Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

A few days ago a post popped up in my twitter feed where this person was complaining about how they had sent their kid (‘Chris’) to a friends place (‘Neil’) and Neil’s parents fed Chris Indian food without asking for permission from the parents. Neil’s parents are both Doctors of Indian origin and settled in the US. This guy was complaining about how they should have asked him for permission because kids tummies are sensitive etc etc and wanted to know if it was ok to tell Neil’s parents that they would only allow Chris and Neil to play at their house going forward. This was sent to a online help personality “Dear Prudence” and they posted it online. When I first saw the headline (“Help! I can’t believe my Son’s friend fed him Indian food without calling me first”) I thought it was a joke so I clicked to get more details which are in the screenshot below:

This is incredibly controlling behavior from Chris’s parents and I think there is a race aspect to the whole thing as well which is evident from the comment near the end about how further conversations on the topic would be racial in nature. There is no mention anywhere about any Allergies or diet restrictions that Chris might have, and if that was the case I understand the parents panicking when the kid is fed something that could be actively dangerous to them or if they were vegetarians and the kid was fed meat. But panicking just because they were fed spicy food is a bit too much.

As a kid I couldn’t handle any Spices and my food was made with minimal levels of spice, then I was visiting relatives who fed me Radish with salt, lemon & chilly powder and I loved it. I felt that my tongue was about to fall off but I loved it and slowly started increasing my spice tolerance. As a kid and even now I eat at my friends place all the time. Some of the food are things that I had never eaten before and it was an experience trying out new cuisines and food. We had a south-Indian family living next to us when Dad was posted in Delhi and we (me & Surabhi) were at their house every other day eating whatever they had cooked, which was my first experience of South Indian food that I remember. Surabhi fell in love with the Dosa’s & Idli’s etc at the time and till date its her favorite food. When they would come to our place we fed them classic north Indian dishes and they loved it as well…

Variety is the spice of life and food from other parts of the world is amazing. Chris’s parents should be happy that he is getting to experience other cultures and traditions at such a young age. When we travel we always explore the local food and try to each as much of it as possible. Which is why as times I do feel sad that I am a vegetarian because of which I can’t try the authentic local cuisine at a lot of places but I still make the effort to try the veg options. When I was in the US we had a whole semester where we went out every weekend to try a new cuisine and it was awesome. There were times that I hated the dish I ordered but that’s still part and parcel of exploring. I fell in love with Mexican food because I ate it in the US, if I had stuck to Indian food as a few of my friends did then I wouldn’t have found out about this amazing cuisine.

In my opinion there is no food that is inappropriate, there could be food that you can’t eat due to restrictions, medical issues or whatever but that’s it. In this case Chris’s parents are teaching their kid that ‘foreign’ food is something bad/dangerous and needs to be avoided. We are in a global world now, I can guarantee that Chris will end up with Indian friends/co-workers (or folks from other nationalities) down the line and have to eat the food. Its better that he tries the food now and gets used to it than have issues later in life.

What do you think?

Source: Twitter

– Suramya

If we go back in time to 1957 and tell people that in future Satellites are going to be powerful enough to detect Penguin Poop from space they would look at you as if you were insane. However now due to improvements in the Satellite-mapping technology we now have the capacity to detect & identify Penguin poop from space. At first this might sound ridiculous and you might be asking why would we spend the time and effort to be able to identify poop from space. Basically the problem we are trying to solve is to locate penguin nesting sites to get an idea of how many penguins are there in the wild and how endangered they are currently.

Traditional methods involve going across Antarctica and other places where they nest to find their nesting places. This is very time consuming, expensive and at times dangerous. The first survey folks used sledges etc to travel across, then we moved on to using planes to view the area from the air now we can do it remotely without leaving the comfort of our homes thanks to the advances in technologies. The scientists used images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and were able to identify Eleven new Colonies of the Emperor penguin.

Satellite-mapping technology that detects stains on the ice from penguin droppings has revealed there are nearly 20% more Emperor colonies than previously identified in fast-warming Antarctica.

“This is an exciting discovery,” said lead author and geographer Peter Fretwell in a statement. “Whilst this is good news, the colonies are small and so only take the overall population count up by 5-10%, to just over half a million penguins.””

The discovery will be used by scientists who are monitoring the birds and raising concerns because they’re particularly vulnerable to sea ice melting from climate change… Scientists warned that most of the newly found colonies are in locations likely to be lost as the climate warms and large sections of seasonal ice — where penguins mate — risk disappearing. “Birds in these sites are therefore probably the ‘canaries in the coal mine’,” said Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at BAS.

While its great that there are more Emperor Penguins than we thought they are still at risk of extinction due to Global Warming/Climate Change. We need to seriously spend more effort to combat Climate change and the time to make the changes is running out faster than we thought.

Source: Slashdot.org

– Suramya