All in the family. Oh yes, one very large family.

This picture titled "All in the family" came in day-before-yesterday's Deccan Chronicle which attracted my immediate attention because of, what else, but gorgeous Angelina. Oh, I did see Brad also in the pic, but what about him ?

The next thing about the pic was their brood of kids - 6 in total of which 3 are adopted and
3 are their biological offspring. And from what I hear, both of them have still not have had
enough of kids and plan to add to their family by either adopting more kids or having more
of their own or a combo of both.

I grew up with 2 siblings and when my parents were planning their family, the population
though a minor issue was not as much a serious problem as it is now, when we seem to be
breeding like rabbits. Actually, we seem to have left the rabbits far behind in the race.
At that time, the government's exhortation to the citizens was "We two; Ours two".
Ofcourse most parents of that time conveniently ignored this advice, including mine.

Actually some parents for eg, my BIL's parents, just laughed at the whole two-two idea as
they went about bringing 10 kids into the world. Oh yeah, 10 kids was more an exception
rather than the rule then. But still, imagine being one of 10 kids in a family. Hey, you are
just short of 1 kid to make a cricket or football team. :-)

As the population explosion became more of a serious issue, the Indian government made
a small change to their slogan, which they thought would automatically reduce the birth
rate by half. The new slogan now is "We are one; Ours is one". Pardon the grammatical
errors in the slogan, because if the point gets through, it is a job well done.

Parents today seem to be very careful about the number of kids they have - no broods of
10 for them. But still, they do not really swear by the government's idea of limiting the
number of kids to just one. Most have atleast 2 kids, while there still are those that go for
the magic number of 3.

There are also lots of couples who restrict themselves to just 1 kid, but that I think is more
to do with the escalating cost of education in India. The other day a friend was telling about
another friend who shelled out Rs.100,000 + change for each of their 2 kids for getting
them admitted to a decent school. And guess what, these kids are in kindergarten. My
4 years of Engineering cost just half of what they paid for 1 kid - all expenses included.
Go figure ...

Anyway, coming back to Jolie and Brad, the main thought that hit me (ie. after I got over
gorgeous Angie) when I saw the snap was, "How the hell do they manage to remain sane
after travelling with 6 kids?". Me and my wife do quite some travel with our son and even
with just 1 kid, sometimes it gets a little too much. At the most, I might be able to handle
another kid, but that's about it.

Just having to baby-sit 6 kids would be a nightmare for me. Let alone having to travel
with six of them. You sure have to hand it Angelina and Brad - they are tough nuts.

P.S.: As if this isn't bad enough, a lady gave birth to octuplets few days ago in the US.
Imagine bringing up 8 kids of the same age !!!

The prodigal son returns home.

It takes you by surprise when real life plays out like a story that was told 2000 years ago,
which is what happened to us last week. There is a parable in the Bible about the "Prodigal
son" - a story told by Jesus to his followers, to stress on the importance of acknowledging
one's fault and repenting for it.

The story tells about a man who has 2 sons. While the elder son is obedient to the father
and does his bidding, the younger one leaves home after taking his share of the property.
He squanders all the money, becomes penniless & then takes up the lowly job of a swineherd
to keep body and soul together. And it is then that he thinks of how life was at his father's
home, where even the servants led a better life than he was now leading.

He decides to go back to his father's home and reckons that even if his father disowns him
(for which no one can fault him), he can take a job there as a servant, which would be much better than his current life. But he is taken by surprise at his father's reaction on seeing him back. His father is overjoyed and kills the fattest calf to celebrate his return.

The elder son returns from the fields and hears the celebration and enquires with a servant
who tells that their father is celebrating the return of his younger brother. Naturally this does not go down well with the elder brother who doesn't understand why his father should do this
for a faithless son, and asks his father.

"Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you
never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened
calf for him!"

To which the father replies,
"My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate &
be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."
- Luke 15:11-32

Something on the lines of the above parable happened in our family last week. My cousin San returned home on 16-Jan-09 after 11 long years. He had left home 11 years ago (at the age of
18 years) due to some disagreement with his parents and all this time no one had any idea of where he was. Search teams were sent to various states of India, but without any success.
The last such mission was to Bombay few months ago, when someone there mentioned that
he has seen a person resembling San, but this turned out to be a false call.

His parents spent the last decade & more shedding tears for a son whose whereabouts were
not known. Not to mention the ridicule of friends/relatives, some of whom even had the gall
to tell them to their face that their son might not be even alive. Ofcourse they never lost hope and were sure that he would return one day. Which is what happened.

11 years is a long time to be away from your near and dear ones. Even while he has been the cause of so much anguish to his parents and sister, I am sure they would welcome him back
with happiness. For as was said, "He was dead and is alive again: he was lost and is found".

I am glad for his parents. Every time I met them (especially his mother), I could see the grief
in their eyes, though this did not prevent them from sharing in the joys of others (especially
our family with whom they were very close). I am glad San is back and hope he stays put &
does not attempt any more of such antics.

A nice business idea and model that deserves encouragement.

Some of you might have noticed the "Zoomin" widget on the left side of this blog's homepage. While Google Adsense did have my attention and brief interest, I avoided having their advertisements on my blog because I felt that the look of the blog would suffer. I visited
some other blogs that had ads on them and did not like the look of it. So, atleast for now, no Adsense for my blog.

Then why promote Zoomin on my blog ? One reason is that the widget is small and does not interfere with the overall look-and-feel of my blog. But the main reason was I was pretty impressed with their business-model and customer service. So much that I no longer get my photos printed at the neighborhood photo studio, but trust Zoomin to print and deliver them
to me.

It all started some months ago with an email I received from a travel website to which I was subscribed. It mentioned about Zoomin, their services and that for the first order I would get
30 prints for free. Even though a little apprehensive initially, I try it out and was very satisfied with the print quality, the delivery schedule etc.

And guess what, their prices are pretty competitive too. They charge just Rs.4 per maxi print, while your neighborhood shop would charge anything between Rs.5-6. Also, delivery charge
is just a flat Rs.25, irrespective of the order quantity.

Like they say, a happy customer not only returns to you again, but also brings you more customers. So I used the "Refer a friend" option on their website to refer this service to my friends, some of whom used it for their photo printing needs. For each friend who placed an order, they gave me 5 free print credits to be used on my future orders.

Earlier, when I needed to print some snaps, I had to copy them to a pen-drive, stop at the Konica shop on my way to work, place an order for prints and on my return home, I would
again stop there to collect the prints. Now, all I do is login to my zoomin a/c, upload the snaps
that are to be printed, specify the number of prints, size etc and pay by my credit-card. In a
couple of days the prints are delivered home.

Over time they expanded their product portfolio to include mugs/T-shirts that can be printed with a photo of our choice. As the holiday season came up, their latest product was calendars
(3 types) which could be customised with our photos. This really interested me and at Rs.125
per poster calendar (12" by 18"), it looked like a good present to give my nieces/nephews apart from having one with my son's best snaps.

Placed an order for 4 calendars which should be arriving today or so. And that is when I saw they had an option for users to put up a Zoomin widget on their websites. Which is how the Zoomin advt came to be on this blog.

The only time this service won't work for you is when you are in a hurry and want the prints
in an hour or so, which you can get done at the nearest Konica. But since these guys have to
ship from Bombay, it would take atleast 2 days before the prints reach you. But since these
guys are pretty innovative, I am sure they must be looking at this too. Maybe soon they will have franchises in all main cities, to whom the orders from those cities would be routed,
thereby making delivery possible the same day or earlier.

If you are like the average digicam owner who has thousands of snaps on his PC which were
never printed and need to print the best of them, and are lazy to haul yourself to the nearest
studio, Zoomin is a good option. Ofcourse I am sure there are others also offering similar
services - like for instance Snapfish from HP. Go for whichever suits your needs.

And what do I get for this free advertisement that I do for Zoomin ? For every person that follows this link to Zoomin and makes a purchase, I get 5 free print credits. But more than
the free credits, I feel that if there is someone providing a good service, the word needs to
be spread. Hence this bit of service via my blog.

Mall crawling in Chennai.

Last weekend I was at Chennai and decided to do some mall crawling. Well, I would not have
done it if I had a choice, but I had some Gift Vouchers that I got by redeeming my Amex
reward points and I needed to use them before they expired.

So, Saturday noon post-lunch I am off to the Lifestyle store at Alwarpet. My wife had been
eye-ing a 2-tier steel-wire fruit basket, which she had seen at a friend's home and who had bought it from Lifestyle. Well, it turned out that they no longer had it in stock, so I just
browsed the whole store for anything else interesting. Naah.

Moved to the City Centre Mall nearby, which has a bigger version of Lifestyle inside it.
Again no luck with the fruit basket, but found some interesting stuff in the kids toy section.
Bought a toy-cellphone for my son (the Chinese one that I mentioned in an earlier post did
not last long, given my son's habit of hurling toys at the wall). A bit costly at 500 bucks,
especially in these times of recession, but still would be cheaper than replacing my wife's
cellphone which would otherwise end up damaged, since it is currently my son's favourite toy.

I am now more into toys that do not require batteries, but there are not too many of them.
Finally chanced upon a 'Thomas' toy train, which requires no batteries - all it needs for it to
move is a push down on the train driver's head. Also, found another dumpster truck that rumbles when you pull on the boulder loaded on it. Again no batteries to worry about. But,
I had run out of Lifestyle vouchers and so decided to pick these up at Shoppers Stop, since
I guessed that the toys available at most stores must be more or less similar.

Ride down to Shoppers Stop, but they are out of Thomas trains. Hmm. Luckily they do have
the rumbling truck, which I pick up for my son. I also find another train with its set of tracks,
a tunnel, tree etc, which I pick up for my nephew Dan whose first birthday is on17th Jan.

I pay for these and am ready to leave when I see a Ferrari F1 replica R/C car (1:28) in the
usual Ferrari red color, with a remote controller that can be worn around your wrist like a
watch. It comes in its custom box, with a platform to lock the car's wheels when not being
used. I fall for it hook, line & sinker, with the only deterrent being the price of Rs.1500.
I spend close to an hour thinking whether I should go for it or not.

I can't use my son as an excuse to buy it because he is too young to appreciate it. I would not
be surprised if he just picks it up and hurls it at the wall. I call my wife for her counsel and as
usual her advice is, "If you like it, buy it. Don't bother about the price. You can use it for the
time-being and when our son is a few years older, you can give it to him".

Boosted by this encouragement, I pick it up and walk to the cash-counter. There is one guy
in line before me whose checkout seems to be taking unusually long. While in line, I remove
the car from the box to have a closer look. As I admire the sleek looks of the car, I can sense
another pair of eyes observing me. I turn to my side to see a young boy with all admiration
in his eyes for the car - I can understand his feelings.

I put the car back in the box and still the guy in front has not finished his checkout. Am now getting a bit impatient now. It is close to 7PM now and I have been out shopping for like 5
hours now !!! I leave the counter, place the car back on the shelf and walk out. Maybe it was
not destined to be mine, yet. But I won't be surprised if I walk in some other day and buy it.

P.S. : In the home-stuff section of Shopper's Stop which is on the 3rd level, just adjacent
their bookshop (Crossword), I found them selling the cute small candles in the little round containers which another friend of mine was searching for. Since she drops in here at this
blog occasionally, this hint is for her.

The Belgian who made India (Chennai) his home.

Many a time I had thought of doing a post on my friend Peter, but then decided against it because of privacy concerns. Not that he would be concerned, but just that the open nature
of the internet could be much more than what we could ever fathom.

Anyway, now that he has become something of a minor celebrity here after being featured
in "The Hindu" (inarguably one of the best English newspapers in India), I guess I can work
on some posts on him.

But for now, I would just be content sharing with you what 'The Hindu" has to say about him. The article can be found here. But experience tells me that links usually change, get removed
and so on, which means in the future it might be difficult to look up the article. So, just to be
on the safer side, I quote the whole article below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article & photo courtesy : The Hindu, dated 3-Jan-2009.

GOING NATIVE

Heart and home in Chennai

The city feeds Belgian Peter Van Geit’s passion for beaches, blue skies and tourist spots.


FASCINATION FOR ALL THINGS INDIAN Peter Van Geit

Peter Van Geit likes beaches and blue skies. But, in Belgium, the sky is persistently grey.
The European country is partly bounded by the North Sea, but sunbathing on its 60-km
long beach is possible only for three weeks. The rest of the year, temper atures are down
to zero or sub-zero. “As summer is incredibly short in their country, many Belgians vacation
in southern Europe,” says Geit.

Unlike his countrymen, Geit has found a way to escape Belgium’s dingy climate forever.
He lives under clear blue skies since 1997, when he migrated to Chennai. As IT resources
were scarce on both sides of the Atlantic, multinational company Barco (‘Scientific Atlanta’
now) looked at India to set up operations involving creation of digital cable TV applications.

Chennai & Bangalore were hot contenders. Looking back, Geit is glad Chennai won the race. Living in the city feeds his addiction to the beach. Six years ago, he built a beautiful house,
just walking distance from the Palavakkam shoreline. There is a lot in this beach house to suggest that this Belgian is completely hooked to India. Plain white Indian marble overlaid
in parts with designs that are clearly Indian. The wall betrays his interest in paintings with Indian themes and the fact that he has found love in India — Geit’s girlfriend Kamala is from Andhra Pradesh.

Kamala, the beach, blue skies, plenty of tourist places to go to, and Indians’ helpfulness are
what’s keeping Geit in India. The year after he landed in Chennai, Geit bought a 500cc 1998
Bullet, which he used mercilessly to get a first-hand experience of the Indian countryside and scenic locales. He would put the bike on a train to Delhi and then go a-riding to places such
as Leh and Kardungla. He has done the same in South India. There are few touristy parts of Kerala he has not visited. “India has a fascinating range of geographical features. In contrast, Belgium is a flat country. There are no hills. To vacation, you have to wait for a short summer.”

As Geit undertook these biking tours all alone, he only had unfamiliar natives to help him out
of messy situations. When his 500cc bike broke down in Thrissur, a local family took him in.
As the necessary spare part was not available in the town, a young member of the family was sent to Coimbatore to buy it. “Indians seldom turn away a foreigner in need.” In comparison, Belgians are usually closed to foreigners. “Following a few immigrant-related crimes, Belgians are wary of people from other lands.”

Less of a lone ranger now, Geit tours with groups. This change happened in 2004, when he founded ‘Chennai Trekkers’. At first patronised by his colleagues at Scientific Atlanta, it has grown into a 1,600 group that organises a trek a week. The treks now and the bike rides
earlier have helped him understand his adopted homeland so well that he has lost the sense
of being an expatriate.

PRINCE FREDERICK

Snuffing out lives even before they start living.

As long as something is not directly affecting us, it just remains a news article for us.
Like the Israeli assault on the Gaza strip that has been going on for a week or more now.
With the tacit support of a country (the US of A for the ignorant) that claims to be the
upholder of democracy and all such good things in the world.

I am not saying even for a moment that the Hamas and other Palestinian groups are not
to blame for the developments. Both Israel and these groups have a role in this conflict
that has been going on for years, claiming innumerable lives on both sides. Ofcourse, with
Israel being powerful and also having the support of the US, casualties on their side are
much lesser.

Yesterday's newspaper (The Hindu) had this photograph in their 'International' section.

Photo courtesy : The Hindu dated 6-Jan-2009.

Three cute kids, who could as well have been photographed sleeping, if not for the telltale
evidence provided by the bandages and other hospital stuff in the picture. Three civilian
lives (minors at that) snuffed out for no fault of theirs. Heck they would not even know
anything about the conflict and why they had been targetted.

We have the United Nations which is supposed to intervene in such situations, but then all
it takes to stop them in their tracks is a veto by any of the 5 big boys in the Security Council.
And when it is Israel in the picture, we know that the US will use its veto to stop any action
against their ally. It don't matter whether Israel is pounding the whole place with shells,
killing more civilians than the Hamas terrorists that they are actually targetting.

When will this ever end ?

The recession makes for good small talk.

5-Jan-2009 - 7AM :
Am on the train to Chennai after my long vacation and in 2.5 hours the train should be at
Chennai Central. It was quite cold at night (by Indian standards ie.) and I am still lazing under
the covers, when I hear a guy nearby talking over the cellphone. He makes a series of calls,
discusses the price of something, places orders etc, effortlessly switching between English,
Hindi & Tamil. I can't make out what commodity he is trading in though.

I sneak out of the covers and see a man in his late-forties being the owner of the voice
mentioned above. He is returning from a trip to the Sabarimala shrine of the Hindu deity
Ayyappa. He continues his business calls while I walk to the restroom to freshen up.

When I return, the rest of the passengers in the coupe are also up and about. Apart from
our man, we have a group of 5 youngsters (mid-twenties), all from Kerala and who look
like the typical IT sector employees working in Chennai.

Having finished his business calls, our man is still in the mood for conversation and looks
out at the group of youngsters sitting near him and targets the guy sitting exactly opposite
him.

Our man : You are working or studying ?
IT guy : Working at Chennai.

From the way he replied, he made it clear that he is not in the mood for conversation, but
our man is least deterred.

Our man : Which organisation do you work for ?
IT guy : CTS. (Cognizant Tech Solutions).

I can make out a a hint of pride in the way he replied. Especially because our man looked
very ordinary and seemingly very far from the tech domain the youngster belongs to.
Which is mainly because Ayyappa devotees are not supposed to remove any facial hair for
the 41-day period preceding their visit to the temple - overgrown hair, moustache & beard
can give a dishevelled look. They also should not wear any footwear and their attire is a
simple black sarong or trousers.

Our man : Oh, CTS. My sister's son works there too.
IT guy : Just nods his head. (Oh, so you know about CTS).

Our man : Is it true that you guys have had to take a drastic salary cut due to the recession?

The whole group freezes on hearing this and the IT guy somehow mumbles an almost
inaudible "No, nothing like that", which did not sound very convincing to our man.

Our man : Is that so ? I keep reading about pay-cuts and even worse stuff. Especially in
the US, where I hear about people abandoning homes and living inside their cars.

The IT guys are silent, not knowing how to respond to this.

Obviously with the constant media bombardment we all face today via newspapers/TV/net,
access to information is available to everyone. No wonder, the main topic I hear today being
discussed everywhere is the global slowdown, loss of jobs in IT/manufacturing etc.

Whoa !!! Long time, no post.

It is 12 days since my last post on 23-Dec of last year. And to think that I have been on
vacation from 24-Dec till yesterday (4-Jan-09) doing pretty much nothing and thus should
have had the time and material for many posts.

Well, for one, my son was glued to me all these 12 days. He just ignored his Mom (usually his
first priority) and everyone else and was following me like a shadow, calling out "Papa papa"
in his cute kiddish voice. While I enjoyed each and every moment of it, it also meant that the
only time I could do something was when he was asleep. And getting online turned out to be
the last priority thing.

Both my sisters came home for X'mas with their kids and with 4 kids in the house, it was a
riot. Also meant many trips to the river nearby to give Divya and Ann some swimming
lessons. They are doing pretty good now, but I guess by the next time they come over,
they might have lost touch and would need to start all over again.

Also went for a long pending 5-day Ayurveda massage session - 1 hour daily, which seems
to have made my aching back a lot better, apart from an giving an overall rejuvenation.

Plus meeting old friends who had come down from various parts of the globe on vacation,
visiting friends and relations, driving around etc.

A nice vacation, though it's a pity that it had to end so soon.