changing the world - one shower at a time

Ah the pleasures of a shower. I remember as a kid when I was growing up in Dubai I would have a shower bath. It was fun. Then when we came to Mumbai, for the first few years we stayed at our old place. Mom and dad later bought a largish house in a more modern apartment block which had all the modern trappings but till then it was the traditional 1970’s house. So our bathroom had a small instant heater which let out small quantities of water. Basically a really small tap attached to what I think was a brass geyser. We would use it to fill the bucket with water and then have a bath. I realized pretty quickly that since it was at a height I could simply stand under the water flow and think of it as a shower.

I love having bath. I could have a bath for an hour, with the water flowing forever. Showers are the coolest thing ever. It takes me just 10 minutes to get properly wet else I don’t even think I have gotten wet. Jasmine takes quick showers and wonders what on earth is going on. How does one explain the great fun of the water slowing over you?

So as a kid when we moved to the new house the first thing that got me excited was the shower. There was a huge capacity hater geyser over head and that was super cool. I could have a bath under the showers for almost forever. But this myth was to be busted. Of course  at first there was mom and dad. They would knock on the door when time went out of hand. And there were siblings. With three kids wanting to shower, one couldn’t really have an unhindered long bathing session. But the crucial point was something else. This was a storage water geyser, means that in some time the hot water would run out and you would get cold water flowing. What crap! The pleasures of a warm shower being affected by something as mundane as capacity.

When we shifted to our current home, I was happy to see the same but modern version of the old small water geyser. This geyser would simply heat the water and go on for hours. It was not a storage water geyser. Awesome fun started again. These years have been fun again! We have been enjoying the benefits of the water geyser and hot water for hours. Jispa has taken up after me. She too likes hanging around the shower. I am sure like me; she plays in the water, and throws water around. I used to do that in the hand shower. Throw water up and wonder what happens :). And like my parents, we too scold her and keep knocking – come out come out. Oh dam you bloody parenting.

It’s such a pain. There isn’t time to have a leisurely shower and refresh. I was explaining to Jispa the other day that four hours of your day goes away thanks to your swimming and hence there is no way you can spend time like this doing the things you want to do. Such a tough choice.

But this isn’t about her, it’s about showers. I have genuinely tried many times to cut short showers, use cold water and other stuff… but I always revert back to the old hot showers. In fact I used to have really hot showers which I managed to cool down. I think it makes my skin drier. Then I have tried to really go in and come out fast. Soon enough the lure of spending 20 minutes in a shower relaxing and thinking about great world changing ideas was too much to give up on.

In monsoon when the rains gets delayed there are many articles on how the rain water must be conserved and how we don’t have enough water. This time I decided to do something about it. I decided to get out the buckets and decided to have water from hot water filled in the buckets. “Ya sure” was Jasmine’s reaction to this. I asked Jispa if she would do the same. She was happy to comply as well.  So now I have tried to have atleast one bath with the water stored in a bucket. Pretty stupid thing, I am sure it going to turn out. One more of the failed ideas. I don’t know how long it will last. My wife thinks it will last till winter at best. But at least a few showers a week will convert into bucket baths and that is also a decent thing. something is better than nothing.

The flip side – world changing ideas can wait for the evening bath!

Bonus video!

Can you stop it?

One day Jispa old me that she has this great desire to once touch the fan while its moving. Hah! Ya sure. I told her that I wanted to touch the fan as well when I was her age. I wanted to stop the blades from moving. She said – ya she wants to do that as well. We both laughed as we shared our similar childhood fantasies of holding the blades of the fan. She told me ‘when I was small once I put a stick in the fan, thinking that I would go round round round, like in the movies.”. “ya? You serious. I have done that as a kid my self” I told her. “So what happened” I asked her. She said “nothing, the stick banged against the fan”. Yup. That’s the thing that happens. Then I asked him “do you really want to touch the fan while it’s on? There is one trick. You can touch the middle motor and not the blades. You should be fine then. Come let’s do it”. So I first touched the middle round bit and then I held her hand as she touched it. But I warned her to do it only under adult supervision. I told her that I did this as a kid. Then I narrated one incident to her. Once, (I must have been around 17/18) I wanted to check if I could stop the blades of the mixer with my fingers. So I tried experimenting with the mini boss. The hand held blender. I held the blades with my fingers and then started it. I got a deep cut in my finger and of course – the blade did not stop :) . that was my stupidity. I then tried showing her the scar on my finger. We could see a faint line. It was fun sharing these stories with Jispa. We really share the same weird ideas. How would it be to stop a fan?

A few stories that I did not tell her was that one of the things I experimented with was that I would do two more experiments with the fan. One was after I switched it off, at what point before it stopped moving altogether – would I be able to stop it. Putting my hand on the motor and increasing the friction was one. Putting a stick and even my hands on the blades when they are slower was another. The other experiment which was very successful and led to the finger in blender experiment was I would switch on the fan and then immediately try and stop it from moving by holding on to the blades. Now in a large ceiling fan that takes a lot to shrug off the initial inertia – it worked. You can stop a ceiling fan from starting by holding on to it. WARNING – any kids reading this – DO NOT TRY this at home. The fans can be of varying speed and this stuff was tried in the 90’s or 80’s. Motors and speeds have surely moved on from then on. SO since I could do that to the fan I wanted to do that to the blender. That successful experiment is not something I am going to tell Jispa about. Prudence prevailed.

But it was still fun to share a lot of these fun things with Jispa. Most of these experiments are garbed under scientific research in our brain. Once Jispa got a scolding for using nail paint in her fingers without asking. Later on I found out that it was a part of a scientific experiment on the effects of chlorine on nail paint. How long will it last while she swims.

But let me leave you with a video of a blender and stuff I would love to do at home. I think they got the amazing insight of every childhood fantasy… will the blender blend it? see all the related videos.

teach me teach you

Parenting is fun. There is a constant tussle where one tri to se through the games or the situation that the child is in. And you are up there sitting pretty and trying to be fair as well as fun as well inculcates discipline. So while you have the upper hand most of the time the greatest pride comes in when your kid can teach you stuff. No I don’t mean that they do their simple things and you end up deriving some great deep thought. Something such as – see the innocence and the unbridled trust that kids have. That is meant for the preachers to sell books after they sell their ferraries. I cant stand that crap. Sometimes though I do think that I can make a living doing that. Gyan or fart as it is commonly called is cheap. All you have to do is dig for some deeper meaning wrap it up in some dumbfounding logic and appeal to a person’s ‘dormant’ self actualised soul.
No, the fun is when you daughter who is eight can really teach you. This time around whoile having a conversation on swimming my daughter was telling me that the coach was stressing the importance of putting your one ear in water while resurfacing to breathe. I thought that was cool. I did not know that. I tried it the next morning to see my speed increase. I felt like a rocket. But I was so happy that my daughter was teaching me what to do. Especially in sports. She has already gone far ahead of me in swimming. She knows the four strokes and she is working on speed and stamina. Now I am dying to see her and compete with her in the pool. Let’s see now who wins. Me, all old and technique less will be a worthy competitor for her with right technique and possibly better stamina.
Same way I am also dying to play badminton with her. I always have had the dream that I will play sports with my daughter. Any sports. Even board games. They would give me immense satisfaction. Slowly she is reaching an age where I might be able to play with her a lot of things, besides nanu baby and motu baby. That will be fun. I look forward to it.
I look forward to conversations where we both contribute to each others learnings. In the near future (very near future) there is going to be one such opportunity. Jisps’s teacher told her that microwave food is bad for health. Ya sure, I have heard that a lot. There even might be truth in it. The other thing she said was that if you give microwave water to the plants then they will die. Ok. I wanted to smash that one but I was also not 100 % sure if that was the case.
I also wanted her to know that teachers / text books and others can be wrong. In this case I am sure her teacher must be led astray not by scientific argument but by an email that claims to be scientific. So now we have a golden opportunity to know the truth and allow for Jispa to question dogma. So I am hunting for a money plant. That’s the easiest plant to grow at home. Jispa and I decided that we will see it for ourselves. She was so excited about it yesterday but I couldn’t get a money plant at 9 pm.
So instead merely telling the teacher that she is right or wrong, we will prove it and merely state the facts of what we saw. That’s the way to do it. We will do it for ourselves and see the difference. We will take photos and then take these to the teacher for show and tell. This will not be an internet search but a proper experiment. Now where do I get two dam money plants?

All for a cracked CD

Oh god. I had no clue this was so complicated.
Jispa found a CD floating around the house. She came to us and asked if this was an important CD. Oh no, that was just around, waiting to be junked. She then asked “Can I put it in the microwave please?” WHAT? Why would you want to do that? “I read somewhere that if you keep the CD in the microwave then it will crack.” Uh ok. I looked at Jasmine and I figured that WTF. Let give it a go. We took a Corel plate and kept the CD on it and put it inside the microwave. In exactly two seconds the CD began to crackle with electricity. It looked so cool. The sparks on the CD looked like how a city looks at night from an airplane. It was pretty cool. We stopped it immediately. Then we started it again for three seconds. Wow. Cool nah? We did it again a couple of times.
Then we removed the CD to see it. The plastic was untouched. It was the mirroring on the CD that was affected. Then I tried to explain that to Jispa. I explained that the CD was actually a transparent plastic disk with troughs on it. so while it looking smooth to you, it actually has many small dimples of sort. Then I had to explain this via a cross section drawing. At first it was difficult to think of the drawing as cross section but eventually she got it.
Then I had to explain how the laser in the CD player throws a laser which bounces back. She then asked me if laser is like electricity. On which I then had to explain how laser is essentially a light beam, narrowly focussed. Like those red lasers which you get. Then I had to explain how light essentially has to bounce for us to see stuff. then I took her to the bathroom with a torch and explained how by merely shining a beam on the mirror you cant see yourself. But if you throw that beam of light on yourself, you can see yourself in the mirror. It merely bounces off the light it gets and hits the eye and hence you see what you see in the mirror. That was one major oh ho moment for her. She thought the mirror works in some other rocket science way. Now that I write about it, I am making a mental note to ask her what did she actually think, on how a mirror works. Then I got the beam on the top of her head and she figured that the light moves in a straight line as her head was illuminated and not her chin.
Now establishing light, we continued to understand the CD and explained to her that the CD language is in dips and troughs or something like that and that the laser (which I showed her on the comp) throws this beam and catches the bounce and understands the language and translates it into the screen image and music. “so, who wrote that language”. Er I don’t know but some body did I guess. “so if you don’t know the language?” “ya you need to know the language. The computer knows the language and then translates it for us”.
Then I had to explain that how the CD goes round and round in a computer and the read goes up and down to read it and that’s how you get to see a movie etc.
Then we went back to the concept of the microwave that sends out an electric signal of sorts that pass through the metal portion and what you see are essential electric sparks on the CD.
Wow this took up at least half an hour, but it was well worth it. Then she decided to take the CD to school as a part of show and tell. I had also explained that the CD would then melt if it would have been heated too much. Today morning as she was putting the CD in her bag, she also wanted to take the small plastic cream bottle that we had kept in the car. That bottle, thanks to it being in the car had twisted out of shape in the car. She wanted to show what happens to plastic if it gets heated too much.
Whew. What a large explanation all because she wanted to see the CD crack in the microwave. Cool nah.
My inspiration for this was Richard Feynman. In the book, 'Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman', he explained that how his dad explained Triboluminescence. It is the light emitted when crystals are crushed. His dad explained that as the blue light you see when you crush sugar. Google search throws this line - “'When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence."
I even found an online version of this lovely book. You can get it here