Friday was a holiday for Vivian on account of Sankranti - the kite-flying festival. So we packed up and went to the zoo ("Ju" in Hyderabadi). The Nehru Zoological Park is almost fifty years old and in it's heyday was one of the finest zoos in India. It was designed without traditional cages for most of it's inhabitants (leopards, jaguars, and cheetas are the exceptions), instead relying on large natural looking enclosures surrounded by moats.
We opted not to drive (there's a main road the winds around the zoo) or take the "visitor vans". It a cool morning before the crowds and the heat of the day. Evan and Vivian enjoyed the monkeys and chimpanzees, the elephants (most of whom were eating breakfast), a roaring white Bengal tiger (with a spot of diarrhea), two rambunctious juvenile tigers, hippos, a rhino, and an variety of birds. We went to the safari park and saw two lionesses very close up, and two Himalayan black bears that rambled past us within arms reach.
Evan called all the smaller animals "dogs" and all the larger animals "cows". It's a much simpler classification than ours and he has stuck to it steadfastly for many months now. He roared with the tiger. And flirted with a girl sitting next to him on the safari, managing to hold her hand by the end of the trip.
Vivian was like a jaded teenager. Some sparks of interest here and there but mostly wanting ice cream and complaining about how tired she was. Some college-age girls hijacked her briefly for photographs and cheek-pinching. She enjoyed the overall experience enough to extract a promise from Jo and me that we'd come back again to the Ju soon.
By the end of our trip the place was overrun with picnicking families and thousands of school boys and girls in uniforms. They looked at the animals but they gawked at Jo. I'd say she generated at least as much excitement as the other white animal - the tiger. Next time I'm going to ask the zoo to waive her entry fee. All 20 cents of it, dammit.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Patang
From when I was 8 till up to about 12, I spent most of my winter
holidays squinting up at the sun and holding the "charak" (the line
winder/reel) while Alu flew "patangs" (kites) and had "penches"
(dogfights) with other patang flyers. It culminated on Sankranti day
when the sky was dark with kites and the roof tops rang out with screams
of glee or groans of defeat and the lanes were full of children chasing
"kati patangs" (vanquished kites) that lazily drifted down to earth.
There were kites stalls on every street corner, each with its special
"manja" - powdered glass and other chemicals glued to cotton line, all
the better for cutting someone else's line in a pench. And every kid had
cuts on his fingers - scars from numerous penches. Strategies of
"dheel" or "kheech" (let-out the line or pull it in) and merits of
Charminar versus Kachigudda manja dominated conversations.
Yesterday and the day before, Vivian had a chance to partake in the rituals. The scenes have changed. We went to the Secunderabad Club and Golf Club for their kite flying festivals with hundreds of others instead of solitary fighters on every roof top. The manja, like everything else, comes from China. Many kites are made from mylar (refered to as "chamak" or shinny) but there are still a lot of traditional paper kites. And there's band-aid and sunscreen now. But the biggest change is that the kite flyers are all middle aged men - and a few saree clad middle aged women. Partha and his friends were the exceptions.
Vivian enjoyed herself and flew a kite like a champ. She was enthralled by Partha and his kite flying. This morning we went back to the Secunderabad Club cricket pitch for our Crossfit workout and Vivian found a few kati patangs and had more fun.
Unless she and Evan and their generation get into patang pilana and pench lagana, the skies over Hyderabad on Sankranti day will be empty in another decade or two.
Yesterday and the day before, Vivian had a chance to partake in the rituals. The scenes have changed. We went to the Secunderabad Club and Golf Club for their kite flying festivals with hundreds of others instead of solitary fighters on every roof top. The manja, like everything else, comes from China. Many kites are made from mylar (refered to as "chamak" or shinny) but there are still a lot of traditional paper kites. And there's band-aid and sunscreen now. But the biggest change is that the kite flyers are all middle aged men - and a few saree clad middle aged women. Partha and his friends were the exceptions.
Vivian enjoyed herself and flew a kite like a champ. She was enthralled by Partha and his kite flying. This morning we went back to the Secunderabad Club cricket pitch for our Crossfit workout and Vivian found a few kati patangs and had more fun.
Unless she and Evan and their generation get into patang pilana and pench lagana, the skies over Hyderabad on Sankranti day will be empty in another decade or two.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Hyderabad Edition
Today is the start of Week 2 of the Hyderabad Edition of the I Am Crossfit Challenge. Vivian is a veteran - I did the IAM in 2009 and Jo in 2010. Sharath, Jo and I are doing it this year. Eight weeks to jumpstart the year.
We workout at the Club. It takes us about 20 minutes to drive there in the morning and about 30 to get back in traffic because 11:00 am is the morning rush-hour here. But Charri does the driving and Jo and I get to chat without the kids or read the Mint (WSJ affiliated local paper).
The gym at the club is well equipped. To borrow a term from Sharath, we workout during auntie-hour - ladies in salwars gently wiping any hint of sweat from their brows. The trainers are fun to watch. Jen would have to kill most of them within minutes out of sheer professional embarrassment if she were here. We do outdoor stuff at the basket ball court and longer runs around the cricket pitch.
Eating paleo in Hyderabad isn't any harder than doing it in Austin. We've finally got it down to where we aren't ging to grocery stores every day. Spar and QMart and our usuals. They aren't bad. But I realized how much I miss a good grocery store when we went to Hong Kong and I tried to buy everything everytime.
Eating paleo out is a bit more challenging. But there's So - a roof top restaurant that is beautifully landscaped with lush plants and banana tress and palms. The food is good. The wait staff is better than at most. There's no alcohol - which is good during IAM. The kids run around. There's almost no one else there when we go - 7pm isn't dinner time in Hyderabad. We went there last night - Jo's third visit there this week (she and Vivian had a girls-only lunch date there a couple of days back). I started with a green papaya salad and had the grilled snapper with ratatouille. They happily substituted the basmati rice for steamed green beans and broccoli. Vivian drinks their non-alcoholic Shirley Temples served in elegant wine glasses.
The two hardest thing about doing the IAM in Hyderabad? Not drinking. And not drinking. Not so much because right now I want to swim in a vat of Silver Oak 2001 Cab. More so because drinking is how we socialize and at hosted gatherings it is downright rude not to partake. And we only had three of those during this week (by Hyderabad standards we are hermits - Hyderabadies seem to go to three parties every night). On the positive side, my wife isn't mad that I'm not drinking!
Today's workout: 12 minute AMRAP: 3 30lb dumbbell shoulder press, 6 broad jumps, 9 supermans.
We workout at the Club. It takes us about 20 minutes to drive there in the morning and about 30 to get back in traffic because 11:00 am is the morning rush-hour here. But Charri does the driving and Jo and I get to chat without the kids or read the Mint (WSJ affiliated local paper).
The gym at the club is well equipped. To borrow a term from Sharath, we workout during auntie-hour - ladies in salwars gently wiping any hint of sweat from their brows. The trainers are fun to watch. Jen would have to kill most of them within minutes out of sheer professional embarrassment if she were here. We do outdoor stuff at the basket ball court and longer runs around the cricket pitch.
Eating paleo in Hyderabad isn't any harder than doing it in Austin. We've finally got it down to where we aren't ging to grocery stores every day. Spar and QMart and our usuals. They aren't bad. But I realized how much I miss a good grocery store when we went to Hong Kong and I tried to buy everything everytime.
Eating paleo out is a bit more challenging. But there's So - a roof top restaurant that is beautifully landscaped with lush plants and banana tress and palms. The food is good. The wait staff is better than at most. There's no alcohol - which is good during IAM. The kids run around. There's almost no one else there when we go - 7pm isn't dinner time in Hyderabad. We went there last night - Jo's third visit there this week (she and Vivian had a girls-only lunch date there a couple of days back). I started with a green papaya salad and had the grilled snapper with ratatouille. They happily substituted the basmati rice for steamed green beans and broccoli. Vivian drinks their non-alcoholic Shirley Temples served in elegant wine glasses.
The two hardest thing about doing the IAM in Hyderabad? Not drinking. And not drinking. Not so much because right now I want to swim in a vat of Silver Oak 2001 Cab. More so because drinking is how we socialize and at hosted gatherings it is downright rude not to partake. And we only had three of those during this week (by Hyderabad standards we are hermits - Hyderabadies seem to go to three parties every night). On the positive side, my wife isn't mad that I'm not drinking!
Today's workout: 12 minute AMRAP: 3 30lb dumbbell shoulder press, 6 broad jumps, 9 supermans.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
What's the most amazng thing you read in 2011?
Or "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" that you came across in 2011, if John Brockman of edge.org had asked me.
The most amazing book that Vivian read in 2011 was probably the first book she learned to sight-read. The Hungry Caterpillar.
Jo got me a book about elements for my birthday - "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements". Easily qualifies as the book with the longest title that I read in 2011. As a book it was average. But it had three pages in there that were astounding.
Ninety percent of the universe is hydrogen. The remaining 10% is helium. Me, my macbook, the room I'm in, this planet, and all the solid stuff you can image in the entire universe? That's just noise. In a first approximation we can ignore all that.
As if that were not amazing enough, there's this story about how hydrogen ends up being converted to you and me. Stars form when there are very slight differences in the distribution of matter in the emptiness of space. Gravity starts pulling more matter together till it is dense and hot enough for the star to burn hydrogen and produce helium. A star could stay lit for billions of years burning hydrogen. Once the hydrogen in it's core is gone, it starts burning helium in the core. The star grows in size - our sun would be large enough to engulf the earth by this time in it's life. After helium, if a star is massive enough, the core creates and burns successively heavier elements, one at a time - carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon, and eventually iron. The star runs out of each successive type of fuel faster, from billions of years for hydrogen down to a matter of days for the last stages. Once thermonuclear reactions can't be supported, the core collapses downwards rapidly (in seconds) and there's a huge explosion called a supernova that shines brighter than an entire galaxy of billions of stars - for a month or so. This collapse and explosion makes all the other elements which are pushed out into space unevenly due to the explosion. From which new stars start forming. And in one case, eventually, you and me.
By the 1920s we knew that stars produce energy by burning hydrogen in thermonuclear fusion. By 1957, most of the major portions of this theory were in place. So this was old news by the time I was born. And I managed to remain completely ignorant about it till 2011.
The most amazing book that Vivian read in 2011 was probably the first book she learned to sight-read. The Hungry Caterpillar.
Jo got me a book about elements for my birthday - "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements". Easily qualifies as the book with the longest title that I read in 2011. As a book it was average. But it had three pages in there that were astounding.
Ninety percent of the universe is hydrogen. The remaining 10% is helium. Me, my macbook, the room I'm in, this planet, and all the solid stuff you can image in the entire universe? That's just noise. In a first approximation we can ignore all that.
As if that were not amazing enough, there's this story about how hydrogen ends up being converted to you and me. Stars form when there are very slight differences in the distribution of matter in the emptiness of space. Gravity starts pulling more matter together till it is dense and hot enough for the star to burn hydrogen and produce helium. A star could stay lit for billions of years burning hydrogen. Once the hydrogen in it's core is gone, it starts burning helium in the core. The star grows in size - our sun would be large enough to engulf the earth by this time in it's life. After helium, if a star is massive enough, the core creates and burns successively heavier elements, one at a time - carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon, and eventually iron. The star runs out of each successive type of fuel faster, from billions of years for hydrogen down to a matter of days for the last stages. Once thermonuclear reactions can't be supported, the core collapses downwards rapidly (in seconds) and there's a huge explosion called a supernova that shines brighter than an entire galaxy of billions of stars - for a month or so. This collapse and explosion makes all the other elements which are pushed out into space unevenly due to the explosion. From which new stars start forming. And in one case, eventually, you and me.
By the 1920s we knew that stars produce energy by burning hydrogen in thermonuclear fusion. By 1957, most of the major portions of this theory were in place. So this was old news by the time I was born. And I managed to remain completely ignorant about it till 2011.
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