A short trip to the Tahoe Region

We have the utmost privilege of living in the Bay Area, where there is an abundance of natural beauty.

Every now and then, we make trips in the direction of Lake Tahoe. Hence, this Labor Day, we rented an Airbnb in the middle of a forest in Camino, CA for a couple of nights.

One of the highlights of this trip was a hike around Jenkinson Lake in the Sly Recreation Area. It is a 4-hour loop but we only did the 1-hour portion of it. For the rest of the time, we hung out by the lake.

We also heard about a waterfall around the Kyburz area called the Bassi Falls that requires a 1hr 30 minutes (4 miles) of hiking out and back to access it but we did not end up going there.

What we did instead was that we drove to White Hall. We used to regularly lounge on the rocks by the river there but this time we just took a short walk in that area. There is a favorite motel of ours called Kyburz Motel (now called Sierra Inn) that we used to go to often because it is by the river. We went there to check it out and on the way back, ate excellent food at a new Korean restaurant called Moon's Korean Kitchen in Silverfork, a town that is next door to Kyburz. 

Earlier on Sunday, we had lunch at the Apple Ridge Farm because our Airbnb was in the Apple Hill area of Camino. 

On Monday, we took an hour-long walk in the hills/forest on Copperton Road. It was a fabulous walk.

This place is in close proximity to towns like Fresh Pond, Pony Creek, Pollock Pines, and Placerville. The Airbnb itself had so much to do. There was a zipline for the kids and a play area as well. 

All in all, we had a great relaxing time on this vacation. 

Documenting family history

I probed my dad today, asking him questions on my grandfather's and his journey during the mid and late 20th century times.

My dad was born in December of 1951 and moved to Dhanbad in 1952. They lived in Dhanbad until 1958 and moved to Muzaffarpur thereafter where my dad attended a convent school for a couple of years before moving to a Government school in 7th grade. 

My dad's family moved to Chaibasa for some time thereafter.

My dad has the fondest memories from the Chaibasa days. They used to go on tours with my grandfather (Dadu) to different places like Jamshedpur. When in Jamshedpur, they used to spend some time with Bade Nana (my mom's uncle) and his family. My dad sang songs for Bade Nana who appreciated my dad's singing skills. They lived in a big Government bungalow in Chaibasa.

After Chaibasa, they moved to Patna. My ancestral home in Srikrishnapuri was built in 1965 after the land was bought in 1964, on the insistence of one of Dadu's colleagues. The house was rented out until the early 70s since Dadu still moved around a bit. BTW, our famed Ambassador car BRR73 was bought by my Dadu from Bade Nana in 1965 for mere Rs. 9000. It was a 1958 model. For the record, we kept it until 2012 (nearly 50 years).

When they were in Patna in the mid-60s, my dad and his two brothers started frequenting Bankipur club on Saturday nights, where my dad performed on stage and collected a lot of accolades doing the same. 

Eventually, my dad moved to the hostel in Patna College in 1969/70. He continued with his interest in music and visited Bombay in 1971-72 with a bunch of friends to sing at a friend's wedding. He had also visited Bombay with his brothers in 1971 and stayed with Mohanjee Prasad. After he came back from Bombay, he visited Bade Nana who asked him to visit Girija Samanta (Shakti Samanta's brother) on his next trip. He got several letters from Dadu's contacts via an Ex Income Tax Bombay chief and visited a host of actors like Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor on his next trip to Bombay. He started working for Shakti Samanta as the assistant director in movies like Ajanabee, Amanush, and Charitraheen. He also appeared for a couple of Pune Film city auditions (once in Delhi and once in Mumbai) around this time where the likes of Jaya Bahaduri suggested that he pursue singing instead of acting. He never pursued singing and returned back to Patna in 1975. 

Back in Bihar, he started a string of businesses. First, he dabbled with the "Glass tinting" business in Patna and then with "Varnishes and Paints" in Dhanbad and Patna. In both the Patna operations, his older brother was his business partner. 

In the late 70s, he started Pizza Hut, which ran until 1984. After Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, everything was shut down for a month and he lost his staff, which prompted him to close down operations.

He thereafter also started a dairy/milk business in Patna, Bihar Sharif, and Koderma, with my mom which he ran for a year. 

This was a brief summary to capture the first 35 years of my dad's life. He is nearly 70 years old now. 

Read to your child

You can start reading as early as 6 months. No need to stop.

E-reading, while better than no reading has lower retention because of physical stimuli absence and distractions.

Audiobooks while better than no reading still misses the visual cues. We have 200:1 visual to auditory nerve endings in the brain.

Closed Captions are thus helpful. An interesting idea is to watch TV with no volume and closed captions on.

TVs have some small advantages for young watchers. It can improve their vocabulary. However, after 10 years of age, there are no advantages. The main problem is what is missed while the hours are spent on TV. Hence, the research recommends not more than 10 hours of TV for kids 2 and older, and no TV for kids younger than 2. Another idea is to mandate no TV on weeknights or TV with no volume and only captions.

The Defining Decade

Some key lessons learned from the book- The Defining Decade- Why your twenties matter and how to make most of them now.

Work:

Build identity capital. Identity capital means skills, experience, and connections that establish the foundation of a strong long term career. It is not impossible but much harder to do this later. There is more long term satisfaction in building a good career in the 20s than frittering time as if the time in the 20s doesn't matter much since everything is happening later in life these days. 

Love:

Be intentional about finding a partner. Understand "The Cohabitation Effect". Don't move in with a person with whom there are no strong commitments. Living together without marriage makes sense only if both of you are somewhat committed. Otherwise, living together leads to the Cohabitation effect with a lock-in and people end up marrying these people even when their personalities are too different and later this ends in a divorce. WHAT YOU WANT is less important than WHO YOU ARE (OCEAN personality type) when it comes to finding a partner. A personality match is the number one indication of a marriage working, more than what you externally think you want in a marriage.
For eg, there are 5 personality traits- OCEAN. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. One can be high, low or average in these 5 categories. The only deal-breaker is if someone is highly neurotic (extreme). Otherwise, most other personality differences can be bridged with hard work on the relationship.

Overall Satisfaction:

This has to do with future orientedness. People who are future-oriented with plans and goals tend to be more satisfied. Yes, being future-oriented means more sacrifices and more hard work but that tends to give more meaning to life so that when you look back at life, you tend to feel more satisfied. An example the author uses is starting a family. Having and caring for a child is not easy (and is not for everyone) but it tends to give a lot of overall satisfaction to life. Fertility peaks for women at 28 and starts declining rapidly after 35. Before 35 is the time to have a child since, after that, a lot of medical interventions are needed which have low success rates and are expensive. Despite IVF and Inuterine inseminations, the safest time to have a child is pre 35. 

Adventures in Africa

There was a Masai boy in Kenya, who wanted to be a warrior. He was guarding his family's cows one night when he heard the sounds of rainfall, out of the blue. He suddenly realized that it was not raining, rather, it was all the cows peeing at once.

A Masai boy knows when that happens, it happens only when the cows can smell or hear a lion. The lions were pretty smart. They were two of them. They figured that the wind was blowing from East to West. There was a lion on the West and one on the East. When the wind carried the aroma of the eastern lion to the cows, the cows started running towards the West, recognizing that the lion must be on the east and thus they were captured by the western lion. Game over!

Such is life in Africa.

Africa is a great continent. Even though it has gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to modernization, it is extremely blessed with natural resources.  

I love immersing in different cultures and I do a lot of research before I embark on a journey. After reading a few books and watching some documentaries, I booked the four of us tickets to Kenya, with a stopover for a night in Doha, Qatar. 

We even crossed over to Tanzania for a while and saw a single stone as a marker for border crossing!

We spotted all popular wild animals, except for Rhinoceros. You can see The Lion King!

The trip was extremely eventful and the kids loved every bit of it. The people were very warm and the safari in the Masai Mara Reserve delightful. It's a great reminder to step outside our comfort zones and explore different cultures. It binds humanity closer together and makes this world a better place to live!

The True North: Travels in the second largest country

What comes first to your mind when you hear Canada? A couple of decades back, for a lot of my Indian friends, I am sure it would have been the most interesting and funny pronunciation itself "Kaneda".  (Yes, in early grades of elementary school, my conscience used to debate on how it was pronounced because my exposure of the world was limited to Doordarshan and old Indian cinema. The word sounded like Canada but the authoritative Punjabi characters on the TV insisted on Kaneda)

But now we live in the era of Connected Cows and Connected World, hence people know something about a lot of things these days, thanks to the ubiquitous articles and snippets on social media. However, the best way to find more about a country is by reading books (notice I did not say magazines or articles), traveling to and the best of all, "living" in that country.

Hence, after a decade of living in the United States, we decided to visit Canada for a week for our ninth wedding anniversary, with an eight year old Freyjaa and a year old Nirvanh in the tow.

Beautiful Trails in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

The trip started with an unexpected twist. We wanted to visit British Columbia and hence I was looking for tickets to Vancouver. However, mistakenly I had bought our onward tickets to Victoria (an island not too far away from Vancouver) . I realized about the mistake only after the pleasant lady at the Delta counter announced that she was feeling sorry to let us know that the flight to Victoria has been delayed and they were willing to put us on other flights going to Victoria or "Vancouver". I pounced on this opportunity and booked us on the flight flying into Vancouver, leaving an hour later.

Canada is a very pleasant country and you gauge that as soon as you disembark at the airport. Most Canadians in British Columbia have accents similar to Americans on the West Coast. However, people seemed to be in less rush than folks back home in California.

View From The Top After Taking The Sea To Sky Gondola Ride in Squamish

We covered White Rock, Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet on this trip and the vast lands with very little population density enamored us.

I highly recommend Nita Lake Lodge in Whistler as an excellent place to station yourself and explore The Pacific Province. It is on the expensive side during peak seasons, however they make your stay very interesting by offering free kayak, boat and bike rentals. It is situated on the Nita Lake where you can paddle and offers beautiful trails in the mountains nearby. Another outdoor adventure spot is Squamish, with its famous Sea to Sky Gondola ride, where you walk on a Suspension Bridge when you reach the top. For a sleepover, I recommend the sleepy town of White Rock, very close to the US Border if you are driving up from the US Border. It has excellent Oceanside accommodations where you can enjoy the vistas if you are in a mood to relax. If you want to go very rural, check out the aboriginal history and lifestyle in Lillooet; stopping at a ranch for a horse ride in Pemberton. Last but not the least, Stanley Park in Vancouver is an urban jungle and is highly recommended. I particularly liked walking on the waterfront in downtown Vancouver.

There are more fun things you can do which I have not recommended in this trip report. Hit me up if you need more info. One interesting fact for my Australian friends and their neighbor Kiwis- Canada has bilateral agreements with you guys and you guys can get easy work permits to work in Canada for the summers. Sounds like a fun idea to spend your idyllic summer in the wonderful outdoorsy British Columbia. Go figure!

Notes From Almost An Island

Cabo, Baja California Sur, Mexico – Day 1

Baja California Sur captures you instantly with its tropical charm. It puts you under a spell of nostalgia; childhood memories of a tropical upbringing resurface. The place feels like India in the Western Hemisphere.

We disembark the sexy virgin we rode on from San Francisco (I meant the Virgin America flight, perverts!!!) and proceed towards immigration. The nice “Mujer” at the immigration counter called herself Viktoria and refrained from giving us much trouble. The next step was customs, which was very customary, but highly unnecessary; given what it involves is denying a series of alleging questions and pressing a red button which ironically means that you are green to go.

As soon as you exit the airport, you get into a party mood. The weather is captivating and loud celebratory music is playing. There is a bar right there outside the gate and we indulge with a tropical mango drink for Shweta and a banana to alleviate Freyjaa’s untimely hunger. The waiter is a good looking young guy nomenclatured Diego. I confirm with him if he is the honorable Diego from San Diego and he blushes, giving me the assurance that I made his day. He is a product of a French father and a Mexican mother and lives in Brussels, Belgium. He has come to Cabo for a visit and by sheer happenstance, landed this job at the airport bar and somehow finds it too enticing to leave. This gives me a reassurance that I might see a familiar face in this strange land next time I visit its shores. I hand him seven USDs, five for the drink, one for the paltry banana and one for keeping him even more interested in his job; purely for aforementioned selfish self-soothing reasons.

The Fox Rental Company has a shuttle waiting outside, which we obligingly board and reach a Master bathroom sized company office. Cabo, like any other tourism hub, is a highly commercial place. Everyone is competing for the tourist’s dollars and sometimes ethics take a backseat in the due process. I had booked a rental car to drive to my hotel in Cabo San Lucas and had decided to buy Mexican Liability Insurance upon my arrival there. However, I had inquired over the phone about the rates and was told it was going to be $14/day. Not surprisingly, the decent looking poker faced Roberto decided to offer me $22/day for the same level of coverage. I reassured him that I might not be a rocket scientist but I knew my numbers; upon which; he decided to take $16/day. And that was the sign that Cabo will be a place where haggling will encompass a good portion of human affairs. It also shows that if humans are not bound by rules and regulations, they are very likely to cheat, given no consequences of faltering.  A human mind is wild and unless you tame it a little bit, societies become interesting but very unpredictable. Author Taleb, a big proponent of antifragility suggests that we should seek out unpredictable chaotic living if we desire to keep ourselves from breaking with fragility but I beg to stay fragile. I would like to live in a somewhat predictable society and don’t mind adventuring into unpredictable lands only for short durations. All of us know that life itself is highly unpredictable and there is value in embracing its nasty yet interesting turns and twists. I am all up for embracing but not convinced about living that way for eternity by seeking out such long term opportunities on purpose.

After this initial education, we reached the next step of looking at the car I was getting. It was a Volkswagen Gol and had a Manual Transmission. Here was my opportunity to show off my fancy folder with all travel related papers filed away in almost an obsessive compulsive way. The paperwork clearly reflected my conviction and my lack of audacity about reserving a stick shift car on my maiden visit to a new country. He tried convincing me unconvincingly and with lack of evidence in abundance that his system shows my enthusiasm for using a clutch again in my life. The conversation turned almost into a brawl since he demanded more money for automatic and I refused to budge and raised my voice far beyond my usual equilibrium levels. He budged and gave me a FIAT convertible. The earlier education has already helped.

The convertible had a horribly small trunk space but the family got together and pulled a “BRR73”. BRR73 was the number of my grandfather’s 1958 Ambassador which our joint family used for many unthinkable number of years. Our grandfather loved to take us to wedding parties and the party of seven would load up in the average sized car for five on several occasions. Hence, I was good at the art of loading up and into a small car. The car was fun to drive and the road and scenery induced a feeling that I was driving from Delhi to Faridabad. We pulled over at Dominos for a late lunch and ordered a medium pizza and two drinks for a paltry sum of 237 Pesos ($13). Post the late lunch, we headed to our Hotel (#1 Bread and Breakfast according to Lonely Planet) in the downtown Cabo San Lucas area and we were charmed yet again. It is an enchanting B&B, tucked away from the all inclusives and has a wonderful welcoming feel. The manager incentivized me to pay in cash (Pesos) by reducing the boarding charges by hundred dollars. I obliged and promised him the sum once I withdrew it from a local ATM.

We had booked a Honeymoon suite, honey being our sweet Nirvanh and moon being our beautiful Freyjaa. Both of them make this honeymoon of sorts complete. It was time to get fresh, grab dinner, relax and call it a day. I got some fresh, same day caught fish from Neptunos after withdrawing cash from the Santander bank and came back to my honeymoon suite, where I lay down on my hammock, swinging back and forth; while my mind swung back and forth between progress and nostalgia, risk and security, love and fear and all other such mesmerizing dualities of life which make this truly non-dualistic life worth living in the worldly way.