Mother of Mine

(Cross-posted on the CHAFF Blog.
Copyright of photographs is acknowledged.)

It has probably been over 10 years since Annikki and me have visited a cinema theatre to see a movie. Yesterday afternoon, we went to the STUDIO in the Youth Centre to see a Finnish / Swedish movie called "Mother of Mine".

During World War II, more than 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to neutral Sweden to avoid the conflict. "Mother of Mine," is the award-winning movie by Director Klaus Haro.

The story tackles that painful history in the story of 9-year-old boy, Eero, a child who increasingly feels abandoned by his biological Finnish mother and yet not attached to his Swedish foster mother. When he returns to Finland, his confusion intensifies and it lasts through his entire adult life till he understands what really happened when he goes to attend the funeral of his foster mother.

The movie is heart rending. To someone like Annikki who lived through those times in Finland, it was particularly difficult to believe that this really happened, as she knows her mother would never have sent them anywhere!

The movie is in Swedish and Finnish, with English subtitles. There were several mistakes in the sub-titles, but that did not detract from the powerful impact of the movie itself. The acting was superb and the photography simply exquisite.


Eero help his Finnish mother.


Eero with Hjalmar, his Swedish foster father.


Eero with Signe, his Swedish foster mother.

Topi Majaniemi starred as Eero and gave an outstanding performance. Marjaana Maijala acted Eero's Mother with Maria Lundqvist as Signe, the Swedish foster mother who looked after Eero in Sweden. Michael Nyquist acted as Hjalmar, the Swedish foster father.

What was especially sad was that all 45 seats were reserved making the organisers cut off the number of people who could attend. More than half the people failed to turn up, depriving many of seeing this movie - which was for free!

All those from CHAFF who took tickets did turn up, however, although many more could have benefited from seeing this powerful movie!

Annikki is working her gut out again

Day-before-yesterday, Wednesday evening, Annikki's mother, Hilja, went in for her interval care at the Hirosen Old People's Home, so that Annikki and me could re-energise ourselves.



It was quite a wet day, so Hilja had to be dressed with warmish clothes. It was after five in the evening before the Invalid Taxi arrived to take Hilja and Annikki to the Old People's Home.

I followed by car. As soon as Hilja was comfortably installed, Annikki wanted to go straight to the garden shops to pick up things for the garden. The Flea markets had already closed as it was past 6 pm. :-)

Besides picking up rich soil bags and some evergreen trees for potting, she picked up some wooden lotuses for the pond.





She also picked up two artificial lotuses which have LEDs in the centre. They run on three small batteries. the LEDS are rated as having lives of 8000 to 10000 hours.

When switched on the colour of the LED changes continuously, rotating through a beautiful soft glow blue, to green, to red and to yellow.

I tried to photograph them but was not successful. They look gorgeous. (I must get a better digital camera!) Annikki put one in the main pond and one in the bathtub. They add so much character to the garden.

At the bottom of the pond the real lotus, which is a local variety, is growing very rapidly. We should soon see them flowering at the top of the water.

The solar fountain sent to us by Susanna a few years ago is still functioning beautifully. But I have to get a larger fountain as the goldfish love to have the water splashing aroung them.

On Thursday, which was a holiday here in Finland (Ascension Day - the day Christ ascended to heaven), Annikki, instead of resting was doing back-breaking work cleaning up every corner of the garden. She took all the rubbish out of the flower beds, sifted all the sand, and realigned all the stones. She had to take up each of her many hundreds of stones so as to get the rubbish out from under them.

I saw the first bee in the garden, hovering over the flower beds, although the first flowers are yet to arrive. The magpies are having their regular baths in the shallow pond, and after they finish the smaller birds take their turn.

We are still waiting for some warm days so as to re-introduce the goldfish back into the pond. Annikki is not going to take any risks again!

This year we will have lots more interesting stuff in the garden - so watch out on this blog as Annikki's new creative ideas come to fruition!

The King of Fruit?

Last Friday we got our consignment of Durian from Thailand, considered by many as the "King of Fruits"! Durio kutejensis fruits, is also known as durian merah.



The durian is the fruit of trees of the genus Durio belonging to the Malvaceae, a large family which includes hibiscus, okra, cotton, mallows and linden trees. The fruit is largish, has a unique odour, and a thorn-covered husk, much like the jackfruit, which, however, is considerably larger.

The fruit can grow up to 30 cm long and 15 cm in diameter, and weighs between one to three kilograms. Its shape ranges from oblong to round, the colour of its husk can be green to brown. Its flesh is pale-yellow to red.

The hard outer husk is covered with sharp, prickly thorns. The edible custard-like flesh emits the strong, distinctive odour, which is overpowering and offensive.

The taste of the flesh has been described as nutty and sweet.



Although the fruit arrived very well packed in a plastic container and over-wrapped with plastic film, the extremely strong smell came through the packaging. We had to keep it in our cold front room so that whole house would not start stinking.

We were not able to eat it till today, as it has been quite cold and cloudy. We had decided that we would eat it outdoors when a warm sunny day arrived!

When we opened the plastic container, we found the smell to be what we in Oulu call the "Oulu Odour". This is the traditional stink to high heaven that pervades our city because of the emission from the pulp factory.

However, we could not get the smell once we consumed the fruit.

The fruit was not quite yellow as was promised, but was more whitish. It had a custard like consistency and although I thought it fairly sweet, Annikki did not find it sweet at all and compared the taste to a mixture of onion and some other mushy vegetables.

Bot hof us were quite disappointed with the taste as it is nowhere near the beautiful taste of a ripe jackfruit, a great pulpy mango, or even a really nice papaya.

It was certainly not, in our opinion, the "King of Fruits".



After dinner I felt like having a fruit.

We had a beautifully carved watermelon which had been given by Pailin and Unnop as a present to Annikki for Mother's Day.

Maybe you noted the blue vase in the picture with a rose on top of what appears to be ice in the vase. This is something that Annikki has recently discovered.

She took some ordinary clear plastic film, crumpled it and stuffed it into a vase. When she poured water into the vase, the plastic looked like it was crushed ice.

A wonderful effect!

Wonder who is the creative plastics consultant - Annikki or me! :-)

Am I being spoilt?

Today is Mother's Day in Finland, but it was not Mother's Day in England.

So Annikki did not get any call from our kids there. She got some beautiful roses from Pailin and Unnop, and Kannan rang and sent her a text message from Rauma - so the kids who have adopted her did not forget her on this day.

When I rang Samu in Newcastle, Joanna answered and was quite surprised to hear it was Mother's Day here!

Annikki thought it was Mother's Day last week and dished up a great cake, only to discover she was a week too early. So this week, with a vengeance, she made another cake studded with strawberries - maybe a kilo of them, plenty of cream and her own lemon rind cream filling. Hilja Reinikka (Äiti), Annikki's mother, was very happy to get all the good wishes and a cake all for herself!

The finishing touches to the strawberry Mother's Day cake.

Äiti observes the cake as it is placed in front of her.

"I am waiting", says Äiti, as she waves to the camera.

We did not quite finish the cake this evening, leaving just enough for a midnight snack after a sauna!

Hope all of you Mothers had a great day today.

P.S. We may eat the King of Fruits today. The Durian fruit is considered as the King of Fruits, but it is also the King of horrible smells. We were advised to eat it outside - and as this evening is sunny and we plan to have a sauna later, we decided we may eat this fruit in the garden later this evening.

It is now 10:30 pm and sunset will be in about 10 minutes.

A well deserved award

Dharavi in Mumbai is one of the largest slum areas in the world. It is also the home of some of the best leather products produced in India.

Right in the middle of this slum is a humble doctor who has been serving the people of the area, never thinking of financial reward. He has a long and hazardous journey to come and go to his small clinic bang centre of the slum. The clinic has been his life's work.

Malathi organised a wonderful Indian Evening
in the village where she lived in Finland.

Malathi in Oulu.

News has just reached me that Dr. Ashok Khembavi, a dear friend, husband of another dear friend and a Finnophile, Malathi, has been awarded the prestigous "Rashtriya Gaurav" award by the India International Friendship Society for the devotion to his work and his patients in this slum area.

Malathi first came to Finland to work with handicapped people and she committed her life to helping others, just like her husband. She loved Finland and Finns and us Findians, in return, loved her.

Malathi and Ashok have two wonderful boys, Darshan and Dishnath, now grown up, and they make a lovely family, as seen in the photo below.



They say that behind every successful man is a woman - in this case it is two wonderful people complementing each other in whatever they do. They give each other plenty of space so that they can develop each other and their children alongside them.

Malathi's sister, Lalitha, a brilliant management personality, is also married to an outstanding engineer and inventor, Anil Ananthakrishna from Bangalore, famous for his electric cycles, electric scooters and his electric cars, way ahead of the rest of the world in thinking and invention.

Congratulations Ashok and Malathi. Annikki and I are proud to know you and be part of your wonderful family.

Is this a laughing matter?

The newspaper coverage of my performance at the Free Speech Day had both Annikki and me in splits of laughter. It was not about what I said but the attitudes shown by those that covered the event.

As I have mentioned earlier, the newspaper Kaleva tried to neutralise the effect of accepting my challenge to prove me wrong by introducing in their Main Editorial the fact that Freedom House had claimed that Finland was rated among the top countries of the world as regards the Freedom of the Press.

This is what Annikki and I wrote to Freedom House:

from Annikki Matthan
to info@freedomhouse.org
date May 4, 2007 11:55 PM
subject Surprised ay your rankings!

Dear Sirs,

We are truly amazed at your ranking that Finland is at the top of the Free Press list.

Either your ranking system is run by some incompetent people or you have fallen for the beautiful Finnish methodology of creating an IMAGE, an image which is far from the truth.

See this Blog Entry at

http://jmatthan.blogspot.com/2007/05/oulus-hyde-park-corner.html

--
Annikki & Jacob Matthan
Oulu, Finland

Kaleva index page coverage.

Oulu and the neighbourhood page coverage.

The Finnish radio and tv may not have covered my outburst, (as far as I know), although I have heard reports that I was covered!

Wonder how they pushed it?


Oululehti coverage.

Another Oulu newspaper, not mainstream, Oululehti, had no coverage of the substance in the event, but in a section called "Bridge view" shared with its readers what a passerby would have seen and heard. What they wrote was truly hilarious, but substantially off the mark.

They referred to me as the "talkative Indian", "speaking in English which flew above the heads of the listeners", "creating the flavour of Hyde Park", "was certainly heard"...

The writer was right in all these issues except that what I said flew over the heads of the listeners. The journalist obviously did not hear the thunderous applause that I received.

But the Kaleva certianly got part of the message which they highlighted in "blue".



It reads as "The Police is corrupt, the Magistrate is corrupt, the Public Guardian is corrupt."

Of course, I did not stop there, as the main thrust of my speech is the reason all these forces of power are corrupt is because the "media, symbolised by Kaleva, is corrupt."

The content of my talk was certainly no laughing matter, and none of the audience laughed at the substance.

But the press coverage certainly amused us!

14 family member deaths narrowly averted!

Annikki has been working desperately to get the Kampitie garden to its very best. She worked hard when her mother was away in the Old People's Home at the latter half of April. Even after her mother returned home, every spare sunny period has been much effort on Annikki's part to make sure everything is right. (She rested in the hammock when she got tired!)

I pumped out the water from the pond and Annikki cleaned it. We were both surprised to find that the lotus had survived the winter at the bottom of the pond.







Annikki's new additions this year are a gatekeeper for the "Green Door" and a "farmhand couple" at the door of the "Greenhouse".






As we walked around the garden, it really felt that we were entering into a summer phase.









Having got the garden just right, we waited for a really "warm" day so that Annikki could reintroduce the goldfish from the two inside aquariums back into the pond.

Last week we thought that day had come. Annikki brought the goldfish down and very carefully reintroduced them into the large pond.

As we stood to admire our brood, we both almost entered a state of shock, just as the goldfish, as they went lower and lower down in the pond. They were literally dying before our eyes. The cold water was just too cold for our brood of 14 and they were keeling over.

Annikki acted quickly.

She got out her fishing net and, with a rapidity that was unbelieveable, she netted her brood and put them into warmish water in a bucket.

We held our breaths and waited.

Within a few minutes we saw the activity in the bucket increase as the fish were warmed to the fishbone!

Both of us were relieved to have saved our 14 family members from certain death.




We put them back into Annikki's table top aquarium. We found all of them none the worse from their life-threatening experience.

Hopefully, their trust in their feeder, Annikki, will be restored in the coming days!

Helsingin Sanomat changes its tune!

The Helsingin Sanomat is the only national newspaper in Finland.

It has been in the past rabidly anti-India, publishing some of the filthiest articles about the country, usually authored by a big-headed "journalist", Jari Lindholm, who did not like the idea that he could not order the Indian Ambassador to fix an appointment for him with the Prime Minister! Mr. Lindholm wanted India nuked because he was served cold rice in Orissa!

At one time he was barred from being given a visa for India, but our Ambassador thought he should not impose such a policy. The "journalist" went to India and then wrote a vile piece, and we were not even allowed the right of reply!

Now, as commercial interests dictate, they are cozying up to India as Nokia has appointed an Indian "lady" onto its Board.

They have a glowing piece about her in their latest online English version: New Nokia board member says mobile phones can bring bank access to rural poor - Indian banking pioneer joins Mobile Phone team.

If Nokia can change its view from when "Paris is too far for NOKIA" to India being the jewel in its crown, I think Helsingin Sanomat, in true Finnish journalistic tradition has every right to be a "time server".

23 years too late....

(Cross-posted on the Seventh Heaven Blog.)

(If you are wondering why the pictures of the children from the opening ceremony are so fuzzy, it is because of a child safety law in Finland which bars the inclusion of pictures of school children from any school event on a public forum without express permission each parent concerned!)

Thanks to Eric Mwai, I was invited to the reopening of the International School Campus in Oulu on Friday 4th May 2007.




The completely refurbished facilities now house three schools: The Leinonpuisto School, the Oulu International School and the International Baccalaureate (IB) of the Oulu Lyseo School.

The Opening Ceremony was truly amazing. It was so professional that it is difficult to believe that it was ordinary school children who were performing.



The choir, the acting, the blending of the Finnish Kalevala with cultures from many countries, including outstanding Bollywood dancing choreographed by the students themselves, were something I would not have missed in years.



They even had the Chief Guest, Ms. Elizabeth Rehn, taking part in their performance. It was so seamless, that one was astounded at their ingenuity.

Ms. Elizabeth Rehn, who after a very rewarding career in politics, being Finland's former Minister of Defence (Europe's first women to hold this post), former UN Under-Secretary General, special rapporteur on the Former Yugoslavia, etc., has been very active in gender and education issues.

The speech by Ms. Rehn was from her heart and to the point. She spoke of her work in the Balkans and the schools she was involved with there, where many different nationalities of countries in conflict live and study together.

This was what I always thought what education was about!



After the event, when we all enjoyed a very wonderful spread prepared by the Home Economics Department of the School, I took the liberty of meeting Ms. Rehn. (I have met her many many years ago when I was involved in work to help Ethnic Minorities.) I told her how much I enjoyed her speech. But, I added one comment - she was speaking of Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay where I studied over 50 years ago.

I informed her how we students had stayed in touch and how we were organising our 50th Year Reunion in 2009!

These true values of education did exist during my childhood, both at Bishop Cotton School, Bangalore, and Cathedral School, Bombay.


Samuel in Florida in December 2006.

(Our grandson, Samuel, attended the Oulu International School when he was studying in Finland. I used to either drop him to school in the morning or pick him up from school in the evening, whenever required. Even then I was impressed by the courteous nature of the students and staff in the school. Samuel now lives and studies in Newcastle, England, where Joanna is studying medicine, and only spends his short summer holidays in his home in Finland.)


I was also able to compliment both Teuvo Laurinolli, Rector of the Oulu Lyseo, the school from which our younger daughter, Joanna, completed her higher education from in 1990, and Raija Perttunen, Rector of the Oulu International School, on the excellent programme.

How I wish such a situation had existed in 1984 when we shifted our residence to Finland.

It was with heavy heart that we had to break up our family. Within 7 months of moving to Finland we had to send Susanna, our older daughter, who had completed her schooling in India, to England to continue her studies. Five months later we had to send our elder son, Jaakko, to England to be able to carry on his studies.

These were heart-breaking events for both Annikki and me to break up our family at that crucial formative stage of the children's teenage lives.

Joanna, being extroverted by nature, and being much younger, was able to adapt into the Finnish system and complete her education right up to the Masters level. Our youngest, Mika, was broken hearted that we had moved to a country which did not play cricket. Once he became an outstanding Chess Player, and was placed in the Finnish Junior's Chess Championship, he was able to integrate, but was never quite at home as was Joanna.

To us, the International Campus has come 23 years too late.

We wish the 3 schools, the staff and the students, a wonderful existence promoting the values of life related to education and tolerance!

Invest in India Seminar

Yesterday morning, I went to a breakfast seminar in the Technology Park where the topic, to a group of Finns, was the possibility of investing in India.



The main talk was by an Oulu old timer, Seppo Keränen who presently heads the Indian operations of FinPro. He talked about the demographics and how Finpro has been helping Finns find their feet in India.

There were a couple of gross errors in his presentation. He said that Wartsilä was the first company to set up production operations in India. He obviously does not know that Airam Oy started a bulb factory way back in the 70s which went bankrupt for reasons of poor understanding of the Indian business environment. Already before we left India, Annikki was translating the drawings and documents from Finnish to English when the plant was handed over to an Indian group.

Also, Seppo had no idea of the failed consultancy project of Jaakko Pyöry in the late 70s when I helped extricate them from a horrible mess in Bhadravati!

On the whole, he quoted some interesting figures and statistics. But in India things are happening so fast these days that even before the first figures are released, they are out of date.

Pasi Vaara, the Director of Wireless Solutions, which is part of the Indian multinational, Wipro Technologies, spoke about being part of an Indian company. A short but quite useful presentation about how a professional Indian company works. This was followed by a talk by Juho Eväsoja, CRO of Systems Biology Worldwide Ltd., from Helsinki who is heading the operations of a joint group on the research and development of drugs.

Seppo Keränen was highlighting the benefits of Finnish companies moving to India, while the other two speakers were focused on the benefits of being linked to Indian companies.

However, the questions from the floor seemed to highlight a completely different picture. It was almost as if the Finnish companies were looking for a knight in shining armour loaded with lots of cash coming to their rescue in this tough world called globalisation!

There were a couple of questions about how one could get going in India. The answers were too shallow, showing a lack of experience or knowledge about what Indian industry is all about. The reverse outsourcing being done by major Indian companies hardly got a mention.

For instance a serious philosophical question would be how would a Finnish company going to india avoid following in the footsteps of the "Union Carbide debacle in Bhopal"!

Having had 23 years of experience in arranging collaborations between the academia and businesses in India with Finnish counterparts, the whole attempt of this breakfast meeting left me totally wanting in getting answers to serious questions.

I did make one comment in that I drew attention to Professor Ajeet Mathur's latest publication which assesses the potential for trade between these countries which has been addressed in an earlier blog entry in our alma mater blogs.

Title : Finland-India Business Prospects 2007-2017
Author : Mathur Ajeet N.
Working Paper No. : 2007-03-01

Abstract

Finland-India Economic Relations were researched for the first time in a study that analysed mutual trade and investment potential through the lens of revealed comparative advantage and identified profitably tradable goods at 4-digit and 8-digit disaggregated levels in the standard international trade classification (Mathur, 1998). This study was made freely available on the world wide web for five years through http:// www.uta.fi/kati as part of longitudinal action research to study how small and large players would take advantage of this freebie. This paper provides initial results of a sequel study initiated in 2005 to understand what happened thereafter, whether trade grew, and to analyse how trade could diversify from identification of new opportunities for product-services linkages after the expiry of the transitional period that brought GATS into effect in 2005. Finland's share in Indian imports and exports has grown rapidly and exponentially and the prospects are vast but the potential realised by 2007 remains considerably untapped and far below comparable figures for other EU countries. This study emphasises the need for policy research on institutional barriers to design new gateways beyond an increased frequency of contact between people from the two countries. The conclusion that robust bridges could be built through tripartite fora comprising business, government and academia points to the need for new institutionalities and deepening research studies, some of which initiated as part of the Finland-India Economic Relations project, are at various stages of progress and expected to be completed during 2007-2010

I was amazed to see that no one had heard of his earlier publication in 1998 which was published by the major Finnish organisation, ETLA. This was published when Prof. Mathur was Professor at Tampere Universuty.

I do wish Finnish organisations will look to get expert advice from people who have long term experience in both countries, rather than allowing the blind to lead the blind, which is what Finns normally do when both are blind! ;-)

Iitu and my package!

Iitu and the Papaya

Last night, I collected the fruits and vegetables that had arrived direct from Thailand. I told Annikki that I would be eating into one of them for breakfast.





In the morning when I unpacked, our 16 year old cat, Iitu, was greatly intrigued by the packaging and the contents.



When I unpacked, she tried her get her claws into it. However, when she smelt the papaya, she lost interest, and decided she would watch what I did with this strange object she has never seen before. She lay down on the table in front of me, appearing bored with the proceedings, but actually she was watching me through the corner of her eyes.





I cut the fruit in a way that I got my 1/3rd share. I consumed it the way I have been taught to, scraping down to the skin with my spoon!





The taste was good although Iitu obviously disagreed.

Being rather a connoisseur of papayas, as we used to have about 400 trees of several different types growing in the factory garden, I have tasted many types which were considerably sweeter than this, especially the seedless varieties that Philip John had given me to test grow. His factory, which was next door to mine in Maddur, Karnataka, extracted the papain enzyme from the white fluid that exudes from the skin of the raw papaya when it is cut.

Papain has many uses, the largest being to clarify beer. The main supplier used to be the Belgian colony, Zaire (Congo). With political instability in that part of the world in the 70s, the Belgians turned to India, and Philip John started to commercially exploit this fruit. He gave the seeds and help to the farmers to grow this and he would send out his tappers to get the fluid. This fluid would be concentrated and the papain extracted as a white powder. Since my factory garden had plentiful water, he used to give me seeds of all the different varieties of the fruit to plant in the garden. That meant plenty of lovely papaya fruit which we used to distribute to family and friends in Bangalore and Mysore.

One pinch of papain powder dropped into a vat of beer, removes the cloudy protein in the beer, making it sparkling clear. It is also used as a meat tenderizer. It became a hit in Oulu when I introduced some elk hunters to it. They cull the elk every autumn. The meat of elk is rather tough. I gave a small quantity to one of my friends in Oulu way back in the 1980s. He, and his elk hunting friends, were amazed that the elk meat, which normally takes hours to cook, was tenderised in just 15 to 20 minutes!

Papain is also marketed in tablet form to remedy digestive problems. It is also popular in the treatment of cuts, rashes, stings and burns. Papain ointment can also be made from fermented papaya flesh, and is applied as a gel-like paste.

Papaya is a great fruit to have for breakfast because of the health value in helping digestion.

I hope I can get the Pailin folk to find us the seedless variety!

In the meantime, I will try to grow these seeds in the greenhouse, just like I am trying to with the sweet Thai tamarind, brown, and the mango seeds I got from what I tasted last week. This service of getting fresh fruits and vegetables direct from Thailand is simply great.

Maybe we will try Rambutan next week, and then if we have the courage, we will get hold of ONE Durian fruit! I do not expect to be thrilled by the smell of this fruit, but I have heard the taste is great.