“So ja beta, nahi to gabbar ayega”

Chances are, if you’re an Indian parent..you condemn your soul to moral perdition at least half a dozen times a day. We don’t believe in burdening our kids with the truth when a well chosen whopper can make them eat their dinner, brush their teeth, study for their tests and stay chaste till their 40’s. We invoke the police and the bad guys with equal zest, often for the same purpose. We shield our kids from bad news by telling them “Grandpa has gone for a long trip” or “Tommy(the dog) has found a new home.” We deflect questions about the birds and the bees by making up elaborate concoctions sure to keep them in therapy or couples counselling for years to come. Stories using organized religion as a backdrop maybe the biggest corkers of them all..no wonder they are called fables.

Our movies reflect our propensity to pretext. Movie moms deal with the loss of the movie dads by telling the child “He’ll be right back.” Exactly how dumb do they think the child is?

When I was growing up, my esteemed parent frustrated me on long road trips by answering the question “When will we get there?” with “In 5 minutes,” every single time I asked. It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually I realized that I would only get the answer she thought I wanted to hear. So when I had kids of my own, I figured I was going to be absolutely truthful to them. Both my kids have been exposed to the virtues of vitamins in their veggies and the perils of tartar in their teeth before they were two, leaving them with permanently bemused expressions.

Unfortunately, all my good intentions came to a hasty end at the hands of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, who conspired to make a liar out of me.  When it came to a choice between the magic of childhood and the clinical and unsatisfactory virtuousness of truth, it was no contest.

Still, I thought I was doing a fairly good job being straight with my kids on all the stuff that really mattered and instilling in them a love for truth that would help them grow up to be responsible, upstanding citizens when an incident happened that shook my belief in the virtue of verisimilitude.

My 5 year old had been  asked by her teacher to go to bed at 8 p.m. sharp prior to an important test day. As it happened she slept half an hour later. In the morning, she was in tears because she had disobeyed the teacher.( This is a rather sad commentary on the authority system at her private school, but that is a topic for later.) I tried explaining to her that-

-each child had her own sleep schedule and an arbitrary bedtime made no sense. ( more tears)

-she was to feel free to blame it all on me.( tearful objections -”but it was my responsibility”)

-the teacher was an idiot and she was not to listen to her( shocked tears)

I went around the block (literally and figuratively..the parking lot was full) with these arguments for a while before exasperation took over. “Just lie,” I said, ” and tell her you slept at 8 p.m., ok?”

The tears disappeared like magic.

“That’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” said the politician in training.

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Before anyone goes labelling me, let me say that I have yet to make up my mind who to vote for in the California Democratic primary. To clarify my own thoughts, I am going to attempt to reason out aloud  -

It is pretty clear to me that on the substantative issues, the agendas the three front-runners have laid out are more or less the same. After the awful presidency of GWB, I think we can safely say that a President from the Democratic party will be more intelligent, less inclined to go off half-cocked to war and more concerned about the well-being of the common man.

That being said, here are the criteria on which I am going to rate Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Experience:

Hillary Clinton: Much has been said( by herself) on HRC’s “35″ years of experience. I am inclined to take this with a pinch of salt. She has perhaps 35 years of experience being in the political arena, just like anyone who starts off young involved in local politics, but by no means can this translate into legislative or presidential experience. Her perosnal legislative experience is only her term as a senator from 2000. Does being First Lady of first Arkansas and then the country count? I wish I could go and presume to compete for my husband’s job based on having been his wife for 17 years. ( would make a nice chunk of change, sigh!)

Barack Obama: Obama has been senator since 2005 and state senator since 1999 before that. He actually has more years of legislative experience that HRC!

John Edwards: State Senator from 1998 to 2004. Also has ( in my mind) the important experience of running for President before and hopefuly will have learnt from the mistakes of the Kerry campaign.

Information from Project Vote Smart.

Foreign Relations:

Hillary Clinton:  An argument can be made that Bill Clinton has accrued a great deal of goodwill in the world and leaders of foreign governments will be happy to have his ear once more. But is that really reflective of HRC’s own capabilities? Her vote for the Iraq war and her vote for a resolution urging the Bush administration to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization cannot have made her many friends.

In the Senate, Clinton has been involved in foreign policy issues through her assignment to the Senate Armed Services Committee and her significant involvement with Homeland Security issues.

Barack Obama: As Obamapedia puts it ( yes, there is really such a thing!) -Obama service on the Foreign Relations committee has placed him in an unique position in that he is the Chair of the Subcommittee on European Relations and serves on the Subcommittees on African Affairs; East Asia and Pacific Affairs; and International Development and Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs, and International Environmental Protection.

He has also travelled extensively and has co-sponsored the “Lugar-Obama Act” with Republican Senator Richard Lugar who was Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations at the time. This act was a bi-partisan effort to increase U.S. security in terms of the elimination of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

John Edwards: Former Senator Edwards has travelled extensively and has already had his policy credentials scrutinised a couple of times before. In the Senate, Edwards served on the Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Electability:

Hillary Clinton: Politiko argues that while he thinks Senator Obama would make a better president, Senator Clinton is better at playing the campaign game against ‘dose nasty Republicans’ and therefore, in the interests of ensuring a Democrat in the White House, one should vote for her. This argument has been doing the rounds ever since her candidacy was announced, in one form or the other. One thing I can be certain of is that unlike Gore, Hillary will not roll over if the results are close or controversial. She will fight tooth and nail and take the case to every single court she can until she can be declared a winner. She knows this is probably her last and best shot at the Presidency.

She also has tremendous grassroot support from middle and low-income families. She can also mobilise the vote verywell. But I find her a polarizing figure among all other constituencies. I doubt if she can swing the independent votes, which are sure to go to John McCAin if he wins the Republican nomination or the youth vote, many of whom will be disgusted enough to stay at home and vote for nobody.

Barack Obama: Regardless of all our pretty speeches about race equality, I am sure there will be many Americans who will be put off at the thought of an African American as president, even if his black roots are pretty shallow. Still, he enjoys tremendous support from the young, independents and even some Republicans and if he wins the nomination, there will be many people who will come out to take part in this historic moment. Imagine what a statement that would make about America to the rest of the world. I foresee a groundswell of support, even from people who were ardent Hillary supporters before.

John Edwards: Even though JE voted for the war originally, his repudiation of it later, his tireless efforts towards poverty alleviation and his anti-lobby speeches make him an every-man who would be popular among Democrats come election day. I find him passionate, forceful and willing to poke fun at himself, even though his recent poor primary performances seem to ahve drained him out. If he survives South Carolina , he has a real chance.

Trust and integrity: This is the biggie which is deflecting my vote away from HRC. I just don’t trust her. Her back-pedaling on the war( I much prefer Edward’s approach of admitting it was a mistake..he is a bigger man for it), her flip-flop on immigration, her veering to the left on globalisation after having been a strident free trade supporter, all point to a politician whose positions change with the mood of the public. Nothing bad in evolving to newer positions, we now know what it is like to have a president who does not like to change his mind no matter what evidence he gets, but it is hard to figure out what she stands for. I also don’t trust that she will tell us the truth when it is unpalatable or acknowledge her mistakes.

Barack has not earned my trust or lost it. He seems like an intelligent and earnest person, thoughtful and incisive. His poor performance in debates is a point in his favor in my books because it has been my experience that people who think deeply are often poor speakers because their speech is not in sync with their mind. He is inspiring and can command a youthful audience, good qualities if this country is to get out from the mess it is in.

John Edwards, as I mentioned before, scores big points for admitting that his vote about Iraq was a mistake. I am a little more concerned over his approach to free trade and his strident and aggressive support for unionization is a little disturbing. But overall my perception of him is that of a trustworthy man. He has real concern for the poor in the country and we need a president who has a clear vision for improving the standard of living of every American.

In the end I am torn between Edwards and Obama and will vote for one of them on Feb 5. If Hillary wins the nomination, I will go out in November and vote for her, but my vote will be tinged with regret.

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Tata’s new 1 lakh rupee( $2500) car made enough of a splash to be written about in the San Jose Mercury News( either a testament to the Tata media machine or the growing India sensitivity of the newspaper). Having just returned from a hectic trip to India, I thought I should put in my 2 bits on the subject.

I visited 3 cities in my 3 weeks in India and it can be fairly said I spent most of my time gazing out the window as the car I was in slowly inched its way to its destination. The pace of life turned languid as maybe one or two things from a long checklist got accomplished, if at all. For someone who is in India purely as a tourist who wants to sightsee and shop, it is a jolting reminder to stop and smell the exhaust. The traffic situation in India is so extreme that it is a miracle that anyone wants to add a car to the whole smoggy mess.

Will the cheap car just make things worse?

If the cars are just incremental to the existing overcrowding of the streets, I foresee a day when it will take the same time to travel from the US to India as it does to travel from any major metropolitan airport to your home there! Already many car owners are ceding the stress to hired drivers and the driver-for-rent business is just booming in Chennai. Added pollution will drive up asthma attacks and road rage will migrate from the volatile north to the rest of the country.

But my New Year’s resolution having been to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses, I’d like to take a stab at an optimistic  POV. Say the car, instead of being an add-on is actually going to replace some of the 2 wheelers on the road. This may add to the gas consumption and pollution overall, it might actually improve the state of traffic. Improving traffic by adding of larger vehicles to the mix may soun counter-intuitive, but my brief look at traffic patterns suggests that 2-wheelers are a real menace to society. Unconstrained by size issues, they duck and weave through traffic, making it impossible to maintain lanes, give any wedge room for manouevering and making it very hard for car drivers to follow the road rules( where there are any, of course). Chennai roads were in a state of permanent gridlock thanks to the antics of these motorists with the typical Indian attitude of “If I let you have an inch of space, more fool me”. Whereas in South Bombay, where there are much fewer types of vehicles on the roads, the traffic kept moving , even though there were many more cars than in Chennai.

My optimism may be unwarranted and the Indian government and populace has not shown any particular signs of being traffic-friendly or rule0respecting, but there’s one thing the Tata’s can do that can mitigate the environmental impact of their new product- have easy conversion to CNG or LPG modes of fuel consumption. In every city I visited, air pollution levels are significantly down because taxis and autos have converted to one of the above fuels and if people do have to spend  an extra hour in traffic because so many more of them can now own a car, at least they can do it with relatively less impact on their physical health. Now about their mental health, bhai Tata hi jaane.

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Rooting for Barack Obama this last year has been somewhat like cheering for the Indian cricket team against Australia - you hope they win, you badly want them to win but your expectations, those you keep really low. Senator Obama’s decisive win in the Iowa caucus has me cheering from the rooftops - IOWANS, YOU ROCK( At least the Democrats!) You managed to cut through the bullshit and see through the formidable Clinton media machine.

After Dubya was voted in, not once but twice, the intelligence of the average American voter has been called into question around the world. Opting for US citizenship this year, I have had to defend my decision to friends and family. Now it feels like there is some hope for Americans after all. There is a promise of thoughtful, intelligent leadership and a restoration of integrity to a beleaguered administration. After all, it is the man( or woman) at the top who sets the tone that determines whether an Abu Ghraib or a Guantanamo is tolerated or vilified, whether cronies are welcomed or given the boot.

Can Californians grab the baton Iowans have handed us? Can we understand that a nuanced, sensitive thought process is in no way an impediment to a pragmatic approach to business and immigration?

I know who I’ll be voting for in February.

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While I’ve always sucked at connecting names and faces and the past is just a blurry haze, I’ve always prided myself on remembering long strings of numbers, like credit cards, library membership numbers and a rolodex worth of phone numbers. I was my husband’s Blackberry before the Blackberry was created. “What’s that Delhi number again?” he would yell from upstairs for the biweekly call home.

Now my one remaining skill is also becoming redundant. A new free program called Roboform saves the password and login at every site I visit and chose to subscribe to. Not only do I not have to remember my user name and password, I can also choose to forget my name, address and phone number, secure in the knowledge that Roboform has my back. All that is required of me is remembering one master password and should I choose to tattoo it on a less visible part of my anatomy, I am all done.

Over the years, we have slowly been outsourcing our memories. Where once our Brahminical traditions required us to memorize lines and lines of verse and pass on our culture through story-telling from grandparent to grandchild, we now rely on the digital world to be our brains. All contact info is stored and backed up on the computer. Directions to places need no longer be imprinted on gooey gray matter; a GPS will take you where you want to go. My most repeated sentence these days to my children is “Look it up” as pages and pages of forgotten history, geography and science lessons are now available at the touch of a wiki-button.

This devaluation of memory is happening early these days. In school, where once we memorized ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Abu Ben Adam’( I still remember most of those poems and plenty of Kabir dohas), kids have access to online information and no longer need to memorize poetry, prose or math tables. Like a private in an army, all that is required of them is name, address and phone number. Pretty soon, the cell phones every kid seems to be carrying around these days will do even that job for them.

I wonder what is happening to all the memory cells of the brain that are now in disuse. As it is we were only using about 10% of our brains at any given time; now technology invites us to let those few cells go too. Are we simply turning into hosts for our machines? What we consider a symbiotic relationship today is slowly turning us into helpless creatures that would be lost without their PDAs ,PCs, GPSs and other similar electronic acronyms.

A company called Memory Lane offers people with memory loss a chance to recreate their memories in the form of videos, CDs and books and use them to reminisce. It is meant for the extremely aged and those suffering from Alzheimer’s but I suspect I will soon join the ranks of those signing up for the product to keep my memory offline. That is, if I can remember to.

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Lately it feels like the Indian airwaves are saturated with this cooked-up war between the 2 big movies hitting the marquee this weekend. Every 24 hour news channel appears to be asking the same questions – Which one are you going to? Which one will do well? Who will emerge a winner?

With my limited knowledge of the distribution economics and a bunch of crude assumptions( Hey! This is a blog, after all), I am going to attempt to prove that however much you, as the viewer, may be invested in it, to my local movie theater owner, it doesn’t matter at all.

First what we know. OSO apparently has 2000 prints out in worldwide release on Friday and distributors supposedly paid about 80 crores for the rights. Let’s say we translate that $20 million for 2000 prints or $10,000 per print. Say the distributor wants to make a 100% markup before he sells the print to the local theater which gets it for $20,000.

On opening night, the local theater is running 11 shows. Say the owner needs to buy 4 prints to keep the shows continuously running. (This may be anecdotal, but since the prints are still in the form of reels, there is a theory going around that it is actually just one print and the owner’s assistants are furiously running around moving the finished reel from one theater to another, sometimes to the viewer’s confusion! Which may explain why there is such strenuous resistance to going digital – though I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to pirate that too.) So the cost to him is $80,000.

Tickets are sold at an average of $8 per person and the capacity of a single theater in our multiplex is about 500, which works out to $4000 for a full house. Since online ticketing is available( at a premium of $1.50 per ticket, no less) I happen to know that opening weekend is likely to be completely sold out.( Half an hour before the show, a long snaking entry line starts forming outside the theater – only local food sales rules prevent someone from making a roaring business selling chai and samosas to the shivering ticket-holders!).

So on the first night itself, the owner has netted $44,000 for the 11 shows. Over the course of the 3-day weekend, he has made close to $140,000, handily recouping his investment. After that, it is all money for jam.

One could inject some more information into this hypothesis – possibly there are more middlemen, possibly there is a profit sharing arrangement between the local distributor and the theater owner. But then I haven’t included the roaring profits made from gallons and gallons of 2 dollar cups of chai and plates and plates of 3 dollar stale samosas. And given the filthy state of the seats and the bathrooms, I have to come to the conclusion that spending on maintenance is pretty small.

The mechanics of movie making are such that very, very few movies (regardless of whether they are termed hits or flops) actually lose money for the producers and distributors.  In a recent interview, Arjun Rampal ( who also got his moment in the sun thanks to his role in OSO) said that his production ‘I see you’ ( ‘who saw that’ anyway?) had recovered its costs. Even a bomb like Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav (about which I wrote an article in Water, No Ice) is still making money off residuals. I haven’t even factored in the music rights, the ringtones, the airline revenue..

It is not difficult to figure out that while us poor gullible viewers are being given the impression that our tickets, like our votes, are going to make or break some movie maker’s hopes and ambitions, everyone concerned behind the scenes is laughing all the way to the bank. If you don’t believe me, just give a thought to why certain flop actors continue to find work in Maya Nagri. It is a money making machine baby – you just have to be smart about it.

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“Do it for your daughters - vote for Hillary,” urged my friend Nandini, arguing that the planets would not be aligned for a woman President in the US for next couple of centuries at least. “Think of possibilities a precedent like this will open up for little girls here at home & around the world? Think how this may possibly inspire a little girl in Afghanistan or South Africa to strive for public office and power.”

It’s tempting. It really is. As a woman, even I feel the sense that there will not be another woman who can make it up the grueling and cruel political ladder to the presidency for a long long time. But that argument also smacks of affirmative action. ‘Vote for Hillary because she is a woman’. Much as I may be doing an injustice to members of my sex, I cannot support this argument. If I ignore her gender, I am not convinced at all that she would be the right person for the job.

Gore Vidal has famously said -any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. In a crowded field of candidates, there is no one who wants this job more than Hillary and the impression I get from media bombardment and presidential debates is that she will stop at nothing to get there. This last trait is actually considered an admirable quality by many Democratic voters who don’t want to see a repeat of 2000 and 2004 when the deserving candidate lacked the killer instinct and squandered their chances.

But a candidate who has not shown that she has any views that are not reflective of the current polls cannot be the right person to pull America out of the disastrous moral and political abyss it stands in now. We need a charismatic, ethical, courageous President who is not afraid to make the right decision even when it is unpopular. ( This is how the current President was marketed by his handlers, and why he got elected twice).

Luckily, the democratic field can boast of more than one alternative to Hillary, which is why I hope we women don’t get suckered into making a gender based decision on who ought to be President. Let’s just look at each candidate’s manifesto and his or her voting record on issues we care about. Everything else is smoke.

Let’s not get misguided by the chance to make history or the ‘winnability’ factor. If it means that a little girl does not have a rebuttal to the statement “Girls can’t grow up to be President,” I’m sorry, but that can’t be the criterion for making such a big decision. That little girl can just knock her tormentor in the teeth and prove him wrong by standing for class president!

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Last week, the last female contestant bowed out of Star Voice of India. Predictably, this raised a few morchas( one cannot help but be suspicious) of women insisting that there should be more representation of women in the finales of reality shows. In an ideal world, they said, the finals should have one boy and one girl. Some of them even went so far as to suggest that ‘just like we have reservation in jobs and schools, we should also have reservation in these contests.’

This is so wrong in so many ways that I will not even attempt to tackle the issue of why affirmative action is ridiculous. Instead, let’s take a look at why women are(supposedly) not doing well in these singing competitions.

First of all, I can think of 2 female singers who did come up through the medium of these shows whose careers in playback singing for Hindi movies has been nothing short of spectacular. I am, of course, referring to Shreya Ghosal and Sunidhi Chauhan. Even if no girls made it to the top 5 in VOI, the ones with real talent will be remembered and called upon to sing in future movies.

Which brings us to the second point, which is that this particular crop of girls was not particularly talented. Say what you will, Priyani was a screecher, Abhilasha’s vocals need to mature and the less said about Prantika the better. So in this particular instance, it may have simply been case of lack of talent. As I predicted in a much earlier blog, when it came to sheer ability, the boys were better.

However, there is one element to these reality shows that does skew the results in favor of the male singers. Singing talent in all these shows is determined by the singer’s ability to sing Hindi movie songs and even the casual listener will realize that the female singers are required to be coloratura sopranos – that is – singing at a really, really high pitch. Since only a small percentage of female singers can really do that, the majority sound like they are shrieking. If the contest rules were broadened to include different kinds of music alike folk and classical, probably the imbalance would be redressed.

Till we accept that there are forms of music other than film music, we will be forced to judge clones of the Lata style of singing. Alas, there aren’t many like her.

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Bollywood and film noir are rarely mentioned in the same breath. For the uninitiated, film noir is a term used to describe low key crime dramas filled with moral ambiguity and sexual motivation( definition courtesy Wikipedia). Johnny Gaddar is a perfect example of this genre, conceived and shot so stylishly that one is tempted to believe that is a frame-by-frame lift from a Hollywood product.

That may be doing a real injustice to director Sriram Raghavan, who was also responsible for Ek Hasina Thi, the taut thriller starring Saif Ali Khan and Urmila Matondkar. Ek Hasina Thi was gripping, well directed and acted and showed the director’s predilections for crime dramas.

Johnny Gaddar, as the name suggests, is about a member of the 5-man gang who gets greedy when he has the opportunity to abscond with 2.5 crores in cash. How the plan goes horribly wrong is the subject of the movie.

Sriram Raghavan’s affection for previous Bollywood movies that have attempted takes on the noir genre is evident in the many references the movie makes to other classics. There’s Parwana, a 1971 movie starring Amitabh in a negative role, which provides the treacherous Vikram with the method to create an alibi. There’s Johhny Mera Naam which is playing in the background during a key moment in the film and gives Vikram his crime pseudonym. The movie is also dedicated to Vijay Anand, who also directed thrillers like Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil.

The film begins on a dark and stormy night with an unknown character being shot to death as a police van is making the rounds of Mumbai. The rest of the movie is a flashback that slowly but surely brings us to the denouement laid out in the first few minutes.

Johnny Gaddar does not boast any particularly well known current stars. Dharmendra, whose career appears to be getting resurrected, gives a restrained performance as the wise leader of the gang. Vinay Pathak, who is better known for his comedic roles and his job as a co-anchor on Ranvir,Vinay aur Kaun, gives this serious role an excellent interpretation. All the other actors give terrific and subtle performances, including the women who orbit the gang members’ lives. Neil Nitin Mukesh, who is Mukesh’s grandson, plays the Gaddar. He is mostly wooden-faced but this does not detract from the movie as his character’s motivations require him to be impassive as his world is crumbling around him.

Shankar Ehsaan, Loy come up with a cool electronic, techno funk score for the movie but the songs only appear in snatches as background music. At no time does the score intrude on the movie’s pacing.

This is a seriously stylish movie where I was not tempted for a single moment to reach for the remote and fast forward any scene. It is also a complex, intelligent movie that you have to pay close attention to if you want to follow the plot. As such, this makes it an almost sure flop and I understand it did not do well in its theatrical release. However, I urge movie lovers to pick it up on DVD. Currently only pirated versions are available in the US and if your conscience prickles, I suggest you put it on a to-watch list or your Netflix queue.

Not recommended for kids because of content and violence.

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They say a man’s home is his castle, but in the sleepy suburbs of America, that honor is reserved for his car.

My first car was a cheap but perky little Mazda Protégé in which, unencumbered by kids and safety issues, I zipped up and down I-680 at 100 miles an hour. That car reflected our lives at the time – simple, easy to maintain and without any frills – a perfect complement to our bare-bones apartment living, when any purchases over 20 dollars had to be approved by the spouse.

Alas. Having kids forces us to grow up and I soon had to graduate to a Ford Explorer – not perhaps the safest choice while traveling with infants – but the horror of being a minivan mom was just too ghastly to be borne. The SUV fit our need for space, having only one kid at the time, and the height made it convenient to load and unload diaper bags, car seats, strollers, grandparents… On solo trips I would test the turning radius and the flip-over tendencies of the vehicle, having consulted the lifeline on my palm on the riskiness of the venture.

Car ownership reached a nadir with the birth of the second child when we succumbed to the lush gluttony of the Honda Odyssey, a small house on wheels. Tricked out with a 6-disc CD changer, a back seat DVD player and a girth that allowed unfettered access to every seat , all it needed was a bathroom to call it home. In fact, most days, it was home, with nooks and crannies filled with food, drink, movies and books. When we parked in the garage, the kids would be reluctant to come out till nature called.

A tendency towards serial monogamy, unfortunately having to be sublimated in personal life, was allowed free rein as I ditched the motherly Odyssey for my latest car, the Toyota Highlander. With interiors designed along the lines of the stylish Lexus, the compact SUV is a joy to drive. All the bells and whistles are positioned perfectly inside; creating a synergy between car and driver that makes it a pleasure to haul the kids to soccer, TT, dance and piano. So it gets 20 miles to the gallon. Nobody’s perfect.

Blackberries and Bluetooth have made workstations out of our 4 wheelers. But there is another reason why we Americans love our cars. An SC Johnson Parent Taxi Survey found that 90% of parents spent 20 hours a week or more with their kids in the car. This kind of quality time with the kids is priceless. On trips to school and activities, my kids have been a captive audience as I question them about their studies, social interactions, fears and worries. I have discussions of philosophy with my son, explain morality to my daughter, eavesdrop as they bridge the 6 year gap between them with silly conversations. On the rare occasions when I am alone, I play my favorite music to relax  or educate myself with public radio. Car time can also be for catching up on reading with audio books and learning a foreign language through tapes.

The love affair we have with our cars would not be possible without the network of roads that borders on the magical to anyone arriving from India. In such calm seas, we are pilots of our little ships, in control of a small part of our day and our lives.

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