Magical moments

An unimaginable variety of people attend my spoken English classes. Most of them are not students wanting to improve their placement prospects. A woman in her fifties who wants to chat on skype with her NRI son's colleagues, a cameraman who finds it difficult to narrate stories to his hindi /malayalam /english/etc/ speaking colleagues in cosmopolitan Chennai, lawyers who wish to take up high court work, bakers, research scholars and nurses who wish to work abroad,home makers who want to hold their own in parent-teacher meetings, party members who wish to expand the radius of their presence beyond Madurai,blushing brides waiting for their visas..... the list is long and the drama which unfolds when they interact for a couple of months is a potential mega serial or situational comedy.

They keep in touch with me online or on phone for quite some time after their classes. A couple of them follow this blog! There is one student of whom I think almost everyday. He is a sailor, who revealed in my initial grilling about his background that, he had lost his mother at the time of his birth and his dad when he was eight, I think. He was brought up by an elder brother. During class discussions whenever the question of parents came up, he never revealed that he had no parents. He always talked as if they were alive. He was also totally cool about the grueling and unearthly hours of work he had to put in as a sailor.
Whenever I feel frustrated or depressed about the twists and turns of my comfortable middle class life, I think of him and my heart lightens immediately. Everyone is lucky in one way or the other.. I was lucky to have had wonderful teachers and now am totally amazed at the types of people I meet in the form of students! Cheerio!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Lies are neither magic nor logic!

Lying is an exercise in futility, especially in the long run....The manipulative mind of a liar does not concentrate on facts but only on how facts may be twisted. So the liar forgets the facts once he leaves the scenario which prompted him to create a pack of lies. You can often spot a liar when
a. he uses words like "There were 15-20 people who were waiting for around 2-3 hours".
b. he is nice throughout or nasty throughout coz it's all an act!
c. he expresses his distrust of everyone and has nasty things to say of everybody. A liar doesn't believe anybody.
d. he repeats that he is smarter than everybody else coz he believes that manipulation is all that is there to intelligence.

Finally a liar doesn't believe in himself. He believes that only his manipulation got him whatever he earned and that without that he is nothing.What actually happens is that the liar loses a lot of friends who find out about his lying and sooner or later and withdraw their friendship and favors.
The greatest loss to the liar is that he has spent his precious life honing the one skill of manipulation instead of learning other things that might help him earn a living or have good relationships. He ends up lonely and much poorer than he should have been. At least one or sometimes all of his off spring carry on his legacy of lying to the next generation.

Water: Is it magic or logic?

There are times when you feel the power of water more than ever; as when you think of the sand, which, geologists claim is the powder of rocks made by centuries of water beating on them!

As when you think of the earliest molecules of life forming proteins, which marine biologists claim, were created when boiling hot volcanic eruptions reacted with the ice cold sea water.
As when you think of how much of our blood is water and how we feel energized and cleansed inside and outside by the water we drink and bathe in.

As you look on the scenic wonder that is placid, wavy, thundering down, drizzling, pouring in torrents taking the shape and colour of the container or landscape.

As when you think of how our food is grown only with the help of water how we survive on such food just as we did right from when we were in our mother's womb.

But nowhere will you be more surprised and awed as when you try to clean something in dirty water. The object does get cleaner than before. Such are the magical properties of water!

some more questions!

1.Is Engineering the ultimate professional course that every job aspirant should pursue? (Now don't answer this question objectively, Imagine that this Q is being asked by your daughter/ sister/ grand daughter/ great grand daugher/ neice/ great neice/ your female reincarnation , who has just completed high school)
2. what percentage of top professionals are engineers?
3. Is IIT the ultimate engineering college? (someone told me that I should have slapped my daughter and made her write the IIT entrance)
4.Will the business scene in India improve? If so, when? (the year, like kalam's much touted 2020)
5, Will it be possible for Indians to start a business that doesn't sell food and be successful?
6. Is there a probability that all Indians will one day,say a good fifty years from now, be engineers?

one more recipe

There is a quick method of making dal powder(paruppu podi) that I discovered after one of my husband's clients started sending me several kgs of fried gram(pottu kadalai) as a complimentary gift.
Grind the fried gram with pepper and salt, may be even with some fried garlic!

LO and behold! your dal powder is ready. The taste is delightful and goes very well with hot rice on a rainy day!
btw it has rained thrice this month! proper rain! got soaked in it too!