out and nothing could wake me till I had worshiped Hypnos for 8-10 hours. I was very religious about it. Weekend the worship was an extended one, taking as long as 12 hours. I can see that my older one has taken after me. She once did not get out of bed till 1PM in the afternoon!

You know how people drop in on you in India without calling first. Well the reason they did that was very few people had telephones then and cell phones had not yet been invented. It was not like we had much of a life outside of home. So people knew that they could expect someone at home more often than not and the few times you travel a couple of hours to find out that your friend is not at home, you go back cheerfully.

C'est la vie and all that you know.

Well this one time, about 25 years ago, a good friend of our parents, Mr Venkatachalam and his wife Girija came to see us and no one but I was at home. Figuratively speaking, of course. I was physically present but my mind was lost in the dream world. They rang the bell but the result was not conclusive. It was not as if I was far away from the bell. Moreover these are Indian ones built with a strong sense of purpose. I mean they were definitely not build to be polite as in please wake up. No; they were loud and shrill; capable of waking almost everyone but the dead. They told me later that after ringing the bell futile for 5 minutes they took to banging on the door.

Our neighbors got into the act and together while one banged on the door the other yelled loudly. This is not unusual in India at least when I was growing up. Finally after a quarter hour of various attempts at rousing me; most folks would have given up after 2 minutes; they left a note and went back home. A hour later when my parents and sister came back from wherever they had been, they discovered the note and got in and woke me up.

Mr Venkatachalam was a lot of fun to be around. I am sorry to use the past tense. He died last year when I was in India. He was very funny and could tell a joke well. He had a good singing voice and was an amateur Carnatic vocalist. He had a good knowledge of the scriptures and would frequently recite the old shlokas to my parents and their friends and bring out the meaning behind them. He never talked down to you; he was capable of engaging me in a conversation as well as he could my parents. I could argue with him which I could not with my dad. Whenever I met them later in life, he and his wife would remind me about it and we would have a good laugh over it. I think of him often and miss him.

Back to my sleep; fatherhood did nothing to diminish my passion for sleep.

And then I started working for a company that had developers in India in 2006. Well it is simple; to get work done, one need to engage with the resources in real time. People think that you can send emails during the day here and gnomes in India (and other places) would scurry around and do the work. It is mostly collaborative and regular conversations are required to iron out details. Well with the time zone differences of about 10 hours, the best way is for folks in US to work very early and folks in India to work late. So I started getting up at before 6AM.

Before 2006, I do not recollect seeing Helios ride out in his chariot, since then I have taken to reprimanding him for being late to work! It has gotten so bad even if I sleep very late, say at 1AM , I still end up getting up by 7-8AM. I cannot sleep more than 6-7 hours even during the weekend!

I am sad, my first love has deserted me.

Ambitions

Those who have two or more kids marvel at the personality differences. If you ask my older one what she wants to be you would get a shrug and if you prod more you will get a slightly more clear answer - I don't know.

On the other hand you do not have to ask the little one. She has no fewer than a half dozen careers chosen. When we were driving back home, she saw this bridge under construction and told me that she want to be a Crane Builder. I asked her if she liked building cranes, no she said she like building bridges. So I pointed out that she wanted to be crane operator. She liked that a lot.

Then she casually mentioned three other careers she had chosen for herself and the first on the list was Archeologist. I tried to put her in place by asking her if she knew what that was, but she is made of unsquashable India rubber. She promptly said, she was going to dig for Dinosaur bones!

Oh, BTW, she also wants to be a doctor and a teacher.

This is the first season she has paid serious attention to fall colors. She asked why some were still green and my wife told her that pines were ever greens and then explained to her that pines do not shed their needles.

Manama insisted that that pines also change color. My older one explained again to her again what it meant to be ever green. But the little one is stubborn as a mule. She insisted that she has seen pines change color.

This argument went on for a few minutes when she triumphantly pointed to a pine like tree that had changed colors. We are not sure if it is a pine or not. In any case my wife and my daughter mustered as much dignity they could and moved on.

The next my wife needled her.

"Manama, look at that pine. I think pines too change colors"

Her reply was typically cocky

"You think. but I know they do!"