Loo loo, skip to the loo....

It has been one of those roller coaster weeks that make absolutely no sense. Yesterday, I felt the need to ponder on the complexity of the human mind that can delve so deeply into non-existent problems that it can crush the soul with the weight of the world.  Today, I woke up to wonder on the meaning of a nursery rhyme that defies all logic.

Loo loo, skip to the loo
Loo loo, skip to the loo
Loo loo, skip to the loo
Skip to the loo, my darling

Why, oh why would anyone skip to the loo in the first place?  Skipping, in my mind, constitutes an act of youthful energy that expresses sheer happiness.  A child may skip to the park after school to play with friends or to a Carnival anticipating cotton candy and Ferris wheel rides.  What, my feverish mind wonders today, would prompt a child to bounce and skip to the loo?  If you ever catch a child doing that, be sure to take the Mom aside to talk about the importance of fiber in her family's diet.

Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk shoo fly shoo
Fly's in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo
Skip to the loo, my darling

Hmmmm.......I am not quite sure how to interpret this really.   If my kid finds a fly in her cup of buttermilk I will probably tell her to remove it and drink it up or dump the glass and pour another one but that is just me.  There is a Mother somewhere out there that advises her child to happily (otherwise why skip?) take refuge in the loo to tackle this problem?  Running away never solves any problem, doesn't she know? You can hide in the loo for as long as you want, but when you get out, the fly is still there floating belly up, right?  Like I said, the entire thing defies logic.

Lost my partner, what'll I do
Lost my partner, what'll I do
Lost my partner, what'll I do
Skip to the loo, my darling

That is tragic, I agree. Losing a partner can be crippling, I am given to understand. And the loss may induce gastrointestinal turbulence for sure but we are not talking about grown ups, are we?  What kind of a partner skipped out on the child - spelling bee partner?,  crayon bee partner?  or  ballet dance partner?  Explain to me how skipping to the loo helps them deal with this loss.

Come on folks, lets get serious here.  Do we really want to condone defeatism so blatantly?  Should our children grow up believing that running and hiding is the answer to all the problems facing this world?  Imagine that one of these kids gets elected as President of the United States in the future.  And there he is sitting in on a routine meeting with his senior staff in the Oval office at 7 AM one morning only to be interrupted by the Defense Secretary bearing news that North Korea is threatening to fire its nuclear weapons just for the heck of it.   Are we going to sit back and watch our President skip to the Loo on TV?   What if he decides to stay there until the crisis passes humanity?  You may think it is just a catchy rhyme now but heed my warning.  This could have serious ramifications to the future of this world.

Oh but hold it!  Before you jump off the cliff in to an abyss of despair, catch this last verse.  It might just bring salvation for the poet of this verse after all.

I'll get another one just like you
I'll get another one just like you
I'll get another one just like you
Skip to the loo, my darling

Now, that's the spirit!  'Life goes on so embrace the challenges with a happy face' is what it says and what a great lesson for all.  Learning that no one is indispensable can be an invaluable lesson in humility.  I believe that teaching our kids that when you step off the train, someone always boards to take your place is as important a lesson as Algebra and Trigonometry.

On that philosophical note, I thank you for reading this post which barely skirts the edges of sanity to the end and will suggest that you always take my words with a pinch of salt. :-)

Now all I have to do is learn to skip without pulling a muscle.  Skip to the loo, my friends and you shall find answers to all your problems in there.  Good luck and a belated Happy New Year to all!

The nine yard nightmare!

By some cruel and sadistic fate, I have been steadily growing rounder with each passing day.  If you were to stand on a hilltop watching me climb the curved road below, it may seem to you that a perfectly circular roller is fighting gravity tooth and nail to roll upwards laboriously.  But hey, I am not here to groan and moan about my weight loss woes again but to let you know of a prodigious idea that I have had.  I have decided to cash in my plump karma chips at last and go trick or treating on Halloween this year with my kids as ‘a perfect mathematical circle’.  I will get to enjoy a sack full of candy without spending an obscene amount of money on a weird costume.  Beat that, hah! 

I amaze myself sometimes with brilliant ideas like these.  Last summer, I had another such one.  It all started with a traditional family religious ritual that required me to wear a nine yard saaree and serve food to women sitting cross legged on the floor in front of a plantain leaf.  If you think serving food wearing a nine yard saaree was hard for me, you should have seen me sitting on the floor a little later trying to eat out of the leaf myself. 

First of all, which sadist designed this saaree, I want to know.  I bet you all the gold on Wall Street that it was a man because there is no way a woman would have asked me to wrap 9 yards of material around me without at least throwing a lifeline in the form of an in-skirt to hold it all together.  I refuse to believe that a woman could do that to another.  So I have just a few questions to ask the guy who came up with this nine yard madisar design. 

Are you out of your scrambled mind?  How do you expect me to hold the folds at my waist AND bend to loop the tail of the saaree through my legs?  And if I fall on my poor head while bending, what happens to those folds?  Do you seriously expect me start over until I crack my head again?  More importantly, given the fact that I have 9 yards of cloth to cover myself, why are my legs playing peek-a-boo with the world? 

Anyway, I gave it my best shot last summer.  I took step-by-step lessons from my sister who makes the household goddess Martha Stewart seem like a clumsy gypsy.  In spite of her showing me precisely how to tie the saaree, I bungled it and managed to tangle myself up in a knot.  Sisterly love saved the day as she helped untangle me before begging me never to ask her for help in tying this saaree.  Next I watched some how-to-wear-a-nine-yard-saaree videos on youtube but that was no roaring success either.  Finally I threw my inhibitions to the wind and let an elderly woman in the family tie it for me.  I assumed the pose of the Christ on the Cross and stood resigned through the whole ordeal. 

Finally it was done.  I was at last wearing a madisar saaree.  I looked totally weird but never mind that as I was used to it.  I had important duties waiting for me.  There were 9 hungry women sitting cross-legged on the floor in the other room looking expectantly at the plantain leaf in front of them.  I would not let them down.  I had to go serve them food.  I squared my shoulders and started to march towards the kitchen to fetch the food. 

Wow!  ‘Not so fast, my dear’ said my legs.  With a look of horror, the cook caught me just in time before I crashed into her kettle of payasam.  Since I was a quick study, I quickly learned the trick to walk without tripping – to walk like a penguin.  I have mastered this penguin walk so much so that if I were to get stranded on North Pole someday, some penguin family may just adopt me.

There I was standing over the first plantain leaf with a bucket of payasam and 9 pairs of eyes turned and looked hungrily at me.  I looked down and the leaf seemed frighteningly far away.  How was I going to get the payasam all the way down there?   Praying to all the supreme powers of this world to help me to not fall on the leaf while bending, I planted my feet apart and gingerly bent down and scooped a cup of payasam on one side of the leaf.  By the time, I crossed leaf# 4, I was giddy with pride.  If you are a newcomer to the world of nine yard saarees, the trick is in planting your feet wide before bending.  Just remember that.  Yes, you will look like a cricket batsman taking his stance but it beats tumbling down on the laps of the hungry folks on the floor.

The nine yard saga continued with my turn coming up next to sit on the floor cross-legged and eat the sumptuous meal.  Have you ever seen a penguin sit cross-legged on the floor?  Neither have I and hence I had no one to take pointers from.  After a few minutes of trying to elegantly sit down like all those other women in the room, I gave up and simply plopped down like a sack of flour on the floor.  Okay, now I was in business.  The 12 course meal was served and looked enticing on the shiny plantain leaf and I eagerly reached my hand out to taste the sweet pachdi only to find my arm stop a bit short of the destination.  Come on….you have got to be kidding me.  I knew just then how the squirrel in the ‘Ice Age’ movie felt about the elusive acorn. 

I may not be ‘accomplished’ in the Jane Austen sense of the word but what I am is resourceful.  If I couldn’t bend down to reach the food on the other side of the plantain leaf, I decided to get the food closer to me.  It was really quite easy.  I glared menacingly and intimidated the women serving into lining up the food items closer to my reach.  My glare, I am told, can scare the life out of the Lord himself.  There was hardly any choice for me.  Really!  Either that or like a fool, I had to look helplessly at the food and drool over the sight of it the whole time and I will have you know that I am no fool. 

Anyway, that was when the idea bulb went on once again in my head and I found a tailor who took my nine-yard saaree and tailored it for me.  Hallelujah!  No more ‘Christ on the Cross’ pose for me.  No more walking around like a penguin.  No more fear of looking like a mummy.  All I had to do was to slip in, tie the pant, wrap the cloth once around and voila, I would have myself a madisar saaree. 

Well, the reality did not quite go like that.  Two weeks ago on my current trip to India, history repeated itself and I found myself practicing my penguin walk once again. 

I figure some ideas of mine are just more brilliant than the others.  

Science for Dummies - Part II

“Just think about it Meena.  14 billion years ago, we were all inside a hydrogen atom.  You, me and this entire Universe” my husband told me yesterday in one of his I am-getting-goose bumps-over-science moments.  Try as I might, I simply can’t get goose bumps over hydrogen atoms.  Or even over carbon atoms or hydrocarbons or intermolecular bonds.  I am so ashamed.

We had just come back from watching a movie and were engaged in some light post-movie conversation.  ‘Don’t you think that the popcorn was too salty?’, ‘Theater drinks are harsh on my bladder, you know?’, ‘Did you see that woman with a week old baby sitting in the front row? -  that kind of light post-movie conversation.  One topic led to another and somehow I found myself yet again in the middle of an atomic subject.  

“Oh Sankar, you know that I think of nothing else on most days.  Explosion of that hydrogen atom on that fateful day billion years ago is the only thought that keeps me breathing” I replied with a solemn face.  I don’t know why I waste my sarcasm on him because he flicked it off as usual with a smile and continued “Just imagine Meena…if that atom hadn’t exploded, we wouldn’t be sitting here today.”  

Grave thought indeed!  If I believed for an instant that I could redeem myself for all these years of pleading ignorance in science, I would petition the UN this minute to build a Shrine in honor of that hydrogen atom.  Do you think it is too much?  A little over the top, may be?  With respect, I disagree.  

If Kollywood  actress Kushbu merits a temple in South India, why can’t this tiny hydrogen atom get a Shrine someplace where people like my husband can go on a personal Mecca each year and prostrate in gratitude?  But as I didn’t see redemption on the cards for me, I didn’t bother with the petition and only said “Not a single day goes by when I don’t offer my thanks to Great God Ganapathy for getting that atom to explode Sankar.”   Of course I meant it.  

As soon as our kids grew up enough to start walking (more like dawdling) on their own chubby little feet, my husband decided that it was time to introduce them to the fascinating world of Science.  He got us renewable annual family membership to a Science Museum and Planetarium in the city.  This place later became a second home to us.  

Every Saturday we would get in the car and go to this Science Museum.  The minute we entered the Museum, I would, by an unwritten rule of the land, assume charge of strollers, diaper bags, picnic lunch bags etc. while my husband would take charge of holding the chubby hands of the kids and walking them from exhibit to exhibit all the while explaining some scientific mumbo jumbo to them with great enthusiasm.  I have crystal clear memories of pushing a stroller full of bulging bags around the many pathways of that Museum making quick, mental notes of emergency exits and restroom locations.  If you think stroller pushing is easy, you should try navigating it inside their atom sized restrooms.  Then, you’ll know.  

Like clockwork, every half hour I would whine about him making me walk too much and we would all wander into an auditorium to sit and watch educational movies on scientific topics.  I clearly remember a show about a bunch of funny-looking carbon atoms that hang out with their buddies, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms, and do some gymnastic stuff together to form long chains.  It was totally weird but looking at the ecstasy on my husband’s face, you wouldn’t think so.

I can’t be 100% sure about it as my memory is not as good as it used to be (???!!!), but my firstborn’s first words in this world could very well have included ‘atom’ and ‘matter’.  But I am positive that she said ‘amma’ first.   At least I think she did.

Science for Dummies - Part I