Whirlwind week

The last week went by very fast. It all started when San hydroplaned her car and survived a crash. She came out in one piece with minor bruises, and yes, she is fine and back to her normal self and to prove that point, she will yell at me for mentioning this to the world. That will bring her "percentage normalness" from 95.6% to around 98.9%. In a couple of days, we are confident that she will reach 100% !

Work went from hectic to unmentionably busy at the same time. Almost worked two days straight with a few power naps of 30 to 45 mins towards the end of the week. Then slept for 12 straight hours to compensate and the weekend almost disappeared.

The only saving grace was my college roomates visit today! He came from the east coast and spent most of the morning with us. It was a treat to watch him play with the kids. He told my wife and MIL old stories of me, but they always beat him to the punchline! He was so disappointed to see that my behaviour has stayed consistant over the years and that my wife and MIL could guess how the old grad school stories ended! For me, it was a joy to watch them make fun at my expense.

The best part? He could not believe that I don't go near the kitchen anymore. He told my kids "your daddy cooks really well, you know. He cooks great food for you everyday right?" and they had the deer in the headlights look. If Jr. was 16 she would have said "our daddy? cooks all the time? which parallel universe are you from, dude?"

fun, fun, fun, to make up for a nasty week.

On the plus side, we now have a new car, now that the old one is totalled. San has a new algorithm for driving the car:

Pray
Sit in car
check everything before opening garage
open garage
carefully ease car out
check dimensions all around car (this reminds me of how saastrigals ask you to put darbais in all four directions around the fire during a prayer!) San looks at all diagonal points to check for something.
drive out extremely carefully

Everyone at home was upset with my busy schedule at work the whole week. Jr. did come to me once and say "Daddy , look I did something very different!"

She had come up with a novel way to assemble the rings on the toy, just out of pure boredom.

So I promised to tell everyone how she did something differnt. So here it is..

She might check on me tomorrow.. This blog is slowly being taken over by the kids!

This week promises to be less busy, and that means a few posts that never made it out of my head into the draft, will actually get out!

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Interesting view of things

Today in the letters to the newsdesk section of the news on public radio, a listener had pointed out an interesting fact.

The student who went on a rampage at Virginia Tech., was being showcased as a "Korean kid"! What is interesting is that he was born in Korea, but he lived his entire life here, went to school here, went to college here, was raised as an American and for all practical purposes was predominantly exposed to American culture.

The newscasters are trying to imply that his actions have something to do with his "Koreanity". Scary part is that, it is simply a question of time before someone in the media actually publicizes the word "Koreanity" and someone else misspells it as "Koranity" and before you know it you have the President triumphantly declaring that he has found the connection between the shootings and the Koran!

The USA today is scary. Over the years I have spoken to many teenagers and college students here, from the time I came here as a graduate student to the the present day. I just thank my stars that I managed to grow up in India in the eighties, an environment where students focused on their studies, were too young to chase the other sex when they were in high school (had no peer pressure to lose their viriginity before graduation !) or had to work and study at the same time.

Kids in this country have a tough time for the most part because they share the financial burden of their education (partially or completely), have peer pressure to do things that distract them from their studies and their future, do not have good examples and role models to keep them focussed and have a system that is more than happy to dole out overpriced student loans, condoms and depression pills to school kids as solutions to their problems as opposed to getting to the root cause.

The lucky ones do get to have role models, parents or relatives that support them during their education process and have the ability to focus and prioritize their goals. It is a fact that the most brilliant and creative people I have met over the last decade are of American origin. If a person has to succeed in spite of all these distractions and responsibilities, they have to be really good. Maybe that explains that creativity!

I have already written many a post on raising my kids here. I can only hope that if I support their education, keep them focussed , put them with kids whose parents share the same hopes and fears (yes, fear works at a lot of levels here) , then they will succeed!

Time and place do play a part in how people grow and develop, probably more than their birthplace or nationality. The media has a lot of growing up to do!

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