To the undaunting spirit

We all have had our favorite super heroes at one point on another - Batman and Spiderman for the adventurous folks, Krishna and Rama for the true to India folks, Hardy boys and Nancy Drew for the bookworms like me. But then most of us have only always had REEL heroes, REAL life super heroes are hard to come by.

I consider myself lucky to have known one such superhero. And that person is nothing like you would imagine a super hero to be. She is a little shy of being 5 ft tall, less than 100 pounds in weight, beautiful white hair and an infectious smile which is sure to catch you the minute you meet her. I met Karin or my American mom as I call her 6 years ago when I had just landed in the United States. I was invited over to dinner at her place one night and what started on that one evening has blossomed into a relationship I could have never imagined. Karin has been my friend, philosopher and guide over all these years. Their home has been a home away from home for me, to the point that they now consider Pradeep their adopted son.

Karin and Bob(Karin's husband) have taught me a lot of things over the years but the most important thing is the importance of love in our lives. It does not matter where we live, how fancy our car is or how much money we make as long as our hearts are open to people around us. They have hosted people from 82 different countries in their house over the past 10 years and to this date there has never been an uncomfortable evening at their place. It just goes to show that truly as humans there are no boundaries that separate us, but there is one common string that binds us all and that is mutual respect and love for each other. As they like to say they did not need to go out and discover the world, the world came to them. This just shows that when our hearts are open there are not a lot of things that we cannot do with out lives, life in turn happens in phenomenal ways to us. Thanks to them and their marital advice I think Pradeep and I have been able to lay down the foundations of a happy marriage.

Bob jokes sometimes that most people have 16 hours in their 24 hours, my wife has 48 hours in 24. Karin is an educator, a volunteer, an excellent cook, pretty much all of her gifts are hand made, she manages to catch up on her reading and still have the time to host people every other weekend. Once again she proves to all of us that life will only happen as much as we are willing to push our boundaries. If the spirit is pure you will always have a great amount of energy to do a lot of things in life however if we carry around a lot of hatred and animosity in us, a large part of our energy is sucked into just dealing with the negative emotions. Never once have I heard either one of them complain about anything in their lives, they believe in giving to everyone around them and as a result they receive a lot from people around them too.

Nothing proves her greatness more than her current struggle with cancer. Karin was detected with lung cancer in April this year, the predictions that doctors had for her were very bleak. But in her typical style she was not going to take anything heads down. She got to work immediately figuring out what her options were, refused chemotherapy and resorted to only holistic methods of treatment. She had won the struggle once before with breast cancer and she was going to do that again this time around. Despite all the struggle that she is going through I think she is still much more hale and hearty in spirit than anyone of us can even imagine. I have days when I go home complaining about work or the dreary weather or some tiny thing and then I get an email from Karin describing the beauty of the fall colors on the tree in her backyard and how the Lord was helping her by making each day more beautiful. For me that serves a reminder of how beautiful this life is and how we pollute our mind with small complaints every single day to a point that after a while we stop looking at the beauty of life.

The reason that I wanted to write this blog was that I thought it was not fair for people who did not know Karin in person to not know that such a beautiful person exists among us. Another more selfish reason was that after reading this blog I can get more people to pray for her speedy recovery.

Incase you wanted to give her your wishes, here is a link to her caring bridge site.
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/karintreiber/

" It is not important to be a superhuman, it is important to realize that being human is super " . - Jaggi Vasudev

Sridevi bani meri mummy

                                             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Vinglish
I recently watched English Vinglish and it reminded me of my mom. Now before you start thinking this blog is about how my mom learnt to start speaking in English, I should warn you that my mom has a Masters in English Literature! All through our childhood my mom widely used her English speaking skills any time she wanted to let me and my sister know that things were going to get serious. Only problem was that we only realized this very late in life and by that time the harm was done, we had successfully managed to not listen to all of her warnings that were always delivered using the choicest of English language phrases.

Well, coming back to the point the reason the movie reminded me of my mom was because of the earnestness that Sridevi had in the movie to learn something in life and get better. She is shy and scared but the desire to learn and grow is so deep in her that she is willing to put aside all of her fears to get better. Of all the people that I have known so far I think my mom displays the strongest desire to learn and grow. You will be surprised by the number of avenues she has actually sought in her life to learn new things in her life.As long as a person is willing to teach she is always an eager student.

My earliest memory is of my mom is when she took a computer class with kids my age. The fact that she was older than them or concerns about what others would think about her were never a deterrent to my mom, she just wanted to stay up-to-date with technology and be a part of Gen X. That desire was enough for her to go ahead and do something which none of the women around her were even considering. Ever since then there is always a new activity every year that my mom picks up. She worked around out school schedules, my dad's work schedules, taking care of the house etc and still managed to find time to learn something new. There was sitar, veena, singing, painting, cooking, knitting, meditation, yoga and the list is just goes on.

The most surprising thing is that as years are starting to add to my mom's age the desire to do newer thing is growing at a even more fervent pace. She turned 50 last year and to mark that she started learning carnatic classical music once again !!  One amazing thing about her is that she is always pushing her boundaries, every passing year she is making sure that she is afraid of fewer  and fewer things in her life. My mom always felt she has missed out on being a working woman and experience of being out on your own. So to make sure she crosses that of her list she decided to start working once she hit the half century. Not as an employee though, she is entrepreneur in her own right. She runs a mini music school for kids in our colony now and the number of students keeps on increasing every day. As you might have guessed by now she is not satisfied by just teaching the kids, she comes up with newer techniques to keep the kids engaged and interested during the entire class.

Sridevi did a great job of capturing the fact that as long as there is desire to get better in life there is nothing in life that can really stop you and I think my mom is a living example of that.!