Holiday Blessings

Diwali is one of the rare Indian festivals celebrated all over India with great pomp, last year Diwali was on November 5. Rare because of the all over India celebration, no rare as in it only happens every once so often, much like Christmas it is back every year. One of the things people do is clean out their houses – very similar to the idea of spring cleaning. Cleaning also involves repainting the house if needed, especially the exterior. Another part of the festival includes sharing wonderful sweets with friends and families. This is also the time many people wait for to buy major purchases such as TV, cars etc, so that they are bought on an auspicious day. People buy new clothes, burst crackers and generally have a good time. It is the time of good cheer in India.

Much like the US, however, India too has latched onto Diwali and the gift giving, new household purchases etc with great gusto. These days you see signs of sales all over the place. But it could also be a byproduct of the fact many young unmarried folks have good paying jobs and next to no expenses because they either live at home with parents (this is pretty much a custom – if a child does not stay at home when living in the same city, the assumption is there was a falling out between parents and their child) they have a lot of disposable income, so shopping is just the next logical step.

My in-laws live in New Delhi and come from a state called Bihar, where a more important festival per their customs is celebrated six days after Diwali called Chhat – literally meaning sixth (pronounced “chh” as in kitchen and “at” as in hut. It is an amazing event. My mother-in-law (MIL) tells me that this is the only festival that starts by worshiping the “Setting sun” and ends by worshiping the “rising sun”.

One woman in a family fasts for 36 hours, because she believes that this will protect of her family from harm and bless them with good fortune. This fast is quite austere, not so much as a sip of water is allowed. From past experience my MIL has learnt that eating a big meal before the fast starts doesn’t help, if anything she eats a very simple meal. At the end of the first 24 hours in the evening the family dresses up and sets out to a river, pond, or any other water body to pray to the setting sun. My family has done both, they have gone to a river, which has its own charm because there are numerous other families there for the same reason. Nothing in India happens in a small scale. Another year, they filled up the little pond in the gardens in front of their house and did the prayers there.

Everyone returns home after the evening prayers and life goes on as usual, well for the rest of the family not the woman fasting of course. When my MIL fasts I notice she also becomes very quiet. I don’t know if it is because fasting depletes her energies, or fasting and its purpose makes are introspective as she seeks greater oneness with the powers that be.

This is also the time when loads of sweets are prepared at home, for which preparations have been going on for a day or two, to be distributed to all who come to the family’s celebrations and receive it as “prasaad”. It is quite a production and wonderful to watch all the preparations.

Early next morning (thankfully this is a winter festival so the sun doesn’t rise too early, but we are still talking about 5 am). The family dresses up again and sets off to the water body they prayed at the evening before. My MIL steps into the shallow water and waits for the sun to rise. As you can see in the photos there are several difference things on offer. I do not recollect them all, but among them is milk and fruits. First, my MIL offers the milk and then everyone in the family offers a tiny bit to the river and sun from the same pot. After my MIL finished her prayers she is becomes a holy person and her blessings are eagerly sought.

It makes a lot of sense that the morning prayers, which also signal the end of the fasting, is the time when most people show up. So now we have family, friends, colleagues and I don’t know who else show up. Not every Bihari family will have someone fasting, so when a friend or extended family member is doing it they all come to enjoy the company of friends as is typical of any social gathering and wait for the blessings from my MIL. After the prayers people walk up and touch her feet for her blessings. She puts kumkum on their forehead and offers them a small packet of sweets prepared the day before at home.

After everyone returns home, meal preparation is in full swing. My MIL is offered the first meal. If you have ever fasted for 36 hours without so much as a drop of water, you don’t simply dive in and eat a meal. You take a little bite, sip some water and wait for it to settle into your stomach, before taking another bite and so it goes on. It is much like offering water or food to a starving person, you can’t simply fill them up.

November December are also months when flu is in the air, not much different than here in the US. My father-in-law (FIL) had caught a cold just before Diwali. By the time Chhat was over he still hadn’t shaken off the cold, in fact it seemed worse than ever. So much against his wishes, after all who likes to go to the doctors, he was taken for a check up. At the hospital, the doctor was convinced that my FIL needed to be in the hospital for observation because he had weakened (a wonderful part if you are lucky to have access to medical help is that the hospitals are happy to keep you on for observation instead of sending you home ASAP. My FIL is close to eighty years old, so it is not so easy for him to bounce back from illnesses. In their hospital room, the doctor was asking my sister-in-law (SIL) questions about the symptoms and progress of my FIL’s illness. While listening to my SIL, he never took his eyes off my FIL. Suddenly, he shouted out at the nurse to put my FIL on the bed and to use the defibrillator. As it happened, my FIL’s was just about fainting when he was swept onto the bed and revived. They later learnt that his heart had stopped for a few seconds before starting again.

What a blessing that this happened in the hospital where he had immediate assistance, or we would most likely not have the joy of sharing our lives with him now. Just as is the case with any heart or head injury, you cannot tell what damages may occur. At first, my SIL told me that he behaved in a very childlike manner. Another change was if he thought of wanting or doing something, it had to be done NOW! He had lost his concept of time. Before his illness, my FIL’s day had a very structured day, he ate 3 meals plus tea and they were always about the same portion size and about the same time everyday. This of course, made him a very healthy man and added to his chances of a better recovery.

My husband was quite worried. Here we are in the States and there they are in India. First, the news of his illness itself is shocking, then, one is never quite sure if you are getting the whole story here, or the family is glossing over some matter. But more than that, no son or daughter can sit in peace without seeing their parent and assuring oneself of their recovery.

Our last trip to India had happened in summer of 2009 (see Blog http://familyandchildcare.blogspot.com/2009/08/summer-travel-to-india-part-i-bombay.html). This year my oldest is in fifth grade and I thought it might be a good time to visit in the winter and it might be more pleasurable for my kids as well, so they won’t be sweltering in the heat, not to mention, we could escape part of the Wisconsin winter. But I kept dithering about our plans. Hearing of my FIL’s illness the decision was taken out of our hands and we immediately made plans to visit in January.

When my youngest heard we were going to India, it is not his favorite thing because he says, “there is no food in India.” A reason, if you need one, not to raise picky eaters. But he was quite sure he wanted to have Christmas at home in the States. Well his wishes must be quite strong that year; we didn’t get tickets until after Christmas. His birthday is the 29th of December. So the next thing he wanted was that his birthday to be celebrated at home too. But we said we had tickets, so we were going.

We set off to the airport in a limo, it was quite funny, my husband and the driver were loading the limo with our luggage and the limo started to slide down the sloped driveway. The funny part was that both the driver and my husband are hanging on to the limo; like they could stop it was sliding down. When we reached the airport check in, we were at the counter for a really long time, before we discovered that while we had a current passport for my older son, his visa was on the older passport which we did not have with us. So we rented a car and headed back to Madison.

We had to reschedule our flights and guess what, we got tickets for the day after my youngest son’s birthday. So once again, his wish came true. Our next attempt to travel went smoothly enough. We arrived in India and the family bought a cake to re-celebrate my younger son’s birthday, so now he got two birthdays!

It was heartening to see my FIL doing well, he was no longer bedridden, he still had a nasty chest congestion that he couldn’t seem to shake, but with the cold weather it would be a tough fight for the fittest, and given his age, it was slow progress. His words a still a little slurred, he still did not have the concept of time. But even in the two short weeks we spent in India (my kids were thrilled because they skipped the first two weeks of school) we saw much improvement in his health. Which was wonderful to see and especially reassuring for my husband.

My husband encouraged my FIL to go out of the house to feel better and less like an ill patient. My FIL was all for it. It was a little amusing to see him get all dressed up every morning and ask, so what are the plans for today. One of the days, my husband said, today we are going to the Bengali Market for lunch. My FIL clapped his hands together and said, let’s go.

In the past I have only ever since him being like the head of the household serious, he does have a sense of humor, and he took great trouble to spend time with my kids and learn of their interests and talk about things they would be interested in. And at least once during our visit he loved to take me and the kids to the Parliament to eat lunch. My FIL has an office in the Parliament. It is the office for the political party my FIL and MIL have spent much of their life supporting and being active party members. The office in the Parliament is to maintain their political party’s presence. It was interesting to note he is next door neighbors with Sonia Gandhi at the Parliament. We didn’t get a chance to see here.

But now, he wanted us to be a part of many outings. It is hard to say if this change was because he had a near death experience which changes people. Where he thought, well I am now living on extra time, so I am going to use it the way I enjoy best and one of them is spending more time with my family in more fun events. Or if the stroke itself was a cause of the change, where he couldn’t control his impulses to have fun, as mentioned earlier, I think he always had that in him, but didn’t openly express it nor do it very often. But now he was all about having as good a time as he could with his family. I think it is a wonderful change, we get our extra time with him and it is such an enjoyable time too.

This year was the last time my MIL was going to fast during Chhat, she is getting older too, and the severe fast takes quite a toll on the body. Her fasting wasn’t for naught, it kept her family safe.

Kalpana Kanwar, Copyright ©June 2011

Sleepless in Bombay

We won a place in the Interior Design competition – Sharada, Parul and I.

We had 3 weeks to prepare and present our design. Like any other college students we postponed it until the deadline was on top of us. We had 2 days to come up with the design and presentation. Sharada and Parul lived in a dorm with many other architecture students. So we decided it would be best if I stayed over with them for a couple of days. If we needed something for a presentation we had a good chance of finding the materials from other students. We started late in the afternoon, right after our last class of the day. We worked through the night discussing ideas and coming up with a design we all agreed on. The next day, we went to our classes and returned to work on our project again. Now we had to finish the presentation. We stayed up all night for this. By mid morning, just an hour before the deadline we turned in our design.

After 2 days and 2 nights I returned home. As was usual I sat down with my family for tea. I told them about our design entry. After tea, I headed off to the bedroom to look for something. I sat on my bed trying to remember what I had come in for and fell asleep.

When I woke up, my bed was surrounded by 6 firemen.

After tea, my Mom had come in to tell me that all of them were headed off somewhere and since I was staying home, they weren’t going to take the house keys with them. Our front door was a self locking door. After a couple of hours they returned home and rang the doorbell. And rang and rang and rang. They rang it so much, that it actually broke down. Now they were really worried about me and wondered if something had happened. The neighbors had come out to see what was going. Someone suggested climbing over the balcony and entering through a window. This wasn’t really much of an option, as our apartment was on the 13th floor.

After some more waiting around and talking with our neighbors, my parents called the emergency number. Soon, a fire engine came, lights flashing, horn blowing and swung into our little compound. Now the whole building was curious as to what was going on. People spilled out of the building, a few were in the landing on our floor.

The firemen charged up, asked everyone to stand back and kicked open the door. By now it was late in the evening, so it was dark in the apartment. Torches on, they barged into the apartment and finding no funny business they let my family in. My Dad came and touched me. I up and found 6 firemen around my bed. Boy, were they cute.

You see, right after I went into the bedroom, I fell asleep. I don’t even remember lying down to rest or sleep. But after 2 nights of no sleep and intense work, I was so wiped out that I didn’t hear a thing until my Dad came in to wake me up.
Later my youngest sister told me how exciting it all was - the fire engine coming blaring through, the men kicking the door in, the whole shebang. She was the only one who thoroughly enjoyed the whole drama.

Blackberry Blues

There was a time when I did not carry or even own an appointment calendar. Any contacts I wanted to keep were simply written down on a piece of paper. Of course, then life was simpler too. I was in college and other than family, friends and school there wasn’t anyone else in my world.

My first Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was Palm Zire and I don’t remember why I bought it. My guess would be that after marriage and kids life got a little more complex – doctor’s appointments, school dates etc and there was no way I could carry all that around in my head. Paper seemed too retro, so electronic it was. I liked my Palm Zire, it was only Black-and-White, but did the job. One of the best things I liked about it was the 2 way sync with the Palm’s Desktop Manager. Since the syncing was with software developed by Palm themselves, it was quite smooth. No duplicates. Best of all, I could enter major information, use cut and paste on the desktop and just update my handheld, instead of slowly entering with a stylus.

After a while, I thought to get myself upgraded and got Palm Life Drive. I was already a fan of Palm, so decided to simply go with them. I have to say, I didn’t spend any time researching other than to go to the store and check out their Palm products and choose one of them. Why Life Drive you ask?

First, it was Palm. Second, it was now colored. So I could have a different color of each of us in the family and I managed all our appointments. By now our contact lists had also grown. The simple fact that my husband and I merged our contacts, and then add on various jobs, internships and friendships along the way, and our contact list was growing too. My original paper system may have continued to work, but when I could have it all in my fingertips why not.

Third, it still synched with a Palm Desktop Manager. And what’s more transferring all my information from the Zire to the Life Drive was a snap. A fourth cool thing about the Life Drive was that you could actually use your stylus and write notes as you would on paper.
The Life Drive came with a huge memory capacity and I thought it might be nice to use as a backup device too. And it worked great.

The down side to the Life Drive was that it was a chunky thing to carry around, and the mode of entry using stylus had changed. So I didn’t even bother to learn the new stylus entry system and simply used the keyboard on the PDA to enter data.

But then sometime last year, my computer crashed. After I had it fixed, I tried synching my Life Drive and nothing. I took it in to the Geeks and they didn’t have any answer. Then I learnt that Palm would no longer support the Desktop Manager programs. The drop deadline was sometime February of this month. So I thought it might be time to look for something else in the market. If the Life Drive wasn’t going to be functional, then I needed something else.

So off to the store I went. I learnt that nobody makes simple old PDAs anymore. Everything is a Smart Phone - an oxymoron if I ever heard one. Well that threw a wrench in my plans. I wanted to stay with Palm if possible. But if I had to combine it with a phone, I wanted to stay with Verizon. Palm had just introduced the Palm Pre with AT&T. But I gave priority to the phone company. Now I wonder why, considering the fact that I have the smallest calling plan on my phone and it works just fine for me. So obviously I am not using my phone a lot.

After a very brief consideration, the choices were iPhone or Blackberry according to my Facebook poll. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple products and I think they work great together. It’s when you mix the Apple and PC worlds I feel things go wrong. But this is from experience several years ago. For all I know things are markedly different now.

As you can probably tell, this is leading to the Blackberry. I figured, it has been around a long time and they know what they are doing. Blackberry was one of the first names I recall hearing things like “I can’t live without my Blackberry.” “People who have Blackberry’s just love them.”
So again without any further ado, I purchased a Blackberry Storm 2. I was eligible to get a phone upgrade from Verizon and yet, I paid for the phone. The sales agent told me I will get a rebate in the mail. Nope, didn’t happen. So now I have a phone that I paid for. Who does that anymore?

Now begins the great adventure. First, we had to find a way to transfer data to the Blackberry. Turns out if I used MS Outlook, this would be a snap. Now MS Outlook is only available with the Professional Version of Office and is quite expensive. So obviously Blackberry was not meant for the Mom market. Then it turned out if I used a Google calendar I could sync it to my Blackberry. But I could not transfer from my Palm to Google calendar. So I just decided to simply start using Google calendar going forward and synch with my Blackberry. The Google calendar itself is quite sophisticated and allowed me the same color coordinated entries as Palm did. Unfortunately when it synchs with the Blackberry, everything is black.

This was the easy part. Let go of the past and look forward regarding appointments. What to do with the contacts? Again, apparently it would sync great with MS Outlook. I can’t say because I never went that route. Blackberry claims they can synch with the Google contacts. But if you look at the data entry modes in the Blackberry and Google contacts they do not match, so if you synch with Google contacts, it shows up as one continuous line of information on the Blackberry. But that wasn’t even a problem yet. I simply did not keep contacts on Google, except to save email addresses. It was not my address book.

I tried to do some research. I am sorry I won’t be able to tell you the whole miserable experience, but just let me say, I had to export files from my Palm in a certain format, go to Yahoo and convert them to another format and then try to import them into the Blackberry. Didn’t work. So I took my Blackberry back to the agent and asked for his help. He had this neat device where he could copy from one of those files from Yahoo or whatever and transfer them onto my Blackberry. It worked. Sort of.

So now I had a bunch of contacts on my Blackberry, most of the information was intact, but it was in a mess. For example, the address would show up as one long line – 800 Washington St,New York,NY. Considering we have a lot of international contacts and some of those addresses appeared thus – 14 International St,near tall pillar,behind well,City,Country,Zip.
But I was not ready to give up hope. I figured I had reached as far as I could with the trying to upload data business. So I went through each contact and painfully corrected each one. The frustrating part was that some of these contacts would randomly return to their original mess. Finally, I would simply delete that record and create a new one. That seemed to work better.
Since I had to take care of synching etc, I downloaded Google Sync for Mobile and synced stuff. Voila my calendar appeared albeit all black text. But then I realized that my contacts were messed up again. Why, because it had downloaded every single email from my Google account as contact and managed to mess up several of my other contacts.

Well this was the learning part, so I don’t mind so much. I realized I could go in and choose not to synch my contacts with anything, just synch the calendar. This worked quite well for sometime. Until one day, I turned on the phone and it said, would you like to upgrade to system whatever. I said yes. It went through its song and dance and when all was done, my calendar looked fine, but my contacts were a disaster. Now I had multiple entries for several people. Now I can understand if Mary Smith is copied from my Facebook contact, Gmail contact, etc. But why duplicate even the ones I already had on the phone. So now I could have as many as 6 Marys. Mary, Mary Smith (only email address), Mary Smith (all contact), Mary Smith (again). How do I know it copied its own self too?

See the wonderful thing about Palm contacts was that you could create categories, and I am not sure how executives do it, but as a Mom, my people categories were simple. Family, Friends, Neighbors, Work, Doctor, etc. You get the point. Well in the Blackberry too you could create categories, but if you created Home and selected Mary Smith, it would ask which phone number do you want to add. It would not include the whole information. Basically, I had to divide Mary Smith into Home, Work, etc. Who operates like that? Even in the business world, I would imagine if you know someone and have their contact information, both personal and professional, you are likely to categorize them in the category you are most likely to look for them. If they are personal friends, maybe FRIENDS works and if you need to call them at work, you just look up your friend’s work number. If they are business contacts, maybe BUSINESS works. But wouldn’t you want to have all of Mary Smith’s information in that one category you went to? And the whole point of categories is to break down your contacts into manageable lists. For example, if I am looking my doctor’s number, if I simply chose the category DOCTOR, there it would be within just a handful of names. At least, that is how Palm did it.

So I soon realized that categories in Blackberry are a dud. If I am wrong, please tell me. But now I had this long list of people in my contact list. And no matter how many contacts you have in your list, you don’t use more than a dozen on a regular basis. It was a pain to scroll through so many names. So the top 10 names became A Mary Smith, A John Doe. You get the idea, since they now started with A they would jump to the top of the list and voila no more scrolling, there they were in the screen.

Now going back to my story about duplicating records, I knew it duplicated my own records because I had 2 A Mary Smith, 2 A John Doe, etc. But I wondered why did this happen anyway, just because I upgraded the software on the phone.
Turns out that upgrading reverts all the settings to some default and it synched calendar and contacts (from various sources such as Facebook, email accounts and apparently itself). So I had to go back and deselect the option to synch contacts yet again. And once again I had to scroll through the contact list and delete the duplicates and unwanted contacts. This took me a whole hour. Since I had already done this once before, you can imagine I was not pleased.

How long have I had the phone? Barely 6 months and in this time, I had trouble finding a smooth way to transfer data from Palm to Blackberry. Now Blackberry has its own Desktop Manager. But all this does is let you use your Blackberry phone as a USB drive and copy files into it – the obsession seems to be media files. And create backup files of the data on your phone. Which I can see will be useful, if I need to reinstall that in my phone or a new phone sometime. But there is no desktop program where I can view what is on my Smart Phone. So any information I enter is typed in awkwardly and without copy and paste, is quite slow going. Now I know people text a lot these days and probably find this funny. But I do not text. I prefer a voice at the end of my phone or an email.

It is nice to be able to check my email and Facebook accounts on my Blackberry. But really they weren’t essential to my being. What I really wanted was a reliable phone, color coordinated calendar and contact list. I have the phone part, but the rest is sadly lacking.

Now I hear Palm has released a phone with Verizon and they do not have a Desktop Manager for it and suggest using Google calendar too. However, there are 3rd party software that will synch Palm to a Desktop Manager similar to the one Palm had or to Palm’s own Desktop Manager. Or so they claim. I am waiting to hear more on that. As an aside, did you hear they had a phone contest and the Palm Pre won - http://blog.laptopmag.com/march-smart-phone-madness-game-13-palm-pre-plus-vs-htc-hd2

Another feature I have not been able to understand is the Silent mode. When I chose my phone to be silent, not vibrate, not low, but SILENT, it won’t ring if I get a call, but every time a Facebook or email pops in, it beeps. Silence means silence, not beep sometimes.

Then the phone comes loaded with all these features, which just seem so redundant. Different programs seem to do the same thing. I am sure people have their favorites and don’t use all of them. Wouldn’t it make sense to only get the ones you use and make them work well rather than have a dozen programs that work somewhat inadequately.

Take voice activation, the button is on the side, very convenient. All you have to do is say, call Mary and voila. Now I will admit I may have a slight accent, but not enough to stump the phone. So I say, call Mary, it asks do you mean John? Whaaa? Oh, and I have even asked my born and bred American friends to try it, same results. Meanwhile, my husband has a Droid and the voice feature on it works just fine when we talk into it. So it is not my accent, it is the program.

I like that I can record a voice memo, I am sorry to lose the ability to scribble a note (no stylus).

As a first time owner of a Blackberry Smart Phone, I must say I am not impressed.