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Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
| Some Kamat Family Stories |  | ||
| Some Kamat Family Stories During the 34 hour drive from Birmingham to Mackinac Island and back, Amma (my mother) told us many family stories. Some of them I knew, and some of them were new. I will keep them brief, leaving the details to the reader's perception. My Mother's Dog Tom My mother had a dog Tom. He was a brave and a faithful dog, and routinely chased away foxes and other menacing beasts that appeared in the village. One night as the family slept, the cows in the neighborhood sensed a tiger and Tom asked to be unleashed. My mother cursed him for waking her up, and let him go outside. He never came back. Since then, my mother hasn't had a dog. Related Links:
My Father's Job Interview Upon his return to India (from USA, where he obtained a Ph.D.), my father applied for a job in the department of sericulture. The chairman of the selection committee asked only one question to the candidate. "Are you a Lingayat?" Lingayat is the name a prominent caste in the state of Karnataka. The interviewee, of course didn't get the job and later started Kamat.com. The interviewer went on to become a close associate of Indira Gandhi, and the Chief Minister of the the state, and built an administration known for favoritism, inefficiency and corruption.
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Kamat-Joshi Nexus I once blogged about the contributions of Kamat-Joshi team to India. Happens that Bhimsen Joshi, one of the prominent Hindustani classical musician is a nephew of G.B.Joshi, who has published many of Kamat's works. He is known as 'Bhimya' to close friends and family. Bhimsen Joshi's biography by Mohan Nadakarni is dedicated to my grandmother.
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| September Updates | | ||
| September is Here! I know, it has already been six days, but I am trying to play catch up... The NFL season began today, so did my fantasy league. I have drafted Edgerin James and Peyton Manning. I was the last in the draft order The US Open Tennis Championship is in full flow, and I am hoping for a Sampras-Agassi final. I've added lots of new contents at Kamat's Potpourri. Check them out. "Not tonite dear" is the recommended Picture of the day. I have also made minor enhancements to the website -- like showing international dates, a better rendering of Pictorial Table of Contents, and stuff like that.
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| Monday Miscelleny | | ||
| Someone Press the Turbo Button! In the 1980s Intel introduced dual clock-speed CPUs, and to make an application run faster, you'd press the high-speed clock switch, typically marked as the Turbo button. I felt like calling CBS Sportsline guys yesterday and asking them to press the turbo button. During the Sunday sports extravaganza of yesterday (US-open finals, NFL opener), the site was hardly responding. Finally I gave up on the Live Scoring. SportsLine is the only online subscription that I pay for, and yesterday, it was certainly not worth it. Can I get my money back?!
Least Used Features at Kamat.com
Buy Kamat's Works
• Mysore Ganesh • Floral Ganesh • Vegetable Ganesh • Stained Glass Ganesh
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| Coffee Notes | | ||
| Quotes to Chew on "The only way you can do more things in life is to do them" -- my wife, this morning (as I complained to her that we are too busy) "Ultimately, Only the Truth Prevails" -- I find this quote from Upanishad (apprx 1400 B.C), used as India's byline, very profound. Since the world still has a lot of falsehood and injustice, one must consider after-life for this quote to make sense. The emphasis, as I see, is both on the Ultimate as well as on Truth. "Only Bill Clinton can distract the attention from a sex scandal by making another sex scandal!" -- Jay Leno in 1999. I remember this often because these days on television, they are interrupting one advertisement with yet another advertisement! Have you noticed?!
Who baby-sits the baby-sitter's children? Those in USA won't find this amusing, but cultures like Indian, fragmented by class and status structures, will. I've known a friend who babysat the children of a doctor-couple for many years. Now the friend has a child, and the doctors are baby-sitting so that the baby-sitter can take a vacation.
Links for the day
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| Looking Back Seven Years... | | ||
| Traffic Stabilization of Kamat's Potpourri For the first time in seven years, in September 2002, the month-to-month traffic for Kamat.com is going to be less than its previous month. This might indicate that our viewership has stabilized at around 1.6 million page views per month.
I think the traffic growth from month to month consistently for seven years is quite phenomenal. Unlike most sites, whenever there was a spike in traffic, the increased level has continued to the next month. FYI: The money we've spent on traffic generation is zero. Most people find out about the site via a search in Google, and subsequently type our URL for repeat visits. About 65% of readers surveyed (about 500 of them, take it anonymously -- it will help us find new advertisers) said that they have book-marked the site. Chronology of Kamat.com
• The Sixth Anniversary Blog
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Update: The viewership exceeded 2 million pages in April 2003. (May 1, 2003)| Agenda for the Week | | ||
Plans for the Week
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| Links to Today's News | | ||
| Lots of News Today
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| Obituary | | ||
| Obituary My grandmother, Ramabai Kamat passed today in my native place of Honavar. She would have been 90 next week.  (1913-2002) The ups and downs experienced by Ramabai Kamat in her long life make for very interesting reading and provide details of status of women at the turn of 19th century in rural India. She was born into a poor family, and was named beggar ("Bhikki") after a vow taken by her father, who had lost infant children successively. She was educated only till 2nd grade, and was married at the age of eleven into the joint family of Kamats. She raised eleven children, and many many grand children. She has been the senior most member of the family since the 1960s, and enjoyed respect, love, and adulation by all. We called her Kaki (literally meaning Aunt -- one of the banes of the joint family was that the children referred to adults by their established titles. By the time Kaki bore children, her title was established in the Kamat household as 'Auntie'), and Kaki was an expert housewife, a famous cook, a tender citizen, and a village pharmacist. In my childhood (in the70s) when the healthcare was not yet easily available in India, people from far way neighborhoods would come to our house seeking Kaki's medicines. All those medicines were home-made, a skill passed on to Kaki from her mother. Kaki would grow many of the herbs in our garden, and keeping the cows away from them was one of our responsibilities as children. Kaki's many recipe's will live, she having passed them on to her daughters. Her huge vocabulary of Konkani language words, sayings, and songs (India has a very strong tradition of oral education; Konkani is a spoken language anyway;) have been documented by my mother and will be published soon (the book has been dedicated to Kaki). While it is not obvious, Kaki is the model of many of our photographs on this site -- using a stationary knife, using a coin-sized mirror to apply kumkum, churning the butter, and as the center of a joint family. Goodbye Kaki. Thank you for serving the family for seventy-five years. Like Bappa once said, "we are happy, safe, and prosperous today, thanks to the divine credits (punya) earned by you!"
• Obituary of Ganesh Burde, my grandfather who passed away earlier this year. • Obituary of my father, who also passed away this year. • Konkani Woman at Work
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| Review of Movie Lagaan | | ||
| Notes from the Lagaan (Hindi) Movie When I bitched about Indian movies (see Why I hate Bollywood) in this space, I received a lot of angry pushback from movie fans. "Just watch Lagaan, and then talk" they wrote, as if one movie can undo the damage caused by thousands of bad movies. And as promised, I did watch Lagaan this week with my wife (who doesn't understand Hindi) and my mother (who doesn't understand the game of Cricket). My notes, in the form of questions and answers, as they happened. Q: Does Lagaan mean "Once upon a time in India" ? Q: Do people really dance for the rains in India? Q: The movie shows such unreal things as the hero fighting injustices of
untouchability, trying to protect wildlife by disturbing the hunting etc. Why
then does it try to be real by showing the hero's widowed mother clothed
only in white? Q: What does this Wicket mean? Q: Why is this movie so long ? (the movie is four hours long) Q: Were all the Indian kings as weak as the movie portrays? Q: Did you like the movie? Honestly, I didn't like the movie. But I enjoyed explaining the game of Cricket to the ladies. Laggan perhaps captures the imagination of the Indian movie goers very well, but didn't do it for me.Sorry.
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| Marking Kamat's Birthday with a Photo Blog | | ||
| Announcing New Photo Blog at Kamat.com My father, had he lived, would have turned 68 today. We mark the occasion by creating a new blog at Kamat's Potpourri. See Introduction.
We were especially touched to receive a card from Mrs. Jeanne Roth of Sweet Home Oregon today. She's been my father's (and the entire family's) pen friend for the last forty years! The warmth and the friendship of the Roths is beyond the words. They have taught us the meaning of durable pen-friendship, and the art of keeping in touch for decades and decades, and across continents. 
To remember the birthday of a pen-friend, even after he's gone is truly amazing. Oh! the joys of friendship!
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