5 October 2014

“Always do your best”

“There was a man who wanted to transcend his suffering so he went to a Buddhist temple to find a Master to help him. He went to the Master and asked, “Master, if I meditate four hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?”
The Master looked at him and said, “If you meditate four hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in ten years.”
Thinking he could do better, the man then said, “Oh, Master, what if I meditated eight hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?”
The Master looked at him and said, “If you meditate eight hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in twenty years.”
“But why will it take me longer if I meditate more?” the man asked.
The Master replied, “You are not here to sacrifice your joy or your life. You are here to live, to be happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two hours of meditation, but you spend eight hours instead, you will only grow tired, miss the point, and you won’t enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love, and be happy.”

Excerpt From: Don Miguel Ruiz. “The Four Agreements.”

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5 October 2014

When the student became the teacher….

Showing how to light up a orange peel to a couple of fellow bartending girls. You probably are wondering why would anybody want to light up a orange peel (it is actually the oils that shoot out of the peel when you squeeze it). Well, many – like my wife – do not like the taste of their gins emasculated by the fruity taste of fruit-infused gins. But they like the aroma of a fruit – like orange in their drink.

So, basically, you are trying to create a sense of taking in orange gin without messing the taste of the gin. As you know, what our brain perceives as the “taste” of food is only a small part in what the tongue senses and a big part of what the nose senses. The solution is to let the customer inhale the orange fumes but drink the gin in its native form. And you do that by making a normal gin and tonic (Hendricks and Fever Tree is what I would recommend) and then light up an orange peel on top of the drink before you serve it. [The technique will require some practice though. And I learnt it from the venerable mixologist Bensan Varghese from Mumbai]

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4 October 2014

Role Reversal

Usually, it is I who remember people and then search the whole world for them, arrange for a meeting, get somebody to take a picture and then memorialize it in my blog with the backstory. Yesterday was a role reversal.
I was out with a friend at a bar and he had invited another friend of his who was visiting Atlanta to the bar. I am not going to bore you with all the details but some parts of the conversations were memorable. As I got introduced to Russell (that being his name), he surprised me by saying, “I know you. I have seen you before. Where have I seen you before?”.
I had not the faintest clue. But certainly not one to give up on a chance to extract some laughter, I asked him “Do you watch a lot of adult movies?”
15 seconds of pindrop silence.
Followed by three minutes of non-stop laughter 🙂
“Were you in Equifax”?
“Yes”
“Were you in i2 before that?”
“Yeah. How do you know that?”.
To cut it short, it became apparent that we had met before!!! And he used to be in Dallas area. (He is still in Texas). We frequented the same bars, restaurants and Starbucks often!!! One by one, we found out we had way too many common connections from the past. It was like we knew everything about the other person!! We were almost high fiving each other everytime we found one more connection – much to the disbelief of our common friend.
Russell pulled one back on me as I got ready to leave – “Say Hi to Mom”, he said.
I frowned for a bit. Then laughed all the way to car thinking about his reference to “Brother from Another Mother” 🙂

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4 October 2014

Small things in life…

It being Durga Puja time, Sharmila and Natasha were all decked up to go to the biggest festival for the Bengalis. But it also being Friday evening, Nikita and I totally nagged till we were let off the hook and allowed to stay back. Neither of us like going outside home after the workweek.

And I am glad I did not go. Instead, Niki suggested we light a fire and sit outside. So that was about a couple of hours of completely idle chat. Not sure why, we talked about wide ranging topics from oil spills (she brought it up) to the phases of the moon (I brought it up). It is always these small things in life that bring the greatest joys to me somehow.

Speaking of small things, we soon noticed a small earthworm wriggling along the concrete surface by the pool. We could see the earthworm clearly by the light of the fire. It was funny watching intently as the earthworm trudged along. It would take a step forward – it was more like a wave started from the back and eventually reached the front and then the front would raise its edge, turn its tip to check out three of four directions (it was like at every step, it was going “What are my options?”, “What are my options” 🙂 ) and then settle down on one of them and lay its head there – waiting for another wave to push it all the way from the behind 🙂

Finally, I started explaining some characteristics of the earthworm to Niki – especially the versatility of its skin (thru which it “sees”, breathes, eats, excretes etc etc). And I let her know that it belongs to a class of species called “Annelida”.

She was like “What?”

I repeated “Annelida”.

She looked at the completely clueless and directionless worm one more time and gave her verdict “Well, it is not much of a “lida” anyways” 🙂

Now, that kind of humor is not a small thing for me. That is a HUGE thing for me 🙂

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