Rich Parents

With its influx of millionaires from all over the world, China, in particular, Vancouver has been seeing a never-before-seen display of ostentation and wealth these past few years. From multi-million dollar homes to flashy cars to pricey yachts to admission into the elite moneyed clubs to endless rounds of golf and what not, there has been a spectacular hike in the extent to which flamboyance could possibly go. As can be concluded then, rich parents beget rich offspring, who in turn display their parents' wealth to unbelievable extremes. I have had students from all over the world who have no regard for money whatsoever, whose spending money each month could support a huge family in dire financial straits, just like that. 


No surprise then that one of my 19-year-old students bought himself a brand new Porsche, a few years ago, and proudly showed it off to all his friends, including the Instructor. Interestingly, I happened to notice that the teachers were all driving beat up old jalopies, as could be seen from the cars in the Faculty parking lot, but the student parking lot was full of high end cars - Lamborghinis, Porsches, BMWs, Maseratis, Benzes, and what not! And then there was this young girl who invited her classmates to her place on a Friday evening, and boy, what stories they had to tell, come Monday morning! Her house happened to be a huge estate with extensive landscaped gardens, and dinner was a lavish affair with a free-flowing wet bar and gourmet food served by uniformed waiters! Need I say more?!?


The police in Vancouver impounded nearly a dozen high end cars last summer for illegal racing on the highways, endangering others' lives, and it was discovered that all these cars were driven by the sons of new immigrants to Canada, some of them not even having a full driver's licence. The police decided to auction off the cars, but the boys were back again on the roads, their parents having bought them yet another new, flashier car! Money happens to grow on those proverbial trees for these families, What values are such parents imparting to their kids, and where will it all go, I shudder to think!?! The ostentatious display of money is sometimes depressing to lesser mortals who have to work hard for a living and struggle to make both ends meet, but the sad truth is that rich parents rule!

Time To Smell The Coffee

Happy Easter! I sincerely pray that this Day of Resurrection also be a day of revival of all our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I am enjoying a four-day Easter break, a mellowed-down version from last year's, when we went on a family road trip in the Pacific Cascades this time around. This year we couldn't do anything fancy since the husband had to work, but the kid and I just chilled out at home in each other's company, cooking our favorite foods, relaxing with a book, and sleeping in every day. We lead very mechanical lives day in and day out, and hardly have time to smell the roses, but this break, I'm having ample time to smell the coffee at home, so to speak! LOL!

Yesterday, we'd been to Queen Elizabeth Park to spend a delightful afternoon there. Nine years in Vancouver, and we'd never been to this awesome place before, the highest point in Vancouver at 510 ft. above sea level. My students used to laugh at me when they found out I'd never been there, so this time I was determined to make amends and make a visit to the place everyone keeps raving about. The park is a horticultural jewel, truly speaking, and its 130 acres of lush greenery with its ornamental trees and shrubs is a sight to behold. The Bloedel Floral Conservatory and its collection of exotic flora, fauna, birds and fish was well worth the entry tickets we paid for. The Quarry Gardens, the Rose Gardens, the pond with its brood of ducks, the picnic greenscapes for families, the sunshine and perfect weather, and the endless rows of cherry trees in full bloom made for a perfect outing. On our way back home, we stopped at Starbucks for some multigrain bagels, banana loaves and coffee, and picked up some Chinese takeout for dinner. All that, and all the time in the world this break to smell the coffee made this a memorable long weekend indeed! :)

Life's Lemons

Sometimes life is really unfair. All the tall talk about good karma and "what goes around comes around" is crap. If one were to do good all the time, then why doesn't it come around to bless them and keep them happy? Time and time again, I have seen very good people being assailed by all kinds of misfortunes in life, while the evil and the wicked just thrive and prosper in life. There's a proverb in my native language that pretty much translates to a king (killing) punishing a wayward subject right away, but God waiting to (kill) punish the bad person. Now how long that wait is, is the tactical question that no one has ever found the answer to. Anyways, this post is not about my anger about those whom I consider to be wicked, rather it's just about the unfairness of life, period.

"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade," the saying goes, but when life hands you one too many lemons, then what do you do? There's only so much one can take, and when there's a surfeit of problems, all coping mechanisms fail. It then becomes increasingly difficult not to succumb to the paralysis of the negative. Hope and activity are two survival issues or coping mechanisms that help us cling on to sanity, and were it not for those key aspects, all of us would be basket cases for sure. Hope for a better tomorrow, and immersing oneself in activity are sure ways of countering the negatives in life, and the better one understands this, the better one's chances of eventual happiness in life!

Mega Million Frenzy!!!

The US has been in the grip of a mega million frenzy since January, when week after week no one seemed to pick out the winning numbers. Consequently, the jackpot increased to a dizzying, record-breaking sum of 640 million dollars or so last Friday, and people were allowed to buy tickets until 15 minutes before the drawing time of 11 PM that day. The ticket buying had reached such a fever pitch that the frenzy had crossed the borders into Canada as well. Watching TV one evening, I was quite surprised to find commercials on Canadian channels advertising the huge windfall and declaring that Canadians could play the lottery too. I could very well imagine the huge line ups at the border this might cause, with Canadians too wanting in on the action and dreaming of this huge windfall!

It was interesting to note that the lottery advertisements came with the constant reminder that the probability of winning those millions was 1 in 176 million - quite an impossibility to ponder about! To be brutally honest, the chances of one's dying on the way to buying a lottery ticket was more than one's chances of winning the lottery itself, but this didn't seem to faze the gazillions of buyers one bit! And to add to the excitement and frenzy of it all, TV news reporters were interviewing random people on the streets to share with the viewers what they would do if they won all that money. Most people wanted to quit their jobs, buy expensive houses and flashy cars, and go away on endless vacations to every part of the world. Some seemed to have belated flashes of altruism and added that they would help out extended family. No one said they would help out friends though, and very few said they would give to charity.

While individuals went out and bought tickets for themselves, offices had lottery pools galore. On a sobering note though, one has to remember that while it is easy for people to buy tickets in a pool and share their lottery dreams with their coworkers, the very same people find it difficult to share the money with their colleagues and lie about having bought the winning ticket individually, once they actually win all that money. Avarice blinds right thinking and deadens the conscience, and ugly feuding and lawsuits follow. Well, the results are out now, and this time round, three winning tickets have been bought in three different states- Kansas, Illinois, and Maryland. It remains to be seen if lawsuits will be filed in the coming days, as buyers gear up for the next mega million lottery up for grabs.

My take on all this hullabaloo is that the media is solely responsible for building up this kind of wishful thinking in people. With the country in recession and the global economy in shambles at large, and unemployment at a staggering rate, one should divert one's attention to rebuilding the economy and working out the unemployment problem. Sitting comfortably on one's sweet bottom and dreaming about that elusive pot of gold is not going to cut it ... so people, get off your lazy behinds and get to work, or at least go in search of some kind of work for a better tomorrow!!! :)

Working For Money

In the course of a recent discussion with my friends about what each one of us thought was the worst thing in life, it was interesting to note the various answers we all came up with. The one who had an infant at home said that she felt so alienated from her girlfriends after the arrival of her baby, and another said that having to go through the tantrums of her teenagers was the worst thing for her. Another friend said that not knowing when her adult sons would move out was killing her, while another mom with three young ones at home said that having her mother visit her and help out with her kids was the best thing, and now that her mother had returned to her own hometown, dreading the lack of help was the worst thing for her. The childless one, having listened to all this whining, quipped, "At least, you all have children to complain about. Not having a child is the worst thing I could possibly imagine!"

Interestingly enough, the one I seemed to agree with the most was the view of yet another friend who said that having to work for money is the worst. I paused for a moment to reflect, and thought, "How very true!" I know several people who have taken an early retirement, who live in multi-million dollar homes, play endless rounds of golf during the work week, and lunch on a daily basis at the exclusive clubs where they have life memberships. They are the lucky few who have already made their fortune in the world, or have spouses who can afford to keep them at home, out of the maddening job market. Some of us might be bored with that kind of a lifestyle, but at the same time I feel it would simply be awesome to be able to work for pleasure, and not "have to do it" for money.

I, for one, would love to have the luxury of a healthy bank balance, do the job I love when I please, take off on those elusive travel jaunts when I please, get back to school to do my Ph.D. when I please, and pretty much do what I want when I want, all without ever having to worry about making money. That kind of a life seems pretty far-fetched for now, needless to say, unless there's a mighty reversal of fortunes and a big bonanza just drops into my lap from the benevolent clouds above. Till then, my life will go on in the same manner, listening to my girlfriends bitch and complain and whine about the unfairness of life and secretly dreaming how great it would be to have the luxury of not having to work for money!

Oh, To Dance On The Mountains!

This Spring Break has been pretty laid back and sedate - nothing heart-stoppably exciting, no adrenalin rush, or anything of that sort! I am just grateful for the simple pleasures of life, being able to sleep in each morning, drink the freshly-squeezed lemon juice so thoughtfully left for me by the husband, read the papers leisurely, cook whatever the kid likes for the day, lie on the couch and read to my heart's content, etc., etc. Last Saturday, the weather was absolutely gorgeous, and we decided to take a drive up the mountains from which we live a scant 20 to 25 minutes away. We have gone up the Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains, and also the North Shore Mountains many a time before, but this time we decided to go up to Buntzen Lake and Belcarra, up past Anmore Village, on the Coquitlam Mountains.

The drive up the mountains was breathtakingly refreshing. It's a whole new world up there, and quite difficult to believe that this oasis of nature in the seclusion of the mountains is just a stone's throw away from the hustle and bustle of the city down below. It's bear country, needless to say, and the tales of bears coming down the mountains to feed on the apples, pears, and other fruits and berries in people's gardens, and on garbage if the fruits are not available, are legion. Man cohabits with the wild life up there - quite saddening to see how man has encroached upon the wildlife habitat in the name of development! Multi-million dollar homes boasting a lot of acreage and zillion-dollar views of the mainland below are plenty on the mountain - a zip code that advertises one's wealth and power, without question! And down below, as the mountains slope down to the waterfront of the bay, there are multi-million dollar homes as well, each one having its own private docking yard for the expensive sailboats and motor boats that dot the bay.

As we drove up the mountains, I was reminded of W.B. Yeats' lines in his "The Land Of Heart's Desire":

"Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,

For I would ride with you upon the wind,

Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame."

I truly felt that the faeries had taken me out of my dull world, and I was one with Nature, dancing on the mountains like a flame! A home or a cabin I may not have on the mountains, but that love for Nature I do have in plenty, and I promised myself that I would go up there as often as I could in the future!

Selective Memory

I was lying in bed last week, gazing at the full moon shining through my window, and as I marveled at its other-worldly beauty, a Tamil poem describing the moon as a beautiful damsel clothed in the blue of the skies that my father had taught me as a child, came to mind. As a little girl, I would lie beside my father and mother on a mat on the open terrace of our house in India at nightfall, and my father would point out to me the different constellations in the dark, velvet sky. On one such occasion, he recited this particular poem by Bharathiar, the famed Tamil poet, and those lines just stuck in my mind. I must have been around 7 or 8 years old then, and strangely enough, almost 4 decades plus later, I was able to recall the lines effortlessly.

Well, one thing led to another, and my mind was a beehive of memories, recalling choruses that I had sung as a child. Then suddenly, from nowhere, the moonlight filling my room brought out yet another poem, just like that. I had memorized "Abou Ben Adhem" as a little girl, and the lines came back to me with crystal clarity, as if it were just yesterday that I had learned them. Strange how the mind works! I cannot recall many things from the recent past, such as what I had eaten for dinner last Saturday, or the times I'd spent with friends at college, or my previous phone number in California, but many things from my childhood jump out at me when I least expect them to. I cannot fully fathom this selective memory process. While my brain seems to be growing new dendrites with each day of my life, and the ones from the recent past seem to be fading away, the older ones from ages ago that have been lying dormant in the nethermost recesses of my brain, seem to spring back to life unbidden. I wish I had a better understanding of the neural connections being made, but one thing I must admit, the human brain is a fascinating organ indeed. Its wonders and capabilities are unmatched, and speak for the unique creation that man is!