1. Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth (as if you were about to say “La”). Leave it there throughout the exercise.
2. Take your left hand and cross your upper body to hold of your right earlobe with thumb and forefinger. Make sure that the thumb is in front.
3. Now take your right hand across your upper body to hold of your left earlobe. Again, make sure that the thumb is in front. At this point you’re pressing both earlobes simultaneously. Make sure your left arm is close to your chest and inside your right arm.
4. Inhale through your nose and slowly squat down to the ground.
5. Hold your breath and do not exhale until you start making your way back up to a standing position.
6. Repeat this squatting action between 15 and 21 times.
Remember to keep holding your earlobes and to keep your tongue touching the roof of your mouth throughout the entire exercise. You may not notice a change immediately, but after a few weeks an improvement in concentration should become apparent.
If the above process rings a bell, then you were well-groomed as a kid and have gone on to make a name for yourself. This puts to rest an intriguing question, why the most punished of backbenchers, are all very successful today.
Would not have known the reason, had it not been for a video forward from a good friend of mine in the UK. Did a bit of research on it and found that the world is all gaga over this.
I knew this as an act of penance among some of my Hindu friends and as a punishment in school, never knew it as an exercise until today. In fact one of my teachers would help us to the extent of sparing us the trouble of holding our ear lobes (Steps 2 & 3 above) and would do it on her own; we just had to follow 1, 4, 5 & 6. Had I known then, this was a great brain enhancement exercise I would have made all efforts to get punished every other day.
We, the world are greatly indebted to the West for having been the seat of industrial revolution pioneering many of the comforts we are enjoying today. At the same time the contribution of the East to the world was always touted as mystic and spiritual. A reversal of roles is in place today. The West is looking up to the East for spiritual and traditional revival and in the process are repackaging good old Eastern rituals and traditions.
That my friend has been the journey of the humble Thoppukaranam, a South Indian tradition of worshipping lord Ganesha holding the earlobes between your thumb and the forefinger and doing the squats which was also a form of corporal punishment in schools in the past. Apparently the earlobes are supposed to be the energy centre of the brain and this coupled with yogic squats and breathing go a long way in augmenting the benefits of the grey matter.
Well the West has rechristened our humble Thoppukaranam as calisthenics of the cranium and are quiet successful in selling it to the world. Brain Yoga and Calisthenics of the Cranium sounds more chic than Thoppukaranam. At least our folks from Pondicherry should have had the vision to rename it La Thoppukaranam to give it a global reach. They came east looking for spices, but unfortunately left centuries later unable to handle the Pyrotechnics of the Rectum as a result of the spices they came looking for.
Friday, August 14, 2015
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
A Madras boy makes Chennai proud!
I sometimes wonder we in India are a selfless lot, since we take great pride in chest thumping a fellow Indian’s achievement with gay abandon. Indian media these days goes a step further and makes it a point to celebrate the occasion by giving us a byte from the tea shop from where the celebrity had his last bite.
We just don’t praise him we leave no stone unturned to claim our share of the limelight. Someone or the other knows the someone who knew someone who was close to our new found celebrity. Call this 6 Degrees of separation from fame?
The elevation of Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google today is one such incidence that has gone berserk on the social media. Well here’s my share of claim to his fame, we were born in the same year and his birth date (12) happens to be a mirror image of mine (21), and that’s not all, we share a rare numerical connection, the squares of the birth dates are also mirror images of each other. Wow! So you see how close we were!
It is indeed commendable that a Gen X compatriot went on to head a company without whose help Gen Z would not survive today. From an Indian perspective the rise of these guys was inevitable. Thanks mainly to the institutions set up in the 50’s and 60’s; within years of gaining independence, such visionary decisions on setting up of educational institutions of quality have gone a long way in shaping the nation. Irrespective of political affiliations I believe this need to be acknowledged and appreciated. A true example of one reaps, what one sows.
The eighties and the early nineties were the coming of age of these institutions and the products of these institutions during these years were juxtaposed between an opportunity filled fast moving world and a complacent India that had lost its fire-in-the-belly post-independence.
This was essentially the pre coaching center, pre-parental aspiration era. An era when the parents were too poor to have aspirations and the kids were so full of dreams, so much so, they forced their parents to reluctantly toe the line. Toe the line, not to enrol them into the most successful of tuition / coaching centers but just to buy them an air ticket to pursue their dreams, the dream they had achieved by sheer hard work and nothing else. Unfortunately, today it’s a reversal of roles, the parents are full of aspirations and the kids are too poor in spirit to dream!
Congratulations Sundar Pichai, this is definitely not a rag to riches story, all stories of our era are Kumar shirts to Louis Phillipe. The middle class successes that we see these days are not just stories but epics that need to be well documented, the good and the bad. Otherwise why would the first Mc Namarical performer from India be behind bars now? So enjoy your moment of glory responsibly with the usual Madrasian humility.
The Madras boy, who is today in the limelight was born and brought up in Madras and left it before it became Chennai and returned to bring glory to Chennai. What Madras sowed then, Chennai reaps today.
We just don’t praise him we leave no stone unturned to claim our share of the limelight. Someone or the other knows the someone who knew someone who was close to our new found celebrity. Call this 6 Degrees of separation from fame?
The elevation of Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google today is one such incidence that has gone berserk on the social media. Well here’s my share of claim to his fame, we were born in the same year and his birth date (12) happens to be a mirror image of mine (21), and that’s not all, we share a rare numerical connection, the squares of the birth dates are also mirror images of each other. Wow! So you see how close we were!
It is indeed commendable that a Gen X compatriot went on to head a company without whose help Gen Z would not survive today. From an Indian perspective the rise of these guys was inevitable. Thanks mainly to the institutions set up in the 50’s and 60’s; within years of gaining independence, such visionary decisions on setting up of educational institutions of quality have gone a long way in shaping the nation. Irrespective of political affiliations I believe this need to be acknowledged and appreciated. A true example of one reaps, what one sows.
The eighties and the early nineties were the coming of age of these institutions and the products of these institutions during these years were juxtaposed between an opportunity filled fast moving world and a complacent India that had lost its fire-in-the-belly post-independence.
This was essentially the pre coaching center, pre-parental aspiration era. An era when the parents were too poor to have aspirations and the kids were so full of dreams, so much so, they forced their parents to reluctantly toe the line. Toe the line, not to enrol them into the most successful of tuition / coaching centers but just to buy them an air ticket to pursue their dreams, the dream they had achieved by sheer hard work and nothing else. Unfortunately, today it’s a reversal of roles, the parents are full of aspirations and the kids are too poor in spirit to dream!
Congratulations Sundar Pichai, this is definitely not a rag to riches story, all stories of our era are Kumar shirts to Louis Phillipe. The middle class successes that we see these days are not just stories but epics that need to be well documented, the good and the bad. Otherwise why would the first Mc Namarical performer from India be behind bars now? So enjoy your moment of glory responsibly with the usual Madrasian humility.
The Madras boy, who is today in the limelight was born and brought up in Madras and left it before it became Chennai and returned to bring glory to Chennai. What Madras sowed then, Chennai reaps today.
Friday, June 5, 2015
A 2 Minute Requiem to a childhood friend.
Circa 1983, they came around to the school I was in and distributed free packets of a new delicacy. Wrapped in bright yellow coloured air tight packages, they were out to tempt our 10 year old tongues with a new taste from an intriguingly shaped object defining a new concept in cooking and eating.
Incidentally that was around the age when you first learnt about litres and millilitres in maths, Centigrade and boiling point of water in science. These were the 2 units that drew you closer to this product. You were excited to experiment at home the boiling point of 400 Ml of water into which you were advised to add the ingredients. More importantly they asked you to boil it for just 2 minutes. That was the first, Time vs. Volume vs. Temperature graph you plotted. The aroma and the satiation of hunger came free with your science experiment. We read what we understood then, we never read Taste Enhancer, MSG, protein content or the other stuff in fine print. Moreover most of the fine print read like pages out of an Organic Chemistry text book. At the age of 10 we recognised 2 Minutes, and 400ml of boiling water.
Aroma was an integral part of Indian cooking. But this aroma went on to redefine the stereotypical Indian curry smell that emanates from any Indian kitchen. An aroma that would go on to replace the smell of sambars, rasams or chicken tikka masala from an Indian kitchen on a busy weekday morning.
The shape in which it came was also quiet fascinating. They were all wormy and dried up. Growing up in a Malayalee household the closest I was familiar with this shape was the Idiyappam which was also an entangled wormy mess but soggy and boring since it was bereft of the so called taste enhancers but the interesting part was the boiled egg curry that was served along with it. The only taste enhancer was the threat from your parents that if you don’t eat it, you would end up starving rest of the day.
So the messiah in the name of Maggie had arrived to exterminate the boring Iddayappam out of my life. But my mom, being my mom and a wonderful cook was always averse and sceptical about anything that was packaged and instant. She didn’t believe 2 minutes were enough to boil anything and take the evil elements out of it. I protested then, but she is being proven right 32 years down the road. Today as a so called busy parent, I am not as paranoid as my mother but instead tell my wife to quickly stir up a pack of Maggie for my kid’s lunch since it saves time.
Maggie and I grew up together, trusting each other; she has come to my rescue many a times during my bachelor days when all you had was a kettle and a large soup bowl particularly when all restaurants had closed for the day. A man’s master chef moment was to cook Maggie in 2 Minutes and break a couple of eggs into it. Several variants of improvised taste enhancers have been tried and tested in those days; one worth a mention is emptying the last drops of Old Monk into a cooked bowl of Maggie as a taste and sense enhancer.
I’m not sure if I am right or wrong now. However, I feel that I failed to show the wisdom my mom exhibited 32 years back, not to trust anything that was packaged and instant. I might sound archaic, but aren’t we all headed the organic way these days? Our lifestyles revolve around looking up available archaic literature from Yogic postures for a better sleep to herbal medication to live healthier.
Anything instant was fretted and fumed at by my mom who was old school. To drink good filter coffee you had to brew the brew overnight, but then Bru came along and claimed that you can brew filter coffee instantly. The jury was out on Instant gratification Vs Emotional Gratification; a good Brew went through a makeover with the emotional vowel ‘E’ being replaced with ‘U’ so as to indicate that YOU made a choice to be instantly gratified at the cost of an emotionally motivated delayed gratification,that decision would prove detrimental in the long run. Well, the whole concept of instant gratification, be it for the taste buds or simple aspirations in life, was not a way of life 3 to 4 decades back. Yet we embraced Maggie whole heartedly.
I’m no food safety expert to pass judgements here but I would certainly like to see large corporations, especially in the food industry to act responsibly realising they are in the business of feeding people of the world and not just in pursuit of a statistic called market share.
Incidentally that was around the age when you first learnt about litres and millilitres in maths, Centigrade and boiling point of water in science. These were the 2 units that drew you closer to this product. You were excited to experiment at home the boiling point of 400 Ml of water into which you were advised to add the ingredients. More importantly they asked you to boil it for just 2 minutes. That was the first, Time vs. Volume vs. Temperature graph you plotted. The aroma and the satiation of hunger came free with your science experiment. We read what we understood then, we never read Taste Enhancer, MSG, protein content or the other stuff in fine print. Moreover most of the fine print read like pages out of an Organic Chemistry text book. At the age of 10 we recognised 2 Minutes, and 400ml of boiling water.
Aroma was an integral part of Indian cooking. But this aroma went on to redefine the stereotypical Indian curry smell that emanates from any Indian kitchen. An aroma that would go on to replace the smell of sambars, rasams or chicken tikka masala from an Indian kitchen on a busy weekday morning.
The shape in which it came was also quiet fascinating. They were all wormy and dried up. Growing up in a Malayalee household the closest I was familiar with this shape was the Idiyappam which was also an entangled wormy mess but soggy and boring since it was bereft of the so called taste enhancers but the interesting part was the boiled egg curry that was served along with it. The only taste enhancer was the threat from your parents that if you don’t eat it, you would end up starving rest of the day.
So the messiah in the name of Maggie had arrived to exterminate the boring Iddayappam out of my life. But my mom, being my mom and a wonderful cook was always averse and sceptical about anything that was packaged and instant. She didn’t believe 2 minutes were enough to boil anything and take the evil elements out of it. I protested then, but she is being proven right 32 years down the road. Today as a so called busy parent, I am not as paranoid as my mother but instead tell my wife to quickly stir up a pack of Maggie for my kid’s lunch since it saves time.
Maggie and I grew up together, trusting each other; she has come to my rescue many a times during my bachelor days when all you had was a kettle and a large soup bowl particularly when all restaurants had closed for the day. A man’s master chef moment was to cook Maggie in 2 Minutes and break a couple of eggs into it. Several variants of improvised taste enhancers have been tried and tested in those days; one worth a mention is emptying the last drops of Old Monk into a cooked bowl of Maggie as a taste and sense enhancer.
I’m not sure if I am right or wrong now. However, I feel that I failed to show the wisdom my mom exhibited 32 years back, not to trust anything that was packaged and instant. I might sound archaic, but aren’t we all headed the organic way these days? Our lifestyles revolve around looking up available archaic literature from Yogic postures for a better sleep to herbal medication to live healthier.
Anything instant was fretted and fumed at by my mom who was old school. To drink good filter coffee you had to brew the brew overnight, but then Bru came along and claimed that you can brew filter coffee instantly. The jury was out on Instant gratification Vs Emotional Gratification; a good Brew went through a makeover with the emotional vowel ‘E’ being replaced with ‘U’ so as to indicate that YOU made a choice to be instantly gratified at the cost of an emotionally motivated delayed gratification,that decision would prove detrimental in the long run. Well, the whole concept of instant gratification, be it for the taste buds or simple aspirations in life, was not a way of life 3 to 4 decades back. Yet we embraced Maggie whole heartedly.
I’m no food safety expert to pass judgements here but I would certainly like to see large corporations, especially in the food industry to act responsibly realising they are in the business of feeding people of the world and not just in pursuit of a statistic called market share.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Cogito ergo sum to Data ergo sum!
‘I think therefore I exist’ was a philosophical proposition put forward by Rene Descartes way back in the 17th century. This proposition, held us in good stead for centuries to follow. However ‘cogito ergo sum’ is now hijacked by ‘data ergo sum’ in the 21st century.
Well if it has all been Greek and Latin to you so far, I can assure you it was only Latin but the new developments in the world around us are Greek to me.
The concept of Big Data is everywhere. You and I have become a data and there are people out there or rather number crunchers who do not ‘think’ but look into our pattern of behaviour, the number of times we visited a supermarket the stuff we picked. We are reduced to a byte in the realms of Exabyte and petabytes of data they end up analysing. (Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, 1 Petabyte = a Quadrillion bytes). This is huge for a person like me, whose knowledge is limited to 1024 bytes (binary) = I KB (binary) and by the way don’t ask me how many zeroes are there in a quadrillion.
Apparently this is called Data mining, in short, your visit to the supermarket was a raw material, and the minute you picked up your product you become a ‘data’ and off, you are shunted to the ‘warehouse’ where you will be ‘analysed’ and be a guinea pig among the hordes of data they are analysing. If you are fortunate enough, you end up sharing celestial space with your co-celestial ‘data’ up in a cloud. That’s probably your only silver lining! The irony is that, as a small man who visited a supermarket to pick up your day to day essentials you have now ended up being a part of Big Data!
Believe me they haunt you virtually. Your search for a low cost flight could haunt you with pop ups each time you open up a website and make you feel sick of yourself for not having waited for these pop ups, in short you were dumb to make a decision without analysing your past trend of flight bookings. Or, a search for a holiday home tucked in a serene hill station could end up being a pop up every time you log on, retargeting you and reminding you that this is your last chance to pick it up. Blame it on the big brother who is on your trails of big data.
A friend of mine recently mentioned to me about a Big Data experiment carried out by Walmart, the Beer & Diaper experiment. Positioning the beer next to the diapers apparently increased the sale of Beer on a Friday evening. It was data mined (determined) that a recent dad will be on house arrest on a Friday evening missing those pre parental pub nights, while shopping for diapers, would reach out to the conveniently positioned beer to keep him company over the weekend. This was the so called result of ‘big data’ analysis. I beg to differ here; I believe this was a result of Mendeleev’s conditioned reflex experiment. A guy who sees diapers and beer next to each other is conditioned to choose the two things that he can correlate with the most. You know very well what can link them both as a result of conditioned reflex!
The stomach feeling, the gut feeling, an intuition are all the stuff I swear and base my decisions on, be it professional, or personal. Unfortunately these feelings or methods of decision making are passé these days. Statistics is what counts. Data reflects your future. There were days when vital statistics could turn you on; today vital statistics can turn you in.
Decision making in the world around us, is reduced to a number crunching exercise where the e-quotient in any decision is extinct. The mathematical or statistical patterns, the trends, the frequencies, the behaviours, rules over the gut / stomach feeling.
Hoping and praying they don’t end up analysing the pattern of the intestinal layout at the time of decision making to arrive at a trend on our gut/stomach feeling. The end result of a ‘butterflies in your stomach’ feeling could be analysed by the number of butterflies and their flight patterns in the coming years.
Scary??? Certainly Yes !!! Leave your foot prints in time but take care to erase your digital ones.
Well if it has all been Greek and Latin to you so far, I can assure you it was only Latin but the new developments in the world around us are Greek to me.
The concept of Big Data is everywhere. You and I have become a data and there are people out there or rather number crunchers who do not ‘think’ but look into our pattern of behaviour, the number of times we visited a supermarket the stuff we picked. We are reduced to a byte in the realms of Exabyte and petabytes of data they end up analysing. (Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, 1 Petabyte = a Quadrillion bytes). This is huge for a person like me, whose knowledge is limited to 1024 bytes (binary) = I KB (binary) and by the way don’t ask me how many zeroes are there in a quadrillion.
Apparently this is called Data mining, in short, your visit to the supermarket was a raw material, and the minute you picked up your product you become a ‘data’ and off, you are shunted to the ‘warehouse’ where you will be ‘analysed’ and be a guinea pig among the hordes of data they are analysing. If you are fortunate enough, you end up sharing celestial space with your co-celestial ‘data’ up in a cloud. That’s probably your only silver lining! The irony is that, as a small man who visited a supermarket to pick up your day to day essentials you have now ended up being a part of Big Data!
Believe me they haunt you virtually. Your search for a low cost flight could haunt you with pop ups each time you open up a website and make you feel sick of yourself for not having waited for these pop ups, in short you were dumb to make a decision without analysing your past trend of flight bookings. Or, a search for a holiday home tucked in a serene hill station could end up being a pop up every time you log on, retargeting you and reminding you that this is your last chance to pick it up. Blame it on the big brother who is on your trails of big data.
A friend of mine recently mentioned to me about a Big Data experiment carried out by Walmart, the Beer & Diaper experiment. Positioning the beer next to the diapers apparently increased the sale of Beer on a Friday evening. It was data mined (determined) that a recent dad will be on house arrest on a Friday evening missing those pre parental pub nights, while shopping for diapers, would reach out to the conveniently positioned beer to keep him company over the weekend. This was the so called result of ‘big data’ analysis. I beg to differ here; I believe this was a result of Mendeleev’s conditioned reflex experiment. A guy who sees diapers and beer next to each other is conditioned to choose the two things that he can correlate with the most. You know very well what can link them both as a result of conditioned reflex!
The stomach feeling, the gut feeling, an intuition are all the stuff I swear and base my decisions on, be it professional, or personal. Unfortunately these feelings or methods of decision making are passé these days. Statistics is what counts. Data reflects your future. There were days when vital statistics could turn you on; today vital statistics can turn you in.
Decision making in the world around us, is reduced to a number crunching exercise where the e-quotient in any decision is extinct. The mathematical or statistical patterns, the trends, the frequencies, the behaviours, rules over the gut / stomach feeling.
Hoping and praying they don’t end up analysing the pattern of the intestinal layout at the time of decision making to arrive at a trend on our gut/stomach feeling. The end result of a ‘butterflies in your stomach’ feeling could be analysed by the number of butterflies and their flight patterns in the coming years.
Scary??? Certainly Yes !!! Leave your foot prints in time but take care to erase your digital ones.
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