18 July 2024

The jaw drop and then the ear to ear grins!

From the previous post you would have gathered by now how I was lurking behind the pillar as Nikita came out of the immigration and customs area in Washington DC airport after two long flights from Uganda.

Keeping a safe distance of a few feet I kept weaving thru the crowd. And then when she reached a less crowded spot, quickly paced up, approached her from her rear right and said “Excuse me!” like I was trying to pass her.

She instinctively said sorry and withdrew to her left.

I made eye contact.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

And that is when the jaw drop happened. I caught a part of her face (you can see in the top part of the picture).

Spent a few minutes with her fellow interns returning from Uganda, took a group picture and came back to my hotel to start my day. She is staying with her friend tonight. And we will go back home tomorrow.

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18 July 2024

She still has no idea!!

Nikita was in Uganda doing an internship for the summer working with “Set Her Free” – an organization that focuses on creating a future for very young pregnant girls and mothers. (Nikita mentioned some of them were 12 and 13 years world).

She had a bit of a rough time the last couple of days of her stay there with extreme tiredness, catching a cold and all that. From Uganda, she flew to Qatar and then to Washington DC. Originally, she was to come back to Atlanta in a few hours. But because of her health and tiredness – especially after two long flights, she opted to stay with a friend for the night in DC and come back home the next day.

You can see her walking out straight from the customs and immigration in DC airport.

What she had no inkling of is that right behind the pillar was her dad with his iPhone camera on!!

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18 July 2022

Airport #151

First time in Hartford, CT airport.

The airport was dead – and I mean dead dead – when I landed. And it was not even 10 PM!! Curiously it is called “Bradley International Airport”. I was wondering about that International bit. Looked up every single flight that leaves or comes in to this airport. All 27 of them.

The only one that qualifies – kinda – is a Frontier flight to/from Puerto Rico. That is not even “international” in the sense you do not have to do customs or immigration.

That is a bit of stretching, I say!

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18 July 2022

Here is a cocktail head scratcher

All my mixology friends (I have tagged some of you on this post), I got a challenge from my friend Steve on how to make a cocktail using garlic.

That is a difficult one. A garlic is too strong on the nose. I do not believe I have ever come across a cocktail using garlic. Have you? How would you go around making one if you had to come up with one?

Asked the chef at home – Sharmila. And she assured me that you cannot beat the garlic at its game on the nose. The only other thought then is to overwhelm the nose with the palate. Building on Sharmila’s suggestion, one idea could be something like a Bloody Mary with the tomato juice (or something like carrot juice) giving a lot of thick texture to the tongue and mix salt with something to veer towards either spicy or umami taste (jalapeno or horseradish for example).

What other ideas might you have? I am going to try your ideas this weekend.

Anand, Ashleah, Tathagata, Akshay, Alexa, Alexis, Bensan, Hope, Joel, Joy, Kaitlyn, Katie, Kree, Leigha, Mathew, Ranjan, Rosalind, Sarah, Satyabrata, Whitney, Subhash

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18 July 2021

What has Holland got to do with an autistic child?

This week, in our annual all company meeting, we hosted one of the special needs (autistic) students and his mom. These are the kind of folks that we make products for (actually to help them and their teachers). We also hosted the CEO of the company the kid now works in. You can guess that he has become a fully functional socially contributing kid now.

I will write about the kid and his mom later (awaiting permission to publish their picture). But this piece is something the mom (please allow me to refer her by that till I get permission to publish names) read out when she was asked during the Q&A session – “What went thru your head when you realized that you kid has special needs?”

It is a piece (some call it a poem) written by Emily Perl Kingsley in 1987. The picture her is of the author and her son Jason, born with Down Syndrome.

WELCOME TO HOLLAND!!

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says,
“Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.

Category: Musings | 2 Comments on What has Holland got to do with an autistic child?
18 July 2020

What a wonderful hour and a half!

Greg and I had worked together long back. Like I mentioned in a previous post, even run together. (Strictly speaking, I think it was more like we started together and then he waited for me to finish up on the other side).

Today, we kept an old promise to motor bike together. And that gave me an hour and half of pure Greg time. And I am incredibly happy that I got it.

We immediately bonded over our dads. For the last few days I have been struggling with the fact that my dad has had yet another stroke and this time he has lost his speech. And I cannot even go see him – for another six to twelve months. Looks like Greg was very close to his dad – who is unfortunately no more. We exchanged notes on how dads are the ultimate influential figures for kids. Every dad is a first hero that a child ever knows.

But what I will always remember our morning for is Greg’s “Never Say Die” attitude. After he left the company we had both worked in, he took what looked like a great role across the other coast. I recollect talking to him before he took the job.

A few months later, I saw a post he had written on Linkedin on how his move did not work out and that he was not going to let this bring him down – instead he was glad he took a chance and now he is going to learn from it.

Reading his post, I remember thinking thru if there was some place in our company that he could be awesome in. Well, somebody else (who I do not know) also read that post. And one thing led to the other and Greg now has a job made in heaven for him. It was not just the job. It is the current virus led situation that has opened up an opportunity for him – and he has hammered it home to great success.

To think – if he had not faced that severe set back (and kept his chin up), he would have never had this dream opportunity!! As the old story from Taoism goes… you never know what is good and what is bad…

Although, Tao be danged, I know Greg is pure goodness!!

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18 July 2020

We have worked together and we have run together…

Today we rode our motorbikes together. For the first time.

I think it was more than two years back when I had run into Greg and his wife Colleen in Alpharetta Green Way after my morning run and I found out that Greg is a motor biker too. I always knew him as a great colleague and an amazing runner. He and his dog runs about twice the distance in the same time as I do. (Here is a previous encounter with his dog). He and Dan Parzych were the first ones, I remember, who had encouraged me to run a marathon.

That day we had said that we should ride our bikes together sometime.

Fast forward a couple of years. This Tuesday, I ran into Greg again while running in the Big Creek Greenway. In fact, I ran about half a mile with him… at his pace!! He suggested that we should go out for a bike ride this weekend. I was so out of breath, I would have agreed to anything 🙂 Just kidding! Of course, I was excited by that. And I could not believe that we had not done it already.

This morning, Greg Jones and myself went up to Dahlonega for a great breakfast and a 100 mile ride! Turns out we are both Honda brethren. He is on a Honda 919 and I am on my CTX 700D!!

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