This fascination with fairy tale weddings is perhaps not surprising, after all, we are brought up on stories of such weddings – right from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty to any number of princesses who kissed frogs / lived in drafty, leaky turrets / made their suitors slay dragons.

Unfortunately all our fairy tales end with the wedding.   Why is that? Is it because the story doesn’t sound anything like a fairy tale after the wedding?

Is that when the Prince discovers that Sleeping Beauty is always sleepy because she has sleep apnea and she snores?

Does Cinderella find herself firing every maid in the palace because none of them do as good a job as she used to?

Does the famously nitpicky Goldilocks get irritated every morning because her husband does not leave his toothbrush in exactly the right way in the bathroom? (Does she fire her cook because the salt in the porridge is never just right?)

Do Rapunzel and her Prince have a fight when she decides she really likes a short bob rather than those high-maintenance long tresses? Does she call him a male chauvinist and say he is worse than the Witch?

I’m trying to think of other fairy tales and how they would have really ended, if only people told the whole story.

Any other fairytale story suggestions ?

If you watch the video, you can see she thinks in terms of sound bytes. “Organic food is good”, “Pesticides are bad”, “Small businesses should pay lower taxes”..

She is not alone.  I have come across many more like her. What happens when you come across ordinary people who are so utterly clueless, who think and speak like five year olds?  What happens when such people form a vocal minority?

These are the kind of people who insist that schools should teach “creationism” (i.e. “God created the world in 6 days”) as a valid scientific theory alongside evolution. These are the people who bring a national debate on healthcare to the level of arguing about death panels.

These are the people who make me very worried about the future.

Watch the video and tell me what you think.

(a) relax,

(b) eat lots of great home food,

(c) eat lots of great street food,

(d) meet other bloggers.

(e) take stunning, candid pictures (of family, friends, street scenes, beaches, trains …you name it).

Each time I run around like a hamster on a wheel. Actually, make that a hamster on a wheel on steroids.  I make to-do lists.  Running into TWO pages.  And I actually go about finishing the tasks on those to-do lists.  I end up visiting at least 2 cities on every trip, usually 3.

I return to the US and my family back in India wonders if I ever was in India.

“You hardly spent any time with us”, they say.  “It’s like you were never here.”

I was, I want to assure them, because I spent a lot of time getting to know the traffic in every city.

I return with a bad back and a worse cold and spend days battling the mountains of laundry and clutter that somehow seem to mysteriously accumulate.

I’m certain none of this happens to other people.

Other people visit India and come back with great stories and even better pictures.  Other people blog about eating mother’s cooking.  Other people actually have a vacation.

What is your secret, other people?

Take these people I saw last week at the Everglades :

That little gray thing that he is posing in  front of ? It’s an adult alligator.  Here is a closer look of the other guy posing :

Is this really a good idea?  That alligator may be basking in the sun, seemingly obliviously.  But it is awake, and can (and will, as we have seen) move very quickly if it feels disturbed.  Do these people feel brave because the alligator is tolerating their presence?

A few years ago, at the Grand Canyon, I saw a man climb behind the railings to stand at the rim of the Canyon near the Abyss, where there is a steep drop-off.   Not only was he standing at the rim, but he was cutting a pose that made me fear he would lose his balance at any moment.

I could not help thinking about these incidents when I read about the climber who had a fatal fall into the Mount St. Helens crater a few days ago.  Why, why do people do such things?

This was an experienced climber, and I am sure he would never take unnecessary risks while climbing the mountain.  Given his familiarity with Mt. St. Helens, he would have known the crater rim was unstable.  Yet, in the heat of posing for the picture, he took a tragic risk.

It may be subjective, and vary from person to person, but there is a dividing line between calculated risk and foolhardiness.  As in business, or everything else, it comes down to the risk-reward ratio – you would not take a huge risk for an insignificant reward.  There is definitely a thrill, a challenge in taking risks, whether in climbing a mountain  or walking down a canyon, but there is also a sense of achievement.  What is the big achievement in taking unnecessary risks for a photo?  And even if you wanted a “cool” picture, why not take a trick shot which makes it seem as if you are closer, instead of actually standing on the rim?

The ultimate irony is that after all this, these people will most likely file away the photo in an album and never see it again.

Pic: Jason MacArthur

It’s always nice to read a $0 bill, and it’s too bad more companies don’t send me bills like that.  Perhaps every service I have already paid for for online should send me a $0 paper bill?  It would make my day, and certainly the USPS’s – those poor souls drive through snow and rain to deliver mostly junk marketing mails.  Delivering junk bills must count as an improvement.  There is also the advantage of reducing those pesky, CO2 emitting trees that we seem to be infested with.

But there was more to the bill – a last date to pay the $0 by, and even more considerately,  an enclosed envelope for me to send them the $0.

It was when I looked at the envelope that I felt a little disappointment – shouldn’t it have been prepaid ?

Somewhere under all that cake icing, you will also find a front garden.

My travel plans are all in shambles.  I have just spent 7 hours at the airport, playing roulette re-book with American Airlines representatives.  I will return for more tomorrow.

The grand irony is  – it’s not the 3 or 4 inches you see here (which must have already become 6 or 7 inches or more) that’s causing the delays.  The airport is functioning smoothly and there is hardly any snow on the roads.

It’s the “upto 1 inch” of snowfall they had today in Dallas that made them decide to stop all incoming flights pretty much  shut down the airport.

I was reading this article on the Atlantic about how some parents in the US who are involved in custody battles kidnap their children from abroad. The article is disturbing at many levels, not least because most of the people involved are identified by their real names and apparently face no legal issues in the US because they haven’t broken any US laws.

And then I read this paragraph:

One morning in November of 2005, an engineer (who asked that his name and other identifying details not be used here because of pending legal issues) left his home in the Midwest for work, carrying the lunch his wife had packed for him. A few hours later, he picked up a voice mail from her saying that she had taken their 2-year-old daughter shopping and wouldn’t be reachable for a while. Only that evening did he learn that she’d fled to India. The engineer flew to Mumbai, hoping to reconcile. But the marriage seemed irretrievable. On his lawyer’s recommendation, he filed for divorce and custody after he returned to the U.S. in January. Ten months later, the engineer called Gus, who advised him to let the custody issue play out in the courts first. Shortly thereafter, the engineer won a default custody judgment in a court in his home state when his ex-wife didn’t show up to contest it. At the end of 2006, he flew to Mumbai and met Gus. He returned home with his daughter days later. A kidnapping case is still pending against the engineer in Mumbai.

I started thinking about the plight of that woman – fleeing a bad marriage, presumably an abusive one (given the manner in which she fled), to what she considered the safe haven of India and her relatives.  Only to find her daughter snatched away with no possibility of shared custody or even visiting her.  It’s very sad that 2 year old is probably going to grow up never knowing her mother.

I wonder why that kidnapping case doesn’t result in an extradition.  I also wonder why, in this age of speakerphones  and Skype (which as far as I know some US courts do admit as testimony) why the woman had to be physically present in the US to fight her case (given the cost and possible visa issues involved).

Digging a bit deeper, it seems that International parental child abduction is much more prevalent than I had realized.  The US State Dept. ‘s website  has a page that describes what to expect (and how the State Dept. can help) if the other parent abducts your child to India. Which brings us to the flip side of the story. What if you are the parent on the other side of the story ?

As the US State Dept.’s website helpfully explains – Parental child abduction is not a criminal offense in India.

India is not a signatory of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Parental Abduction; therefore, left-behind parents must rely on other avenues to recover their children from India.  Once a child has been abducted to India, remedies are very few.  India does not consider international parental child abduction a crime, and the Indian courts rarely recognize U.S. custody orders, preferring to exert their own jurisdiction in rulings that tend to favor the parent who wants to keep the child in India.  For these reasons, it is often very difficult for left-behind parents in the United States to obtain any access to a child who has been abducted to India.  In the rare scenario that a case is resolved, it is usually due to an agreement between the parents, rather than the result of court orders or arrest warrants.  The State Department can help by attempting welfare and whereabouts visits; however, these visits may only be conducted with the consent of the child’s physical guardian.

You can see how such a law can work both ways – if parental abduction is not a crime in India, not only can ex-spouses abduct children to India, but they can also abduct them out of India. You don’t even need to be a non-resident Indian for this law to affect you.  If a couple living in India is divorcing and one parent makes off with the kid(s), it seems to me there is not much the other parent can do.

I think we need to change Indian laws on parental abduction if we are to protect the rights of Indian citizens better.

More here.

I’ve heard of people abandoning their dogs and cats in this recession.  So was it just a matter of time before a few of them moved on to abandoning their own children?

Then there was a basket which had been possibly attached to the balloon with the boy in it – and it was caught on tape falling off.  (That is to say, it was either a basket, they said, or a speck of dust on the camera). Then the experts said maybe the balloon could carry a boy after all.

Then there was no basket either, and the boy (Falcon Heene) was all along in his own home.

Meanwhile, the National Guard had been called in, helicopters and special aircraft were operating rescue missions,TV cameras were following the balloon every second on live TV  and the experts were gabbing nonstop, even if they were contradicting each other and themselves every few minutes.

Falcon Heene with his father (pic: CNN)

If this does not make any sense to you, well, it doesn’t to me either.  But this is the sum total of four hours of non-stop, breathless reporting all afternoon by both CNN and MSNBC.  Balloon boy (in various forms) was also trending #1, 2, 3 and 4 on Twitter, and I’m sure millions of hours of productivity was lost today by people watching TV at work.

Sigh.  Does this country have nothing better to focus on?  Why is it that we don’t find the health care debate  (or any other serious issue) as riveting as a balloon boy who wasn’t ?