Manic Monday or a Amazing Monday

Hola!!


Was reminded about the song "Just another Manic Monday" by the Bangles group.


Weekend gone and here comes another week. Back to work (or school/college). Ever noticed how quickly the weekend goes? Even before you notice, its gone!! And then we are eagerly waiting for the next weekend to come :-).


If you observe, you would notice that as Friday evening comes closer, most of us are charged up , excited and raring to go :-).Why? Coz the weekend's coming and its party time... And also as Sunday evening approaches, the mood slowly changes (as if getting ready for a war or battle) and all you want to do is sink into the couch and   get rest as much as possible, or start preparing for Monday morning. One classic example is my son. If I ask him to finish off his homework on friday evening, he would say "Dad, tomorrow is saturday. I will do the homework on sunday" :-) .. And on sunday evening, just as he is about to hit the bed, he remembers and it takes a whole lot of effort from all of us to get his homework done :-).


Though I took the example of my son, most of us have similar experiences :-)..


And there are some of them who eagerly look forward for Mondays. For example, couple of years back , I used to look forward to Mondays. I had lots of friends at work and it was fun to be with them. And over the weekends, they had their own stuff to do and since I was staying away from family, I did not have much to do over the weekend. So, ultimately it all boils down to what is the context for the near future.


Imagine, you are supposed to go on a date 2 days from now. From this moment till you actually go out, it would seem that the days are going too slow and you cant wait for 2 more days. On the contrary, consider you are going out of town and would not be meeting the person you love for a month or so, then you would feel that the days are shorter (though in both cases the day is of 24hrs only :-) ) .


So, in short, our actions/emotions/feelings are totally totally based on the context that we have for the near future. It could be an empowering context , which makes u charged up ,excited!! or on the other hand, it could be an dis-empowering context, which could make you sulk ..


Well, another fresh week is here and the world looks bright and beautiful. 


Have a GREAT week ahead :-) and specially to my friend for whom this is a much awaited week.


Cheers
K

Degree Kaapi

It was lunch hour and after a decently long meeting, I was looking forward to have a sumptuous lunch. As i was driving through the roads of chennai, I realised that I was near Mylapore, and the obvious choice of eatery was the famous Karpagambal mess.

So, off I went navigating the always-oh-so-crowded mada street until I reached the destination. As I sat there, waiting for my food to arrive, I happened to notice the price list that was put up on the wall. I started going through each item in that list. I stopped at the third one which read "Degree Kaapi" . 

I have heard the term quite a number of times (thanks to my Grandma) , but never really ventured to find more about it. Sitting here , waiting for food and nothing better to do, I did a search for "Degree coffee" on my mobile. What I found was really interesting which i will share in a moment.

In this age of "Coffee Days", "Barista", "Java City", I think its a good idea to know a bit about Coffee or Kaapi.

So, I had this question "Why is it called Degree Kaapi". Came across a few explanations . 

1) Coffee prepared with "degree" milk (milk of good quality as measured by a lactometer) was called degree coffee

2)  when coffee is decocted for the first time, it is called as the first degree or simply as the "Degree Coffee".

My thoughts and reading was interrupted by the arrival of my food :-)

There is a whole lot of detail that is available @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee.

Kaapi enjoy maadi

Cheers

K

Awaiting Eagerly......

I am sure most of us have had this experience at one point or other. The presence of a loved one is most felt in his/her absence. I am going through that experience right now. Its vacation time , Schools shut , that time of the year when kids have a gala time and parents (well most of them), otherwise :-) ..

Its hardly been 3-4 days since my son has gone on vacation to his G'pa's place, and it seems that he has gone for a longer time. Much of the time he was here, we were mostly wrestling over something , sometimes playing, some good times, some otherwise.. And now when he is gone on vacation (even if its for a few days), the void created cannot be explained but only experience . This is true with every relationship, especially if the other person is someone whom we dearly love :-) .. Interestingly , that person is more often in our thoughts when they are away. More because we are thinking if they are thinking about us, or maybe not, missing us or not..Whatever it is, i know he is having a good time at his G'Pa's..

I remember a similar incident that happened a few years ago when my son was 3 yrs old and I had returned home after spending a month away from home. I guess these little ones have instincts. He was there at the doorsteps even before I could ring the doorbell :-) .. I still remember that moment. On seeing me , he jus came running and hugged me tight . He held on for a good minute or two .. Amazing!!! mabbe as kids we would have done the same.. Somewhere in the process of growing up , we have suppressed that display of affection ..

Waiting for the day when he would be back from his vacation.. ( and we can resume what we were doing.. having fun) ..

Cheers
K

Celebrating Women's day

International Womens day is being observed on Mar 8th for a long time now. Since 1911 to be precise. What started as a political move has now lost most of the political flavor and has given way for people to express their love and gratitude for all the women in their life.


It surely has caught up in India as well. I know of a few friends of mine who argue that they dont need a "women's day" to show affection. Some feel its more of commercial value. Anyways, will leave that aside for now.


I was driving back home from work and spent a good amount of time inching my way through the city traffic, and during this time i notice atleast 20 women having either a gift box or a bouquet of flowers in their hand. And corporate houses doing their bit to encourage and promote this.


Multiple thoughts ran across my mind and I realised that though we (read men mostly) have deep respect/gratitude towards women, we dont express it , or sometimes the expression of love is just being silent ;-) , and here is an opportunity to express that gratitude/love towards the women (spouse/mother/sisters/friends) in our lives.


To all the women in my life, I love u and grateful for the contribution you make to my life.


Be right Back :-)

Collections with a difference

When I was growing up, I was fond of collecting stamps. So much so that I lost count of the albums I had. God only knows where they are now. And I remember 6 out of 10 people had the same interest at that point in time.

However , Its interesting to know and see people who have passion for collecting things with a difference. For instance, an ex-colleague of mine used to collect spoons and had a display of all the spoons he collected from all over the world. I reckon he would have a huge collection by now. Another intersting collection which one of my relatives has is collection of  "Ganesha" . As of now the count stands at 168, Ganesha in various forms and shapes :-), which makes me conclude that Ganesha is the most customised god :-) ..Interestingly , save for a  few. most of the collectibles of this collection (of Ganesha) have been gifted by someone or the other :-)

Here are few pictures from the collection. The best one that i liked is "Ganesha in a crystal"

Learning from Kids - Being unstoppable

This is something I always love. observing kids in what they do and how they learn things. And interestingly , they pick up most of the things from parents (and we wonder "where did u learn that from?"). My son is very good at immitating his mom :-P (some mannerism, speaking etc)

One thing I observed and learnt today is "being unstoppable". Here's how it all went about.

One of his friends at play home had made a paper toy (he calls it scary finger). He wanted another one of the similar kind and asked me to do it. I looked up from my laptop screen and shrugged indicating "I dont know how to do it". what happened next took me by real sweet surprise. My son fishes out his school diary from his bag, ruffles through the pages with a serious look on his face and after some time comes to me holding a page open and says "This is his number (that guy's dad'ss number). call him and ask him" . I was like "waattttt, noo way.. not at 10 in the night". My son almost took the phone and started dialing which is when I sprung into action  of cajoling , convincing. Realising that it did not go through well, I offered to make something else, but he was clear about what he wanted (and something that I did not know to make) ..So, I had to do find means of doing it. Did some reverse engineering on the already done toy and managed to make a similar one. And boy, was he happy to see it?? loved the expression on his face :-)

Bottom line .. when something appears to be urgent, we find one way or other to make it happen. Only thing is most of the things in life are important to us, but not urgent and we keep postponing it till it becomes urgent :-)

Ciao

K

A different world vs a world with a difference

A few days back I was out doing some photography for a project that my wife has taken up. This project is about making basic public services easily accessible for the physically challenged folks. My job was to go around and get pics of the public places that are near to the place where I live.

To give a brief background, even before starting this work I have been associated in empowering the physically challenged folks in one way or other. One instance was when I was a scribe in an examination for a visually-challenged person whom I had not known until the day before his examination. The point I want to make here is that it was not a new thing for me to do this sort of stuff.


Coming back to this project, I started to go around my neighborhood and began capturing pictures of places like parks, school, places of worship,restaurants,public toilets, bus stand and so on.


It took me a good deal of time to go around and in the process visited a number of each type of the above mentioned categories, and it was one eye-opener for me. 


Imagine you going to your favorite restaurant for a meal. The restaurant is on the first floor. There is one small hurdle. There is only one way u can get to the first floor (no stairs, no elevator), a rope which hangs from the first floor. That would probably be the last time you ever went that side (to that restaurant). THAT is the level of accessibility that is available for the physically challenged folks in most of the places that I mentioned. Most of the places have steps, including most of the public parks and places of worship, which is a hindrance to the physically challenged person. Shockingly , some of the smaller health care centers are not equipped with easy access for physically challenged people.

There are rules and policies for each and everything to be  "easy to access" , but most of the times these are on paper. In reality, its a dream come true.

There are lots of organisation doing good amount of work in their best possible capacity. But the need is for more hands to join to make a big difference.


What is the message that we are communicating without saying?? How do all of us look at people with physical challenges?


How would it be to make a difference to atleast 1 specially abled person (if not daily) atleast once a month? it could be doing anything that makes a difference, brings a smile to them.


Jaago!