While I love running, I am not a terrible fan of stretching. However, after I hit 45, not stretching gets me into a lot of trouble. I was curious about Yoga and asked my brother if he could show me some poses. Here is a few he showed me. It might be easier for me to stop running altogether!!!

Puppy love! My sister is the ultimate magnet for puppies!!

If “thanda legey jaabey” (“you will catch a cold”) is a Bengali’s trademark remark, a close second contender for that status would be “ombol hoyechhe”. (“you have indigestion”). Regardless of your symptoms – stomach cramps, short of breath, headache, broken finger :-), the latent doctor in a Bengali will invariably sprinkle that wise diagnostics phrase “ombol hoyechhe”. By the way, every Bengali is a freelance doctor!!
You probably also know that Bengalis are famous for their consumption of sweets. We have sweets for breakfast, lunch, snacks,dinner… Our long breaks for sweet-eating is interrupted only by our short breaks of sweet-eating. For whatever reason, sweets do not give us “ombol” 🙂
For years, I dodged all my relatives offering piles of sweet by lying to them “I have a sugar problem. My doctor said No sweets”. Like I explained before, doctors trump sweets for Bengalis. That was that. Till my sister decided to go ahead and marry a real doctor 🙂
That story later! Here, you can see how last night my mom was setting the “table” for dinner. Note that the food had not arrived yet. But four different varieties of sweets were already there. Just so that we are clear on our priorities..,

Reliance on technology paid off!! Terrible phone connection and terrible roads – but we made it to my mom ‘s birthplace alright!! This is the house she was born in. I have a couple of hours of video of mom going from house to house like a small kid and reconnecting with her old friends!! One amazing thing – one look at faces she had not seen in 40 years, and she nailed their names immediately. And most of their siblings’ names too!! As thrilling as the whole experience was, she also had to deal with the painful part of hearing half of her old friends are no more…

New Year adventure: For the last few years my mom has been wistfully talking about the small village she was born in and her childhood friends. She has not been there for over 40 years. I have some vague recollection from the only visit i had ever made there. Last night brother and I decided to take her to visit her birthplace.
That was the easy part. Finding the place was a whole different ball game. Mom was not too helpful with her directions – “it is by a big canal”!!! And Google maps has nothing on a village called ” Upalati”.
Internet to the rescue!!! Wikimapia had some place called “Upalati” but all it had was latitude and longitude and a whole page of irrelevant ads. Unless all the folks in Upalati have suddenly started selling life insurance policies 🙂
Armed with that latitude, longitude, iPhone, google maps, car phone charger and a whole lot of reliance on technology, here we go!!