Hasta La Gadget!

Meet Munchkin the Shih Tzu. Or as I like to call her when she’s wearing her teddy bear costume, a real life Ewok from Star Wars. Or maybe she’s just a real life teddy bear. Whatever she is, she’s super cute and when I watch her walk, I can’t help but smile.

Read more…

Usually, deleting emails is a no-fanfare, one-click affair — but not when you’re the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Homeland Security. Both agencies have recently submitted proposals to the National Archives and Records Administrat…

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will lead you there. –Lewis Carroll

Orange may be the new black, but India is saffron, indigo, marigold, and emerald all rolled into one. The colors hit your senses at every turn, as does the sheer size of the crowds in the cities. India’s population is over 1.2 billion, second only to China’s at 1.4 billion. Our guide in Delhi (population 25 million) was amazed to learn that our 7-by-7-mile city by the bay has a population of only 838,000. As for the smells, think Indian spices, exhaust fumes, and incense. In the cities, the sounds are a cacophony of horns from every conceivable kind of vehicle.

Passage to India
The reason for my journey to India was an unusual one. Sixty years ago, my father attended a British boarding school in Darjeeling called St. Paul’s School. We, of course, know Darjeeling as a kind of tea, but this Cambridge-affiliated private boys’ school is situated in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, offering magnificent views of Mount Kanchenjunga. It was founded in 1823 and patterned after a military institution to keep the young students busy and their minds off of living away from home.

For as long as I can remember, my dad had talked about his schooling in India. Boarding school is not uncommon, but the reason for my dad’s attendance was. He was born in Iran to Christian Assyrian parents who wanted nothing more than to emigrate to America. So at the tender age of eleven, my father and his ten-year-old brother traveled to the school, accompanied by my grandfather. The journey was arduous: it took ten days by car, steamship, and train to reach Darjeeling. The British had colonized India two hundred years before, building standard-gauge railroads. But the final leg of the journey to the school was a six-hour ride on a narrow-gauge locomotive known as the “Toy Train,” which my sister and I renamed the “Harry Potter train.”

My father and his brother would not see their parents again for six years. Their only means of communication was through writing weekly letters. These letters often crossed paths with those from their parents, but they kept the family connected. My father’s heart-wrenching story is witness to the sacrifices his parents made for their sons’ education. It’s the quintessential immigrant story of hard work and dedication to achieve the American dream.

To celebrate his 80th birthday in October, my sister and I traveled with my father to India. He had been back only once, with my husband and brother-in-law ten years ago, since graduating in 1952. This time around, my sister and I were not going to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime father/daughter adventure.

The part of India we saw is known as the Golden Triangle, a tourist mecca that includes Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. The trip lasted eight days and covered over six hundred miles, though the distance sometimes felt much greater due to the many unpaved roads. India has two faces: calm and chaos, wealth and poverty. We saw both. Our adventure began in Old Delhi, which was established by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1638. At the famous Red Fort, we traded in our car for rickshaws to view the open-air markets. We toured Jamal Masjid, the best-known mosque in India, as well as Qutb Minar, the second-tallest minaret in India. We concluded with a visit to Raj Ghat, the resting place of Mahatma Gandhi. An eternal flame burns atop a very simple memorial in a park-like setting. The memorial is perhaps what Gandhi would have wanted: simple, humble, and peaceful. The next day, we set out for Agra Fort, the work of Akbar the Great. This enormous structure from the sixteenth century is built entirely of red sandstone. Our sunset visit to the Taj Mahal, just north of Agra Fort, was well worth the wait. The white marble mausoleum was built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who bore the shah fourteen children. In Jaipur, we toured, by elephant, the unforgettable Amber Fort and palace perched high on a hill, and the impressive Jantar Mantar, an astronomical observatory built in the early 1700s by Maharaja Jai Singh II, the great warrior-astronomer to whom the city owes its name.

Tips for Travelers to India
If you’re lucky enough to be able to visit this fascinating country, here are some tips for your adventure:

1. Take health precautions in advance. Make sure you have inoculations for typhoid, hepatitis A and B, and pertussis. Also advised are antibiotics and medications for malaria. To avoid “Delhi Belly,” never leave home without hand wipes and sanitizer, Imodium, and “tush” wipes. Be prepared, or be sorry.

2. Hire a private guide. Secure the best guides/drivers possible in advance of your trip, through a travel agent or referrals from friends who have been to India. Never wait until you arrive, especially during high season. But be advised that when even the best guide says a tour will last for four hours, he really means eight.

3. Carry snacks. Cows are sacred in India, which means no beef on this trip. Pack nuts, peanut butter packs, and protein bars in your suitcase to have on hand when touring. They will sustain you during the long drives.

4. Steel yourself for the traffic. It helps if your driver was a Formula One Racer in a past life. Traffic in the cities is habitually gridlocked with cars, tuk tuks, cows, and camels coming at you from every direction. Literally. Due to an unpleasant case of motion sickness, I was relegated to the front seat with my ginger ale, Tums, and more twisty turns and near misses than I care to remember. Luckily, I lived to tell this story.

5. Pack less, not more. In case you haven’t read my travel book, please note that one suitcase is plenty. Pack with a basic color in mind to keep things simple and choose accessories in complementary colors. Leave your fine jewels at home; there are plenty to buy in Jaipur.

We knew our Merchant Ivory moment was over when we saw a Starbucks at the airport coming home. But if only for a short while, my sister and reverted back to our childhood when my dad began drawing a map of our journey on a paper napkin. Geography was never one of my strong suits.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said it best: “The journey of a one thousand miles begins with just one step.” Our India trip was a long and exotic journey, a world away from ours. We will long remember the kind hospitality from our tour guides: Gihan, Assif, the two Ranjits, Shan, and Yogi. On our last evening together, we engaged the services of a local palm reader. If his predictions are correct, we will all be living long lives. The next family adventure is already in the works.

Lisa Grotts is a globetrotter. Like her father and grandfather, she is also an author. Her book, A Traveler’s Passport to Etiquette, is available on Amazon. Lisa has been quoted by the Times of India, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Times. She is involved in many Bay Area charitable causes and cultural institutions, including San Francisco Suicide Prevention, the California Pacific Medical Center Foundation, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. To learn more about Lisa, follow her on www.Twitter.com/LisaGrotts and www.Facebook.com/LisaGrotts.

Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the official “Holiday Season,” a time of year that is focused on family as well as fun. But in recent years, smartphones and other technologies are growing increasingly common, often detracting from the time we spend with the people we love. However, you may not need to choose between your family and your phone. These gadgets can actually enhance your bonding time — it just depends how you use them.

According to the Pew Research Internet Project, 90 percent of Americans owned a cell phone and 83 percent of adults between the ages of 18 to 29 were smartphone users at the beginning of 2014. To say that technology has forever changed the way we interact with one another and altered the way families spend time together during holidays is nothing new; however, these telling numbers have exposed the complexities that evolved our relationship to our devices, and, subsequently, to our loved ones.

One of the major differences is how social norms have evolved for annual gatherings, such as a formal Thanksgiving dinner. Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and school consultant and co-author of the book “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age“, has noticed the curiosity in this trend. “It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that people would gather at Thanksgiving and people would have phones at the table,” she says.

And believe it or not, gatherings do more than just give you that warm fuzzy feeling; bonding with your family can actually make you mentally healthier. According to a study published by the Journal of Adolescent Health, frequent family dinners lead to higher levels of emotional well-being and satisfaction with life.

However, sitting around at the table with everyone is on their phone doesn’t count. The National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health found that an increase in parent-family connectedness helped protect teenagers from risky health behaviors, and mealtime is an ideal space to work on these connections. “Parent-adolescent communication accounts for some of the relationship between family meals and adolescent mental health,” Daniel Miller, an assistant professor of social work at Boston University, told USA Today.

So what impact could technology actually have on these occasions? Professor Jim Taylor at the University of San Francisco wrote on Psychology Today that “the ramifications of [tech’s influence on family bonding is] profound. Less connection — the real kind — means that families aren’t able to build relationships as strong as they could be nor are they able to maintain them as well.”

Unfortunately, the ones who could benefit the most are often impossible to pry away from their phones: the youngest family members, who get a great deal of social development from the holidays. Dr. Steiner-Adair’s research shows that when mothers and fathers stick their sons and daughters in front a tablet or similar piece of technology, children interpret this as a way for adults to exclude them from conversation, because adults find the youth of the family boring.

But despite some social hindrances, tech has also influenced familial rituals for the better. According to a study posted by Rutgers University, family meals have actually been on the rise since 2003, a few years before the smartphone boom. While this could be attributed to a number of factors, it would be remiss not to recognize technology’s place in creating easy, hassle-free occasions. While many used to view things like planning a holiday dinner and arranging travel as unpleasant, hectic experiences, technology has eased the burden during these high-stress times. Now, there are apps for Thanksgiving cooking, planning and more.

In addition, technology can also be used as a central force to bring families together. As an alternative to the family football game in the yard, some families now sit down and play video games, or select movie marathons from the DVR.

As every family interacts differently with technology, the important thing is to figure out how these new developments can help encourage your physical connection as opposed to detract from it. For some families, that means encouraging guests to drop their phones into a basket before they sit down to table. In others, that may mean everyone should be posting in a family Facebook group about what they are going to bring for dinner, or pose for an annual Instagram portrait.

No matter what, utilizing these moments of togetherness is integral to your health and your family’s wellbeing. Finding fun, easy ways of bonding, such as setting aside time to watch home videos or unplugging and playing charades, can intrinsically boost the connection family members have to one another.

Whether your Thanksgiving table embraces or shuns the presence of technology, recognizing the power of the medium can help you better understand its effects on you and your loved ones. At the end of the day, the opportunity to create strong familial bonds can benefit you both physically and mentally — no matter what role a smartphone plays at your dinner table.