Eating right vs. Eating Home Cooked Food

So, I ended up being in the ER for a night and under observation for another day. With 4-5 pipes running into my veins for almost a whole day supplying my body with IV fluid, antibiotics - I wondered laying on the hospital bed whether deciding to go with home cooked food was the right thing to do on that Tuesday night. I think I jinxed my good health off-late. Been running 5 miles atleast once a week and 3-4 atleast 2 times, eating an egg everyday, eating healthy (salad, rice, roti, vegetables, occasionally pizza and fries). Come tuesday night - I was debating if I should cook something and eat or just have some ready made parathas since my roommate had rice and chicken from a restaurant the night before. I decided, fine let me cook instead of eating something ready made. Picked up frozen green beans and mixed vegetables from the freezer and cooked a simple sabzi. Boiled an egg and had roti along with it. Wednesday morning was almost normal apart from diarrhoea in the morning which I should have realized then that something wasn't right. Around 11 am felt surprisingly hungry - I was thinking to myself what was wrong, pushed my hunger until 12 and decided to eat roti and THE SAME sabzi from the night before. That was it! God Knows (really even after spending a day at the hospital - all that doctors could say was GI infection) what went wrong that I had total uneasiness in my stomach. Pushed it until late evening on Wednesday hoping it was a condition of usual indigestion or gas. But when it didn't detiriorate until night, I decided to show it to a doctor (in this country going to a doctor when you are sick is going into ER unless its a regular check up). So even though it seems big - by the time I entered ER, I was 60% better than what I had already gone through.

What I am getting to is these situations can demotivate one to live healthily. I don't see anything wrong with what I did but still ended up sick :-(. May be I should have ordered a pizza, or had parathas.. but thats all now not at that very moment when it happened. Well I guess recovery wasn't too bad after all (I guess me being fit helped a bit). I am almost back to normal. Now I have to regain my stamina to be able to get back to running 5 miles under 40 mins and I am looking forward to it. I can saw it was good in a way this happened coz they could analyze my system to see if something was seriously wrong - Thank God! nothing came up - phew. Now I can recover for the next 3 weeks before I can enjoy good Indian food :D.

Off to home to get some lunch!

World Famous yet Humble!

So I got to witness the fantastic brothers from Mysore (Nagaraj and Dr. Manjunath) perform over the past weekend. These two have become famous for their amazing talent in playing Violin. They have played with other world famous musicians. You can get to know more about them here: http://www.violinindia.com/MNM.htm. One of my friend's cousin learns music and she suggested I watch them play. I have attended the past two concerts (one theirs and the other of famous vocalist Sanjay Subramaniam) at a nearby auditorium over the past couple weekends. This weekend was mind blowing. 3 hours of technically sound, synchronous violin concert. I also got to witness them perform against each other during the performance. More interestingly, I got to meet and speak to these two great maestros personally (courtesy: my friend's cousin). She has known them for a quite sometime and thus introduced me and my friend to them. I was dumstruck to say anything to them since:

1. I have musical knowledge but not as much to be able to commend about the specificities and
2. I couldn't come up with the right words (both in English and in Kannada).

All I could muster up and say was "Adbuthavaagittu" to the older of the two Mr. Nagaraj. They were not interested in people showering accolades on them but to just have a chat about general things. Both of them are quite funny in conversation. It was great to listen to jokes in Kannada after a long time. My respect for them kept increasing as we began to spend more and more time. I felt great when Dr. Manjunath shared a compassionate moment when I said I was born in MysoreImagine these both have been performing almost non-stop for the last 15 or so days and were scheduled for almost another 20 days. The night before they were in Florida and on Saturday they were in Philly and were scheduled to perform the next three days in Chicago and so on. I was amazed at their energy level - neither looked as if they had just 3 hours of sleep the night before. I even got to have dinner with them (courtesy: my friend's cousin again). As we (me and my friend) were uninvited for dinner and had to join in at the last moment, we let all the others start their dinner and then jumped in at the last. By the time we served our plates and came out, everyone had already sat down to eat, so we three sat at a table closeby. Seeing us sit by ourselves, younger of the two brothers invited us to join them - he moved out from his circle to join us on our table along with the three of us and another person joined us. It was great seeing both of them have dinner in our traditional way - eating with hand and not spoon and fork. We meanwhile were eating the westernized way. One would imagine that being world class performers would have changed a lot about them but not really! We had a nice conversation for the next 20 mins on everything including his PhD in music. We had fun pulling my friend's cousin's leg quite a bit. In the end when we left - he was as happy as us to have been a part of this concert/dinner. Truly humble Maestros!!

Hail The Mysore Maestros ;-) !!! ("Kombu bartha ide") If you are interested in carnatic music - please listen to them playing if you get a chance.

Being Respected or Liked?

So which do you prefer? Respected among friends and peers or liked among them? or both? well - I don't know if both is possible though.. may be it is... if so, I would like to be there.. The fact that I have been the latter almost all my life hurts me and now I want to start being respected.. Can you be totally funny, outgoing and yet when it matters your friends/family look up to you? I feel people have a tendency to take you the way they see you and not the way you behave at different situations..Some just take you for granted (which I am dead allergic to) and some just want to deal with you the same way they deal with you all the time. So is it possible that a group of friends or a family can work together and still one person lead the way? what defines credibility? how does one build it? experience? so without actually giving someone a chance, how does one get experience? the same story with jobs and experience.

Being liked is easier than respected - for example I can pretty much say I am very much liked in the whole family, although my sister probably might be more respected when it comes to certain situations. She keeps telling me that I am a volcano waiting to explode. In the habbit of being liked and pleasing everyone, I am probably hurting my ego. But wait, isn't ego bad? well, err, i guess not as much as long as it is controlled well - so how do you know if you are controlling it? what acts constitute bad ego and what doesn't? All this adds to your management style. I guess I need to be more assertive and clear if I am heading up to lead a company or just a team or even a family. Has looks got to do a lot with the way people treat you? My uncle and a neighbor used to tell me that my height and personality suits for a leader/manager. Well, granted I was the President of my school, was captain of the sports team, used to be the captain whenever I played cricket with friends (atleast most of the time), but now that I can look back, it wasn't all because of my height or look - it was either moreso that people didnt want that responsibility and I enjoyed it. Whatever it is, I will try and figure it out someday... until then I will work on improving my "Respected" qualities :-) !

The Secret is No Longer a Secret !

So I started reading "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. Supposed to be a motivating read and an eye opener to a simple concept that we have forgotten to notice. The bottom line that I have got so far from reading it is that "Law of attraction" has tremendous power. If we need success, we need to attract success, we need to act as if we are successful. This should be applied to everything we want in life. To some extent I agree with the author. Remember all those occasions where you know something's gonna happen (good / bad) both and indeed it did. We keep hearing to people say, I knew I was going to get it, I knew this would happen. When reading this book, all those incidents came back to me. I think it does make some sense. For example, think you are going into a crucial match and you are the only known good player, rest of them are out/injured/etc.. You have prepared day in day out for this one moment, although you have butterflies in your stomach, something tells you, "you are gonna make it".. and from nowhere you see this talent flowing like a river and before you know, you are tasting success... I have experienced this more than a few times. I had read something similar to this and would like to call this state as "The Zone". It is a time period, at which each individual is at his/her best.. he/she doesn't have to think whether he/she is going to succeed.. things just happen.. everything goes through so well that the individual is oozing confidence and if its a team event, the entire team is affected by this one person. Ofcourse, there's background to it - one has to have enough practice, training, etc. to be even in a position to experience this. I call the effect "Blanking effect" - it is where one can blank out all noise and purely focus on what he/she needs to achieve. A lot of what this book says is about believing! I agree, if one believes enough and has the confidence, he/she can achieve his/her goal. but ofcourse remember that confidence only comes by practice and natural ability. Believe it or not - I still believe that what Keanu Reeves showed in the movie "The Matrix" is possible. Call me crazy but I think human mind has that ability and power to make things happen + the fact that most of us use less than 10% of our brain!..

But some of what the author confuses me. For example, I was reading an article on the Cosi River Flooding in India. One lady said "We worship this river every day but still she did this to us - Why??" Interesting I felt... we all do, we all worship, land, air, water and any natural resource almost and sometimes as GOD! and the same thing we worship causes such damage that it baffles people ! Do people lose hope? stop worshipping? The author says - we attract what we want - it is our thoughts that go out into the universe and the universe delivers it to us - of course not magically but with our involvement. So my question is all those people who die in earthquakes, floods, hurricanes - did they attract death?? According to the author - they probably had negative thoughts floating more than positive thoughts..

Takes me back to my school/college days when I was forced into not going to long distance trips, "all thumba danger appa - hogbeda", "neera, beda kano... ", "mooru dina trippa?- no", but when it came to going to "Religious place" - not many qns asked ! Should I call this their Love personified as negative thoughts?? or just negative thinking which probably carries over into children??

So while I continue to read and analyze further to see how I can start believing in my goals, you start to think on what I have written and comment!

Life on Cruise Mode

Life was on a cruise mode yesterday night! Coming back from my uncle's place in Maryland, I had the highway for myself (surprisingly no traffic on the last day of a long weekend - courtesy: higher gas prices and slow economy). I set my speed to 65 mph, inserted Amruthavarshini CD into the player and it felt like heaven! I usually take the route 1 (parallel to Interstate 95) which is much quieter plus I avoid all the toll. Sang along with S.P.B. all along the way.. was even able to pay attention to the lyrics more than before since it was so quiet. My Acura TSX felt more like a plane than a car. The 8-speaker surround sound made it even better! Stopped on the way to get the cheapest price per gallon of gasoline between MD and PA, got a coke for myself to calm my stomach down after eating as if competing with Lord Ganesha over the past two days! The drive felt way much shorter than it usually is... I realized I need some time off like this every now and then. No one to critize my thoughts, actions, words and even my singing ;-)... The movie is from my list of favorites and so are the actor/actress. The song "Bhale Bhale Chandada .... " reminded me of my Eng. Days! Singing was one of our favorite lunchtime things to do.. After this CD, I plugged in another one - this time it was an assorted Hindi cd. It feels so nice when you accidentally find out something you have that you cherish a lot and had forgotten for sometime.. This CD was one such thing! The songs that were on this one were: Maine Dil Se Kaha from Rog, Khoobsurat wo itna from the same movie, Fana title song, Bin tere sanam (remixed version), Jal Jal ke dhua .. (forgot the movie name), Tanhai mein basi hai zindagi - Another great one from lucky ali - not sure if it is an album, Aadat from Zeher movie I guess and a few others..

Music can definitely change a person's mood in minutes if the person is into music. No matter what, just humming the tune of a song you like makes you either happy or sad! I was all along a happy kid singing on top of my voice on board my Acura TSX!