Personal

It’s been a very mellow start to 2008. And that’s pretty much how I’d like the rest of 2008 to be.

I’m refusing to do any lists including one on resolutions. As I look back on the list I made a year ago, what seemed reasonable and achievable back then didn’t quite pan out that way. Some things I hit, some things I missed by a mile. But… I’m not going to stress about it. 2008 is all about mellowness… just floating along. 00…

Or so I tell myself. Because, after all, the 2007 list seemed reasonable and achievable back then…

This post made me look around and realize how much I adore our bookshelves…

Sometime in 2005, we ran out of bookshelf space. Done. All gone. But there was a small problem – we still had about 30 boxes of books in storage and we had to get them out.

The boxes showed up, we doubled up every shelf in the house – so there are two layers of books on every single shelf – and yes, you can’t see the second layer at all. Even after all that, we still had close to a thousand books and no clue where to put them.

Then we discovered these really cool stand alone bookshelves. In fact, when fully stocked, you can’t even see that it is a bookshelf. It looks like a stack of books rising from the floor. We first got a couple and then, over time, acquired a few more.

Life savers. Space savers. And elegant. These now dot the house. I can’t recommend them more highly. But as much as I love them, R is on a book diet and is also armed with an eBook reader in the hope that we don’t have to buy more of these!

When I lived in California, I listened to music all the time when I was home. Moved to NY, married someone with overlapping but different tastes in music, combined our music collections and put it all on a shared server. In concept a great idea, but the damned thing never worked properly and connecting from my Mac was excruciating (old NAS boxes were very Mac unfriendly 2-3 years ago). And back then, our collection was too big to put on a single iPod.

Barely listening to music for over two years = less happiness.

But all that changed when my friend and tech savior George visited and came up with the idea of making a Mac Mini into our server. With a couple of external hard drives plugged in, all the music is shared and we can each listen to anything. Everything is online. One central, in-sync library. Perfect.

I have all my various versions of Offenbach’s Barcarolle/Belle Nuit on continuous repeat 🙂 Happiness.

Thank you, George! You rock!

A lot to be thankful for this year… At the top of my list:

– I’m thankful that despite it being a tough year health-wise on family, we’ve mostly recovered and are chugging along.

– I’m thankful for being able to stay in touch with special friends. I’ve been on an IM spike with a friend from eBay who I hadn’t really talked to in a while. Made me realize that there are handful of folks in my life that I hope I will stay in touch with for a long time – with these folks, even when we reconnect after a while, it feels like we just spoke yesterday.

The New York Times has an interesting article on making thankfulness a daily (or weekly) experience versus just a yearly one… And on that note, thanks to my imaginary and not-so-imaginary readers for making this a fun space to hang out!

A few weeks ago, A&L turned one.

This picture is of them surrounded by all their party presents. This was them at seven months. And here was my post the day they were born.

They are so adorable.

Perfect. Family.

A & L are now seven months old. Here’s the happy family – how adorable!

On May 10th, 2004, I started blogging.

I had been in New York for about six months (albeit with a horrendous travel schedule to California) and I quite disliked being in Manhattan. After the wonderfully warm weather and incredible open skies of the Bay Area, I found Manhattan claustrophobic, dirty and over-crowded. And, to be fair, I was never here long enough to establish any kind of routine to help me feel settled.

I thought a lot about my own attitude and decided to try to focus on the positives. So, I committed to blogging about the best of the city each week. Three years ago today, “My Space In A Place” with the tagline “They say loving a place is all about attitude. Let’s see, shall we?” was born.

I didn’t focus too much on the title (obviously!) or the aesthetics or the logistics (no Feedburner, no Technorati) of the blog – I had a very clear purpose – to start sampling the variety that the city offers and to document it online to make myself see the pluses of the city.

My first post included the following:

On that topic, I realized I need to give big, bad, Manhattan a chance — yes, the winter sucked, but we are past that and I hope a glorious summer will let me explore more and enjoy this city. I’ve heard that it takes about a year to fall in love with Manhattan. Which means that I have till October or to be fair, till May of 2005 (arriving in winter can’t count, can it??!!!).

So, a post a week till October and we’ll re-evaluate, shall we? 🙂

The blog lived on Blogger and I did not list it publicly. I shared the URL¹ with family and a close friend who was also adjusting to Manhattan.

With each post I wrote, I started to fall in love with Manhattan – opera, ballet – no, not just ballet, but Swan Lake with Nina Ananiashvili!!, Carnatic music, concerts in Central Park… It was a fabulous summer. Soon, I was missing NYC when I was in California on business. My experiment was working!!

I hit my goal of starting to love NYC by October of 2004. And I was having so much fun with my blog and I kept it up. Finally, in late 2006, after I had quit my commute to California and taken a little breather, I felt ready to blog publicly. That’s when this blog and my Tatvam blog appeared².

I’ve loved my three years of blogging – I’ve fallen in love with my city, made wonderful new friends and had great conversations!

To my incredible readers, thanks for making this little blog, which started out with only imaginary readers, so much fun! 🙂

1. Since that blog had so much personal information, it is now only open to invited users. ↩

2. A couple of times I’ve wondered whether I should have blogged publicly earlier. The answer is no – my earlier blog was a personal journey and one I was not ready to share with the whole world. ↩

eating an Alphonso mango!

There is no doubt about this. None.

To those who wonder what the fuss is about, the Alphonso mango is a type of mango grown in India. To say it is the best mango species in the world is a huge understatement. You have not lived until you have savored one.

Due to the US ban on importing Indian mangoes, it is virtually impossible to eat one in the United States. And given that I rarely go to India in April, May or June (mango season), I haven’t eaten an Alphonso in about 12 years. I weep at the thought of my deprivation.

But all that changed this week. A good friend very kindly gave me three Alphonso mangoes a couple of days ago. Entirely unexpected. I refused to ask how she got them – I am just happy she shared her bounty with me!

I’ve been savoring one each night. Eating an Alphonso mango late at night in the heart of Manhattan is a delight to be treasured.

When India and the US negotiated the nuclear deal, India also negotiated the export of mangoes and apparently this summer will be the first time in two decades that the Alphonso will be available in the US. I still have no clue where they will be available (if you know, let me know in the comments, please!), but I assure you that as soon as I find out, I will be first in line!

_{Photo courtesy: Kejriwal Enterprises, which retains all rights}

Many months ago, Charlie had mentioned on his blog that he’d love to stop receiving all junk mail. That got me thinking – there is the Do Not Call registry, why the heck isn’t there a Do Not Mail registry? Junk mail sucks up a lot of time too! Then a few weeks later, I found Green Dimes which promises to shield you from all junk mail. I wasn’t too sure if it would actually work, so I held off on signing up.

But after my friends Om and Micheal each did a post on it, I decided to try it out.

I’m a rabid recycler – I will spend ten minutes ripping the plastic and random other doodads off cardboard in order to recycle it. So saving trees is a huge motivational factor. Green Dimes says for $36 a year, they will unsubscribe me from junk mail. In addition for $3 a year, I can add another name to the removal list. Lucky for me, they are running a promotional special and I added on R for just an extra dollar. So, for $37, in about 3 months, I should be junk-mail-free! In addition to saving tonnes of paper, it will, hopefully, save me the time and the pain of having to shred, toss everything into the recycling bin and drag the huge bag of paper down every week.

I can’t wait. I am still a little fuzzy on what happens with catalogs – they tell me not to unsubscribe from catalogs that I don’t get because the evil catalog companies will then add my name to the list (yes! instead of unsubscribing you, they say “a-ha, a name we didn’t know” and subscribe you!) So, I wrote to them. The answer, which I got back in about 10 minutes, was disappointing. There is no catch-all for catalogs. I will have to get the catalogs, go to the Green Dimes site and unsubscribe. I guess that is better than having to call the companies, but I hope they can come up with a better idea for dealing with this.

A couple of months ago, I called my credit card companies and asked them to not send me *any* solicitations whatsoever. AmEx is the worst offender in this regard. And last year, I switched everything to paperless statements. So, I am on my way.

And now with Green Dimes, I hope to be almost fully paperless. Green Dimes will even plant a tree for me every month. I could even pick which part of the world to put my tree – I decided that I would keep my tree planting equally divided across North America, Central & South America, India, Africa and Haiti.

Let’s hope Green Dimes really works. Saving our planet while also saving time – what could be better? I will be sure to report back on progress!

This past week, I got on an Air Jamaica flight from New York to Grenada. I had barely slept the previous night so right around take off at 7:40am, I fall asleep. I awake to hear the captain telling us to start preparing for landing.

I groggily look at my watch. I can’t possibly have been 5 hours. It was 8:00am. Huh? I flag a flight attendant – what’s going on? Apparently the captain announced that we have to go back to NY because there are flight control problems. Oh, and I should read the card in the seat back since this is an emergency landing and we will all need to be in the “brace position“.

That’s a first. In all my years of flying, this has never happened. I look around at the other passengers. There seems to be lots of nervous energy but everyone is dong something to keep their minds and hands occupied.

Oddly, I am not stressed. At all. In fact, it is the other extreme – I am very calm. I wonder if this is how I am going to die. At some level, I don’t really believe we are going to crash and die. Very detachedly, I think “Ah, well, it is what it is”. The pilot circles the landing strip in huge circles, trying hard to dump as much fuel as possible. I guess the turning is hard because of the control issues he’s having. But this goes on for about 35 minutes. I read the safety instruction card and examine the brace position – very straightforward.

Then the captain asks the flight attendants to take their seats. He orders all of us to go into brace position. This is where things got a touch nervy. The brace position I assumed was with my elbows on my knees, my hands clasping the opposite arm, and my head against the seat in front of me. The thing is that in this position, I couldn’t see very much. Actually, nothing besides my shoes. So, not knowing what was going on was what made it a touch scary. That and the fact that the captain barks over the PA system “Brace position! Brace position! Brace position!” Yes, we get it dude, we are all in brace position already. Snapping at us is just making us nervous! Maybe he had to do this – mandatory protocol to make us aware that this was serious stuff.

The plane made the approach and it was very rocky – lots of swaying with one wing always above the other instead of in stable equilibrium. He hit the ground and jammed on the brakes like there was no tomorrow. Screeching halt, my head firmly imbedded in the seat in front of me. Phew – we had landed. As soon as we came to a stop, 40 or so emergency vehicles surround us. More ambulances and fire engines in the distance leave the scene, happy that the plane didn’t explode. The captain tells us that one of the wheels is on fire/smoking and the fire department is looking into it. We sit there for a while and then finally start pulling into the gate.

There is an Air Jamaica employee sitting near me. I see her quietly take her cash and passport out of her bag and put them in her pockets. Hmm… I wonder if they will make us leave everything on-board. I do the same.

The captain announces that this happens sometimes. Much like a car, aircrafts need service. What?? How dare he even make the analogy?! Well, first, you don’t find out you have to service an aircraft when you are in midair. Second, as an airline, you are PAID to make sure that aircrafts are serviced regularly – BEFORE there are issues. Isn’t that what service days are for?? Honestly, I was not upset that this happened – stuff happens. But the captain trying to make a lame excuse? That made me really mad. When things go wrong, accept responsibility, stand up and be accountable. That’s what differentiates great companies that can lead in times of crisis

We disembark – I see the Air Jamaica employee hug another employee on the ramp. She is shaken. Must have been a first for her too. And apparently this was quite serious. I learn later that even when we landed, we could have blown up since we had so much fuel. Thankfully we didn’t.

Air Jamaica does a terrible job sharing information. No apologies, no information. The standard $8 meal coupon for passengers is handed out an hour and a half after we have disembarked. Terrible – this load of passengers just went through something scary – do you need to check their tickets before handing out a coupon? Hand them out like candy! Break the rules and give everyone four coupons so they can eat a great meal. Make them happy!!!

I think airline employees should learn how to step up in these situations and make the passengers feel better – break the rules, do more than expected and you will have customers for life. Do the basic required minimum and you’ll have people who will try to avoid flying you ever again. Air Jamaica clearly fell into the second bucket for me.

I see the captain a couple of hours after we land as the crew is being changed. I ask him if it has been fixed. He says yes. I ask him are we sure it won’t happen again. He says that we can never be sure, but if it happens again, the new captain will be able to land the plane again. Such words of inspiration!

I spend my time calling family and telling them I am fine. I watch some cricket on my computer and chat with my fellow passengers – many of them Grenadians who live in New York who are going home for a visit.

Finally, at 2:30, the plane was fixed and we took off again – on the same airplane. Everyone was nervous this time around. The plane seems to struggle to get off the ground. But we are off.

I look out the window at a shrinking New York. I wasn’t really nervous through 99% of the experience (except when brace position was being yelled at me), and even though I know how statistically safe air travel is, I think this experience will come to mind each time I take off – at least for the next few months.