Vittachi

Feeding experiments to try on your kids

The Air Baby and other mysteries of dieting

By Nury Vittachi

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Now here’s one of the great mysteries of modern life. All the westerners in my office keep in shape by cutting noodles and rice from their diets. All the Asians in my office keep in shape by doing exactly the opposite: eating nothing but noodles and rice. How come?

This observation proves one fact conclusively: I spend too much time watching other people in my office eating. It’s the curse of being on a diet.

Here’s another mystery. If you skip 10 desserts over 10 days, you lose one pound. But if you eat one dessert on the 11^th day, you immediately gain one pound. How does that work?

My wife has a penchant for molten chocolate cake, but no longer eats it. She just applies it to her hips.

If you are interested in nutrition, as I am, the most important thing, of course, is to have children. This is because you can use them for weird and bizarre experiments, a process known as “parenting”.

But at first, I couldn’t try out any feeding experiments on my youngest child, who turned out to be an Air Baby. Air Babies refuse to eat normally but extract nutrients from thin air, just like those hydroponic plants you get on tree branches in Sri Lanka. If we ever tried to get her to eat something, she would holler, aggrieved, “But I ate something last month.”

                We took her to a doctor.

               He said that there was a test to see if small children were thriving. He shook her chubby cheeks. “She’s fine,” he said. “At this age, they have an instinctual knowledge of what their bodies need—and it’s more trustworthy than what adults think they need.”

                So we stopped trying to make her eat normal meals and just put food on the table to see what she chose to eat.

              The first day, she ate only plain rice—three bowls of it—but no meat or vegetables. The second day she ate no rice or vegetables—but a whole steak, chopped into tiny bits.

                The third day she ate no rice or meat but no less than four large bowls of dau miu – a Chinese vegetable that’s a bit like spinach.

                We suddenly realized that she was in fact eating a healthy balanced diet, although stretched over a week instead of half an hour like the rest of us.

                This discovery led to me getting a reputation as The God of Parenting. This is how it happened. One Saturday, we invited three other families over for dinner. In the run-up to this, the Air Baby had lived on Ribena fumes on Wednesday, desserts on Thursday, and air on Friday.

As luck would have it, on the day we had guests, she was having a Vegetables Day.

The other parents watched astonished as this tiny child ignored the French fries on the table and just ate vast amounts of greens.

                “Wow! How did you train her to do that?” they asked, their eyes as green as the spinach.

                “Skilled parenting,” I lied.

                In the meantime, I have decided that the best diet advice ever comes from Miss Piggy of Sesame Street fame, who said: “Never eat anything at one sitting that you cannot lift.”

                I am heading to the gym to practice bench-pressing three-kilogram cheesecakes.

Running for your life

Jogging through the valley of the shadow of death

By Nury Vittachi
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The world’s most invigorating exercise is jogging, but only in Asia. Going for a run anywhere else is pathetically dull: you pad along purpose-built waterside tracks with other yuppies like a herd of iPod-wearing sheep. I recently went jogging in Perth, Australia, and learned I could sleep at 10 kilometres an hour.

                But joggers in Asia never have a dull moment. You have to leap over massive holes. You have to maneuver around wild dogs. You have to sneak past wild people. And of course you have to negotiate normal Asian pavement traffic: pedestrians, scooters and 10-ton articulated trucks.

                My most memorable jogging experience was on a road near my home. This road was dug up so regularly that residents proposed changing the name from Victoria Road to Victoria Trench.

                That night, I took my youngest child with me. She sat in her stroller while I pounded the pavements, pushing from behind and feeling like SuperDad. She was so excited at the thought of an outing with me that she immediately fell asleep.

                Reaching the road, I was horrified to find workmen had dug up both pavements. They had also turned off the lampposts. And they had installed a contra-flow system, which is when temporary traffic lights force cars to take turns using a single lane.

                Contra-flow systems bring out the worst in drivers. Normally, when a traffic light turns red, a few drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a second or so.” But when a contra-flow system traffic light turns red, all drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a few minutes or so, probably.”

                The only way for us to continue on would have been a suicidal sprint down the middle of the road in pitch darkness with crazed drivers running red lights in both directions.

                So I was about to turn back when the man operating the temporary lights asked a favour of me. The walkie-talkies were broken, he said. Would I mind delivering a spare handset to the traffic light guy at the other end?

                Seeing that he had the ability to turn the lights to “stop” and ensure our safety, I agreed to make the delivery. He clicked a switch, the lights turned red, and I jogged off down the middle of the dark road, holding the equipment in one hand, and pushing the baby-stroller with the other. I felt even more like SuperDad. Here I was exercising, AND taking the baby out, AND doing my bit to keep the city’s arteries moving.

                But we were less than halfway down the road when I heard an ominous click. The idiot had turned the traffic lights green!

                Vast numbers of roaring vehicles charged through the darkness, heading straight for us. The pavements were fenced off. Suddenly I knew what a skittle in a bowling alley felt like.

                There was only one thing to do. Pray. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

                The next couple of minutes were a blur as we dodged trucks, cars and buses and raced to safety. Miraculously, we survived.

                I delivered the equipment and got my breath back. The excitement had woken the baby up. “Again! Again!” she said.

                Next day I joined a gym.

The truth about global families

The article below was commissioned by the Singapore press to commemorate the inaugural Family Day on May 24, 2008

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Insanity is all relative, especially in my clan

By Nury Vittachi

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You think the Middle East Conflict is a tough problem to resolve? You should try the Vittachi family reunion. Admittedly, slightly fewer rocket-powered grenades are involved. But in terms of the complexity of issues, the two events are pretty much on a par.

This past weekend marked the first ever Family Day in Singapore. Like many families in East Asia, the Vittachi clan is split around the globe.
          Some family members are in Asia, some are in Europe, some are in the United States, and some, we desperately wish, were on Despina, the third moon of Neptune. But sadly they are not; they are right here on Earth. Now when I say “sadly”, I don’t mean to imply that I am not fond of them. Indeed, I am so fond of them that I can only cope with the excitement in small doses, such as getting one visit from them per century, for example.

And when I say “right here on Earth”, I should make it clear am talking in literal terms only. Speaking in figurative terms, there are certain members of my family who are definitely not on planet Earth at all.

Take my late Uncle Ernie, for example. He believed that aliens were using mind control rays to invisibly guide millions of individuals into making bizarre, irrational decisions. We all used to laugh at this outlandish theory. Until George W. Bush won the 2004 US Presidential Election and Uncle Ernie’s version of events suddenly became the only logical explanation. 

Like other geographically spread families, we have numerous difficulties in communication. Consider a simple concept such as the 15-minute break in the middle of the school morning. My American brother calls it “Recess”. My English sister calls it “Playtime”. My Australian cousin calls it “Break.” My Sri Lankan cousin calls it “Cease fire”.

Having a split family comes with significant dangers. For example, when my siblings and I were brats, my father became increasingly fond of lengthy business trips, until the inevitable happened: he went on a business trip and never came back.

But he kept in touch by sending us news dispatches from time to time. One of these informed us that he had got married and was going to be a father, it apparently having slipped his mind that he was already married and a father.

But we didn’t blame him. When you’re miles from home, you forget things. As the saying goes, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder of absence.” Anyway, everything calmed down eventually. My father got into the habit of visiting his former family every few months, and we would never fail to greet him affectionately with warm, loving cries of: “Die, scum.”

No, actually, we all got on very well. You see, by that stage we realized that extreme quantities of patience and tolerance were vital to maintain harmony in spread-out families, or, indeed, any other type of family.

Anyway, I’m just about to start organizing the next major gathering of the Vittachi clan. But lately I must admit I’ve been tempted to give the job to someone else and concentrate on doing something simpler.

Such as solving the Middle East Conflict, perhaps.

I wonder if someone at the United Nations would like to swap jobs with me?

Hi kids, let's learn about life

Youth role models set astonishing new records for egotism

By Nury Vittachi
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This is a key week in the history of youth culture for three reasons. Three of the world’s top role models for young people are poised to take the limelight.

                First, we have singer R Kelly, one of the top blues and rap singers of recent years. Mr Kelly has been charged with various unsavoury crimes involving children and is due to appear this week, [May 9] not on stage, but in court.

He recently expressed his deep contrition by saying in an interview (I am not making this up): "I'm the Ali of today. I'm the Marvin Gaye of today. I'm the Bob Marley of today. I'm the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realize that now."

A lot of people are also starting to realize that Mr Kelly may soon have problems squeezing his ego into smaller quarters than those he is used to.

                Then there is the top selling female pop singer of the past decade, Britney Spears, who has a special gig today [May 6] in a court room. At the earlier hearing, judges decreed that wealthy mother-of-two Ms Spears does not have the ability to cope with (a) being wealthy or (b) being a mother of two or (c) being. Ms Spears expressed her humility by telling the media: “I don't like defining myself. I just am.”

                Many of us could probably think of good alternative ways of finishing that sentence.

                The third major role model for young people is Dan Houser, author of some of the world’s bestselling video games. Hitting shops this week is his latest effort, Grand Theft Auto IV. It teaches youngsters the following lessons about life.

All women are prostitutes or strippers.  Why save up to buy a car when you can just steal one? A good career choice these days is “transporter of illegal drugs”. No one but a fool goes out of the house without loaded weapons. Guns should be used at the slightest provocation. Driving is much more fun if you do it drunk or stoned. Add drama to your leisure time by running over innocent pedestrians. Drive-by shootings are also a good laugh. You get extra points if you shoot a police officer. Hire a prostitute and instead of paying, beat her with a baseball bat.

A few people dared to suggest that Grand Theft Auto IV might not be an ideal role model for children. Perhaps we shouldn’t market “murder simulators” to impressionable youngsters, said a lawyer named Jack Thompson.

Did Mr Houser respond by changing the game from age 15 to “adults only”? No. He replied by introducing a new character. A lawyer who looks suspiciously like Jack Thompson gets threatened by a gunman and replies: “Guns don’t murder people. Video games do.”

What do we do about people like the three role models above? The bad news is I don’t think there’s anything we can do. The good news is that being hugely egotistical is a surefire way of cultivating bad karma.  In the words of John Lennon: “Karma’s going to get you.” Mr Lennon wrote some great songs, but had a massive ego and a drug-addled private life. And events sadly seemed to prove him right.

Mobile phones for children

Kids want phones, but I am totally not c%l with th@

By Nury Vittachi

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Terrible news was delivered to an Asian men’s discussion group I belong to. “Some idiot father bought a mobile phone for his eight-year-old daughter. So now my daughter says she needs one too,” spluttered one red-faced, hyperventilating dad (okay, it was me).

                The other guys in the group, which meets weekly in the city’s business district, murmured in sympathy.  “How totally irresponsible,” they agreed.

Except for one. “Er. Actually, it was probably me,” said a 50-something Malaysian banker sitting opposite me. “I bought one for my little girl. I didn’t realize it would make problems for you.”

                Peer pressure is a dreadful thing.  One minute my daughter’s biggest ambition in life was to have a Hello Kitty eraser, and the next she is doing price comparisons on tri-band receivers at telecom sites on the Internet.

                The downward spread of mobile phones to teenyboppers is causing problems all over Asia. Primary schools from Colombo to Kowloon are constantly interrupted by the likes of Little Jin-Jin taking calls from knee-high friends who wish to exchange digital photos of their Hello Kitty erasers.

Organizers of a poetry competition for school children in East Asia received hundreds of entries beamed in on mobile phones. “We had to spend hours trying to translate text-talk shorthand before into choosing the winners,” said one of the judges. The poetry was full of phrases like “r u c%l w/ th@” (Are you cool with that?)

                Abhorrence of the devices stretches from the lowest of the low (i.e., me) to the most powerful man in the solar system. George W. Bush hates the things. At one press conference, he got mad because the constant ringing made him lose the logical thread of his comments—which, let’s face it, were pretty weak to start with. If he toured Asia, he would have the same problem visiting kindergartens.

                The upshot of all this was that your humble narrator had a detailed discussion with his daughter about why she could not have her own cellphone, using a variety of carefully argued arguments on the lines of “No, no, no, no, no, no, NO,” and “Because I said so.”

                The following day, a friend who works for a telecoms firm gave me a new phone. What to do with the old one. Bin it?

                “I’ll have it,” my daughter said.

                Your columnist explained that the cost of a cellphone was not the price of the handset, but the monthly payments. It took her no time at all to discover that thanks to unfettered competition, the monthly charge had plummeted to the same level as her pocket money.

“I’ll pay for it, Daddy,” she said. I no longer had grounds on which to refuse. The thing was handed over.

The following week, this writer attended the men’s discussion group looking sheepish, and revealed that he had joined the shameful ranks of idiot fathers of phone-carrying eight-year-olds.

And that’s not the end of it. A reader informed me that phone makers have developed a mobile phone that fits on a dog collar and enables owners to be able to use electronic positioning signals to locate their wandering pets.

My dog has not yet asked for his own mobile phone.

But one of these days, I am sure I will find him comparison-shopping on the Internet, and then there will be trouble.

An introduction to Englasian

How to order fast food in Asia
By Nury Vittachi

MY FRIEND’S DAUGHTER works in a fast food shop in Hong Kong. I watched her and her friends in action the other day.

                The weird thing is that the staff can communicate perfectly well in English with anyone from Hong Kong, South Asia, East Asia, or pretty much any other part of the region.

But when a fresh-off-the-boat tourist enters the restaurant, communication gets difficult. Monolingual English speakers from America, for example, “hear” Asian-English words differently.

               Fast food server: Harlowelcumkaneye L. pyoo?

                Customer: What?

                Fast food server: Harlowelcumkaneye L. pyoo?

               Customer: Er, yes, I’d like one cheeseburger please.

                Fast food server: Dull Swiss wit Baygon?

                Customer: Excuse me?

                Fast food server: Dull Swiss wit Baygon?

                Customer: Oh, no, I don’t want a double-Swiss with Baygon, I mean bacon. I just want a normal cheeseburger.

                Fast food server: Humbugger wit jees. Setter Al Eckart?

                Customer: Pardon me?

                Fast food server: Setter Al Eckart?

                Customer: Ah, got it. A La carte, please.

                Fast food server: One-for-rice wee tat?

                Customer: No, I don’t want rice, thank you very much.

                Fast food server: One-for-rice wee tat!

                Customer: Oh, yes, please, I want fries with that.

                Fast food server: Smormy dyumludj?

                Customer: I’m sorry, would you mind…?

                Fast food server: Smormy dyumludj. U juan smor, me, dyum, ludj?

                Customer: Medium.

                Fast food server: Ad too duller soup a size.

                Customer: What?

                Fast food server: Ad too duller soup a size.

                Customer: Not supersized, thanks. I’m fat enough already, ha ha!

                Fast food server: Wad rink u juan?

                Customer: Fresh orange juice, please.

                Fast food server: Fray soringe ad too duller. Chippa u buy set.

                Customer: Okay, gimme a set.

                Fast food server: Wit set you juan?

                Customer: Cheeseburger.

                Fast food server: Dull Swiss wit Baygon set?

                Customer: Excuse me?

                Fast food server: You juan dull Swiss wit Baygon set?

                Customer: No, I don’t want – actually, maybe I do want Baygon. At least it would kill my appetite.

               How come Asians can communicate with other Asians using this bare-bones English, while tourists struggle with it? Because English is really a whole group of languages. A tourist who speaks only “the Queen’s English” limits himself to communicating with speakers of that dialect. But if you speak Asian English—which I propose we call Englasian—you end up with a language the majority of people on Earth can understand.

                In fact, I reckon we should train the Queen of England to speak it. I can just picture her on her next tour of Asia stepping off the Royal yacht and saying: “We are most amused to be here. My husband and I would like to say harlowelkumkanwee L. pyoo.”

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Tomorrow: The questions Asian men will never answer

Anna Nicole Smith Exclusive

Only a parent could understand

ALMOST EVERY WEEKDAY morning for the past eight or nine years, I have put one or more children on the school bus.
      We have stared at each other through the glass windows for five minutes until everyone's on board and it's time to go. On occasions during the first year or two, the child would be weeping, because he or she didn't want to go to school. I'm weeping too, but only on the inside: on my face is a fixed grin to reinforce the message I have been sending out: don't worry, it'll be fine, you'll have fun.
      But these days, usually, there's no weeping. The child smiles or waves or yawns.
      My youngest child Lexi, who has just turned eight, has developed a complex system of hand signals. We have detailed conversations, interspersed with blown kisses, while the bus fills up. I stand on the other side of the road, trying to interpret the signals. Buses and taxis blur the air between us, but neither of us register them. Over the years Lexi and I have developed a detailed ritual of farewell, which involves my running from one location to another, so the handsignals can be done twice.
      This morning, something happened. She got deep in conversation with the other children on the bus. I waited. She didn't turn round. The bus set off. She'd forgotten I was there. I raced to the second location, getting ahead of the bus. But she was still lost in a debate with the other kids. I waved at the back of her head as the bus disappeared up the hill.
      I was devastated that she had forgotten I was there.
      And I was thrilled that she had forgotten I was there.
      This may be something only a parent can understand.
 

Five silliest absence notes

The five silliest school absence notes:
    1. Please excuse Gloria from Jim today. She is administratg.
    2. Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.
    3. Irving was absent yesterday because he missed his bust.
    4. I kept Billie home because she had to go Christmas shopping because I don't know what size she wear.
    5. Please excuse Jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday.

George Bush is a Saint

This funny story about George Bush was sent to me this morning by my sister, writes Mr Jam. It gave me a smile so I thought I would share it...
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PRESIDENT George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Episcopal Church outside Washington as part of his campaign to restore his poll standings. Bush's campaign manager made a visit to the Bishop and said to him, "We've been getting a lot of bad publicity because of the President's position on stem cell research, the Iraq war, Katrina, and the like. We'd gladly make a contribution to the Church of US$100,000 if during your sermon you'd say the President is a Saint."

The Bishop thought it over for a few moments and finally said, "The Church is in desperate need of funds and I will agree to do it."