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Lemon & Ice Lemon & Ice India Calling: A prodigal returns to the motherland. About Subscribe to this blog's feed Recent Posts Has Facebook killed the joy of blogging? Update on schools Weekend breaks from Delhi/Gurgaon High Tea, India Style (Great NY Times article on Tea Tourism) Moving to India: Four Stages of Cultural Adjustment Moving to India: Making peace with the system Correction and apology!! The Joys of an Indian Monsoon The Sweet Life Moving to India - Gurgaon Perspective Categories Consumer Cost of Living Doing Business in India Economy Food and Drink House-Hunting Jamshedpur Lifestyle Moving to India Mumbai People Politics Reflections Travel See how we're connected September 28, 2009 Has Facebook killed the joy of blogging? I am back to blogging after a seriously long hiatus of 2 years. Lets just say that this blog's loss has been FB's gain. Somewhere along the way, FB morphed from a way to connect with old friends to a lazy person's blog of one liner's and pics. Could FB's rise be the death knell of blogs? Granted, its a lot easier to post on FB than on any blog. However, some of the personal information being shared by seemingly sane folks on FB borders on freakish! Why is FB a safe environment to spontaneously express too much personal information, when a roomful of friends at a house party is not? I gave this some thought during the boring part of my cardio-workout today, having run out of more exciting things to focus on. Here's my take on it: Its that relentlessly blinking cursor on the FB status line! It seems to have a hypnotic effect on even the sanest and steady sorts. The compulsion to 'update' one's status has taken on addictive proportions for some of us. Pray tell me why would anyone care if you overloaded on sweets over the weekend or for that matter if you are stuck in a line at some consulate. Totally pointless to advertise that kind of information, isn't it? However, we would be totally incorrect in this assumption. We do give a damn and that's the beauty of FB. The clever folks at FB figured out that humans are essentially social animals who are hopelessly addicted to voyeurism. FB has become a medium for humans to send out 'breaking news' alerts on their private lives to their tribe members, who dutifully respond with wisecracks and comments. Dr Eric Berne , the late Canadian psychiatrist would have described FB as a giant cyber-factory of 'transaction and strokes' within the context of his psychological framework. But let me not get distracted by Dr Berne's psychonalytical framework, which by the way is brilliant in its simplicity and everyday application. FB in its current avatar is a platform to convert all our 'friends' into a giant peanut gallery with a voracious appetite for titbits of each other lives. We feed periodically them with 'updates' consisting of snippets of the relentless inner dialog coursing through our minds, in the vain hope that they would at least be mildly amusing to evince a response. The 'attention exchange' makes all of us feel like minor celebrities for a few fleeting moments or hours, and therein lies the users' payoff, and the key to FB's profitability. For those of you FB regulars who are now shifting uncomfortably in your chairs reading this, I have a small confession. I too have fallen victim to the FB addiction over the last few weekends, wasting away precious hours staring at 'updates' in my FB page, instead of being out and about. When I caught myself checking my FB page today before breakfast, I realized that I was developing a facebook problem , which is why I am back to blogging as a way to wean off Facebook. If this doesn't work, I am deleting my FB profile! Posted by Vik on September 28, 2009 at 06:10 PM in People , Reflections | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us June 04, 2008 Update on schools We have unfortunately had to change our kids' school from Pathways World School to American Embassy School. When we started there , our son who has some distractibility issues, had a very sympathetic teacher who included him in the class in a very proactive manner. This resulted in him having a fairly gentle introduction to a new country. When he moved up a grade it appeared that his new teacher was not going to be able to provide similar support. Over an 8 month period, we tried in vain, to get the school administration and teacher/s concerned to make some commitment to helping him maintain better focus in the classroom. His work started to deteriorate and soon he completely stopped bringing homework, without any alarm or penalty from his teacher. There were also a few instances of bullying on the school bus which the school did not want to deal with and before I knew it he had stopped communicating with us at home. During this unhappy time, I heard of the possiblity of places being available at the American Embassy School in the boys' grade levels. Long story short, we managed to get both the boys into AES. The Elementary school support team has, since March, been working to repair the backward slide that our son experienced at Pathways. He is now more communicative at home than he has ever been....sometimes its difficult to shut him up! The work in school is constantly monitored and he is learning to deliver better quality and quantity! Our other son has slipped seamlessly into AES, though he was flourishing at Pathways too. Continue reading "Update on schools" » Posted by Geet Harris on June 04, 2008 at 04:06 PM in Moving to India | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Weekend breaks from Delhi/Gurgaon Its been a while since my last post. So here goes.... Since arriving in India last year, we have taken weekend breaks to cooler climes like Shimla and Rishikesh as well as the tourist trail to Jaipur, and even fled to Kerela for a quick overnight without the kids! Our latest trip was to the Neemrana Fort Palace which is halfway between Delhi and Jaipur. In general the distances involved with getting somewhere cool and relaxing are daunting because of the time it takes to get from A to B. A 300km road trip can take anything from 8 hours driving upwards. Having travelled 1000 km in 12 hours in Australia, its a bit trying. Still we were positively luxuriating in our Innova compared to the pilgrims heading to Haridwar and Rishikesh in the State-run buses and they definitely had the higher purpose. Having your own vehicle does add to your convenience factor also as you can then choose to carry on or make leg-stretching stops. Both Rishikesh and Shimla enjoy a section of really good highway travel from Delhi, but once you pass Ambala you are crawling at 10kmph for 30-40 mins at a stretch. Rishikesh: Having said that I would whole heartedly recommend Rishikesh as a fantastic break especially if you have children. The Ganga which travels through Rishikesh is at its most user -friendly. Not yet filthy, it is just wild enough to give you a few very enjoyable thrills in an inflated rubber dinghy! We went in November 2007 and it was chilly body surfing but so very pleasant that we didn't care that we were slowly turning a truly strange shade of blue.Our boys loved everything about the stay. We stayed at the Himalayan Hideaway http://www.nivalink.com/himalayanhideaway/index.html which also has a camp on the riverside called Himalayan River Runners www.hrrindia.com . The meals at the Hideaway were basic and hearty, the service was really good and the room was rustic and lovely. All in all perfect for a short break. We took a local guide for a 2 hour walk in the area and he was full of fairytales and mythological stories about the Ganga and all the Hindu gods. I had to play translator for my husband and kids which resulted in some unintentional hilarity, but it was all good fun. The white water rafting was really enjoyable and not too hairy and the best part was seeing our boys faces light up at the sight of frothing...