Ten Facts about Minneapolis Metro Transit

Being without a drivers license in a foreign country , I am forced to use the public transport system to commute to work. After reading this blog about the public transport in India , felt like writing one about my experiences with the metro transit.

Metro Transit Facts :

#1 You will never be without a seat on a bus.

Till this date , I have never ever been without a seat in any of the metro transit buses. The trains may be ,  but the buses always have plenty of seats. In fact I have even had the whole bus to myself once or twice.

#2 Always have exact money to pay.You cannot buy a ticket unless you have exact change, but most drivers will let you have the benefit of the doubt and give you the ticket , once or twice  even if you don't have it. But it does get you a lot of stares from around the bus  (This applies only if there are people in the bus).

#3 If some one asks about your job , avoid the usual techno jargon like programmer , software  etc , Better still avoid the word software altogether and say that you work for

 so and so employer. With huge recession fears looming, you don't want people staring at you like you stole their job from them.

#4 There are weirdo vaynokkis in every land. I even had to endure a guy try to talk to me about cricket (duh!)  and he was not an Indian or Pakistani.

#5 The other women you see on the bus are either dressed like sluts or women in their fifties talking about their grand children.Exceptions are few and far between mostly being Asian women with multiple children or Indian software engineers who sleep till their destination is reached. Men who are not in their fifties or sixties are usually dressed in jeans that look like they are held up only by virtue of static electricity and over sized t shirts.

#6 If you want to make polite conversation with fellow passengers , stick to safe topics like weather (What crappy weather today) or angst at approaching winter . Family questions are a strict no.

#7. Sometimes , your bus might stop for a disabled person and if it does , be assured that your connection bus will be gone , for in this country disabled people on wheel chair get royal treatment. (Made me feel sorry for the same category in India where they are just bound to be pushed off by the huge rush of people in the bus stop.

#8 If  you see some one who is carrying many leaflets , act fast asleep , for the person is most probably  a zealous follower of some church who will talk to you for hours about joining them which will make you fall asleep anyway.

#9 Expect public displays of affection. If you are embarrassed by it , feigning sleep is the best option , but believe it or not , I have seen worse in Indian trains.

#10 Know exactly where to get down. Do not expect the driver or the fellow passengers to be able to help you because , 9 out of 10 times they won't know and even in the odd chance that they do know, they might misunderstand your accent and misdirect you.

Dance Dance Dance........

This was a post I have been wanting to write for the past 2 weeks , but have been postponing it for a while because of household hurries and worklife worries..So here goes..

Flash Back :
1988:(or may be 1989) I'm not really sure. I was 6 year old girl-just like all the other girls of her age.
I spent my time outside playing with friends, going for a ride on my new BSA Champ and watching the only cartoon shows that came on doordarshan.Mom had always wanted her daughter to dance and soon there was a dance teacher knocking the door every saturday and sunday morning.It was soon clear that I did not have any aptitude for dance and the frustration of teacher and student were evident. Soon I started waking up every sunday dreading my dance lesson and crying because I could not watch the mickey mouse
cartoon on doordarshan. Finally my dad who is as interested in the fine arts as an average mallu is in veg food, decided that spending 150 rupees a month on something that made his daughter cry every day was not worth it.Thus ended my brief stint with dance.

Back to Present:

Later in life, I avoided any kind of dance including the mandatory to learn Thiruvathira knowing which is a
necessity in my community unless you want to look like a stupid in your own wedding video(Yep, it is a part of the welcoming ceremony to the groom's home or kudiveppu). I had been content (with a wee bit of envy I must admit) watching my friends perform amazing dances and win prizes in school and college, with my part limited to dressing them up and giving pep talk before the program. With great difficulty and ample help from my grandmother and aunts, I mastered one step of thiruvathira which helped me avoid looking like
a complete fool in the welcome thiruvathira at my husband's place.

Watching the ease with which my hubby's cousins danced , for the first time , I had a burning desire to be like them. To learn the dance. So when I got a chance to take part in an Onam program in Columbus, OH , I jumped on to it and found to my chagrin that to wish to learn is one thing , but having 2 left feet is quite another. Heart aches and body aches and 2 months later , I performed my first ever dance on stage. I wasn't quite so graceful, but it worked out. I could do the right steps.

This made me more ambitious, I wanted to try doing some other types of dance.But I didn't have the confidence to ask anybodyfor a chance as I was quite sure that nobody would have that much patience.
But this year, I gathered up courage and joined my friends for a cinematic dance. It was way difficult at first,
But good friends and a great teacher (who is a good friend too) and a supporting hubby can do wonders I was able to learn it , bit by bit , step by step.

And we put up an amazing show. It felt so happy to be part of such a winning combination that I felt this was the right thing to blog about to co-memorate the other achievement that I'm proud of- that of completing 50 blog posts.

Space , Time and Woman?

I know space. It is that vast empty space that surrounds the earth and other planets. I have a fair idea of time too. Considering how I'm juggling it between the multiple priorities of my life.I think I know space -time as how time relates to space.(You know, I did read or try to read Stephen Hawking's a brief history of Time and about that feline of Schrodinger who dies and does not die at the same time in that black horrible box she was put into.) Feeling pretty pleased with myself now that I still remember all this.But space, time and woman? Woman(!) how is Woman in this picture at all? How is she related to space-time? And then I realized I was thinking about the wrong Space -Time.

Well, space and time are the two primary things that woman needs and most often complains about. I need more space. I  just don't have enough time are the most common refrains in the air.Google told me that somebody called Dorothy Moss has done an extensive study of how space and time affect the life of women in different spheres of their life. Wow. looks like somebody has had a lot of thought about this one.

Every being wants its own share of solitude to think and to be with oneself. (No,. the 7 hours of tired sleep that we get doesn't fall in that category). Most women either ignore or choose to ignore this particular need because of the second part of the equation. -Time. To get that much coveted personal space , one needs to make time. Adjust priorities , household, job or other to have a small niche for self. It is one of the first ingredients to a recipe for happiness. Introspection helps you to develop yourself and improve as a being and fulfil the destiny that was meant for you.

So quit that life of the Schrodinger's cat which is dead and alive at the same time, and serving no purpose whatsoever.Get a little space-time for yourself. Be at peace with yourself and balance the rest of your space-time with renewed vigour.

Crazy Voices

The world is buzzing past me
I hear voices all around
Some talking to me ,
Some about me ,
Yet others about things beyond me
In this cackle of voices,
My voice feeble and tremulous
seldom aired, seldom heard
often self muted by the cacophony
Of the loud and senseless
Closing myself to the blaring noise,
Sit down I did to hear my voice
Only to be deafened
By the my own loud  silence
Thoughts took wings and
flew through clouds
Words rained down
with strength never seen
With no rhyme or reason they flowed
With a purpose of expression bold
Looking down at my pen and paper
scattered with senseless chatter
Realizing that my voice unheard
Had metamorphosed into a written word

The blank Stare

The blank stare
That spoke a thousand words
Of sadness and a heavy heart

The blank stare
That shed a thousand unshed tears
Of loneliness and pain

The blank stare
That asked silently wordlessly
For a friendly helping hand

The blank stare
Unfocused at the distant Horizon
Icy numb and oblivious of the fading reality..

Gloom Day-A windows Fantasy

I know the title sounds suspiciously like doom day. But it is not. It was just was it was- A gloomy boring sad day in the life of a supremely uninterestingly ordinary human being. What made it so ? I have no idea. But as such days usually happens, the day started much much earlier than the time I woke up and this was probably half the reason. Try as I might , I couldn't start myself off and get out of the bed when the 6:00 o' clock alarm or the 6:30 alarm or the 7:00 (this is getting dangerous) alarm blared into my ears. No I had not turned my ears off  overnight , but heavy multitasking had had its toll and I just chose to snooze the repeat alarms. At 8:00 , realizing that I have way too much to do and too little time , rushed to office , with sleepy eyes and a starved stomach only to find that I had a meeting at 9.15 that I missed. 

I started work. Work was going slower than a Windows Vista machine on a 16 bit RAM . My mind just wans't working. It was as though gloom.exe was running a background process on me and sapping all my resources away.I would look for a file and not find it. I would look find something I wanted and then realize that I did not have the rights for it. Nothing was working. I felt so absolutely tired and frustrated.  I wished I could just click a restart button and things would start working again. (What a horribly Microsoftic fantasy).I knew there would be a system crash sooner or later if I didn't check the taskbar and close some of those unwanted processes going on  in my mind. But I just couldn't do it , and soon gloom.exe had other side programs like sadness.exe and selfpity.dll running and soon all I wanted to be was by myself.Even normal processes like coffee.dll and lunch.exe were forgotten. Finally the inevitable happened. All processes ceased because of low CPU and tears.exe started a disk clean up and restart program.

It was defintely lucky that I had no eye make up on that day.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows -My 2cents

I am an unabashed Harry Potter fan. I will read any material that is remotely related to harry potter characters or J .K Rowling. So in case you have not read all of the 7 books , you can stop right here.

I had always wanted to write my 2 cents about the books and how they managed to influence a generation  epic times more than what Enid Blyton was to a generation before . A whole new world where magic is real. A young orphaned wizard hero, a villain who is evil personified and the ultimate triumph of good over  evil. 

What fascinated me most  was the realistic portrayal of characters and the gray shades associated with most of them. Except for Voldemort who is pure black . And it is precisely the gray nature of the characters that brings the ultimate downfall of Voldemort. Snape who loved Lily more than his life and sacrificed himself for the son of her love to whom he shows only hatred.With the Malfoys , who were  opportunistic and power hungry ,Rowling tries to distinguish between misguided and evil.And ultimately it is also Narcissa's love for her son , that saves Harry at the most crucial moment, and Draco's cowardice/fear that makes him not identify Harry and Hermione at the Malfoy Manor. Dumbledore who turns out to be a good man but some one who thinks about the greater good over the life of Harry and someone who made many mistakes when he was younger. 

I like to think that Voldemort was thwarted by Love in the expected and most unexpected quarters.(Snape's Love for Lily, Narcissa's love for their son,Molly's love for her children(she kills his most trusted follower Bellatrix), Harry's love for all the people fighting for him).

The last book is the completion of growing up. Realizing that people are not infallible. Learning to take tough decisions. And the triumph of good over evil.