Red-Winged Black Birds!

I see black spots decorating the evening sky
They are the black birds on migratory fly

To the south of Tundra they go in autumn

Back to Alaska when the spring blossoms

Moving black cloud blocks the sun

Oh its the black birds having fun!

They gather as groups, split in formation

And regroup to the onlooker’s confusion

Do you hear the sound "oak-a-lee”?

A bright red patch you will see

The male black bird is in delight

Singing to impress the female in sight

Oh I see black dots on the fall sky

It is the black birds on migratory fly!

                -Inspired by Wallace Stevens &

                  the Black birds I see everyday

Pookolama illai Idhazkolama?

The festival of Onam falls in the month of September on the day of "Thiruvonam" star. Good guess, most of the festivals in India are driven by star and moon positions and hence the date will differ each year. This festival is celebrated to commemorate the greatness of King "Mahabali" who was an Asura king (the divine bad guys :)) and Lord Vishnu who killed this king but granted a nice wish to him. Though Mahabali was very nice to his subjects he was giving trouble to Devars (The divine good guys who are protected by the Gods). He is a strong king but very generous too. So Lord Krishna came up with a plan to destroy him. He came down to earth as "Vamana" a short Brahman and went to meet the king. King Mahabali asked Vamana what he wants and Vamana asked for 3 feet of land, deceived by the size the king granted the wish and asked him to take it. Then Vamana grew so huge and became Lord Vishnu and for the first foot he took the earth, for the second the sky and for third since there was nothing else left Mahabali understood his mistake and bowed down and asked the Lord to take him and the Lord put his foot on the King's head and destroyed him. The devars were happy, but the people of the kingdom felt miserable about losing the king and pleaded to Vishnu, the God wanting to make the people happy granted a wish that Mahabali can come to visit his people every year on that day. Hence the tradition goes as people welcome the king with the "Pookolam (Floral Rangoli) and present him with "Ona Sadhya" (variety of food served on Banana leaf) every year.

This festival is celebrated at my home too because of the Kerala ancestry, and with my "Chathurthi" experience, I decided to celebrate it here in US by making Pookolam and a smaller version of Sadhya. Since it is already fall here there were no flowers in my mini garden, I had no choice but to get flowers from a grocery store. I needed at least 3 colors so settled for a moderately priced bouquet. There were so few flowers in it that I decided to pluck out the petals inside of putting the flowers as a whole. The flowers were not enough as there were exactly 3 colors and I needed to some more to finish the design I took. So took the leaves and some part of stem too. With this all set I had to look for a suitable background. Between a glass cake base and a plain dark blue chart I went for the glass. The picture here is the final look. I sent it to a friend in India thinking it is really nice and all that and the heading if the blog is the comment I got :)), point being The Floral kolam I made did not have even 1 whole flower :(.

To give this to the intended God I needed a Vishnu picture. It was late in the night to go shopping so had to "make my own Vishnu". Found a picture after a bit of 'googling', fed it to my All-in-one printer and framed it. Picture Perfect! Decided to make the sadhya fresh in the morning and called it a night. In the morning Rice was ready as the first dish, followed by the okra theeyal (my ex-roommates recipe, but the stickiness of okra had not completely gone), in parallel channa dal in the cooker for payasam (This came out wonderful). The other item in the plan was raw banana eruseri, only that the bananas were already ripe within the two day shelf life. When the eruseri (Dad's recipe) was done it was almost close but with all the sweetness of banana (people @ work liked it for lunch though). All these dishes were loaded with coconut, coconut milk and coconut oil for nice flavor and taste.

Though it was a comedy of errors, I loved the experience.

"Green" Pillaiyar - Past and Present

Ganapathy, Vinayakar, Pillaiyar, Ganesha are all the different names denoting the elephant faced God in India. The story goes as devi Parvathi created him and Shiva still did not know about him. And one day Shiva went to visit Parvathi. She was bathing and Ganesha was standing guard. Ganesh was not aware of Shiva and vice versa, Ganesha did not allow Shiva inside, hence had a fight. In the ordeal Ganesha lost his head and Shiva gave him the elephant's head when he knew the truth about him.

The festival "Vinayaka Chathurthi" is the celebration for the birth of Lord Vinayaka. This God as per Hindu mythology is good natured, humble, and likes simple down to earth things. The statue itself is made to depict the nature of the God. I love to dress up the statue back in India when I was a small kid because it involved getting flowers from the backyard and on the street corners and making a garland out of that. The Bermuda grass (Arugam pul), Calotrophis gigantia(Erukam poo), Datura(Oomatham poo), Leucas aspera(Thumbai) are his favourite.

For the festival in the South India we get the statue made of clay and decorate it with flowers and cotton garlands, infact a very green way of doing it, but this time I am in US so I was not able to get this clay version, I did not want to get any other statue as I cannot leave it in water after 3 days. Was thinking about it, when it struck me that I can make it with turmeric. Yes, there is a non-figurine version for ganesh, made of turmeric. Also it is a general practice to keep and umbrella and a fan too (so that he can walk down to people's house to eat modhakam), My friend was generous enough to make a fan for my "green" Pillaiyar. Now the decoration flowers, I could not find any so was wodering if I can atleast get the grass, and learnt a rather strage thing. In US most of the grass on the golf course, in the house yards are bermuda grass!!! That was perfect, it was right in my patio.

Final version- An awesome Pillaiyar, huge mound of turmeric decorated with rose flowers, bermuda grass and kumkum, nicely seated in a raised seat (inverted mixing bowl on a wooden chair) lined with silk saree, fan on his side.

The next important thing is Modhakam and Kozhukattai, made of rice flour with sweet and savory fillings. In India the rice is soaked, dried and ground in flour mills a day before for making this dish. But here there are no flour mills, so I soaked, dried the rice and grinded it in a dry mixer, some prefer to save this trouble and use the store-bought flour, well its just me. I did it to get a feel of what my mom was doing for years. It came out nice and white, making the cups was a bit of a struggle for me, but learnt it in a bit. After the "Naivedhyam"- official offering to God and a mini pooja (as I am not all that orthodox), it was heavenly to eat them. Ofcourse took some pictures and sent to my family in India!

Sweet Rights

Its a nice day and I was casually browsing the News from India. This news made me happy.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/tirupati-laddoo-gets-geographical-copyright/517376/

Thirupathi reminds me of laddoo as much as it reminds me of Lord Venkateshwara. I have always liked that laddoo. I dont know if it is because of the fact that it is not freely available or it is the Lord's prasadam or the wait in the queue. Neverthless the taste is unmatchable. And finally this precious little sweet that belongs to India is being protected by Law. I feel India needs to patent a lot more things and get copyrights. Sandal wood products, cotton scarfs, khadi, silk sarees, the color saffron, a lot of rice based dishes, South Indian Sambar, Garam Masala and more :) India can become rich just by suing other countries for using their copyrighted items.

The Art of Language

The recent acquaintance with the German language made me ponder about a basic human skill – Languages. While our close relatives, the chimpanzee can only make sounds, use sign language and facial impressions but cannot talk, it is amazing how we, the Homo sapiens one single species can talk in thousands of languages.

In India alone there are 200 registered dialects and 18 official languages. Infact it is the first country to ever do a linguistic study with Astadhyayi written for Sanskrit in 5 BC and Tolkappiyam written for Tamil around 2 BC. The Europeans started it a few centuries later.

I also noticed that the sounds among languages are shared, but not necessarily the meaning. For example in German there is this sound “au” where
                                  - “a” is pronounced as ‘a’ in apostrophe
                                  - “u” is pronounced as ‘u’ in noun

A similar sound is in Hindi and Tamil and a most of other Indian languages.

- In Tamil it is the 12th consonant

- In Hindi it is the 11th consonant

A similar sounding word in different languages would refer to different things. That essentially means in the same human mind at different location/ages/time the same sound reminded of different things. I guess it would be fun to learn linguistics for people who are intrigued by languages. With all that said, if any of you are interested in learning one of the oldest and alive languages Tamil here are a few links, you can even get a degree online :)

 http://pm.tamil.net/pub/pm0100/tolkap.pdf
 http://www.tamilvu.org/coresite/html/cwhomepg.htm

Our Medicine for Their Well Being

This is not a saying but the reality that is happening in India. All of us have been reading about the H1N1 flu virus and the rate at which it is spreading. The WHO has made predictions that a much worse strain of this virus would come back and can cause huge problems in a short while. In US it is still summer and flu generally spreads here in fall-winter seasons, so they are stocking up the vaccines for this virus. The Indian company Baxter has already produced its first batch of vaccines, that should be a happy news right? Well it is not! Here is the twist. These vaccines are going to be shipped to US and UK who already have contracts signed with this company and other Indian pharma companies. Indian government has not done anything about this yet. They have not even placed the orders for vaccines yet.
Somehow I am not able to assimilate this fact. The vaccines are produced in India, by Indians, with Indian resources but not for Indian use? Wonder what was this company thinking, may be their workers and family are immune to this virus or is it just the money or is it business as usual. This sounds like a suicide mission to me. Someone should stop this! For more info check this out http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/H1N1-vaccine-ready-India-napping/articleshow/4946865.cms

Happy Independence Day!

Yes it is another Independence Day holiday or celebration I would say, time for flag hoisting, patriotism and chocolates. Today I sent out wishes to all my Indian friends, colleagues and acquaintances at work, following that at lunch with my close buddies had a heated discussion on India. As always it was all talk and nothing productive happened to India because of that. Then I was casually browsing the News websites of India and found some interesting blogs regarding the Independence Day and India. Check this out if you like http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

You can even put in your comments for some of them. Interesting though how varied and different the thoughts of these people are. Reading all these I was thinking why not take a resolution you know like New Year's resolution how about Independence Day resolution. Nothing major, but we should be determined to follow it, so take practical ones. Like I wont spit on the roads, I will not throw any garbage on the road which includes the used bus ticket and the chocolate wrappers :), being courteous to old people, controlling my anger towards unknown people, being polite in public.. The list can go on but try making atleast one and see if you can stick to it. It can be even something no one would notice. There is a long way to get India into a good shape, but come on we need to start somewhere there is no use just talking about it.

So you must be wondering what mine is :) Since I am currently not in my country I decided to put out proudly the fact that I am from India and make sure to change the notion of anyone who comes and tells me, "I heard India is a poor country. The traffic is bad and people are mean" to "India is a prosperous country with great cultural heritage with strong family values where people strive for a better future."

After a long time I had a strong urge to write this blog today. I have a new determination to do atleast one post per month per blog of mine.