Ramana's Musings

A very dear friend from Scotland is determined that I should get married again and has sent me a link to a video that shows how modern weddings are conducted in her part of the world.

In India, Hindus get married in an elaborate ceremony, conducted by priests chanting Sanskrit shlokas around a holy fire. You can see a picture here:

I have agreed that if I ever get married again, I shall arrange for similar drum beat to be played in our ceremony and get our Pandits and witnesses to chant the shlokas and dance to the beat. What an idea! Perhaps just what the dull boring ceremonies need!!

Just for a contrast, you can see a Hindu wedding here.  Whereas as the still photograph shows a South Indian wedding, this video is more representative of weddings in the Northern parts of India.

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Tags: Church Wedding-Modern, North Indian wedding, South Indian Wedding, Weddings

This cartoon  in one of my favourite news papers set me thinking of not only my past but also my current situation.

Go to any Leadership training program or read a book on leadership and the point of giving praise to people who work keeps getting hammered again and again. This is one of the motivational tools that all people in Supervisory and Managerial positions are supposed to use liberally.

Personally, I have found it very effective to give and receive both.

When Urmeela was alive, she would inevitably praise me for some dish or the other that I hustled up for her or for something that I did for her or whatever and I would feel like an Emperor. Ranjan learnt this trick from her and uses it liberally on me to great effect too.

In other words, I am thoroughly spoilt.

It was too good to last. My father belongs to that generation that takes being served by the women of the house and children for granted. If at all any comment is made, it has to be criticism. Under no circumstances should the underlings be praised, lest they get uppity and forget their station in life.

I am his first born. In other words that fortunate creation who took the maximum brunt of such thinking as a child and a teenager. For him, despite my now being a grand uncle to scores of kids, father of a 39 year old son and a fairly respected elder member of the society does not matter. I can not come up to his standards. Full stop.

I can relate to that cartoon. Can you?

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Tags: Motivation, Praise

This is the kind of story that Jerry Davich and Denis Berlien give in their book ‘Connections – Everyone Happens For A Reason’.

A few years ago when I was looking to purchase a particular book and went searching for it on the internet, I was directed to ‘Scholars Without Borders’ . Bingo, I was able to get the book but had problems paying for it with one particular credit card and had to use another. When I complained about the inconvenience, the man behind the website wrote to me a very nice letter and explained the problem and assured me that the matter would shortly be resolved and in the meanwhile, if I had other requirements, he would be perfectly happy to send the books in advance and await payment by cheque or demand draft. This kind of trust from a total stranger was new to me and I tried to find more about the man, Ramakrishnan Ramaswamy and discovered that he was a fellow Tambram and a teacher to boot.

Ram is a bit greyer and thinner on top now, and every now and then tries to compete with me with a greying beard. Otherwise the photo is quite a resemblance to him. If I had asked him for a photograph, he would have had a fit so I stole it from the web!

I have a high repect for teachers, as I am sure Magpie would vouch for, and decided to make friends with Ramakrishnan Ramaswamy and I have not regretted it for a moment. We spoke to each other on the phone and met when Ram came down to Pune and have been in reasonably good touch via email, SMS and Facebook.

Ram is an amazing person fully deserving to feature among my list of heroes for reasons slightly different from the last hero about who I had posted. Let me give some background.

Ram is an Army-brat. Born to an Officer of the Indian Army, he has had the kind of life and career that a typical Indian middle class person has. Focus and emphasis on education above all, and an unusual vision about their station in life.

Ram is a graduate of one of India’s prestigious institutions of higher education, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The Indian Institute of Technology, is the IIT that Scot Adams character Asok, in the comic strip ‘Dilbert’ comes from.

Like many graduates of IIT, Ram too went to the USA for higher studies and got his PhD from, a great Ivy league institution of higher learning, the Princeton University. AND, hold your breath, Ram’s subject is not an ordinary one that anyone and everyone can study and get degrees in. Physics is the subject and Ram’s own specialty, hold your breath again, is Chaos Theory.

Unlike most IIT graduates who go to the USA for higher studies and settle down there, Ram decided to return to India and teach. He is currently Professor, School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India, and I am told on excellent authority, that he is a highly respected and effective teacher of a difficult subject.

So far, so good. This does not make him my hero. What makes Ram a hero for me is his dedication to spreading education via books to places where books are difficult to procure. This is his where his Scholars Without Borders comes in and that is precisely what they do. I have bought many books from them and Ram has always told me that he will get any book for me from anywhere in the world as long as I am willing to pay for it. He has not let me down so far, though now, the initiative is no longer receiving his personal day to day attention, as his staff attend to the nitty gritty of the business.

Ram’s obsession with this particular aspect of education has got him due recognition and funding from the Ford Foundation which has enabled him to set up an initiative called ‘Access Equity’.

Ram is a remarkable person and I am very proud and happy to count him as my friend. For all his achievements and status, Ram is an ordinary guy, simple and humble to the extreme. Unfortunately, he is extremely busy with his teaching, his obsession, guest lectures all over the place, and rafting down the Ganges! The last one, a totally unprofessorlike hobby but in which he seems to take great delight in. Unfortunate because, I do not get to meet and talk to him as much as I would like to.

Ram, I hope you won’t blush. I salute you. You can buy me a Pav Bhaji when we next meet.

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Tags: Access Equity, Books, Dilbert, Ford Foundation, IIT, Outreach programme, Princeton, Ramakrishnan Ramaswamy, Scholars Without Borders, Scot Adams

This post has been in the making for some time and finally was triggered by a recent exchange of mails between me and a very perceptive and dear friend. I hope that this is the catharsis that will bring about some badly needed change.

A little background. My friend had been hard of hearing for many years and only about a year ago was fitted with hearing aids after a successful surgery for cochlear transplant. The two of us meet infrequently but exchange mails and SMS messages often.

The exchange was triggered off by a reference to a book by my friend who wanted me to check out and if found interesting enough to buy it. I checked it out, found it not up to my current levels of interest in the subject of social psychology, and advised him about it. That led to another set of exchanges, starting with this:

“Rather surprised. The impression I took away from my last visit to you was of someone increasingly impatient with appearances. On the other hand your blog suggests that the Tambram in you wont go without a Nobel. Perhaps the breaks that arise so subtly in our dialogue are due to this. (Tambram is short for Tamil Brahmin, the community to which I belong. For a great write up on the community, you can read a literary icon of India, Kushwant Singh here.) My friend suggests that despite many dissimilarities with the stereotype, my innate Tambram qualities come out unexpectedly and with some impact on the immediate neighborhood!

“The dialogue that I refer to is with with one of the many yous. The you on the gaddi ( Gaddi is the ceremonial chair that Gurus sit on.) at the moment is said to be the Sage of Kalyaninagar but I have a feeling that he has been installed there by a you that’s in rebellion against another you. You’re quite a complicated guy!” ( I live in Kalyani Nagar, a suburb of Pune, and my friend lives in St. Patrick’s Town, another suburb, about fifteen Kms away)

I responded with this message:

“I yield to the sage of St. Patrick’s Town. I am complicated only to those who try to find hidden agendas in me! I simply do not have any. I wear my heart on my sleeve as it were! This being so unusual that people tend to find me a very complicated fellow!”

This led to some more exchanges which are not relevant to this topic, but ended with this message:

“My mistake, incurred in the course of conversations in the pre-cochlear days. Reinforced by the evidence of Tambram irregularities. Seriously speaking though, you do appear to be groping your way through some inarticulate crisis. Obviously something to do with your wife’s demise but more than that at the same time.”

The last paragraph is very perceptive of my friend. I have been noticing a tendency to be short tempered and easily annoyed in the recent past. Today, at lunch, an innocuous statement by my father sent me off into orbit and it took me some time to cool down and get back to my normal self.

Some post lunch meditation and introspection helped me to identify the problem of a simmering “Why me-itis”. I have now been a caregiver for nine years and perhaps it is natural to want out. After my wife’s passing away in March, I have been focused on looking after my father and perhaps have over done that. Yet, present compulsions prevent any drastic decisions towards achieving that status of wanting out. This is the possible reason for the “inarticulate crisis”. I am not a psychologist, but this makes sense to me. Between my father and me, “Status Anxiety”, each coming from Head of the Household positions into a unavoidable yet a new equation is upsetting to both. This in turn is perhaps making me appear as I do to my friend.

I need to work on that understanding a bit, lest I end up being a care receiver instead of a care giver. This possibility was advised to me by my late wife’s Cardiologist who warned me to live my life too. I have not been doing that the way I can, and I think that I should now change.

I wonder if I will be nominated for the Nobel for introspection and blogging about it! The Tambram in me will then be satiated.

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Tags: Appearances, Caregiving, Catharsis, Tambrams

This post is the Loose Consortium Bloggers’ Friday post when Ashok, Conrad, Grannymar, Magpie11, Marianna, Maria and I write one post each on the same topic. Please visit the other blogs too to have different views on this fascinating subject.

One of my favourite restaurants.

My earliest memory of eating at a restaurant is, of when I was about four or five years old. Our paternal uncle, my father’s eldest brother was at that time based in a small town some 200 Kms west of Chennai, then known as Madras. We were living at Madras and our uncle used to visit Madras to attend some periodic meetings of the Madras University’s Senate meetings. He was an avid restaurant goer and would look for some company and since I hardly had any choice in the matter, he would drag me off from my games to eat some dosais or vadais or whatever followed by his coffee and some sweet dish for me.

Those days, and in fact till about ten years ago, Indian restarurants were just that. They offered food for sale and no liquor was served in them. Those particular clients had to carry their hip flasks and surreptitiously charge their glasses of soft drinks with the drinks from the hip flasks.

As I grew up, and was in secondary school, it was a great treat to go to any kind of restaurant and we would pester our mother for increased daily allowance to enable us to go for some treat. Nearest to our school was an ice-cream parlour which though not a full fledged restaurant, served just as well for the hard begged for extra money.

Post school, I became hep and started my love affair with restaurants. Across the country, small ones, big ones, wayside dhabhas, five star hotel ones; and eventually, across the world in many countries again of various types. As a salesperson, traveling constantly, it was inevitable that I was most comfortable eating, entertaining and being entertained in restaurants. This lasted till I finally came home to rest and recoup and since the year 2001, I can count on my fingers the number of times that I would have gone to a restaurant.

I am considered to be a reasonably good cook by many of my friends and members of my family. I became so by seeking out the cooks/chefs of the restaurants that served me something extraordinary, to compliment them and to seek recipes. I also observed India’s famous Dhabha food being cooked before one’s eyes to learn some tricks of the professional cooks and that too has come in handy with what started off as a hobby and now become more or less a full time occupation! Apart from this one great advantage, I cannot think of any other factor that would encourage me to go back to a life of eating at restaurants.

I strongly recommend Nick’s excellent post on ‘eating out’ which says a great deal more than I can with my outdated views on the subject.

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Tags: Cooking, Dhabas, Dosai, Restaurants, Vadai

Ashok, the youngest of the quartet on this Friday consortium binge, for all his youth, chose a topic totally unexpected from him. I hope that this post comes up to his very high standards. The other two, apart from me, Grannymar and Conrad, are seasoned travelers on this route. Both on the Friday posts, and the subject matter. Hints of their capability have seeped through, in their blog posts and I hope that they too would find this post interesting. Grannymar hopefully will withdraw the punishment that she gave me last week for not coming up to her very rigid standards of propriety.

“The hardest lesson in life, is to know which bridges to cross, and which to burn.”
-Anonymous.

“Nothing can be taught to a man; but it is possible to help him find the answers within.”
-Galileo Galilei.

And that sums up my journey from religion to spirituality.

I understand Religion to mean the various actions one takes to establish contact with the Divine.

Like all Hindus, my exposure to religion started from my first being aware of being a person. The constant teaching to pray, attend poojas, invoke God before meals, before falling sleep, before writing anything, asking for blessings, things and so on and so forth. Rituals, rites, group affairs, prayer songs, functions, the upanayanam, an important land mark in a Hindu’s youth when he is given knowledge of Brahma and given a sacred thread to wear. Exposure to our Mythology, Traditions, Legends and lore too played a great role in shaping my religious being.

In India, everything is religious. Nothing is ignored. If one’s foot accidentally touches another, an immediate apology in the form of a Namaste is given, because the other is Divine. If a coin or a currency note falls down, it is picked up and an invocation is said apologizing Goddess Lakshmi for the insult. A sacred symbol is written on top of the page before anything is written. Before studying anything, the Goddess Saraswati is invoked to bless the endeavour.

A lifelong obsession with all these and festivals including marriage and funeral ceremonies being converted into religious occasions sums up a Hindu’s life. Everything that happens, good or bad is attributed to Divine intervention. All commitments are made with the proviso, “God willing!”

My life till my mid teens was no exception. I went through all these things. Belief and Faith was drummed into my head with precision and regularity.

This was in the midst of the Rationalist and Atheist movement gaining strength in the South of India where I was then located. If from one side religion was being drummed into my head, from another side, rationalism and atheism was. I succumbed to the latter due to “peer pressure”. By the time I was sixteen, I was an atheist and a hedonist. Life was good.

Many things happened subsequently in my life, but religion played no part in it except in one case, when a Roman Catholic girl that I was interested in, insisted that I convert to Roman Catholicism before even getting engaged. I attended catechism classes and took serious instructions from her Father Confessor. I could not be convinced, and that relationship broke up. So that attempt at organized religion also failed. Life was good. Life began to revolve around spirits – Rum, Gin, Beer, Whisky, and when not available, hooch.

Fast forward to my early thirties. Something kept nagging me to give religion a shot again. So, I went back to practicing some rituals and visiting temples of worship etc. Life was good. The spirits continued to flow.

Came mid thirties and I was on the fast track in my career burning the candle at both ends. Step in an atheist friend of mine, who incidentally continues to be one of my dear friends and an atheist, who introduced me to Transcendental Meditation, yes the very same that the Beatles took up to. He thought that I would handle my stress better with that technique. I did, and curiosity took me to studying the subject of meditation and I was hooked into spiritualism. That initiation and the subsequent practice as well as reading of various books on matters spiritual, comparative religion etc, put me on a different tack completely. Life got better. The spirits continued to flow, but now the most sophisticated variety, like Single Malts!

Came the early forties and my mentor and then immediate boss, with whom I had many occasions to exchange views on spiritual matters, challenged me to attend a Vipassana meditation camp. I accepted the challenge and that ten day camp, transformed me and the path that it led me to, is the one that I continue to be on today. The importance of spirits started to decline.

So, from the chaotic and totally unstructured Hinduism, I travelled the Atheist route back to Hinduism and then, dare I say, got promoted to spiritualism due to unquestionable serendipity. So, it all boils down to serendipity after all. Came my late fifties, and the spirits simply disappeared from my life. Hedonism too just fell off by itself.

I understand spiritualism to mean, the real-ization that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. This implies that every other person and being in creation too is the same. If that trend of thought is to be taken to its logical conclusion, every ‘thing’ is one. The path that I am on now, should hopefully take me to that real-ization.

I accept that Religion has its place in society, but it is not for me. I am on a different ‘high’. I also accept that Atheism too has its place in society. It is just not for me. While I can defend myself about this, I simply do not wish to.

Post Script: Grannymar, Ashok never did take up your suggestion for brevity. I am glad that he did not. I would not have been able to do justice to this subject, had he agreed.

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Tags: Meditation, Religion, Spiritualism, Sprituality, Vipassana

I had my cousin Devi and her son Sundar spend part of their week end with us. I had not seen either of them in years and thanks to my father now living with us, Devi decided to come over and visit and we had a wonderful time catching up with so much that has happened in both our lives.

Sundar, her young son is an IT professional with a very highly thought of company in Mumbai and a delightful fellow to chat with. I was sad to see both of them drive away to beat the traffic earlier this afternoon.

This blog is however is about Devi’s younger child, her daughter, Meena Venkat who is a celebrity of sorts. Somebody whose exploits we had not known about.

Meena is doing her doctorate in wild life protection and as part of her project work, has been working among the Asiatic Lions of our Gir Forest.

BBC had produced a documentary called the Last Lions of Gir and Devi had brought a DVD for us to share her pride in her daughter’s achievements. Viewing the entire DVD was an astonishing experience for us. Meena has more or less been physically very close to many of the lions in the forest and the film clearly shows that. We simply could not get over this bravery. We are however told that she is quite nonchalant about it.

As my little contribution to the family’s pride in the young girl, I post this article here and request you to visit an excerpt from the BBC film here.

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Tags: Asiatic Lions of Gir Forest, Meena Venkat

Have had an eventful week-end and beginning for the week. I had a friend of fifty years come over from the USA to stay with us for a few days. He is planning on returning to India to retire here and is on an exploratory visit. He left for Hyderabad earlier this afternoon.

Both of us were struggling salesmen when we met at an Irani tea shop in Hyderabad. This was a popular meeting place for many salesmen and other regulars. We became good friends and eventually became relatives as well. We married cousins and so became brothers in law.

That is what set me off writing this post. In English, it is simple. We are brothers in law. In the Indian system, it is more precise. In Tamil we are shattagars and in Hindustani, Sadubhais. The Indian, with his particular obsession about relationships, calls this relationship, ‘Co-brothers’, when he is speaking English.

I have always wondered why we Indians are so particular about our relationships. Why can’t we simply use a word like uncle, or aunt or nephew or niece? In India, we have Chacha, Kaka, Mama, Chachi, Kaki, Mami, Bhanja, Bhathija etc.

Just some random musings on our peculiarities. What do you think? Should we follow the English system and simplify?

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Tags: Nomenclatures, Relationships