Faith Faith Faith

Faith is an interesting thing.. it makes you do things that are ingrained in you from childhood. Everytime I lose something and I have to find it in a time sensitive way, subconsciously say a prayer to Ganesha and say "will light a camphor light(karpooram) for 10 paise at the local temple".. 

a. we don't get camphor lights in the US that easily

b. there is no 10 paise anymore

c. local temple can be anything but was originally intended for Vembadi Vinayagar, a little ganesha under a pipal tree that I have circled with prayers to remove obstacles real and imaginary..

But it gets done.. and we are not even talking about if we actually found the thing on time or not.

In 2014 my MIL was going for a bone marrow test and in pure panic mode I prayed to my family deity (Gunaseelam perumal) that if the test came negative for cancer, will go shave my head in the temple. That was more of an extreme case of the camphor lighting thing.. 

Have made at least 6 trips to India since that time but never got the opportunity to go visit Gunaseelam. Faith is interesting.. seeing your family deity is not up to you, it is up to your deity.. or so the saying goes! Guess on this short trip to see my dad, there was no agenda. 

Three weeks ago, was lying in a hospital bed myself, dreading some worse case scenarios, which fortunately turned out to be something a lot less threatening. While there, the thought of unfinished business with god somehow bubbled up to the top of the already buffering thought process.  What if I died and did not do the "mottai"? After all the bone marrow test for MIL had come out negative! 

The original plan was to just go alone with a driver and get things done and get back. Then my parents said the words "Can we come with you?".. In case you didn't get the reason Faith got mentioned three times in the title, "you cannot say no to someone when they ask to come to a temple with you".. My dad was bedridden two weeks ago and he barely started walking again. An adult in diapers who just started walking, coming on a day trip where we spend 11 hours in the car and 3 hours in a temple is no joke. 

Somehow, we told ourselves, if it was meant to be, we will make it. I did a risk mitigation plan that would make any project manager proud and we left at 3AM. It was still raininig in Chennai but we were off to a flying start.. We had one stop for 25 minutes and were back on the road. 

Given this is my n'th mottai at Gunaseelam, the whole thing was done in 7 minutes.. then came the best part. There was water in the river that flows to the temple! Had a great time taking a dip in the river and have the fishes nibble at me. We were on a deadline and I had to pull myself out of the water to go in and finish the rest of the prayer. 

Our driver and some total strangers helped me navigate a wheel chair through the temple. The priest knows our family and was extremely nice and made sure my dad got to see the deity up close. 

On our way out a puppy came up and lay down under our vehicle. This one knew how to put on a sad face like a pro..

It was time to drive back. My dad is like a kid who just got his tonsils out and knows that his parents won't say "no" to anything... we just got out of the temple and he mumbles "elaneer.. I want elaneer". He wanted coconut water. Was not even sure if this is coconut water season and we were watching the road for it and sure enough we found a vendor selling fresh coconut water. It is not a good idea for a person of his age to drink that instead of lunch. We stopped at an A2B for lunch and it was really delicious. Had a full course meal. As an added bonus this place had a wheelchair ramp!

Then came the bombshell from my dad "I want to use the restroom". That was not part of the plan. It was going to be diapers all the way. But a kid without his tonsils... is a kid without his tonsils. The restrooms here are not typically wheelchair accessible. They are simply not for anyone who is not fit and can manoeuvre around a potty, a door that swishes past the potty with millimeter tolerance and a bunch of taps and buckets on the floor that are trip hazards. In what can only be described as a houdini move, managed to get my kid to go potty and get him diapy changed. That coconut water was a bad idea. Our driver concurred. 

The rest of the drive back was calm and serene. There were cops every 100 feet. So I started counting cops. After 270, I stopped counting. That was only on one side of the road from Dindivanam to Melmaruvaththur. My mind boggled at the efficiency of this whole security apparatus with so many cops just standing on the roadside doing nothing.. then again, maybe this system works, who knows! We actually slowed down to ask one of the cops to find out what the big deal was. He proudly answered "The Chief minister of Tamil Nadu is making his way back to Chennai on the same route!"

We made a dash for it to avoid his motorcade and made it back in exactly 14 hours. For a few minutes after reaching could not find my legs.. had let my dad doze off on me. . . which reminded me of my kids dozing off on me on another recent trip.

It has been another interesting day. 

A picture that says it all..

and a short video of the days experience.. 

It is always a great feeling taking a dip in the river.. mottai or not. Was glad to see my parents smiling again, even if for one day! 

Now the only thought in my head is "the mosquitoes are going to get me good tonight with this exposed scalp.. they will suck my brains dry and I might actually wake up smarter!"

My head feels lighter already, both literally and figuratively...

Routines'R'us

On my recent Asia trip, I had to participate in a business dinner at a Japanese restaurant. In case you don't know my food habits, here is a short summary of what I don't or can't eat:

1. I am Vegetarian (so no meat)

2. Allergic to Peanuts and Sesame seeds (so that rules out certain places like Thai restaurants, select Chinese restaurants that use Sesame oil, etc.)

3. Allergic to shellfish (not that I eat fish, but if they cook using the same utensils or some of that gets transferred, I still get a reaction

4. Allergic to eggplants (that rules out a few dishes in middle eastern , Italian restaurants)

5. Allergic to select fruits/vegetables (simple check is, if it has fine hair on the skin, I can get rashes just by touching them, if I eat them there will be othe side effects)

Usually when I eat things on the allergy list the symptoms are skin eruption, wheezing followed by a throbbing pain in the base of my head behind my left ear followed by extreme light and sound sensitivity which is immediately followed by violent throwing up till my stomach is empty. Then I sleep out of sheer exhaustion and after two or three hours wake up like the world is a rosy place and feel on top of the world. 

This happens periodically. With a lot of food restrictions, I have managed to make these "food poisoning" episodes (as my parents and wife call it) less frequent. The problem though is that when they hit me these days, the magnitude of the episodes is increasing on a Logarithmic scale. It is like I exchanged frequent mild tremors for a Banda Aceh type quake! 

Now given all this, I do NOT carry Epi pens with me because my allergies are not the deadly kind. On the Immunologist scale, most of them are a level 4 or 3 reaction. Severe enough to end up immobilized for the short term. Then again, I have not tempted fate by deliberately exposing myself to high levels of these "toxins".

Recently I am hearing that the reasons for this are :

- that kids who are not exposed to lot of different foods as babies are more prone to getting food allergies (eating street food as kids can help was one idea that was talked about)

- some of these are genetically transmitted triggers (my had had excema as a child)

- some of these are environmentally acquired (dust allergies etc.)

I am also told by friends who read the "news" that :

- reintroduction of these allergens in small quantities helps overcome this as long as it is done at a young age

- one can naturally outgrow allergies to certain foods and develop allergies to new ones, if one is prone to such allergies and that one has to periodically "test" for such changes (a colleague of mine has developed an allergy to almonds close to the age of 50! )

- allergy to peanuts could be allergy only to dry roasted american peanuts vs. boiled Indian peanuts (this I can actually vouch for.. I can eat a few Indian peanuts without getting a severe reaction but the large US peanut gives me rashes within a few hours)

- There are "eastern treatments" that can work for this ranging from :

   - oil pulling (gargling sesame oil in your mouth for 10 minutes and spitting it out for 30 days)

   - going to some place in Andhra where they take a small live fish and push it down your throat 

   - going to kerala where they put a flour dough boundary on your stomach and fill the surface of the stomach with some herbal liquid which absorbs the poison from your insides 

etc. etc. It may not be fair for me to clump all of them under same bucket as some come with more evidence, recommendations, different thumbs up/down ratio on Youtube comments, and other metrics which are equally helpful in evaluating cures. In spite of having a lot of respect of eastern medicine (our elders were wise) but being a product of western HEROS thinking (Hypothesis, Experiment, Result, Original Schedule, Status .. for those who are wondering), have not tried any of the pulling, fish shoving or toxin absorbing stomach swimming pool treatments. 

Instead I have always :

- Watched what I eat

- Mostly eat only home cooked food (take my lunch with me to work every day)

- eat the same thing on trips (after doing trial and error in different restaurants, different dishes, and taking my own food with me for the most part of the trip)

I am also not fun at business dinners because of my abstinence from alcohol, sodas and coffee. So it is either sipping water without ice, orange / apple juice or apple cider or tea!

On this recent dinner, the chef was challenged to know of my Vegetarian status and allergy status. So he got "creative".  I get the "poor guy" looks from people which baffles me. Even if I am allergic to a subset of food, there is still plenty I can eat! 

The restaurant came up with mountain yam cooked and extruded to look like pasta, a funnel of asparagus, cucumbers, and other greens in a yogurt sauce, something called dragons beard leaf, some other stuff that folks had difficulty translating into English.. 

Ate or tasted stuff that was translateable and found it to be tasty after mentally preparing myself for the worst. Then they gave a sauce which had some green wasabi stuff, white stuff and a powder that had to be mixed in the sauce.. (could clearly smell sesame seeds on that powder and avoided it) for the yam to be dipped in and it had a sambar flavor! 

There were some dishes that were simply shutting down my nose with the smell and those I passed on to my fellow diners. The tea was great as was the conversation and I loved the fact that everyone in the table at least respected my "sensitivities" in a literal sense. Everyone else in that table had a penchant for fine wine, high proof alcohol, exotic dishes of every kind from everywhere in the world. In short, I was feeling like Buddha dining with the Anthony Bourdain family! 

After that dinner, I did not go through the usual throw up routine. There was mild rashes and a stomach upset for 48 hours, but the rashes are gone now and the stomach is well set after a day of dieting only on bananas, oranges, grapes, almonds and coconut water. 

This weekend, I plan to start eating one sesame seed and one peanut on saturday, increase it to two each two days later, four four days later and see how far it goes. I have to see what the breaking point is. Worse case I will drink salt water and throw up.  Was inspired by one person at the table who drank like a fish who could not handle alcohol at all as a young man but he told me he conditioned himself to it over time as his job involved a lot of wining and dining! 

Will post the results HEROS table style and let you know if shocking the system on a non linear scale helps condition it better. Somehow my initial "gut feel" is that a linear increase my condition it less. While my experiement is still not as agressive when it comes to the max, it is still a lot less than eating a full ellu urundai! 

Routines may be good for me, but I think those periodic throw up sessions after "food poisoning" were actually doing me some good in a self regulating way. 

Yoga has definitely helped with getting back to normal post such attacks, but even doing yoga 200 times a year for more than six years has not eliminated the food related triggers. There are other triggers like dust, old library books, certain incense sticks, perfumes etc. that I have improved with respect to tolerance levels.

(these topics have all been broached before in various forms.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here..   but going for the experiment this time).

Will come back with data!

Technology challenges..

It has been an interesting two days. 

The last few days, there has been a problem at work where a duct spews out bursts of cold air directly above my head. My office has been trying to figure out the root cause and come up with fixes for it by blocking the vent with cardboard, building paper dampers to direct it away from my head etc.. In the meantime, I got a nice cold, thanks to that and the highly changing bay area weather. 

As most of you know, my solution to all ailments is to try doing Yoga in the hot room first before going to the doctor or resorting to any pills. So after scheduling a bunch of late night calls post 11PM, I decided to go do Yoga at 8:30 in the night. It was mildly drizzing when I went into the class and things were, lets say "pleasant".

When the class ended and we came out, there was cold winds and water coming down in intervals in sheets! I am guessing these were more than the 20 mph gusts. This was way stronger. At several points on the way home thought the Leaf was going to fly off the road. There was also a lot of palm leaves falling off the trees and flying around. 

In all of this I did not realize that there was no power in the neighborhood. I drive to the garage and the thing is not opening. I called my wife and she goes "there is no power in the house and the entire area". 

So there I am in my yoga shorts, all sweaty, with cold rain and winds trying to manually open the garage door and park my car inside.. and a gust of wind litterally sends a wave of water into the garage! 

Finally I parked the car and closed the garage door. By now any residual body heat from the yoga class is gone and I am shivering. Then I tell my dear wife "I will go take a quick shower and eat what you have made. good thing we have the flashlights". 

A few minutes later, I realize that the flashlights are the least of the problems. Turns out that the water heater we have installed as part of the new construction which is tankless, energy efficient, reduces our gas bills etc. etc. doesn't work when there is no electricity! It didn't matter anyway. It was not going to be worse than the rain. So that was the shortest coldest shower I have taken after a hot yoga class. 

Then came the dinner part. Wife says "I made stuff for you, but it is all cold. Maybe you can reheat it on the stove because you cannot microwave?"

By now I am conditioned to try everything manual have a low expectation for any gadget. So I know the pilot lamp won't work (it didn't) and use a matchstick to try and light this stove. Turns out that only the back burner turns on without a pilot. These guys have some interlock on the other stoves! 

Finally managed to reheat some stuff and eat with the flashlight and look at my phone... it has <20% charge! 

Went to the battery pack that was given as a company souvenier which is always in my travel bag and that had no charge! 

We both drive a Nissan Leaf. That means if you don't have power all night, we have to fight for the car with the most charge left.. It is a new interesting dynamic in our house.

It was a hard lesson on how dependent we are and how much we take for granted! I managed to muddle through the day and keep my thoughts going. Deifnitely feel better now, thanks to another yoga class, no manual door openings, a nice hot shower, hot tea.. and more importantly a house that is back to 68F instead of 56F!

This afternoon I was thinking about the folks in war zones. People in first world countries have no clue what those folks are going through. We are making it all worse for them by our every day thoughts and actions and what we support knowingly or unknowingly. We also take a lot for granted. The biggest rights we seem to cherish are our rights to stupidity and our right to be irresponsible when it comes to the rest of the world and the planet. At least that is my feeling right now.

A bad vent, a storm for a few hours and an all night power cut are able to make a dent in my life. That is just sad.

Time to spend more time with nature and improve my immunity to cold weather. Also time to do something about all this guilt for everything that is happening in the world!