Happy New Year 2009

Joules World wishes everyone a happy new year. I will be bringing in the new year with friends, fun and flutes.

Cal will be feasting on her favourite - chicken of the sea.

A Christmas Story - Part II

During the month of December after school and play practice we would hang out at my neighbors house - the Johnsons. Johnson Auntie would make cookies and mini plum cakes and their house smelled of sugary delight during the month of December. She would package these plum cakes and distribute it to all the neighbors.

She brought a lot of christmas cheer to the neighborhood, but what Johnson Auntie really wanted was for Santa to help her escape from an abusive relationship she had with her husband. One Christmas her wish came true, she decided to pack her bags and leave. We never got to see her as she left in the middle of the night. She left a couple of plum cakes outside our door.

As a kid I didn't understand why she had to leave without saying goodbye, but that year when I was making my Christmas list my mom suggested I ask Santa to bring peace and happiness to Johnson Aunty and her kids. Since then I always think of her during Christmas and include her in my wish list.

A Christmas Story

The holiday season besides being my favourite time of the year brings a lot of memories from my school days. Hubby is always surprised when I can sing along with 'O come all ye faithful' or 'Silent Night'. Although what probably astounds him every time is my inability to carry a tune.

My sister and I attended a private Christian school in India run by a protestant family, the Chalkos. Every year before the Christmas vacation the school had an annual tradition of enacting a play which between singing Christmas songs would tell the story of Jesus Christ from the time Christ was born in a manger to the crucifixion.

Parents would clamour to get their kids on the play. Parents whose kids made it would feel so proud while parents whose kids did not, always thought the teachers were conspiring against their talented kid. My sister always got the lead role of being Mary. I was an angel who had no lines and really no expressions. Just had to smile through the show. My pictures though came out well, always smiling.

My parents came to the show every single year and watched us act as if they were watching the next Meryl Streeps. After our graduation though my mom revealed that she was glad that we were pursuing engineering as acting would not have been our future.

Hurry Down the Chimney

Yashodha from Louisiana

We can do no great things, only small things with great love. ~Mother Teresa

As a child I would spend a lot of summer's at my grandma's home. Amma, as I affectionately called her lived in a village in North India that did not have any electricity. As soon as it would get dark, my cousins and I would sit with Amma by a lantern and she would tell us stories.

Most of these stories were about Krishna (a Hindu God) - the Krishna who was "natkhat" (rambunctious) and surrounded by gopis, the Krishna who Radha secretly loved, the Krishna who imparted wisdom to Arjun during the battle of Kurukshetra and the Krishna who saved his people from a murderous dictator.

But none of these stories fascinated me as much as that of Yashodha, the foster mother who saved Krishna (or Bal Gopal as the young Krishna was called), gave him love and shelter, spoilt him like a mother and made him realize his full potential.

That brings me to the story of my friend Caroline. A woman from Louisiana who went to India to find a child her friend was sponsoring through the Christian Children's Fund. Determined to prove it a hoax she landed in Orissa. Not only did she meet the child (who had every single letter written to him by his sponsor), she discovered the staggering statistics of orphans in India. (25 million orphans in the system, 3000 get adopted every year).

Appalled by what she saw - these kids had barely a roof, no medical help, barely any food and no one to love them or hug them. They were the lowest of the lows - the Untouchables. Caroline decided to become Yashodha to these Bal Gopals.

She came back to the US and started an organization that would build world class orphanages in India. Daunting as that task seems to most of us, she read international and UN mandated briefs, applied for licenses, worked through bureaucratic nightmares and the organization now owns six orphanages in Orissa and Jharkhand in India. Since then they are going through the process of upgrading these orphanages.

The model is to have 20 houses per campus with 10 kids in each house. Every house has a house mother. The house mother is hired from the underprivileged as well, hence empowering the woman. The kids get proper nutrition, an English school education, a stable environment and someone to call "mom". Two orphanages have already been upgraded to this model and Caroline and the organization is always improving on the model. She encourages every one to visit the kids.

In this season of giving please visit her website. It doesn't take much to transform a child's life.

Congratulations Shah Rukh Khan

Cal found this picture of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan being conferred the Datuk award in Malaysia. Shah Rukh looked absolutely dapper in a black baju Melayu (traditional Malay outfit for men) complete with a samping (skirt) and songkok (jet black head gear).

We both think he looks absolutely fabulous. Cal and I will watch "Chhaiyya Chhaiyya" (he is the one in the red jacket in the picture accompanying the wikipedia entry) again to celebrate this huge honor.

Pigeonholing

Over the years, I have heard a lot of stories from Indians about Americans perception of my homeland. Some of these stories are true, curiously asked by people trying to make sense of a country that is alien to them, while some of them are often repeated remarks in the form of "a friends-friend was asked". Examples range from "what does the dot on the forehead signify?" to "do people in India travel on elephants?". Most of these tales were repeated with a John Stewart like mock disbelief on how less the average American knows of the rest of the world.

I probably would have thought the same based on this anecdotal experience had I not lived in Texas. In a trip to Jaipur in 1994, one of my friends father asked me where I live. When I told him Austin, TX, he remarked that Texas was a dangerous state as they had assassinated a President in Dallas. I had to politely remind him that two Prime Ministers have been assassinated in India since then. Note that this was before George W. Bush and his so called "cowboy" diplomacy. In fact, most of America also wonders about the gun totting cowboy ways of Texas. Austinites apologetically explain that Austin is not like the rest of Texas. At least we don't cling to religion or guns like Pennsylvanians.

This got me thinking that not only Americans, most people form conceptions of alien lands and of people they don't know and most of the time these impressions are negative. Our window to these worlds is through television news which tends to usually focus on the negative.

Watching television I have always wondered "Do people in Rwanda walk around with machetes?", "Is there a women jeans market in the middle east?", "Does everyone live in a tent in Sudan?", "Are all Hawaiians wind surfers?", "Do people get regularly eaten up by sharks in California or Florida?".

One of my new years resolution is to try to resolve these preconceptions and I hope you do it to yours as well.