Meandering thoughts - Sita Sreeraman

If you are like me, you moved to London or Europe after your marriage, found yourself in a strange country where every thing costs 10 times what it does in India and had the task of setting up a kitchen, knowing you may have to throw/give away stuff when you leave/move, but obviously of decent quality. When I started out and I realized how expensive it was, I decided to stop and make do with whatever containers etc I could find - one of my friends confided she used old yougurt pots as containers untli she re-discovered pearlpet at an Indian store(according to her, finding Pearlpet drove her to Nirvana). I saved Minute Maid juice bottles and jam bottles. Anyways, this list can be handy for others just starting it out. London stores are expensive. So find an Indian store- Wembley is a good place to start - The Poppat store is great, it has everything at affordable prices(familiarity is comforting?). IKEA is another good place. Rice: varieties Ponni, Sona Masoori for daily cooking ...

The sun descended bright and shiny last Saturday and what a glorious day it was indeed, especially coming after a 6 week long spell of cloudy and rainy, cold and wet weather. We decided to make the most of this glorious sunshine by making a trip to Greenwich or Grenich as it is locally called. The visit involves a tube ride to Embankment (we lived in Bayswater at that time) and then a boat ride across the Thames to Greenwich Pier. The boat takes in many sights of London's skyline - the London Eye, The Royal Festival Hall, London bridge, St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge, O2 center and other buildings. If you are lucky, you get to see the Tower Bridge open up and lift its two forks to let a tall ship pass. Greenwich is famous for the 0 degree longitude. In addition, it is home to London's only Planetarium- the Peter Harrison Planetarium as it is called. I was as excited as my young son and really looked forward to seeing the planets, stars etc. I told him stories of gian...

My son Aditya is now two and a half years old.  I am making a record of some of the videos/songs we have played him online. When he just a few moths old, we would play him songs from Karadi Tales - he loved the Train Song (Chai Chai, Coffee Coffee) and Just Like You. Then came the Phonics Song, the ABC song, Ba Ba Black Sheep, Twinkle Twinkle etc (mothergoose.com) and other rhymes. He loved /s the Wee Sing rhymes CDs. Aditya then moved on to Trains(Swiss Trains, German ICE trains, Japanese Bullet) videos, Vande Mataram(Vikku Vinayaram, Sashank, Vande Mataram 4 singers) . He has since graduated to Mr. Bean, Pimpa, Barbapapa, Tigger and Pooh, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, In the night garden, Teletubbies, Peepa Pig, Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom. Music videos: Mridangam by a little boy called Shyam Krishna, songs by Erode Anantharaman (pibare), Sai Bhajans, Aruna Sairam's version of "Veshamakara Kannan". Some of the episodes he watches again and again are: Mr...

I was reading Nelson Mandela's A Long Road to Freedom. After his 27 year long imprisonment, when Madela visited his home town, he was dismayed to see plastic bags and litter, spoiling this once serene hometown. And he mentions how he went away before plastics and when he came back it was shocking to find this new thing and to see it littered pretty much everywhere. How did this happen - how did we let this little(convenient) monster in? Before plastics became mainstay: Milk was delivered to the doorstep in bottles or one collected it from a common collection center. Yogurt was/is made at home, so yogurt pots are not a menace. One carried bags to the grocery stores, and whatever was needed was packed in Paper and coir thread. For oil, one took steel containers. No shampoo, cosmetics in plastic Soap came in bars wrapped in paper. No diapers, baby food, buggies No restaurant take-ways in plastic. Again one took containers or the food was wrapped in bananan leaf and pap...

I recently read a book called " 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life". It is a journal of Cami Walker, who is diagnosed with MS(multiple-sclerosis) a month after she is married and how she slides down into the disease and depression and self-centeredness and then starts a process of simple giving on the advice of her friend. And the giving starts profound changes in her life. I made notes of some really nice things from the book: (hope this is not copyright violation): By giving, you are focusing on what you have to offer others, inviting abundance into your life. The gifts can be anything but their giving has to be both authentic and mindful. A closed hand cannot receive. I think you need to stop thinking about yourself. If you spend all your time and energy focusing on your pain, you are feeding the disease. You are making it worse by putting all of your attention there. Healing does not happen in vacuum, but through our interactions with other people....

We love our family but every family has them - for lack of finding a good fit of a word, I will call it 'currency'. It is that thing that makes you accepted, appreciated or not. Some of these labels/prejudices are short-lived , others stick life-long. It is the yard-stick of success within the family. In some families, it is comparisons based only on good looks, being fair skinned etc. For others - it is comparisons on education, money, job, family you are married into, handsome spouses, your in-laws social status, foriegn travel, being modern(a blog topic for another day), how well one can cook, how big and aesthetic one's house is etc  We have all faced some of these prejudices at one time or another. Some of them are plain funny and we can laugh them off. Others hurtful and cruel for eg. someone being dark skinned - to judge a person just on this and ignore the rest of their personality - is cruel.  As one grows up and become older,  we begin to realize...

I am fascinated by how our names are getting shorter, more difficult to pronounce and unique and unheard of before. The more exotic, the more difficult to pronounce, you have got a winner! lol! Until our parent's generation and to a large extent in my generation, this was not the norm. With our children's generation, we are taking names a lot more seriously, a lot lot more seriously! I decided to jot down the names I know because before long these names will be extinct! My grandfather is Sri T.R. Parameshwara Iyer (Trikkur RamaIyer for the initails). My father's generation pretty much went the same way, though they dropped the Iyer and names became T.P.Sreeraman, T.P. Gopalakrishnan etc. (T for Trikkur and P for Thatha's name). And the names were the names of dieties: Rama: Sreeraman, Rajaraman, Anantharaman, Pattabhiraman, Kalyanaraman, Kodandaraman, Sundararaman, Subharaman, Sethuraman, Seetharaman, Balaraman, Jayaraman, Ramachandran, Ramabhadran, Ramanathan, ...