Happy New Year

Merry Christmas

Make a Smilebox greeting

None of the photo links work!

I just realized that none of the links to the photo albums are working. Photobucket did something :(

Christmas 2008

Here is a photo that I took this morning.

Nostalgia!

We studied together, way back in the 80's. That takes us back maybe 2 decades! We met again in October this year.


From left to rt: Swati (the entrepreneur and engineer), Sophia (the dentist), Yours truly, Urmila (the banker).

Where are their hearts?

Here is the story of Moshe and his brave nanny.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/02/moshe.mumbai/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Teaching Math to a 4 year old

My 4 year old daughter, Lisa, taught me yesterday that we should never under estimate the learning abilities of children.

She's in pre-school and came home yesterday with one full page of math homework. I was really upset with the school for having started so early and thought that this was just pushing kids to the limit. However, I was pleasantly surprised. She completed the whole thing- 2+1, 4+5, 5+5 etc etc in less than 10 minutes using all 10 fingers. Very cool indeed.

I also found this link, which describes exactly how she does the simple math:
http://www.thecoloradoindex.com/the_colorado_index/2007/09/on-teaching-mat.html?cid=139939784#comments

Languages

I absolutely love this feature. I can actually write in the local languages:

Hindi: मेरा नाम रीना है और में इस फेअतुरे से बेहत कुश हूँ।
Kannada: ನನ್ನ ಹೆಸರು ರೀನಾ. ನನಗೆ ಈ ಫೆಅತುರೆ ತುಂಬ ಇಷ್ಟ ಆಯಿತು.
Malayalam: എന്റെ പേര് റീന. എനിക്ക് ഈ ഫീടുരെ ഒത്തിരി ഇഷ്ടമായി.
Tamil: எனோடு பேரு ரீனா.

Most of the spellings seem fine, except a couple here and there. Absolutely fantastic, strange that I've never tried it before.

School Hunting!

We've been trying to decide which is the best school in Bangalore for Lisa and somehow it seems to be Sophia Girls School. The only problem is that it's really quite a distance for Lisa to commute everyday. The second on the list is Bishop Cotton Girls school and it seems to me now that it's most likely that she will go there.
I submitted forms to Sacred Heart Girls early this week and I loved the campus very much. Old stone buildings, plenty of trees- lovely environment. What we are looking for Lisa is a place that does not concentrate on only academics but a more holistic approach to developement.
Many of them also told me about Baldwin Girls but it's really not on the top of my list atleast.

The White Tiger

I've been reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and I must say I am impressed. It is hilarious, entertaining and outrageous. All about Balram Halwai's seven letters to the Chinese Premier, to educate him about the real India before his impending visit.
While many in India might be offended by Adiga's narration of the pathetic life in India, if looked through the eyes of the uneducated Balram Halwai, it is in fact the plain truth about the poor.
Everyone likes the world to know India as the emerging economic powerhouse, as long as the facts about the poor, the homeless and the uneducated are brushed away under the carpet.
Being brought up in Bangalore, I have seen how this place has grown from being a quiet paradise where the rich and famous were sparse, to a city bustling with people from all rungs of society, from every state, hoping for the "Bangalorean dream" to come true. Adiga is surely exposing the real India not just to the rest of the world but to some Indians who like to run away from the truth.

Lisa is 4!

Lisa turned 4 on Sept 3rd. Here are some pictures!

This was supposed to be a plain glossy chocolate cake with a big 4 written on it, but the baker let his imagination go wild!

Bicentennial Celebrations and more....

This weekend we were part of the bicentennial celebrations at St. Marks Cathedral, Bangalore. The Cathedral where we worship every Sunday also the Cathedral where we got married.
All of us were extremely tired but it was fun.

The webpage: www.saintmarks.in has some awesome pictures of the Mass Choir and Children's choir who performed at Bishop Cotton Boys School. Lisa is the tiniest of the lot.

Since I'm not going to bother with a new post, here is a picture of Lisa as Little Red Riding Hood for an even in school.

Zoomin

I've tried out this new (atleast to me) website called www.zoomin.com where you can upload your photos and place an order for prints to be delivered within India. Most of the other photo hosting sites take orders only for delivery to the US and so on. But this is simply great.
You can pay for it online and even select what kind of finish you need- glossy, matte or metallic (which is absolutely super). You can also select any size you want.
There is just one bug, which the developers promise to fix- if you happen to lose connectivity to the site or signout when you already have some items in the cart, then these items just vanish. So if you are placing an order, make sure you do it all at once. Don't wait to sign out and come back another day.

My weekend

I think I'm a "Half Yearly Blogger", Not that I've forgotten about my blog, just cannot seem to make time for it, every single day, or every single week, or month. At this rate, it will be every single year.
The weekend was good- I had 2500 bucks to blow, thanks to the generous token of appreciation gifted to me by my company, for slogging myself to oblivion. When I entered this store, I thought I'd never spend the money well but I did, simply because I knew what I wanted to buy.
This store is good, provided you know what you want. It has children's toys (one level) and then CD's (a good collection), latest DVD's, tons of books, home stuff, and much more.
So what did I buy- Corelle plates, a carafe, Cinderella and Noddy DVD's, a Barbie, and the latest album of Coldplay. Hurray! Because it was all done in 2 hours ! Gosh I do really hate shopping, maybe what repulses me is the crowd more than anything else. Bumping into people is not exactly welcome.
Then got the return tickets for the cousins, got a whole lot of stuff cleared up at home and poof- the weekend's gone! I even skipped my yoga classes.

However, my "To do" list seems to be growing at a faster pace everyday. Slowly but surely it shall be done :) As you can see I've started with an extra helping of optimism.

Wonderful!

I have been in a training the last few days and this was about how the world is moving towards Agile and Scrum instead of the traditional waterfall method.
About how the waterfall method was based personal views that really didn't make any sense at all and how the Harvard Business Review of 1986 called "The New New Product Development Game" has really changed the world of software development in many ways. I ofcourse am thrilled, simply because I couldn't understand why any company would have 3 year or even 1 year product development cycles. It never made sense.
This guy called Craig Larman trained us and as of now I am a Certified Scrum Master :)

All these months- Christmas was great and so was New Years (we stayed at home) .

We're off!

I'm looking forward to our 10 day vacation in Dubai. I've never been there and although it was never in my list of travel destinations I'm excited since it's the first trip for my mom outside India.
I don't particularly fancy high tech cities and concrete jungles but I have never seen a desert before, except from an aircraft. So am looking forward to the sand dunes.

Short post, gotta rush.

For some reason...

The site is not allowing me to post more pictures. :)

Anyways! This morning, I parked my car on Brunton and realised that I had parked it way close to the parking signboard. Parking is such a nuisance, really. Never imagined that Bangalore would get so crowded that it would become close to impossible to get parking at 9am.
I've also been following the Madeleine McCann case lately and I really wonder about the media frenzy. I know every child is precious but nobody even thinks about the hundreds that are lost in India. The Indian channels report about a child missing in Europe but don't care for the hundreds missing in our own country! What a shame!

Here is another photo taken at her school.

Here are a few more pictures of her 3rd Birthday.

Birthday Time

Well am I glad to be writing again. Busy as ever, training a couple of very polite Poles, organising Birthday parties, working, going on a vacation, being plain lazy etc etc. All since the last time I wrote.

Lisa turned 3 this month and I think it was only on this Birthday that she really had fun with the balloons, decorations, cake and friends. The last time around, she was really excited about having everybody around but I don't think she realised that it was all about her. But I'm glad she enjoyed herself. She had been waiting for it for several weeks. She literally had 3 separate parties, with 3 cakes to cut. The next day, she wanted to know why she had so many birthdays. Here is a photo. I'll upload some more later. And that's anybody's guess when.

Life's all about the choices you make. Sometimes, good, sometimes bad and sometimes ugly. And the kind of choices you make, moulds you into the person you are and the life you lead. Sometimes a lot of choices we make are not really ours, we chose it because somebody else wanted us to. While that might not really be what you've wanted, that was probably the best and that's the beauty of naievity.
On the other hand, what if all the decisions you made, was exactly what you wanted? That sounds perfect doesn't it, but usually a decade later, you wonder if you had the choice to do things a little differently. Reverse, retake, Ctrl Z.... and if you didn't think that way, you are probably lying to yourself. That's just human nature, to want and to change.