The 2016 Christmas Letter

It's Christmas Eve. The gifts are under the tree. The bird is brining. The lamb is marinading. The kids are in bed. Finally a silent night - and a moment to reflect on the last 12 months.

Twenty sixteen was a grim year. Syria and a handful of other places continued to burn. Mid year, the deadliest Ebola outbreak finally ran out of steam but not before ravaging west Africa. Zika said hello. Hackers held organizations and countries hostage. ISIS and Trump exploited the new digital media landscape and won hearts and minds. AIs caused havoc, being unable to distinguish between popularity and truth. Terrorists and drones killed civilians near by and in distant places. Different-ism awoke - we fought those of other color, religion, gender, nationality. On a personal note, bad news about death and sickness among friends came in waves. My dear cat, Crazy, died. So fuck you, 2016.

I could go on. But 'tis the season. There's good news too.

In our little bubble we had a good year. At nine and six, Vivian and sometimes Evan give us glimpses of what their futures may hold and Jo and I are thankful and terrified and hopeful and worried as parents tend to be. Evan has blossomed into a lovable young dude, a voracious reader and vociferous conversationalist, but for various reasons, peace and tranquility continue to elude his teachers. He is an enthusiastic Scout and adores camping and hiking. Vivian has jumped into choir with a surprising gusto and patience and we now drive her places and watch her perform with alarming regularity. I was Vivian's math teacher for the last term and on most weekdays we both love spending an hour or two together walking and talking about numbers and factors and operations and geometry and sometimes String Theory.

[Thanks for Bonnie Berry for the photograph https://www.facebook.com/mynameisbonnieberry]

Vivian and Evan spread their share of joy and life and hope and we some made wonderful memories during the year. We visited friends and family near and far and were nourished by their love. But we are not unhappy to see 2016 in the rear view mirror.

So we wish you love, happiness, peace, and a big helping of hope in the New Year.
December 24, 2016
Austin, Texas.

Modeling

We didn't get called back after two interviews for the modeling gig, but I did take some pictures of the front side of the house in case we made it to the next level. So that Vivian and Evan can look at these later when they are adults and may not remember what their kitchen and living rooms looked like, and because the house is rarely this clean, here we are.

From Thanksgiving to Now

We missed Thanksgiving. Jo spent the holiday chilling at a resort in a coffee plantation in Coorg with her husband and kids instead of masticating turkey with her family in Nebraska, and it was my fault.

It took us ages to get rid of jet lag. For days, various members of the family would drop off into stupor at 4 or 5 in the evening and wake up at 3 in the morning. Poor Evan was the only one who had a regular schedule and it sucked to be him. The three weeks between then and now have been a blur. I'm blaming it on my body muddling up its melatonin.

Evan finished the term and had a very nice winter concert (these things are usually hell to sit through but this year was actually much better). He did have trouble with his teachers towards the end of the term. It is almost impossible to get him to do anything that he doesn't want to, and we can beat him while his teachers can't. So we all counted days till the end of the semester and left it at that. I thought he did a wonderful job on the self-portrait collage from stuff in the recycle can, and that's got to count for something.

Evan's popcorn from the Boy Scouts arrived and Jo and I were mollified to see how pitiful they were. Here is a can of chocolate covered popcorn. The can is small. You open in a find a smaller mylar packet inside. Once you empty it out the popcorn fills less than half the can. That will set you back by $25.

So we apologize to the neighbors who had signed up for popcorn. Almost everyone succeeded in hiding their disappointment at being gypped (sorry dear Roma people - am I insulting you and coopting your culture simultaneously) by the Boy Scouts of America. For his troubles, Evan got a bracelet with a compass that broke in less than 5 minutes.

Vivian's first semester of homeschooling ended well. I mostly enjoyed teaching her math and immensely enjoyed my walks with her. She did some interesting projects with Jo - on Amelia Earhart, women from the civil rights, and propaganda under Hitler. If you are looking to introduce race in America to a nine year old, do consider this book about Claudette Colvin.

To round out her education, Vivian babysat Zizi occasionally (aren't they so cute - leafing through the Tiffany's catalogue together), and wrote with Karen often. Coincidentally, at a time when about a quarter of this country is reeling from having just discovered that another quarter is composed of hypocritical immoral and irrational lowlife, it seems like people are drawing closer to those they trust.

Here they are. Evan, Vivian and Ava, pretending to be mannequins outside a GAP store.

Demolition is Fun

There is this narrow angular covered walkway between the house and the garage that I have hated since the day we bought the house on Lariat Ridge and ten years is a long time to hate something.

Last week Gunaraj and I pulled it down. The roof had a few rotten spots where the walkway had been connected to it. We fixed those and put in fresh tar paper. This week we go back and patch the shingles.

While on the roof I took this photo looking north east over the pool. Not much besides trees even from up here - which is one of the reasons I love this place even though the house is falling apart.

Preaching to the Choir

I'm beginning to worry that I'm going to burn in heaven - lately I'm spending more time in churches than pubs.

Even if it's for Vivian's choir practice. But all that practicing came to fruition recently. She and her group went to Galveston for a overnight trip as featured guests at the Galveston Dickens on the Strand festival (unfortunately it rained most of the time and the poor choristers were very very wet). Then, last weekend, they caroled holiday shoppers at various places around town.  This weekend they had their winter concert. Vivian - I have included a photo of the program so you see what you sang long after that piece of paper is gone.

Today Vivian and her choir group were at the Texas State Capitol for the benefit of the Electoral College. My dear daughter - you were there when the trajectory of history changed. The Texas delegate of the Electoral College pushed Trump over the needed votes while you sang patriotic songs

While Jo and Vivian were at the Capitol for almost five hours this afternoon tearing their hair and hearts out, Evan and I went Christmas shopping. He asked if he could buy this plaque for his mother. Yes, Jo and I have been cursing a lot. Better get used to it, kids - four years is a long time.

His Turdiness

During our recent trip to India Evan mostly stayed true and strong to his desire to not be photographed, especially in family or group shots, to avoid hugs, and to not listen very much. On our second evening in Bangalore we went to the wedding Sangeet ceremony - lots of singing and dancing. Evan wouldn't crack a smile or return anyone's greeting. So Sahiti took him off to a corner to spoil him a little till he felt better.

A couple of mornings later when we were getting dressed for the wedding and Jo was in her saree, he refused to take a family shot with us. So here's the rest of the family without him. Meanwhile he jumped around Suki's house and the best I could get was this.

So he didn't get in any photos with my friends or even the bride and groom. But he did occasionally settle down - as for this photo in Coorg - though it was a rarity.

Night Job

The morning after we arrived back in Austin from India, Evan (and I) woke up at noon. He just loved it. And he set about trying to imagine jobs he could do that would let him sleep till noon. His first attempt: "I could fly back from India and be jet-lagged enough to sleep till noon everyday."  Me: "Umm - who would pay you to do that?" 

Sensing that neither Evan nor I were qualified to argue about jobs, Jo opened the question up to her Facebook page.

Heading Back Home

On the final morning in Coorg after a breakfast of alu poori and methi parathas we set out for the long ride back home. First step: a six hour drive to Bangalore. Here we are with Raveesh, our driver. I was trigger happy with my iPhone camera on the drive back to Bangalore - here are some photos.

We drove past coffee plantations and descended from the hills into fields of sugarcane and paddy and teak and coconut palms and colorful villages. Roadside vendors sold coconut water, vegetables, hand made wooden toys, tiffins (a light snack - the one in this photo and a couple of others I saw were named "somethnig-and-something Tiffanies") and Chinese stuffed dolls. The road was uniformly good except when we drove through small towns - where road bumps and zig zagging barricades popped up unannounced. 

We passed through the historic town of Srirangapatna where Tipu Sutlan fought the forces of the British East India Company in the late 1800s and beat them back a couple of times with the first large scale use of rockets in battle. When we got closer to Bangalore we passed through a surreal landscape of giant granite monoliths of the Deccan Plateau - some of the largest in the world. They dwarf our very own Enchanted Rock here in Texas, and Raveesh announced that large portions of Sholay (Bollywood's first huge adventure blockbuster, from the mid 1970s) were shot here. 

The photo of the Ford billboard is interesting in that Jo noticed that at the bottom it reads "To test drive a Ford EcoSport, give a missed call to: " followed by a phone number. India has one of the cheapest cell phone tariffs in the world - calls costs about a cent per minute and are only charged to the calling party. The missed call is a way for the caller to incur zero charges - call and hang up quickly and wait for the called party to call you back. It has progressed from a social mechanism to a bona fide user interface. You can give a missed call to the prime minister's office and get a call back that plays a recording of his latest report to the nation. Or to your bank and get a text back with your latest account balance.

A little bit further into Bangalore we ran into stand-still traffic. The ubiquitous auto rickshaws were everywhere - a familiar sight from what I remember four decades ago. But wait - see the driver staring at his smartphone attached to the rickshaw? Raveesh again explained - he's using Ola - India's home grown Uber. You can hail a rickshaw from your app.

And in places like the one advertised here, located upstairs from a store selling Kingfisher beer, young Indians are getting trained in hadoop and Amazon Web Services and are using big data from our buying habits and insurance claims and inmate recidivism to create apps and algorithms.

We arrived in Bangalore back at Suki's home and had one last dinner with her. Suki left to attend the opening of a new cancer clinic somewhere in the city and we went down for a nap. Our alarms went off an midnight and we showered and changed and packed and Raveesh dropped us off at Bangalore airport. The kids posed for a photo in this rickshaw at a store where Vivian bought some gifts for her friends. At 04:30 our flight left for Dubai. After a two hour layover in Dubai we loaded into the giant Airbus 380 for our 15 hour flight to San Francisco. Evan had an adrenaline and testosterone fest - he watched every X-men movie and he and I watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" together. At one point about 7 hours into the flight Jo overheard a fellow passenger complaining to a flight attendant about poor wifi and she replied "I'm sorry sir - we are flying over the North Pole and there aren't a lot of wifi satellites out here".

We landed in San Francisco (can you tell from the color palate that one of these photos is at airport in India and the other in America?) and a few hour later hopped on to our last flight - a three hour trip back to Austin. We arrived at the white wooden house a little after 11:00pm and everyone slept till noon the next day.

Elephants

One morning after breakfast we thought we'd go on the advertised "plantation walk". But the management regretfully informed us that the walk had been cancelled due to a problem with wild elephants. Not to worry - they were using tame elephants from the elephant camp to capture the wild elephants. Which piqued our interest to visit the elephant camp the next morning.

Situated on the other bank of the Kaveri River, we arrived at the elephant camp after a short ferry ride. The kids fed the elephants and watched them drink from the river. We walked around and looked at the enclosures for the wild elephants from yesterday from afar, under towering eucalyptus and teaks (if you look carefully at the left enclosure, you can see a elephant trunk sticking out from between the slats).

A few days later, back in Bangalore, Suki's mother asked the kids about the trip to Coorg. And Vivian replied "We saw an elephant pee. It's penis was bigger than my leg."

Biology class in the wild!

Speaking of wild, the elephants seemed well cared for and all that but it was disheartening to see them reduced to tame versions of what they once were - inevitable collateral damage when two species bump into each other in their search for resources and habitat.

Coorg

On the morning after the last of the wedding celebrations we drove off to Coorg, on the eastern foothills of the Western Ghats - the mountain range that runs parallel to the west coast of India. Our destination was a resort about 250 kilometers away, but due to our having to traverse the city of Bangalore during rush hour (which is pretty much mid morning to late evening) it took us seven hours. Our driver Raveesh drove as fast as he safely could while we napped, snacked, and enjoyed the passing panorama.

The resort was beautiful, nestled in a coffee, beetle nut, and black pepper plantation. It was also empty - being low season and not the weekend. We were pampered and we mostly lazed around, ate, played chess, and didn't do much for the next day.

One morning we drove to Abby Falls and the town of Madikeri. This is the view from the Raja's Seat - a place where the raja could sit and enjoy looking at his lands. A little bit later we passed this rickshaw full of kids from school. I would estimate that there were probably ten of them (and zero car seats :) in their school uniforms. They waved and smiled toothily at Vivian and Evan.

The next day we visited the Namdroling Tibetan Buddhist monastery - the exile home of one of the great and ancient Tibetan monasteries. A plaque in front of the temple explains how the Rinpoche started construction with Rs. 300 in his pocket and his bare hands. Today it houses over 5000 monks and is one of the largest centers of Tibetan Buddhist learning.

To mark this astonishing accomplishment Vivian bought some trinkets for her choir mates and Jo bought a souvenir for Carol.

We headed back through Kushalnagar town and procured some silk fabric and met with a tailor who measured the kids and told us he would have Evan's sherwani and Vivian's lehenga-choli ready for us by next morning. Then we stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant where Evan refused to eat almost anything and Vivian chowed down two plates of "lolipop" chicken. We were so stuffed by the time we returned to our coffee plantation that we missed dinner and were fast asleep when the worried chef sent hot Bournvita to our bungalow for the kids.