Asian Ocean Media - Living

Her name is Kerala and she's 8: Meet the American kid visiting the state she was named after

chandranbek — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 06:59:47 +0000

It was in the year 2004 that Charles Kramer, a TV producer and his wife Brenna Moore, an interior designer; first visited Kerala.

"My name is Kerala. I am really thankful to be in this school and make new friends,” as the 8-year-old says this, the assembly of students breaks into applause.

Kerala had travelled all the way from Los Angeles with her parents and her younger brother to get a taste of the culture of a state that she was named after.

It was in the year 2004 that Charles Kramer, a TV producer and his wife Brenna Moore, an interior designer; first visited Kerala. It was love at first sight. “We had travelled to many places in India like Delhi, Udaipur and other places. But we fell in love with Kerala. A progressive state with high literacy rate and forward thinking people, Kerala was just different,” says Brenna.

By the time they left the state, it left a deep impression on them. “The hills of Wayanad, the beaches and backwaters, the energy we received from Kerala was positive,’ says Charles.

And so, the couple did not think twice before naming their first born, Kerala, in 2009.

When I connected with Ganesha - in New Zealand

chandranbek — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 16:00:52 +0000

New Zealand is known for its natural beauty, cricket and All Blacks. But this Indian business executive realized the essence of Hinduism there, through Ganesha.

Last month while the world celebrated Ganesh Chathurthi, there was a debate going on in India mostly among the so-called educated Hindu middle class. On the surface of it, their position was simple: Ganesha is a Hindu god and the idea of Ganesha and its depiction is also owned by Hindus and it should not be meddled with.

In one instance, an engineer-turned-artistic photographer friend who was busy trying to get a shot of a kingfisher taking off from a pond in the bushes in northern Kerala suddenly remembered it was Ganesh Chathurthi and sitting in the bushes, used his sophisticated hi-tech camera to quickly make a caricature of Ganesha -- the ears formed by distorting the camera body, the nose using the zoom lens and tip of the lens hood -- and sent it around on social media wishing Ganesh Chathurthi to his friends. What followed was an avalanche of anger bordering abuse. He was stumped, in part because he happened to be a non-Hindu and it was suggested that he purposely mocked Ganesha. The angry responses questioned whether members of other faiths would accept it if anyone made fun of their holy books or gods and broadcast those on social media....

Categories:

Living, Religion and Spirituality

Date added:

Jan 26 2017 - 10:45am

Infosys Founder Narayana Murthy's Humble Letter To His Daughter Is One Every Girl Should Read

chandranbek — Thu, 05 May 2016 03:40:15 +0000

Most often we see mothers giving meaningful advice to their daughters. We forget that fathers love their children just as much and want the best for them from life.

Fatherhood changes a man as much motherhood transforms a woman. This is precisely what Infosys founder Narayana Murthy experienced when he became a dad to a beautiful girl, Akshata.

In his letter, which he penned a while ago, Murthy expresses his gratitude over how his daughter made him a better man. He traces his journey from being a king of an empire to the doting father he became.

Akshata,

Becoming a father transformed me in ways that I could never have thought possible. I could never go back to being the person I used to be before. Your arrival in my life brought unimaginable joy and a larger responsibility. I was no more just a husband, a son, or a promising employee of a fast-growing company. I was a father, who had to measure up to the expectations his daughter would have of him at every stage of her life.

Your birth raised the benchmark of my life, in every aspect. My interactions at the workplace became more thoughtful and measured; the quality of my transactions with the outside world more considerate, dignified, and mature. I felt a need to deal with every human being more sensitively and courteously. After all, some day you would grow up and understand the world around you, and I didn’t want you ever to think that I had done anything even remotely wrong.

Is Courting Controversy An Urban Outfitters Strategy?

chandranbek — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 02:16:34 +0000

Earlier this week, Gawker published an image of an invitation sent to Urban Outfitters employees, exhorting them, as the invite put it, to "break out your juttis, kurtas, turbans, saris, lehenga cholis and harem pants" for the company holiday party.

"As you can see," Gawker's Jordan Sargent wrote, "employees are being asked to dress up in some mish-mash of Orientalist signifiers so obviously offensive that two separate Urban employees forwarded the image to us this morning."

This comes barely three months after the infamous red-stained Kent State University sweatshirt that made apparent reference to the tragedy there, after which Urban Outfitters issued a sorry-not-sorry statement via Twitter and pulled the item from its website. The company soon followed with a more circumspect-sounding apology to Time that acknowledged its penchant for pushing buttons: "Given our history of controversial issues," it said, "we understand how our sincerity may be questioned."

http://www.npr.org/blogs

Categories:

Fashion, Living, Religion and Spirituality

Date added:

Dec 16 2014 - 9:15pm

Steve Jobs Didn’t Let His Kids Use iPhones or iPads: Here’s Why

chandranbek — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:26:53 +0000

Steve Jobs is a name which is synonymous with cutting edge, innovative and groundbreaking technology.

So it may come as something as a surprise to learn Apple’s former CEO didn’t believe in letting his kids use some of his company’s greatest products – the iPhone and the iPad.

And it’s not because the Apple godhead was a closet Samsung fan either.

Jobs, who died in 2011, may have had an instinctive flair for technology but he was a low tech parent who firmly believed in restricting his children’s access to electronic devices.

“We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” said Jobs way back in 2010, expressing growing concerns about his children’s gadget use.

As all modern parents know, iPhones and iPads are extremely appealing to children. These little hand-held devices are state-of-the-art toys. Surrogate parents almost, capable of entertaining, distracting, and pacifying children during school holidays and on long car journeys when mom and dad’s attentions are focused elsewhere.

Categories:

Education, Living, Tech

Date added:

Sep 18 2014 - 10:30am

A Prostitute and a Porn Star, Working to Pay Bills – Who’s Right, Who’s Wrong?

chandranbek — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 05:08:52 +0000

WASHINGTON, DC: The high profile arrest of the national award winning actress Shweta Basu Prasad, 23, from a hotel in Banjara Hills in Hyderabad, caught in a compromising position with a businessman from Mumbai, has set off a fierce debate in India after the actress released a statement that she turned to prostitution of her own volition to help support her family and due to other financial constraints.

Prasad said in the statement: “I have made wrong choices in my career, and I was out of money. I had to support my family and some other good causes. All the doors were closed, and some people encouraged me to get into prostitution to earn money. I was helpless, and with no option left to choose, I got involved in this act. I’m not the only one who faced this problem, and there are several other heroines who have gone through this phase.”

Categories:

Living, People

Date added:

Sep 4 2014 - 1:00am

The Most Surprising Things About America, According To An Indian International Student

chandranbek — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 15:42:09 +0000

Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley.

During two years in the U.S., Chaturvedi has been surprised by various aspects of society, as he explained last year in a post on Quora.

Chaturvedi offered his latest thoughts on America in an email to Business Insider.

The most surprising things about America:

Categories:

Living, World

Date added:

Jun 16 2014 - 11:45am

The Countries Where Men Do the Most Housework

chandranbek — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 21:55:02 +0000

It may come as no surprise to Indian women, but their menfolk do some of the least housework in the world. At least, that’s what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found when they looked at gender disparities in various nations.

India consistently ranks quite low on various measures of gender equality. (The United Nations placed India at 132 out of 148 countries in its recent gender inequality index.) The housework issue is a decidedly less dire example than the country’s increasingly high-profile problem with sexual violence.

Seven Reasons Not To Marry An Indian Woman

chandranbek — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:23:33 +0000

In a country of 1.2 billion people and with 48.2% of them being women, we know better than to generalise. But, Indian women are absolutely exceptional, and we’ve listed the top 7 reasons for you not to marry an Indian Woman. Even if you happen to be an Indian man.

1) She’s gorgeous. Yes, we’ve said it. With her kajal and dusky skin and gorgeous hair, it is hard not to get distracted. And, she’s going to be better looking than you. Just saying.

2) She’s too colourful. And by that, we don’t mean that she loves Holi or that she just likes colour in her life. She LOVES colour in her life. With everything that she does, her life will never stop being colourful. In the clothes she wears, in the way she does up her home, and in the way she lives her life.

3) She loves her family. You marry an Indian woman, you marry her family. And, while tradition dictates that she leaves her house when she marries you, she’s not really left them behind. Her family is her life.

Three of the Top 5 Wealthiest Neighborhoods in America are in Maryland, With a Large Population of Asian Americans

chandranbek — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:20:12 +0000

WASHINGTON, DC: A new compilation of the 1000 wealthiest neighborhoods in all of America lists finds that four of the top 10 are located in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, and that three of those four are rife with Asian Americans.

The Higley Elite 1000 – so named after Stephen R. Higley, a professor emeritus of urban geography at the University of Montevallo in Alabama who researched and compiled the list himself – lists Maryland neighborhoods Bradley Manor-Longwood (in Bethesda), Potomac Manor (in Potomac), and Carderock (also in Potomac) as the #2, #3, and #5 richest in the US, respectively. Additionally, the McLean, Virginia neighborhood of Swinks Mill-Dominion was ranked at #7 on the list, and another McLean neighborhood, Glendale, came in at #19.

The Bethesda neighborhood showed a mean income household of $599,440, with Potomac Manors following very closely behind with an average income of $599,331. Carderock registered $595,669 in mean household income per year, while Swinks Mill-Dominion came in with $562,596. The main reason attributed to such staggering financial success is that the area is populated relatively heavily with double-professional families, in which both the husband and wife work.

Categories:

Business and Economy, Community, Living

Date added:

Feb 28 2014 - 7:15pm