stomp boom

You see this on the road and what do you think?

Boys will remain boys. When we were growing up these tetrapacks of Frooti were great while full and even more fun when you finish off the liquid. You then basically opened it out, place it on the ground and go STOMP. There would be a large BANG and that would mean a free cracker. Wow! Once I learnt about it from my friends I used the trick to stomp an empty pack wherever I saw it. You don’t care who threw it on the road, all you did was go stomp and bang.

This went on real fine till one fine day when I was still in school I was walking near Kings Circle (I remember this very well) and I chanced upon a pack on the rod. Yes a pack waiting for my stomp and bang. I lifted my leg and let down with a STOMP. A BANG followed and then I was completely taken aback by what happened next. The dam pack was a brand new pack with Frooti inside. I remember seeing in slow motion the yellow liquid bursting through and I was trying to avoid it and a large amount of it flew to my pale blue faded denims to soak them with a sticky sweet yellow liquid. Yuck. Imagine if a glass of mango juice spills onto you.

Once while flying back from London on a business trip as we were taking seats the stewards had placed a glass of mango juice on every seat. Now why would they do that? Why would they put a glass before the passengers are seated and comfortable? That’s a British carrier for you. They don’t care. You are to get your free drink so the faster I put it on your table the better it is for you. You can then come and get uncomfortable trying to maneuver into place while not spilling your drink. That’s the shit bit. As luck would have it, it spilled on my seat and there was yellow sweet sticky liquid over my precious business class seat. The steward tried to clean it with tissues but you can’t really clean a juice spill properly with at tissue box can you? Luckily they had another free seat or else I guess the freaks would have had me sitting on that seat. To hell with business class getting better service or the sort.

So coming back to the pack on the street. Post the earlier incident; I never did ever burst a tetrapack ever again.  Especially the laawaaris ones you find on the street. No way. Every time I see a pack lying unflattened, I am tempted but then I am reminded of my escapade from nearly 25 years ago and I stop. Let an unBOOMED tetrapack remain unboomed. Someone else might come and enjoy that. I am staying away.

And while we are at it – here is one nice dance number going boom boom boom…

And just on dance hits – this song is the greatest hit with those under 13 years old… they dance like crazy with steps and all and they can listen to this all day long…

Radha from Student of the year. I can’t understand how the kids love the movie and this song. With my daughter nd her gang wanting to listen to this all the time I have now begin to hum it at times. Oh god…

its awesome fun

To continue in the same vien with the last post… yesterday I was left alone in the morning with Jispa. My job was simple – feed her breakfast, get her to do homework and the practice math.

First things first – breakfast. That meant looking in the fridge for interesting things to eat. We had the Khulchas and then we had the zataar powder that we bought from London. One of the lovely bits of the London trip was a visit to the Edgware road which has these amazing rows of Lebanese restaurants. The fun bit is that the cuisine is a delight for vegetarians as well. We were spoilt for choice there with the amazing veg offering. In our naivety we entered the restaurant and asked – is there veg on the menu, he almost choked while answering – of course. I had been told about the street, but our host in London had recommended it highly and that’s why we ended up going. That was where we bought zataar to bring it back home. Made in Lebanon to be shipped to London to be brought back to India. So much for food miles.

So breakfast yesterday was fixed. Jispa loves zataar as well. After Jasmine left, I took the khulcha and put the zataar on it. Then I put shredded cheese all over it. Then olives and then a cheese slice. The cheese slice is yellow and the shredded cheese is white. So it gives an interesting coloring to the whole thing. Then in the micro it goes for a minute. Remove it and crumble feta on it – voila you have three cheese zataar khulcha. We absolutely loved it.

Post breakfast we sat to do our homework. I can’t really help her in Hindi. She asked for the Hindi translation of Sports day which I promptly asked Google. It was boringly apparent as ‘khel divas’. Then we got to the math. Here Jispa had to do fractions. After a few sums, I realized that while Jispa knew the sums she wasn’t really very clear about the fractions. She couldn’t visualize the problems. What then happened was a one and half hour session on fractions. Different sets of issues, different problems, different ways of looking at things. I was explaining the basic concepts of fractions to her. Then we went on to LCM and why we need LCM to add or subtract fractions. This helped her quite a bit. She was simply learning how to do the method without really understanding how or why. This way she could solve a few fractions directly without even using the paper. I don’t know how it might have impacted her immediately in helping her solve her sums faster but surely she walked away with a better understanding and a lesser hate for math.

Math is fun, it’s logical and it’s amazing. It’s evolved so beautifully. The multiplication and division and the fractions. They have a life of their own. I love them and now I love the fact that I am reliving them. I too did not know so much about them. While explaining to Jispa I am forced to look at them with a beginner’s eye. Then I am forced to bring them down to simple equations and situations and then look at them fundamentally. I broke it up into pies and pies and how you can get different parts of the pies to add up. I never did see them that way before. It was lovely and Jispa too loved it. She did get scolded in the middle but in the end she still loved it. I guess I must take more such lectures with her. And now I felt that we should have a white board in our home as well. The current one was designed for Jispa to access while she was three.

So Jispa and I are having some fun with math. Then today morning while driving her to the bus stop I asked her again if she enjoyed the session. She loved it. Then suddenly a thought stuck me and I asked her….When you multiply two numbers by each other – let’s say 7X7 you get a bigger number… But when you multiply two fractions ½ X ½ you get a smaller number… why?

Oops… it stumped her and me together. If multiplication is merely repeated adding then ½ X ½ should be 1, then why is it ¼

It took me some time to clear this out in my mind as well. 7X7 is seven TIMES seven and if you do seven multiplied by half you do… seven times half.  So I explained to her that seven into 1 is seven. Then seven into any number less than 1 will be a lower number. And hence ½ into ½ is half of half, hence a smaller number. So any number multiplied by a fraction has to be a lower number.

It seems so easy now. But to suddenly think of it and then logically solve in your head was so much fun. Especially with you 11 year old daughter. I loved it. The only problem is that I can only do these on Sundays or Saturdays when her exams are not on the head. Else it’s up to mom to ensure regularly work happens.

Mom and dad are in many ways opposites reconciling into each other to make parenting as a whole work. Its good fun going up with my daughter.

teach

Sometimes I wonder where do I get all my gyan from. Sometimes when talking to someone I amaze myself. I also did not know I knew all this before I actually ended up speaking to someone about it. I know a lot of reading helps. Most of the time you just dip into your memory and figure out something that you actually read once upon a time and at the right time you were able ot dig it out for complete effect. That’s the easier one to fathom. But the difficult one to fathom is the one that you never knew at all. Like sometimes when I teach math to Jispa – I too did not know that I knew what I taught. Simple stuff that comes out mostly as logical deduction more than anything else. Like the other day spoke about the concept of infinity. How anything divided by zero is not zero but the answer is infinity (or indeterminate as I just learnt from google). Explaining this to Jispa was a nice tough challenge. But after explaining the concept explaining a practical example was even more fun. To keep it short – I explained how if you invested 100 bucks in a lemonade stall from your pocket money and made 50 bucks profit your profit percentage is 505 but if you borrowed that money from someone and you made 50 bucks then your Return on investment is – infinity (or indeterminate). That was fun.

We have been talking about a few things about town planning and today she wanted to discuss it further. I explained that town planners need to understand Brownian Motion. Each dust particle is impossible to predict but a group of them are fairly predictable and stuff like that. Planner need to understand this and make their planning. It was good fun.

Teaching is always fun. It’s the best way to retain what you think you know. There is some concept of unconscious knowledge that resides in all of us. Teaching brings this unconscious knowledge to the conscious self. I love teaching. Teaching keeps my mind running active and alive. The other day my digital agency wanted me to take a class for them on their offsite. They asked for stuff that I normally teach in any case in colleges. One thing stood out from the entire experience. They asked me for what presentation material I might require – projector etc. On no. nothing – just a white board.thats it? No slides no presentation, nothing. No dudes. I know this concept like the back of my hand. I have been teaching these for many years now. That’s the real test of knowing something I guess. So I took what was a roughly 6 hour lecture with only a white board (large). I know what it is.

This knowledge that I try to pass on to my students helps me in so many ways. It improves my grasp of the subject, makes me conceptually clear and makes me revisit the logic again and again. I have found new logic, new criticisms of the model and reinforced my beliefs in them. It’s so important to think aloud. All my conversations with Jispa help me as much as all my teachings with anyone else. Finally it’s a sum total of all things we do. Reading, talking, listening, teaching come together in a potent combination. The thing is to have enough of it.

The fun side is that when you meet a lot of people and read other stuff, you gain a great ability to see the bullshit from the stuff being thrown at you. It’s not easy for people to just simply lob pies at you. You know what shit is being thrown and you can quickly ask the most pertinent questions disarming the pie chucker. It happens in meetings all the time. Never stop learning and never stop teaching what you have learnt.

Coming to random rubbish. Here is one shit piece I saw on the internet. Read and laugh about loud. They say planning a trip gives a high level of happiness and after the trip you feel unhappy. Well that’s pretty intuitive but their conclusion is worth a million bucks – plan a trip but don’t take it…

Plan a trip – but don't take one

 As opposed to actually taking a holiday, it seems that planning a vacation or just a break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal, Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as employees enjoyed the sense of anticipation: In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people.

If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar—even if it's a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.

I am reminded of a joke once told at the family dinner table.

Once a guy took a cockroach and cut one leg and said – run. The cockroach ran. Then he cut one more and said – run. The cockroach ran. This went on till the cockroach was left with one leg. Run – the cockroach still ran as best as he could. After all the legs were cut and the guy yelled – RUN. The cockroach refused to move. The guy wrote in his science journal the conclusion – after cutting six legs of the cockroach, the cockroach turns deaf.