Veranda Tales - Free advice anybody?

Storytelling has been an integral part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to stories during the hot summer evenings and nights with my cousins. Mothers and grandmothers would gather all of us children for story time. It was usually pitch dark except for a very faint light coming from the flickering candle. Power cuts were as frequent as the hot and humid summer days. We all spread out on a cool concrete floor or bamboo mats on the veranda intently listening to fascinating stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, and peasants alike. Stories about love, life, families, and people entertained and taught us life skills. These stories transported us to distant worlds, strange yet familiar. Often the same story told by two people sounded different as storytellers added new twists and turns adding their personal style and flair to the stories.

Storytelling wasn’t limited to summer evenings and bedtime. I was surrounded by adults who didn’t pass up an opportunity to share their wisdom using the art of storytelling. These rich vibrant oral traditions include songs, poems, stories, and సామెతలు (Sametalu are proverbs in Telugu). Men and women sing songs as they work in the fields, grinding grains and spices and doing other daily chores at their homes. Stories are often used to teach important life lessons, interpersonal skills, and survival skills. These stories and the time spent listening to them made our lives richer leaving an impression on me. This series is all about reliving those memories as I share these stories.

ఆయనే ఉంటే మంగలి ఎందుకు (aayane unte mangali enduku)

During the course of my career, I have moved from one division to another within a company, and employer to employer in pursuit of challenging work. I like to be challenged and I don’t shy away from starting at the bottom of the ladder in pursuit of knowledge. I also don’t shy away from green field opportunities with higher risk if the opportunity challenges me and has the potential to get me out of my comfort zone. The term for it is growth mindset. I would expand it to a growth mindset that comes with constant changes and challenges. It offers immense intellectual rewards and expands the world. I get to meet and work with amazing individuals who have so much to teach me.

One such adventure took me to a large company working on a large project. This was when verticals were a thing and companies built hardware, developing their own software to go with it. These large systems sat 6+ feet and 4 feet wide each with rack after rack of hardware.  We had one or two large lab floors with rows and rows of these systems to develop and test standing shoulder to shoulder and back to back. Even with labs full of systems, we had to reserve time to use them and they were a hot commodity. At times I would have had to drive very early in the morning or stay late at night to find a time slot to test the code I wrote.

This was the BCs (Before Child) of my life. I had the luxury to stay as late as I had to at work or having fun and go to work as early as I needed to. I have fond memories of my 100 mile roundtrip commute on sunny days, through rain, snow, and 100 miles per hour wind day after day for more than six years. Music, news, and National Public Radio, and their programs, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air and their people, Noah Adams, Nina Totenberg, Ina Jaffe, and Terry Gross were my constant companions. I listened to numerous episodes of Fresh Air as Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley talked to experts covering a wide range of topics in popular culture, books, news, and current and past issues in depth. It was soothing to have all of my NPR friends speaking to me as I drove to work and back. They couldn't hear me joining the conversation as I spoke out loud reacting to what I heard.

My older one joined the party for nine months when I was pregnant with him, kicking me as I counted the daily kicks and snoozing as the car cruised along the Interstate. I couldn't hear his fetal opinions if there were any about the muffled conversations he could hear during our drives. I suspect he decided to be born early just so he could listen to these programs clearly. I was still driving a week before he was born as my life partner was on pins and needles from the time I left home for work to the time I walked back in at the end of the day.

Working on this large project was a lot of fun. I learned a lot and had fun while doing it. We would sit in front of this large system hours on end, swapping boards out and powering them up and down as needed. It was hard to reach the top of the rack where the color coded power switches were. We had industrial grade step stools all around to stand and power cycle the systems. We discussed technical topics, reported bugs, had some spirited arguments about how to fix them, made lunch or dinner plans, and talked about who was dating whom, upcoming nuptials, and child births. There were a lot of these events with a project that employed 100+ people in various disciplines of hardware and software engineering. When I was pregnant I was the butt of their jokes about how they would have to put me in the back of their truck to drive me home if I go into labor during work hours. 

I met amazing people and made friends who are still in my life. I also met an amazing person who strived and achieved against the odds. She is legally blind and lost her sight during her teenage years. In spite of this disability she became a software engineer and wrote code every single day. She used a special monitor and several other aids for her visual impairment to do what she loved doing. She wore a smile on her face and offered a friendly ear to everybody who worked with her on the project. We would stop by each other's offices to just say hello or help each other with some technical issue. We all had the same size offices irrespective of our rank on this project instead of row after row of cubicles with 4 to 6 foot walls.

The two of us with our offices in close proximity would run into each other in the hallways as we ran back and forth from labs, cafeteria, coffee room, and other places. I would smile and wave when I saw her from a distance and was puzzled, getting no response until I understood she couldn't recognize people from afar.

One evening we were both working in the lab. She asked for help powering up the system she was working on. I promptly got up on the step stool to reach up and turn it on. There was some recent change to the color scheme and the sequence in which we were supposed to turn on the switches. I stood up on the step stool demonstrating what I recently learned pointing to the small switches and their colors. She patiently listened to my explanation that probably lasted a few minutes. Then she smiled and said, if I could see all of that I would have turned the system on myself. I realized what I just did and burst out laughing.

Whenever I hear, ఆయనే ఉంటే మంగలి ఎందుకు (aayane unte mangali enduku) sameta I think of my friend and this hilarious episode. ఆయనే ఉంటే మంగలి ఎందుకు (aayane unte mangali enduku) means, “If I have a husband, why would I need a barber”. Women in India wear గాజులు (gaajulu are bangles in Telugu) on their hands, గొలుసు (golusu is necklace in Telugu) in their necks, కుంకుమ (kumkuma) on their forehead, కాటుక (kaatuka) in their eyes and wear flowers in their hair. Hindu women wear కుంకుమ (kumkuma) on their forehead. It is considered అశుభం (asubhm is bad in Telugu) for a married woman to not wear కుంకుమ (kumkuma).

కాటుక (kaatuka) is makeup applied to emphasize the shape of the eyes in India and other parts of the world such as Egypt and Arabia. It is black soot formed while burning a lamp fueled by Ghee. It can be made easily at home by inverting a plate on top of a burning lamp balancing over it so the flame keeps going as the soot accumulates in the plate. Before the advent of ultrasounds, how the soot accumulates in the plate was used to predict the gender of an unborn.

When a woman loses her husband and becomes a widow, Hindu widows had to give up on all their adornments including కుంకుమ (kumkuma) and keep their heads shaved. Some women still practice this tradition to this day in some parts of India. The sameta can be understood better once we know this tradition of keeping their heads shaved. It was also considered అశుభం (asubhm) to run into a widowed woman on the street. Hence widows didn’t step out of the house during the day. They had to ask others for help if they needed something from outside. A widow needed her barber’s services to get her head shaved. She asked a man walking by her house to ask the village barber to come to her house. The man replied, “Why don’t you ask your husband to call the barber”. She then shook her head and said, “ఆయనే ఉంటే మంగలి ఎందుకు (aayane unte mangali enduku)”, saying in another way that she was a widow and that if I had a husband I wouldn’t need a barber to shave the hair on my head.

This sameta is used when someone dispenses advice quickly without fully understanding the situation at hand. It aptly describes that advice is worthless when given free of thought and understanding the problem. Whenever I hear this sameta, I think of my explanation to my friend about how to power up the system without thinking through why she needed my help in the first place. In my case, it was rooted in my absent mindedness, but nonetheless worthless.