Ode to Joy

Today’s google doodle made me smile and I wanted to share the joy. What with Christmas around the corner and carols floating through the air, the little Ludwig puzzles seemed most appropriate!  The curls and grumpy look on the cartoon face were worth a chuckle.  The last few weeks have been a mix of joy and sorrow. We lost a beloved 94 year old friend. And while we celebrate him and his amazing life, we miss him terribly too. He’s gracefully stepped through the door into another dimension. ACO – wherever you are, thank you for all the joy you brought to our lives!

In a Winter Veggieland

We started the new year with a trip to the Bagan (or garden). We left behind the hustle and bustle of Kolkata, the traffic, the political rallies and flag-wielding clowns, the traffic, the half built metro and wandered around the greenery. The Bagan is peaceful and quiet (unless you get chased by the geese!)
The G’s Bagan is a small reflection of “animal, vegetable, miracle” and thinking about where your food comes from and who planted and grew it. So here are some snaps to inspire you in 2015 to think about growing some of your own food (or hanging out with wonderful people who do!)
Happy New Year!!

Hybrid variety

Green fingers

Cabbages (and kings)

Herbs

Red saag

Gardener S

Goosey goosey gander

Miracles of the earth

This weeks veggie basket

At the G’s Bagan

Oswald Chambers

Oswald Chambers is a Scottish theologian. My great grandfather had one of his books – My Utmost for His Highest. JAM also have a copy here in BC and we’ve been reading it together at home every Sunday morning. Each passage has beautiful thoughts and despite the ‘old English’ which is horribly King James-ish, it is really inspiring stuff. Yesterday we found this lovely cartoon from Zen Pencils which gives you a peek into what his philosophy is.

Ironically, we’ve just started planning our trek to the Kumaon Ranges :) More about that later…

The humble comma

I am a big fan and user of Ubuntu. I started with 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and have graduated to 12.04, the long term support (LTS) version, Precise Pangolin. The journey from F to P has been fun and I love Ubuntu.

However, I live in world of gates and windows (metaphorically atleast!) so need to use microsoft excel for budgeting spreadsheets. And it bugged me no end that the numbers in excel are in millions by default. I googled changing default to lakhs and crores and came up with a few answers. Nowhere near as many as the Ubuntu forums will give you, but then that just proves the worth of FOSS (free and open source software, for those who don’t speak it yet).

So this is what I did to finally get my comma separators in the right place.

1. Go to Control Panel (I have an ancient version of windows, so you’ll have to get this far on your own). Click on Regional & Language Options

2. Now in the Regional & Language Settings, click the drop down option and look for India – you won’t find it (atleast in my version of windows). Not in the ‘english’ section or in the ‘I’s.

3. I chose English (united kingdom). Don’t think it matter much. Click on Customize (on the right). That open another window.

4. In the Numbers tab, click on the dropdown option for ‘Digit Grouping’ – you get three options and yipee, there is one for LAKHS and CRORES with the comma separators in the right places! Select that option and click OK

5. Open excel, and woohoo, all the numbers are in Lakhs and Crores.

A lakh is 5 zeros 1,00,000 and a crore is 7 – 1,00,00,000 and the comma’s make all the difference!

In Ubuntu, its just one step to do – right click, format cell and custom format. Still, I thought the world of gates and windows could do with some sharing and less fences and walls!

Eyebrows & Pencils

The other day, I read an article in the Indian Express about the modern female eyebrow and how this generation is tending towards low, masculine brows. Rather insulting to someone like me who has flat and very mildly arched eyebrows. Or perhaps I should see it as a compliment to my great (and accidental) sense of style and high fashion. The Huffington Post has a whole gallery of famous over-plucked eyebrows, which have apparently been getting less arched since the 1960s. The word ‘high brow’ means to be intellectual or elite or representative of high culture and society. Fancy-pants, to put it simply. So perhaps our generation is getting simpler with its low brows. Or so I hoped until I got into the bus yesterday.

It was a relatively empty bus and I plonked myself into a seat right at the front. A hand tapped my shoulder from behind. A very powdered nose in a limey green sari said almost accusingly to me “mudilai pencil irruku” (there’s a pencil in your hair). I tried to explain that I didn’t have a clip, and that’s why there was a pencil in my hair. Two eyebrows shot skyhigh into her well-oiled hairline. A few stops later, I was marvelling at the bright maroon sari getting into the bus, pushing past all the old ladies in her rush to get in. “Excuse me, thalai ilai pencil irruku” (there’s a pencil on your head) I heard a minute later. It was maroon sari, who hadnt managed to get the coveted seat, and was standing over me, staring at the top of my head. I naively tried to explain. Couldnt find my clip, or hair sticks, so I used a pencil to hold up my hair. Again, eyebrows went shooting up. Not just maroon sari’s, but the ladies on either side of her as well! By this time, I was getting a little worked up. I hadn’t really thought about it in the morning when I grabbed the first thing possible to tie up my hair. Thank goodness I hadn’t grabbed a pen. A pencil is the lowliest in the hierarchy of writing tools (something I’ve always disagreed with as I like writing and doodling with pencils). Graduating to pens in grade 5 was seen as a growing up ritual, despite the splotchy ink stains on fingers and white shirts. So imagine the shock if I had stuck a ball-point pen in my hair. Reynolds probably wouldn’t approve either. So this never-ending bus ride went on, and I kept mumbling ‘no clip’ to the various straining eyebrows who were helpfully pointing out to me that I’d gone crazy and left a pencil in my hair. “You’re lucky no one tried to pull it out and make you put it back into your pencilbox”, was all my aunt had to say, when I finally got off the bus and grumbled to her.

So much for eyebrows getting less arched and becoming equivalent to the male brow, so much for fashion and the peak of the arch moving away from the nose. The Indian eyebrow is still forms the highest arch when a woman does not conform to the norms society has set out for her. When she uses one tool for another equally useful but not so obvious purpose. When she forges her own path and leaves the beaten track. When she has the courage to be different, to stand out. And it’s going to take a mightly amount of plucking and shaping before we get anywhere close towards an open, accepting societal brow. Hopefully the pencil is mightier than the eyebrow!

Today, I found my hair stick. The pencil I used to write this post.

Hairstick

A New Year Begins

Here’s a reading from a man called Oswald Chambers who wrote this in the 1920’s in this book – My Utmost for His Highest.

” If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be poorer all the days of his life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to yourself, and God will use that expression to someone else.

Go through the winepress of God, where grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else. But if you lazily say –  “I am not going to struggle to express this for myself, I will borrow what I say” (or remain silent), the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to re-state to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not our own until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you is not one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been struggling for utterance in you.”

So as a new year begins, may there be many struggles and experiments in expression, articulation and …. blogging!

Happy New Year!

I’ve moved my blog to https://sparklinraindrops.wordpress.com/

More links. www.justchangeindia.com/news.asp Been using ubuntu and kompozer – but sadly there seem to be some compatibility issues with IE. I say everyone should just switch to mozilla firefox. NOW!

I have a sore throat and have been croaking brokenly all morning. Finally, I’ve given up. Stopped trying. Stopped talking. Of course, Dilip’s enjoying his sunday afternoon nap and my phone is switched off. So apart from the laptop, there isnt really anyone to talk to…. Still, I have my hour of silence.
I’ve always wondered how Gandhi managed to stop talking for one WHOLE day every week. I didnt try that once…but didnt get past one hour. This time though, the silence is involuntary.

However, my hour of silence is only silence on MY part. Around me, things go on as usual. The faint sound of traffic on the main road, the occasional autorickshaw zooming past our house, the watertank next door which is forever overflowing and dripping water onto the banana trees below (incidently, the banana trees, (or are they banana plants?) have a huge bees nest on them. Never seen one like that before, with a lovely concentric circular kind of pattern). The wind is noisy too, and rushes at you as if its trying to push you back into the house. I fight my way to the varanda and listen to more sounds. Clothes flapping on the line, the kids from Kottarvayal, a village just down the road, and the sudden burst of crackers in celebration of the poojas.
I make my way to the kitchen to find something to sooth my aching throat. More sounds there. The gas stove, the water bubbling and boiling, the rasping knife as I peel some ginger. Armed with hot ginger and honey, I smile as I listen to Dilip’s deep breathing that is interrupted by the sudden contented snore.
It’s not so bad this time. My world seems to be making enough noise to cover up for my involuntary silence.
(Throat, I hope your not listening to this though – because still I want you back!!)

Finally, the wedding albums :)

http://picasaweb.google.com/shikhadilip