How was this even possible?

In 2005, I had posted this about Naadi Astrology and this unbelievable palm leaves that had poems that could accurately give all my details from my birth to the point those leaves were destined to be read. 

It is now your destiny to be able to hear this !! There was no easy way to upload just an audio to a blog then. Now we have methods!

There was no google in 1997 and even then, getting details about someone including their Indian Horsocope which needs date of birth and place of birth with an accuracy of 4 minutes, time windows, family details, names etc.. all in poetry.. not possible with even today's AI and computing power to write those as recitable poems. 

It was just amazing. A lot of folks reached out to me then and I did give them the contact to go find their palm leaves of destiny. However, not everyone who went there, could find their leaf. That is part of the deal. 

Some folks went multiple times over a period of years and managed to find it later! 

All that said, as part of digitizing audio tapes from years ago, found Naadi tapes from when my parents got my leaf and how years later San found her leaf on a visit to Vaideeswaran Kovil. She rushed it and was impatient as she had to come back to a hungry kid. Still you can see two data points.. 

Majority of what was said in detail was accurate. Then again, a lot of stuff was vague when it came to the future. We have two girls. In my reading, that was off. In San's reading it was right. 

If you have the patience, you can listen to this..  pretty impressive actually for a palm leaf that is a few thousand years old and preserved for generations in a temple! 

Maybe our destinies are all pre written.. or maybe there is some time travel involved here. In either case, the beauty of human existence is that we just go about our daily life with amazing selective memory loss. We all assume that we will wake up day after day and do things as we plan them. We put in for vacations 3 months from now, plan weddings, put 5 year FD's, etc.. forgetting that there is no guarantee for anyone for their very next breath! That is actually a good thing, so we can keep moving!

I usually forget this tape exists, except when someone brings up destiny in a conversation. Guess the readers of this blog can scratch their heads after listening.. 

Not sure if these places are still around and do the leaf readings. Have read articles that there are a lot of fake centers and copies floating around. Still not sure how any fake thing can guess this many details right and come up with limmerics in record time while the person is sitting in front of them.. that too in ancient Tamil script!

If any of you have had recent experiences with "meeting your leaf", do share in comments! 

This was out of sight and hearing and out of mind for a good 16 or so years. So it was interesting to listen to after a long time.. especially with Jr. listening in on every word  and asking questions. 

She was laughing so loud hearing my dad keep interrupting the reader about my wedding plans! 

This was way way ahead of Chat GPT !!! 

31 years later...

31 years ago, I went to college. Being the first grandson on my mothers side and given most of my social interactions were with my maternal grandparents and uncles and aunts who raised me, the entire family was participating in a social experiment.

"Sundaram has never been outside this small area all his life. Sure he can read write and speak Hindi enough to be the official translator for 20+ people crowded in front of the TV every Sunday before Mahabharat starts,  but that doesn't necessarily mean he will survive up north by himself in college!" 

Yours truly was the real life version of Jim Carrey in the Truman show... and I went to Benares to study.. The Hindi didn't help and first year was not what I expected. There were a lot of mistakes mostly on my part which made my first three weeks a crash course on life.  It took a phenomenal effort from my parents and classmates to help me through that year. Something for which I am forever grateful. Being intelligent and being smart are two different things. If anyone needs to understand that in your house, send them to me. Will gladly explain. 

The more time I spent in Benares the more I loved it. Was actually sad to say bye after 4 years. That experience at 16 did help me later in life multiple times as I moved to US for grad school and went from place to place, apartment to apartment and moved to the west coast.  My worldview is all the more supportive when it comes to dealing with people and events thanks to some rude awakenings in my freshman year. 

This weekend, Jr. goes to college. She is the first grandkid on both her mother and fathers side of the family but she has seen more of this world before college compared to me. Hoping she is smart and not called intelligent. This blog has seen her grow up right in front of all our eyes. Time flies because they are mostly good times.  She is a good kid. She is the type of person who will go run towards a problem to help someone when everyone else runs away. I hope she stays that way. 

It was decided by the family on a 3:1 vote that daddy will not be the one to drop her off in college. The logic was that I will cry in front of Jr. or make her feel sentimental and it won't help while saying bye. The little one's words I believe were "Appa is a drama queen! Don't send him. Let him stay here with me and I will manage him".  So San did the college visit. 

The best part of this was that my classmate and chai partner drove 4 hours to help. That is the real blessing.

She now knows a lot more about our college going days than I would have wanted her to know.. but that comes with the territory when uncles share stories.

My sincere hope is that she makes friends in college who will be her lifelong friends.. friends who will help her kids move to college when the time comes! 

After leaving for college I never got to spend more than 2-3 weeks with my parents at any time till to date. If history is any indicator, it will be something similar with this girl unless she comes back to the bay area to find work. 

As a parent, one can always hope. 

Have started a countdown to when she will be home at the end of the semester...

as long as daddy is working on counting something, tracking things in spreadsheets, etc. things will be fine.. cleaned up her room and sorted things out. It will take me a few days to get used to the fact that she is in college, but I am confident of getting through it. All I need to do is go every morning and change that number to a smaller number and take it one day at a time.

All that yoga is going to help! It already is.

Facebook and data..

This is a post on Facebook data.. my Facebook friend list data..

Given I tell FB a lot, it was quite interesting to see how FB doesn't make it easy for me to even track what is going on with my Friend list and update me on what is changing. 

A few hours ago, I was trying to see how many of my friends post politial stuff on my feed. I could count 8 people off the top of my head and by skimming my feed over last week. Given it is holiday season, it is easy to spot the political posts.. My count was accurate. My entire feed is pretty much overwhelmed by these 8 people. Maybe the others dont post much? Maybe the most vocal ones are the ones that keep forwarding stuff to everyone on their timeline? Maybe the things they are forwarding are paid ads masquerading as meme's or just regular forwards? Maybe the people are not who they claim to be on FB and the account is hijacked? a lot of thoughts led me to try and find out again how after reducing my friend list to 150 two years ago, it is back at 318 now.. what has changed in the friend mix etc. etc.

Any analysis starts with the data set. Trying to export just the list of friends and the number of friends they have (or mutual friends) is not trivial. I did spend a lot of time copy pasting stuff from HTML to csv to JMP and had to do some clean up just to get the data in three Columns.. (Friends name, their friends total, mutual friends). Now why FB lists only Mutual friends in some cases I do not know. At first glance it looks like some folks do NOT want to even disclose how many friends they have!! I don't know what the point is of being on a social network if you are that worried. Let's move on..

Then I found that some of my friends have deactivated their accounts. Their pictures are blank and there was nothing listed. When I click on that friends page it says "this account is deactivated. you have the option to unfriend this person". WTH? This was for multiple people. So the person just left FB without a note of any kind to say they are deactivating it? 

72 of my friends show only a mutual friend count. So it makes it difficult to do a fair distribution.. that was a painful realization that there was no way to get the friend count. You have to go to that friends page and see if it will show up. Even my wife's page will only show we have 152 mutual friends. It wont tell me how many friends she has in total. Not that this count matters but if you are looking at data and you try to see patterns it makes sense to have apples to apples. 

Then I put in a classification by how they are my friends. 

F- Family (anyone related by blood or marriage)

HS- high school (PS. Senior)

C- college (classmates, juniors, seniors) from IT-BHU

GS - Grad school (All the Drexel and RPI connections)

FF- Family friends (this one is tricky because some of these people we met in social settings, my kids classmates, but Majority are spouses of friends from HS, C, GS or my wifes classmates and their spouses)

BL- friends from my Blogger days who I have managed to stay in touch with till now!

Y- Yoga (there are teachers and there are students, but I just lumped it into one)

W- Friends I made at Cypress Semi at work

Here are the distributions given this classification:

This one is the distribution of the friends my friends have (unfortunately for the 72 people out of 318 where it listed only mutual friends, that data is not included in this). 

If you read the anthropology books Guns Germs and Steel or Sapiens, the authors make a case that tribes split up into rival tribes or multiple tribes after their populations cross 140-150. The social structure at that point is unmanageable and the connections become meaningless. At any one point everyone closely interacts with 15 people on a day to day basis. In the last 2 years I have observed this at work, at home, at gatherings and on my social media feeds. People simply become inactive.

Given that there are some celebrities in my FB friend list (read star Yoga teachers, music teachers, public figures) I took them out of the distribution to see what it looks like for the bottom two bars in the previous graph.. ie, people with under 1000 friends.. The people who are between 600 and 1000 are mostly inactive but keep accepting friend requests and looking at some of their pages, I am seriously wondering if there are account issues. Again, companies that pride themselves on AI should be able to see patterns and alert people that one of their friends is multiplying on their friend count in an abnormal fashion that does not make sense.

117/212 still have <300 friends.. and 78/212 are within 200.. Gave this 150 number a lot of thought for the "average person".. read "not someone who is trying to get a following like a Business person or Brand ambassador)  and maybe given todays ability to connect more easily, that number can be 300.. It should be able to plot the number of active interactions between me and my friends to verify this. I am sure FB does this or has the capability to do this, but it would be nice for me to do it with data at least as it relates to my account and friends.

In the graph above the top four points on the Family (F) are wife, MIL, SIL and co-sister (see graph below) why it will only give the number of mutual friends for these four people is beyond me.  You can see that a lot of my High school and college friends are connected to each other by looking at the mutual friend count and it is the case with the Yoga community. I really don't have an apples to apples on this one as technically all the mutual friend counts are not available.

The graph below is the mutual friend list distribution where FB wont list their total friends but only mutual. Each bar is the number of friends who have a mutual friend list between those windows.. eg. 1 friend (wife) with 150-160 mutual friends, 1 with 50-60 (MIL), 2 friends with 40-50 mutual connections (SIL, co-sister), etc. etc.

The bottom 32 people with 0-10 mutual friends are mostly not sharing their friend list?

So what did I learn from all these exercises of graphing and charting and cleaning up data sets?

1- It is not easy to get exportable data out of Facebook.

2- There is no notification if your friends deactivate accounts or become inactive for prolonged periods of time

3- There is no warning if your friends account is showing abnormal increases in friend counts

4- A lot of my friends on the list have way more than 150 friends just like me. 

5- Never got to the actual reason why I started doing this.. which was to see what % of my friends post political stuff. That count is still 8/318 but there is no easy way to classify the posts on an excel file and put a code next to it and pareto it!  Out of almost 200 most recent posts in my feed, 50 were political and they came from 8 people.. They all seem to have posts on their pets, yoga, family which always seems to be anywhere between 50-70% of their posts. If there was a select way to mute that, I would be a happier person. 

The real question is "Am I seeing all their posts?" or "is FB only showing me select posts from these people that are political?" or "are these people deliberately posting this only to me and a select group?"

No way to tell. 

Majority of the posts are travel realated or family photos and pets. For that, I will gladly keep reviewing accounts periodically, clean up stuff and go explain to people why there is no point on being "friends" on FB when I don't get to see what they look like after 5 years but keep getting memes and political forwards for years. 

I am just having data withdrawal symptoms.. there is a lull at work and Christmas/New Year is coming.. next I will go look at my Yoga class graphs and charts.. Thankfully, that dataset was generated by me and is very accurate!

The perfect aftershave..

Yes..

Yours truly.. Dudeji Beardybaba, as I was affectionately called by friends and family alike over the last few months have had a setback of sorts in prepping for my next career move. 

To put it simply, the beard is gone. It just got to that point where letting it go, became an appeling option.

The beard survived for 7+ weeks and it was no longer patchy. It was an "official" beard that could enter into a beard competition.. it made it to Asia through multiple airport securities without being the cause for "random" security screening as was expected by the rest of the face.

It made it through multiple meetings.. it made it through rides in the Shanghai metro where it was the only beard on the entire damn train.. well I was the only Indian on the entire damn train, but the beard stuck out to the point where kids were staring at me non stop and their parents were politely teaching the kids "not to stare". The beard become a social education tool for Chinese parents.. it had value!

Having finished work in Asia, gave up on biz upgrade chances and flew back early on "premier economy", just to beat jet lag by sleeping in my own bed. The beard became "itchy and scratchy" during the return trip while attempting to sit and sleep by leaning on the plane window!  

It got completely messed up.Could have taught homeless hobos, how to look like legit homeless hobos after getting out of SFO. My Uber driver was not sure if I was the passenger or some guy trying to get a free ride, and was checking twice. Even that believe it or not, was not the last straw.

My lovely wife of almost 20 years, always greets me with an unreserved hug when I come back from Asia.. she is glad to see me because she knows the next pickups and drop offs from classes for kids,  will all be on me at least for a few days post my return.. Today she gave me a hug that said "yes, I would like to hug you, but without getting anywhere close to your face".. it was a hug that one gives their boxing match opponent or a hug your nurse gives you at the time of discharge when you are the huggy type and she too is the huggy type based on her other patients, but you are being discharged, after being treated for rashes.. 

That was it..a line was drawn and I decided to shave. It turns out that shaving a 7 week old beard is not easy. Having had no such prior experience, it was tricky. First you have to use a trimmer to cut it down and then shave, or you can cut yourself pretty badly. (note, if you need additional tips, will be glad to give you some).. 

After 15-20 minutes, the beard was gone.. but it is not easy to get used to its absence. Did not realize that I got used to the beard.. it kind of grew on me!

After coming home, had a severe migraine and stomach pain and did the only thing I could think of under such circumstances.. Go do Bikram Yoga. 

Went to the first class that was available after coming home and the class was awesome. Somehow my symptoms after shaving off a 7 week beard was similar to what folks describe after getting their limb amputated. It was weird. Standing in front of the mirror and breathing made my nose all hot. It was like running an airconditioner without the filter.. 

Then halfway down the class, while doing leg stretching head to knee pose, a few gallons of sweat just went straight into my nose. The whiskers and beard would not have allowed that.. It took me a few minutes to recover from the stinging in my nose and sinuses before rejoining the class. 

There is one good thing about having a clean face. I can actually see myself smile better in the mirror and it makes for great positive reinforcement. 

Also the yoga class did me a world of wonders. When you sweat like crazy, that skin smoothes itself out and all the itching and scratching is gone! 

San took before and after photos..the little one hasn't seen me yet and will possibly be thrilled that the beard is gone. She was not a fan..

Same smile, but one gets trapped in the beard. Now when the teacher in Yoga class says "with your happy smiling face..." there is a visible happy smiling face!!!

The beard did have the best run this time..who knows when it will come back?!!

Birthday happiness

Last year was 45. Folks reminded me that once you cross 45, you become less employable, etc. etc.

This year had the same birthday ingredients and that is a good thing. Last year's birthday was on the day before Thanksgiving and ended up at the company party.

This year, the birthday ended up being on Thanksgiving. The company picnic was interesting.. we had caricature artists which was a lot of fun. 

This is a collage of two different caricature artists interpretation, a selfie at the party and a picture of me the next morning.

guess the profile of how you sit down in front of the artist makes him draw you with a long face or a round face.. 

The actual birthday started with Yoga bright and early.

By the time I got back home, showered and made and drank tea, no one had woken up. That was still teh state for another hour and finally the family woke up one by one.. we were in Vacation mode, and it was a good thing!

Then came Lunch at my favorite place.. Bhavika aunty made me "mini" pooran poli's. I call them Personal-Pan-Poli's. They were absolutely yummy.  The entire Bhavika's family was surprised by my Swamiji look. Told them it is just a temporary experiment. 

Then there was a post lunch get together with friends, where again folks who had not seen me in some time were pop quizzing me on the new look. There was the group photo where the rudraksham was put outside the sweater.. so they could lay claim to having known Swamiji before he became an internet sensation.... the jokes were all good. Looks like all one has to do is:

1. Stop shaving

2. Declare an intent to add "ananda" or "saraswathi" to one name

3. be able to come up with some wise ass remarks

4. give an all knowing sarcastic smile

5. insult the intelligence of anyone who is willing to listen to you 

and a moment creates itself around you! Next thing you know, Sri Sundarananda Saraswathi is the water cooler topic.. 

There was a special banana bread for me to cut.. which was yummy.. by this time I was ready to be the acting double for the burmese python in the Harry Potter movies...

This year I also got my other wish.. an afternoon nap on my birthday! 

Then came the India women playing the England women at the World T20 Cricket semi finals and they lost big time. This was an undefeated team till the Semi finals.. and they just lost it. It was a good reminder for me that I was a lucky guy to have a lot of things go my way so far.. 

Was also thinking about my grandpa a lot be it at the company party or on my birthday. It has been 9 years since he passed away. Listented to him reciting slokas for a good 30 minutes and recited along with him. Thanks to technology this is possible!

Then we went to spend the evening with friends, have Italian food for dinner, music, games and finally called it a night. It was past midnight when we got home. 

It was a fun evening spent with smiles all around!

My friend also gave me her one word review of the beard "sahikkalai"! (unberable) which created some instant solidarity moments between the rest of my family members and her. There is a new Swami Army in town and it is hell bent on "making Swamiji Sundar again"

The only thing which we could not cram on the birthday wishlist was to go for a movie. Usually I go to a Bond movie, Harry Potter Movie or Marvel movie on my birthday with San, MIL, kids or whoever from that combination will come to the movie with me (also depends on the movie). Last year San and me went for Justice League. 

This year I wanted to see Venom first as it was already going out of a lot of theaters. It was going to be like a "Stan Lee homage visit". There were no favorable show times.. so we went to see Venom today. 

While driving there San started pop quzzing me "who is the hero? who is the heroine? etc." and I got worried. There were some expectations to set.

Me : We are going to a movie titled "venom". he is not even a good superhero. He is more like a supervillain type.. this is not a chick flick ! There are no songs, duets etc. etc.. I don't know the full story but heard there is a twist at the end of the movie. 

San was betting that no matter what, there had to be a hero, heroine, love angle, villain for any Marvel movie to work and I was shaking my head..

We came out of the movie with the realization that she was right! Both of us liked this movie. 

The birthday has now come and gone but we will use this excuse to watch another movie or two over what is left of the long weekend. Then it will be pedal to the metal again till Christmas. 

My birthday events are getting predictable and to me that is a good thing.

It has been a good week so far! Hope this year finishes off on a good note!