Men,
If the woman in your life decides to spend some time with her women friends, understand that it is the best sort of therapy she can ever get! Yesterday I treated myself to five uplifting hours of the same at Narika’s first annual South Asian Women’s Conference appropriately titled “Rejuvenate: Mind, Body, Spirit.”

The Lotus Room at the India Community Center in Milpitas was packed to bursting when I entered at 10:30, just in time to catch the tail end of the opening speech by Susmita G. Thomas, the Indian Consul General based in San Francisco. A career diplomat, Ms. Thomas is a remarkable role-model for women seeking to balance the challenging demands of a career that involves lots of travel, and caring for the home and family.  She admitted that she had a lot of help and support in the latter part of her duties and that finding the balance was an intensely personal choice that did not have any easy templates.

Ms. Thomas was peppered with questions regarding the Domestic Violence  Act in India, which came into effect in 2006. Given the interest in the topic in the room, it would not be remiss to infer that despite the presence and untiring efforts of domestic violence advocacy groups like Narika, the issue is still of burning interest to families in the area.

After the excellent speech and Q and A session, the first of the three workshops for the day began. Anchored by Saadia Ahmed, a financial planner and Christine Parlour, an Associate Professor of Finance  at Berkeley, the workshop provided a basic undertanding of finance and financial planning issues. The session revealed, not surprisingly, that most women, even those highly educated and in high-paying careers, prefer to leave financial matters to their spouses. If the aim of the workshop was to communicate to women that they needed to take charge of their financial future, it was very successful as attendees crowded around Ms. Ahmed after the talk asking her for more details.

The workshop after lunch was termed “Dil Chahta Hai” – Following Your Bliss, where yours truly joined a panel of speakers who had chosen to forge alternative careers that suited their deepest interests and desires. Painter Tanya Momi and World of Good’s Jagadha Sivan’s stories were familiar to me, but Sukhi Singh of Sukhi’s Foods served up the tastiest morsel of information when she revealed that the excellent lunch we had had moments ago was made up of her own frozen food products! The story of her 16 year old company was inspirational and I hope to bring it to WNI readers one of these days.

The Narika team saved the most entertaining workshop fo the day for the last. This one, titled “Sundar Hoon Aisi Mein ” focussed on self worth and self respect. Priya Kasturi, who along with a demanding career manages to find time to teach a variety of aerobics classes at ICC, led the group in a short but fun exercise session, followed by some simple rules of physical fitness. After counselor Naheed Shaikh led an interactive session on the importance of paying attention to mental health issues, Catherine Toyooka of Good Vibrations had the audience in splits with an entertaining talk about sexual well being-  with plenty of visual aids!

Fremont City Council member Anu Natarajan closed the session with some ideas on community participation. She emphasized that most cities in the Bay Area have commissions and boards that are staffed by volunteers and it is the easiest thing in the world to find a way to participate in your city’s development.

Put together on a stringent budget but with an abundance of willing hands, Narika’s Rejuvenate conference was a delight to attend. I came away refreshed by the honest interactions with the talented speakers and a reinforced respect for the hard-working, high achieving women who shared the room with me. I was reminded of Charlotte Whitton’s quote, “Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

Just got off the air ( 90.1 F.M) after conducting a geography and general knowledge quiz in collaboration with Sri of It’s Diff radio.

Thanks to all who called in and pitted their brains and memory against our quiz questions. Hope you enjoyed the hour-long program. I had a blast both preparing it and conducting it and talking to all the people who called in. Mr. Subramaniam from North Carolina, you are the undisputed champ of the hour!

Folks, this was a teaser program for a future GK quiz that Sri and I are planning. It is still in the very early planning stage so we welcome all your ideas about the format for the quiz. As of now we are thinking of structuring this quiz for kids in the 5th to 8th grade, but if there’s a lot of interest among the grown-ups we could have a segment for them too. Let us know –

– What categories are appealing?

– Are you interested in participating?

– If your kids are interested, what is a good time of the year to hold the contest?

– Do you have a good venue you can recommend? We are operating this quiz on a non-profit basis, with any left over proceeds to go to a deserving charity so we need the cheapest place you can think of!

Do send me your ideas and feedback at Vidya (at) waternoice (dot) com or by commenting on this post.

Happy quizzing!

Folks,

Growing up in India, quiz shows were a staple of our extracurricular activities. I have participated in science quizzes, GK quizzes and even one memorable “Hindu” quiz sponsored by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad( which, if I remember correctly, my team won hands down.)

Perhaps the quiz contests were particularly appreciated because of the the premium the Indian education system places on memory skills. I remember mugging up all the countries of the world and their capitals, prime ministers and presidents, highest, tallest, oldest, longest natural phenomena and arcane scientific facts that would have no practical use for me later in life. It was great fun even though we worked hard and stressed out a lot.

It is to recreate the joy of quizzing that Water, No Ice and Bay Area radio show It’s Diff are putting together a General Knowledge quiz for kids sometime in May ( we still have to figure out all the details ). As a teaser, we are doing a small segment this Wednesday on-air as part of It’s Diff’s weekly show on March 18th. The quiz will be at 7:30 a.m. and will cover World Geography, US Geography, India General Knowledge and just General Knowledge.

Be among the first to call in and you will have your choice of topics to be quizzed on – I do have a limited set of questions on each subject.

Tune in to It’s Diff’s show on 90.1 F.M. this Wednesday to get more details on the quiz. I look forward to quizzing you!

Picture by Leo Reynolds under Creative Commons License.

When times are as bad as they are now, it helps to share your troubles with others, to know that you are not alone, we are all in this together. I invite WNI readers to share their stories. Send your experience to vidya at waternoice.com and I will publish it without naming names.  Here is mine.

Silicon Valley has been insulated from the bursting of the financial and home bubble for the longest time, but the depression is inevitably creeping in here too. Our little family went from one paycheck to no paycheck and the price of our home has dropped by 30%.( It maybe more but there is only one way to find out.)

Yet we are one of the few lucky ones. We have a comfortable nest egg. Our kids are in public school and the mortgage is paid off. And like most Indian Americans, we have a fallback option..going back to India, where there is no stigma in returning to your parents’ house and using ailing and aging parents as an excuse for the move. ( Before you panic Mom, we’re not going to be needing that guest room ..just yet!!)

I shudder to think of the millions of Americans who are one illness away from bankruptcy and one monthly payment away from foreclosure. The gloomy jobs numbers and the falling Dow have completed a process started by eight years of administrative bungling by the Bush administration – the erosion of our national confidence. The one silver lining is the seriousness of the current administration in tackling the economic crisis and its holistic approach to the depression. On one hand, homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage are getting a little bit of relief in the form of renegotiated rates. On the other, schools preparing for serious cuts in staffing due to shrinking budgets can see a ray of hope on the horizon in the form of increased allocations for education.

As for us, we hope to ride out the recession in relative comfort. Fancy vacations may be off the list, but the Bay Area has plenty of local destinations reachable by car. Major home renovations are on hold, but little repairs will continue – the handyman, like the beautician, provides services that can be classified as non-essential by customers feeling the pinch; their incomes tend to crash in bad times and I want to do my bit in supporting these endangered service providers as long as  I can.

The kids are in for valuable character lessons – don’t take affluence for granted and yes, we absolutely cannot afford that new toy. If you think your life sucks because you can’t download that latest hit on iTunes, there are kids down the street who have recently become homeless. The recession is full of teaching moments for those of us who are not so badly off and if there’s one thing I want the kids to learn, it is that this is the moment to reach out and help. I plan to look around for volunteer opportunies for myself and the older kid.

Sitting in my comfortable home on a warm California day, it would not be fair to say that we are experiencing the worst of this economic meltdown but the reality that millions of my fellow citizens are experiencing is coming a bit closer.

What’s your recession story?

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” is the aphorism by which community activists live. And the biggest community organizer of them all is the President of the United States today. But the sleepy suburban town of Fremont is hardly the typical setting for activism. A bedroom community in the Bay Area with a large population of immigrants, the city has muddled along with haphazard development plans for years, with only fringe input from its residents.

But the recent plan to relocate the A’s stadium to one of a possible couple of locations in south Fremont galvanized the usually apathetic community. NIMBY! ( Not In My BackYard) was the rallying cry, as horrified residents in one of the best school districts in the city contemplated the repercussions of traffic, crowding and strain on essential city services. The emotion was strong enough that a quick web group was formed, the Fremont Citizens Network, which actively began advocating against the presence of the stadium.

Deepak Alur is one of the founders of the Fremont Citizens Network. He and his friends enlisted the help of experts in the field to determine the impact of building a stadium on a city and quickly came to the conclusion that no stadium construction has ever benefited a city in the long run.

In the beginning the concerned residents communicated by email.  As the numbers grew, Deepak and his fellow techies decided to create a community group called the Fremont Citizens Network with a website that would keep track of the research, resources and plans involving the stadium project.

As befits Silicon Valley, the group is purely a web-based one. The power of the internet was harnessed to  mobilize the group  to protest the stadium on Tuesday, February24th, right outside the City Hall, where the city council was due to have its meeting about the project.

This was not the first outreach for FCN. “The first thing we did was to ask the city council if they were interested in the research we had done,” says Deepak. ” I went to the city council meeting and was given 2 minutes to talk about it.  The response of the city council was that it was too premature to be talking about the project at the time. But within a few days members of the council were making public statements about the stadium coming to Fremont.”

Members of FCN also attempted to present their findings to the Fremont Planning Commission but were rebuffed. That’s when the idea of the protest was formed. “We were dismayed at the lack of transparency and openness in the dealings of the city,” says Deepak. The protest was a way of getting the attention of the city government.

For a small web-only group, FCN has been surprisingly successful. Perhaps the current economic climate has made the development of the stadium less viable but there is no doubt that FCN’s activism made it clear to the parties concerned that the residents of the city were not going to passively accept the decisions of the city council.

A letter from the developer for the project, Lew Wolf, arrived at the eleventh hour, withdrawing from the project, somewhat taking the wind out of the protest’s sails.

But the protest went on anyway. Not being a fan of the stadium project myself, I took my 13-year old to his (and my) first protest yesterday. A large group of Fremont citizens stood on the sidewalk outside the City Hall holding signs saying “Fremont First” and “No Stadium”.( One even asked for Mayor Bob Wasserman’s recall!) Knee-high little kids chanted “No stadium”, “No Stadium”, probably the first few words of their vocabulary. The protesters represented Fremont’s diversity, with an equal number of Indian Americans, Asian Americans and Caucasians. Pizza, chips and protest signs were being distributed.

“It was a humbling experience,” adds Deepak. “Ours is not a funded group but some members just decided to pitch in on their own.” Someone brought the pizza while another distributed T-shirts with the words ,”No Stadium”. Deepak himself got some FCN caps printed for the main organizers.

I talked to protester Shaital Desai who was there with her husband. “This was just too important an issue not to be involved,” she said. She had come in reponse to the email alert sent out by FCN and did not know any of the other people there.

The number of protesters kept growing. An unofficial count put it at 521, which is really significant in a population of just about 250,000. People spilled over to the roads and had to be herded by policemen so as not to obstruct traffic but it was all very peaceful and non-confrontational.The spirit was buoyant and when my son and I left around 7:15 the protest was moving to the main street.

Cars driving by showed their support by honking. Deepak contends that once the populace is informed of the facts surrounding the stadium project, even residents not too concerned about it today will reject it. That is why FCN is now moving forward to assure two things. One that the project is not resuscitated quietly once the fuss dies down and secondly that the matter be eventually put to a vote so that it is taken care of for the foreseeable future.

It was remarkable to see community activism in action. One hopes that through the FCN, the citizens of Fremont have a united voice for their concerns. To paraphrase President Obama’s line from yesterday’s Address to the Congress, “We all love this city and want the best for it.”

For more informationabout the Fremont Citizens Network click here.

I may have just discovered the single most important key to successful weight loss.

But more on that later.

In my last post, I had committed to a day of “uni”tasking on February 21st. Well, Saturday arrived and I set out on my mission to do only one thing at a time. It was inspired by my desire to be more “mindful”, as they say, about my activities during the day.

It did not take long to figure out that this was a flawed experiment. Multitasking falls within a spectrum of behaviors, after all. Does talking to your spouse while having breakfast count? What about humming along to the music on the radio? Still, I was determined to eliminate some of the more obvious multitasking habits like reading the newspaper with my morning tea and watching the television while eating.

By 9 a.m. my resolve was already shaken. The oatmeal I usually have for breakfast tasted like the horse food it is without the the daily spice of the comics page. Driving to an errand, I chafed at not being able to listen to my favorite program on NPR. Only the thought that this was an experiment limited to a single day kept me going.

What I discovered ( apart from the fact that I really don’t have the appetite or temperament to “uni”task) is that our standards become much higher when we bring our complete attention to our current task. The book I was reading had to work hard to capture my imagination and I discarded several choices before settling on the novel I wanted to read the most. While listening to music I was quick to change the song if it did not suit my tastes to a T. While cooking, I hovered over the dish, tasting and correcting till I felt I got it absolutely right.

The corollary to that is that multitasking disguises a multitude of mediocrity. If you have headphones on while writing an essay, the music simply has to be pleasant and non-disruptive..chances are the essay will be too. If you are watching your favorite show while doing household chores, it is fine if the tasks are repetitive and ingrained in muscle memory, but it would be hard to try out a new recipe, for instance. Multitasking allows our brains to give fractional attention to our many simultaneous tasks and they all suffer a little as a result.

Studies by the American Psychological Association suggest that we also lose time while multitasking.

…for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got “up to speed” faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people’s innate cognitive limitations.

But back to the weight loss tip. Mireille Guiliano, author of “French Women Don’t Get Fat”, suggested that one of the reasons women in France don’t overeat is that they savor every bite and know when to stop. I can vouch for that. When all your attention is on the plate in front of you, you tend to be aware of and respond to the cues your stomach and brain are sending you. There is no incentive to keep eating after your stomach signals “full” and another more desirable task awaits your undivided attention. I found myself eating a lot less than I normally do and this is one “uni” tasking habit I’m going to take a shot at continuing.

But right now the oatmeal is neighing to be eaten. Thank god for the Sunday funnies!

We take our Blackberries into the bathroom and listen to music while we work. While us old fogeys have to be content with doing 2, maybe 3 things at a time, it is marvel to watch a teenager at it – simultaneous screens on the laptop deal with Instant Messages, chat rooms, homework assignments and YouTube; earphones blare music in one ear while the cell phone is pressed to the other.

Are we really mindful about any of the activities we are doing? Can we really concentrate on or enjoy any of the various appeals to our senses? I sense that multitasking has made us shallow consumers, not of products, but of technology. Our attention spans have gone down and our depth of understanding of any one subject has virtually disappeared.

That’s my hypothesis anyway. In a bid to find out what I’m missing, I plan to make February 21st “Uni”tasking Day for myself. So

-no taking a book into the bathroom

-no drinking tea with the newspaper

-no eating in front of the TV

-no multiple screens on the computer open at a time

-no listening to music or talking on the cellphone while I drive

and finishing whatever show on the television I start watching. You get the point. I plan to give my full attention to whatever activity I start and see if I can survive the day.

Will you join me? Pick any day over the next week that is convenient. See how long you can go without slipping. Share your experiences with me.

Good luck!

Most thinking people will admit that they have doubts when it comes to faith. I was born a Hindu and Hinduism’s easy-breezy style of focusing more on rituals and less on dogma is perfect for the mind taught to trust science when it comes to belief.

Over the years I have described myself as an agnostic, an ugly word that conveys more of a sense of wishy-washyness than a genuine interest in exploring the dimensions of spirituality and faith without blind belief. I have a friend who prefers the term “spiritual”, de-linking herself from the smothering hold of religiosity and creating a strong set of moral values of her own.

I suspect many of us who were born Hindus choose to do that. We are not comfortable in believing in a literal “blue” god or a multi-limbed destroyer, but they serve as useful anchors for a belief system that is personal and customized. We don’t have priests telling us how to think and behave and no compulsory practices that reinforce our Hinduism and this gives us the freedom to create our own morality.

But what can we fence-sitters call ourselves? “Atheists” is too harsh and most of us would be uncomfortable categorically denying the existence of a higher power – we have all had moments when we gasp at the sheer wonder of the world; no one can be unmoved by a look a clear night sky, when the glowing stars make us feel at once minute and universal.

Take a look at the following passage and see if a beautiful term pops out at you. It is from an address by President Obama at a Prayer Breakfast this morning at the White House.

We know too that whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. Jesus told us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Torah commands, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” In Islam, there is a hadith that reads “None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule – the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.

Yes, I am a humanist. Anybody who believes in the Golden Rule must be.

Had to face a blogger’s worst nightmare – the site crashed last Friday with no warning and no explanation. After 2 days of intense argument with server-side people on one end and application developers on the other ( no bipartisanship there – it was all about finger pointing) hubby and I decided to start afresh, wipe the slate clean, get a do-over..you get the gist.

Thanks to backups of the content, we seem to have got the site up again. It is missing a few bells and whistles and we are going to be very careful putting them back, since it may have well been a bell or two that precipitated the crash. I’ll push out the posts, and hope you will resume reading.

Picture by diamond mind under Creative Commons License