Author Archives: vpdot

The Bhagavad Gita -Chapters 3-5 ( Part 2)

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By Gaurav Rastogi

Yada Yada, desi style In Chapter 4, Krishna describes the lineal tradition by which the secret knowledge has been passed along. Arjuna protests the logical error in this statement (see opening lines of the previous blog entry). In reply, Krishna describes the concept of multiple births, and why he keeps coming back. whenever there is a decline of dharma, bhaarata, an ascendency of adharma, then myself I manifest for the deliverance of the good and for the destruction of the sinners in order to establish dharma, I come from age to age Tough job, but someone’s gotta do it! Continue reading →

Going on a cruise? Cruising tips & tricks…

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By Rohini Mohan

Are you one of those people who dream of being on a floating Bohemia, your every need catered to, while you lie on your deck chair in the sun, sipping your margarita, with miles of deep blue ocean to feast your eyes on? Or do you belong to the category that develops a rash at the thought of being confined to a ship for days on end, herded together with a loud, milling crowd, your only respite being unbearably touristy, over-commercialized ports of call? My husband used to be a die hard category 2, but after a 5 day tryst with a Carnival Cruise vacation, he is slowly inching his way into category 1 – well, kinda… Continue reading →

TGIT- Thank God It's Thanksgiving…

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By Rohini Mohan 

Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pie. Warm toasty fires, mom’s big dinner table, delicious aromas, family fun, great conversation and good times. That’s what this yearly American holiday is all about. Everyone knows that this tradition started with the Pilgrim Fathers, who gave thanks for the harvest they reaped after a harsh winter. Their original feast was not elaborate, but the thanks were loaded with gratitude, because a bountiful fall harvest meant food on the table for the next few months. Continue reading →

The straight and narrow on bone marrow

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By Vidya Pradhan

“Why don’t we help our own people?” asks Amrita Lokre, who along with friends organizes bone marrow drives in the Bay Area. If you live in this community, chances are that you have received an email from this bunch of committed people about a drive somewhere close to you.

The big push to get Indians to join the bone marrow registry started when friends of Vinay Chakravarty and Sameer Bhatia started an online campaign to encourage members of the community to come and get typed for a possible match. Both Vinay and Sameer suffer from Acute Myelogenous Leukemia( AML) a cancer of the blood which is treated with a transfusion of healthy cells from a matching donor.

For a Caucasian, the chances of getting a hit from the nationwide registry are 1 in 15 whereas an Indian American has a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a match. Given our population in the US, the numbers are already against us (there is no registry in India yet and the few data that are available are not connected to the registry here).

What stops us from becoming donors? WNI attempts to demystify the process of bone marrow donation to address the concerns typical donors have. Continue reading →

The declining value of memory

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While I’ve always sucked at connecting names and faces and the past is just a blurry haze, I’ve always prided myself on remembering long strings of numbers, like credit cards, library membership numbers and a rolodex worth of phone numbers. I was my husband’s Blackberry before the Blackberry was created. “What’s that Delhi number again?” he would yell from upstairs for the biweekly call home.

Now my one remaining skill is also becoming redundant. A new free program called Roboform saves the password and login at every site I visit and chose to subscribe to. Not only do I not have to remember my user name and password, I can also choose to forget my name, address and phone number, secure in the knowledge that Roboform has my back. All that is required of me is remembering one master password and should I choose to tattoo it on a less visible part of my anatomy, I am all done.

Over the years, we have slowly been outsourcing our memories. Where once our Brahminical traditions required us to memorize lines and lines of verse and pass on our culture through story-telling from grandparent to grandchild, we now rely on the digital world to be our brains. All contact info is stored and backed up on the computer. Directions to places need no longer be imprinted on gooey gray matter; a GPS will take you where you want to go. My most repeated sentence these days to my children is “Look it up” as pages and pages of forgotten history, geography and science lessons are now available at the touch of a wiki-button.

This devaluation of memory is happening early these days. In school, where once we memorized ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Abu Ben Adam’( I still remember most of those poems and plenty of Kabir dohas), kids have access to online information and no longer need to memorize poetry, prose or math tables. Like a private in an army, all that is required of them is name, address and phone number. Pretty soon, the cell phones every kid seems to be carrying around these days will do even that job for them.

I wonder what is happening to all the memory cells of the brain that are now in disuse. As it is we were only using about 10% of our brains at any given time; now technology invites us to let those few cells go too. Are we simply turning into hosts for our machines? What we consider a symbiotic relationship today is slowly turning us into helpless creatures that would be lost without their PDAs ,PCs, GPSs and other similar electronic acronyms.

A company called Memory Lane offers people with memory loss a chance to recreate their memories in the form of videos, CDs and books and use them to reminisce. It is meant for the extremely aged and those suffering from Alzheimer’s but I suspect I will soon join the ranks of those signing up for the product to keep my memory offline. That is, if I can remember to.

Tested – One American school struggles to make the grade

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By Vidya Pradhan

It has always been a puzzle why American schools cannot replicate the dominance and the reputation for excellence demonstrated by American universities. US students have always performed rather shamefully compared to students from other countries. In an international math assessment of 15 year olds in 2003, American students came 29th out of 34 places. The outrage reports like these have generated was the driving motivator for the No Child Left Behind(NCLB) act, President Bush’s accountability-laden education policy unveiled just a year after he took office. Linda Perlstein, who has been covering the education beat for the Washington Post for several years, decided to spend a year with an elementary school in Maryland to study the impact of NCLB on the school system. What emerges is a gripping tale of heroism, sacrifice and uncommon bravery on the part of the principal, teachers and staff of Tyler Elementary as they attempt to deal with the new standards and punitive threats that NCLB brings in its wake. Continue reading →

THE WATER NO ICE ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST

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Water No Ice is in the business of good writing. It is also in the business of expressing an opinion. We have had many young writers communicate their views through Water No Ice in the last months; Arvind Srinivasan, Samyukta Suresh, Aparna Balakrishnan, Shalini Ramachandran, Shana Dhillon, Divya Valluri…

The very first of our literary events, WNI is kicking off its annual essay writing contest for pre teens and teens. Here are the details;

Category 1:
For students in Grades 5, 6, 7, 8
Topic: If I were President of America

Category 2:
For students in Grades 9,10,11,12
Topic: Is America ready for a minority president?

Word limit: 1000 words

1st prize: Gift Coupons/ books of a total value of $50
2nd prize: Gift Coupons/ books of a total value of $30
3rd prize: Gift Coupons/ books of a total value of $20

Each category will be judged separately
There is no entry fee, but entries must reach us by January 15 2008 to be included in the contest

You can upload your entry directly on this website using our feedback form or email it to rohini at waternoice.com or vidya at waternoice.com ( please substitute the relevant character to make the email address work). Online and emailed entries must have all the details required in the entry form below. For those opting to send entries by snail mail, please make sure you include the entry form details. Here is the address for the mail entries. Entries by mail must be postmarked no later than January 13, 2008.

Water No Ice
34972 Newark Boulevard #164
Newark
CA 94560

Entrants must be residents of Continental USA (Hawaii and Alaska are excluded) and must be studying in the grades specified. The Judges’ decision is final.
All winning entries will be published on Water No IceSo sharpen your pencils and your imaginations and get started. What do you have to lose?

Water No Ice is interested in the writer in you…

WATER NO ICE ANNUAL ESSAY WRITING CONTEST ENTRY FORM

NAME:

DATE OF BIRTH:

SCHOOL( with phone number):

GRADE:

FULL ADDRESS WITH ZIP CODE:

EMAIL ADDRESS:

PHONE NUMBER (1):

PHONE NUMBER (2):

ESSAY TOPIC:
TO BE FILLED IN BY PARENT/GUARDIAN:

I CERTIFY THAT MY CHILD/WARD ___________(SPECIFY NAME) WHO IS PARTICPATING IN THIS CONTEST IS A RESIDENT OF USA (EXCLUDING HAWAII & ALASKA) AND IS CURRENTLY A STUDENT IN GRADE ________

NAME OF PARENT/GUARDIAN:

SIGNATURE :

Om Shanti Om – License to ham

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By Vidya Pradhan

oso.jpgFor a parody to work, everyone in the film must play it absolutely seriously.

And this is the basic problem with Om Shanti Om. Like a couple of other over-hyped movies I can think of, (Ocean’s Twelve and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom come to mind), if the cast and crew look like they are having too much fun, the movie-goers begin to feel it is at their expense; they tend to scratching  their collective heads and wondering if they’re also supposed to be in on the joke.

As a lover of mainstream Bollywood, I found OSO incredibly frustrating at times. Continue reading →

Down Memory Lane

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By Rohini Mohan 

1980 – 1990; my wonder years. No rat race, no decisions to make, no fires to put out. Oh it was fun growing up in the 80s. So many defining moments in history that we were a part of.  The Berlin wall, Rajiv Gandhi, Reagonomics, Ravi Shastri of the ‘Chapatti Shot’ fame with his six 6’s in the over and the Audi, Boris & Steffi, Paul Simon’s  Graceland. Continue reading →