What’s up everyone? How has everyone been?I have been good,I have been realizing lately,contrary to my own opinions about my life having a sad pattern, about how God constantly keeps sidelining me and blessing everyone else and about how every single incident is somehow just targeted at me and my family , is really not so! I am actually a lucky person, touchwood.I am watched over by the same man who watches over some of those people I was earlier very envious ofthat same big man up there also fumbles at times,in the sense, he sometimes tests a chosen few a lot ,seriously a lot.While he lets others escape with a few bad hair days now and then.And also, He is the same person who lets a Manu Sharma, a Bitti Mohanty, a Kasab not get what they truly deserve- torture and death. The news on TV of late is just plain depressing.Someone is getting raped,someone is getting bludgeoned to death because they just happened to wander in the way of angry young spoilt men, somewhere farmers are committing suicide because the government completely forgot about them in the midst of their power and money struggles and an entire city’s tolerance lies at stake because of a certain new poisonous breed of politicos wanting to create internal rifts between people by bullying and vandalism.Yes the last one was Raj Thackarey and his gang of nincompoops,namely the MNS.In the latest of his brazen acts,he has now issued threats to SBI to stop recruiting non-marathis.I mean ,what is that demented guy upto?Is he trying to snatch Mumbai away from India?Since when has Mumbai belonged just to Maharashtra.And if he does want to cleanse the state of non-marathis,I suggest he start with Bollywood and with the politicians too.Are we really going backwards ?I am kinda scared ,but I have to admit I have this lurking fear that one day India might just be ruled by the likes of RSS,Pramod Muthaliks and Raj Thackerays and the people will just be slaves again,albeit of a different kind.

Anyway,let me move on to other subjects before I really let my skepticism get the better of me.In other news,I have one more trip coming up this week.One a trip for ‘work’ and the other to my dad’s native town to attend my cousin’s marriage.And wow,speaking of marriage, there are about 500 couple tying the knot the next week alone.Yes,true.And may be this is the figure in just my city.I have been asked this a lot of times too now, by over-inquisitive aunts,uncles and the likes.I am going to refrain from answering anything here for now. I am very hooked to playing ‘Sorority Life’ on facebook.I have never been into any game,okay wait,I used to play Mario when I was in school.But that’s about it.And occasionally I would play ‘PAIN’ on J’s PS3,but I seriously suck at all those hard-core,gun-toting ,bloodshed video games.I lose hand and button sense co-ordination.SL is not a game as per real gamers.It is the chick version of Mafia wars is what I read somewhere and I am fine with it,thank you very much.I have been jumping levels,fighting biatches and stealing their money and buying stuff.I do not know when this excitement will wear off though.

I have been good otherwise, still determined on my goal to think positive and not to bring myself down.I know one there is a romantic angle to being depressed, you know,you can write some tear jerking blogs, poems and all that, but I would rather want to be not depressed than write well when sad. I have been thinking of doing a blog on 3 of my most favorite products from my own make-up bag, and I will but I just need to get over my laziness.I will leave all of you with one of my favorite pictures of my favorite dog in the whole wide world ,Otto.I love him to death.

I think my favorite holiday is Christmas.It is such a happy time.I have of course not celebrated Christmas at home, since we are Hindus, but nothing has kept me from loving this holiday just so much.I went to a convent school and we would have nice celebrations just on the last day of the school year,before our Christmas vacation.That used to be a happy time.We would do skits, sing carols, would come in colorful dresses and the school would distribute candies.Then after all that it would be 10 days of fun at home,sleeping late,no home-work, no studying for a while.

I have also seen enough movies to further my love for this special holiday.The snow covered houses,the lights,the christmas tree, the presents,Santa ,Rudolph and the good food and wine.

I had the best Christmas last year,and I would once again like to thank Mary and LeRoy for having me over and everyone else who was there,it was just one of my most happiest times.

So this time,I am not going to be there, but I still wanted to have a wishlist( I hope ’someone’ is reading this ) and perhaps if I have been good this year, santa will somehow make sure I get these not-so-expensive presents.The joys of being honest and greedy tee hee!

Okay, so here goes.

1. It is but natural that I want my make-up needs given my love for it now.This is what I want

                             

.Have heard a lot about Urban Decay and this set looks good,it has the primer which is a big hit, the eye pencil and a lipstick and a gloss.

2. This brand is one of my new and cool find.A bit pricey but they package their products in a very cool way,I kind of like that a lot more.But I think one could also get the same products in other brands,and also way cheaper.Anyway still,I would like to have this for reasons best known to me.

3. I hope by now it is very clear,I have some serious make-up addiction now! This Lorac gift set looks very tempting and the clutch is super-cute too.

4.  I have heard very good reviews about Philosophy from Andrea  and I think this would make for an ideal gift on any occasion.

5.  I am just beginning to discover etsy now, and I so wish I had found this before.It is an amazing site for anyone who loves hand-made art and craft work,vintage clothing and home decor.I highly recommend it to you Shalaka if you still have not checked it out.I like almost everything on here,but this clutch grabbed my attention and so before I get distracted by more stuff,I shall put this down on my wishlist.This has a pretty design and would fit well on formal occasions.

 And also this tote ,I think it will be a good bag to carry around more and look hep too.

6. Look at this! such a lovely dress and it is by an Indian girl,am so darn happy.I like the way it falls and it looks Bohemian-isque to me.I like such cuts a lot.

7. And this too! By the same girl,she is gorgeous,look at her, and so talented.

So I get it,I cannot get everything.And I wanted to keep my list even shorter,but then I got carried away.And I feel like I have been a good enough girl,so that gifts can be expected on other occasions as well

The holiday season has almost begun,I am in good spirits and that is what counts for now.

Love to all!

So our day started at 6 in the morning on a Monday.My mom wanted to make us breakfast, but as luck usually gives us the slip, it so happened that we ran out of cooking gas right that moment and in normal conditions, my mind would have looked at it as an ominous sign of things to come further along the day but I suppressed that then.I had an interview, so naturally it was a big day,more so for my parents.Even if I tried to play it down a tad and act like it was just another day,it would be difficult to not get affected by the huge deal being made of it.We wanted this to work out bad.But I have taken a decision,to look up,to not count single stray incidents as an indicator of being singled out and targeted.I am trying my best to think anything could happen and we just have to take it in our stride.

So anyway, after a cup of tea which our apartment’s handy man was able to quickly run and bring from the nearby tea shop in our thermos, we headed to the airport.I always love these father-daughter times so much.We catch up,we never run out of conversations,we laugh a lot-my dad has a very sarcastic sense of humor, but he is also very observant,a trait I believe has been generously passed down to me. We have the best laugh out of situations which would pass as seemingly ordinary.This journey together is more than a year after we had made a similar trip in the US in the summer of 2008,when we had to fly to Michigan and we had to change two flights, with a lot of stop over time in Atlanta.We were enjoying strolling through the airport,looking at shops,eating some good food which I treated him to from my measly savings,and just being so much at peace in our little corner of the huge crowd of people.The bhubaneswar airport did not set the same backdrop,but the feelings,the emotions were the same.I was going to have a long day ahead of me,one that was important and one that my parents looked at as a possible turning day.

So after a sandwich in the cafeteria and a cup of tea,we boarded our one hour long flight to Kolkata and booked a cab to reach our destination.And you know how you have heard,life can change in a matter of seconds.Well,damn right! I got out of the cab assuming I had my one hand-bag belonging safely tucked with me,when I suddenly realized I had left behind my mobile.I tried groping inside the bag,which seemed too unnecessarily big then, and looked at the street,and the cab had already disappeared from view in a matter of minutes!

So there it was, that ominous sign and I felt I was caving in to it.I felt terribly sad, not because of losing a handset,but because I felt we had made it this far and I just had to lose it.I went with a very rattled mind to my test and interview.But by the time it was over,my dad and me had come to terms with the morning shake up.I mean,it was not the loss,it was more like the timing of it and the realization that something can happen in a matter of seconds too.But well well, we decided not to fret and we had a lot of time to kill before our train back home.I was already aching to be back home,in my own home,lay in my bed and feel the warmth of being in one’s home.

After spending some time in the mall,where I did spend a lot by my usual restrained shopping self,we took a  cab back to the railway station.The day was finally giving way to a sense of satisfaction that okay,if we could over-look that one incident,everything went smoothly.We were quiet for the most on the dusty cab ride to the station.The dust, the traffic,the chaos made my heart very restless and I felt like it was an impossible task to drive on these roads anymore.This from someone who would whizz past speeding vehicles on busy roads on her moped.Life does make you change honestly.And this was the kind of change which I did not at all regret.I will never be able to drive on these roads again with the same confidence ,period.

the station was a mix of a lot of smells-sweat,heat,the humidity,the general depressing air,the rush of people,the lack of space to walk without walking over people laying all over the platform,the smell of urine wafting out of badly maintained urinals.I felt a little horrified because yes I knew this has always been the case with public transport places in india, but to be suddenly re-living it was unsettling.It was the sinking feeling that it is my reality now.I wanted to cry,but I then remembered not to make a big deal of these circumstances.My dad and mom and a million other people can do it and so can I.

We sat together and my dad shared stories of his days when he had got into the wrong train and how he had to jump into a field after pulling the chain,run to the road,get a lift from a motorcyclist , stories of how he would have to walk distances we would normally cover by train-it was such a fun time looking at his life and picturing a young dad doing all that.We had a very horrible dinner at the 24/7 restaurant,it was cold,tasteless and on top of that,one had to stand and eat with people jostling you from all sides.ughh!

But it was 9′o clock finally,all I had wanted was to board that damn train,go home and hold ma, and just flop into the bed.My bed.

at 4 in the morning next day, we finally had come back to our city and we walked back home and felt like we had the day and its events behind us now.All that was retained was a very quality father-daughter time and some very comfortable silences to soak in the experience.

For a daughter there is no one like her father.

Every other ‘man’ who  walks into her life , just does not treat her right.He is either cheating on you, or demanding to be left out of your personal shit, or is ready to shit on you and run off,or thinks you are too weak for crying if he shat on you, or he does not listen or even if he does, he screens out the stuff that really means something to you.

After a father, there is no one who quite gets it how special we are,and how we need to be loved!

boring and emotional crap- but it is not far from the truth

Want to review a few books I liked immensely and are not necessarily popular, but may be I could do my bit of putting the authors out there!

 

But first,need to tackle my fever,my scratchy throat and a whirlwind trip.

love to everyone out there who is going through enough shit ,I hope everything is better sometime soon!

Hello Y’all!

This is in keeping with my new mission: to stop getting worked up ,to stop thinking way too many days into the future and just to stop worrying in general.I now have two grey hair and I hate it.It could be my stress.I want to change but may be not entirely.I want to try to curb the negative thought processes.I have wake up calls about this a lot often now, and I have tried earlier, and I will try again.

What’s been happening? Well nothing much, but every single day life is changing a bit, advancing somewhere, or even if it is not, there are new things I learn and try to clutch on to tightly so that when I am in a bad state,I can focus on the learnings and the big picture.I think one of my favorite terms is ‘big picture’, I do use it a lot!

I am going to start a new novel, my first ever Kafka, ‘America’.It is a suggestion by daddy dear and I think he knows what sort of books I would enjoy reading because I feel more or less we are alike.Speaking of daddy, I think he has become one of my best friends.We talk a lot,share a lot of experiences, moments,a lot of laughter and affection and we also enjoy hanging out together.When I was younger, we would always argue and fight and indulge in playful banter,that would sometimes verge on the angry exchange of cheeky remarks.But now, we have called a happy truce, not that we were warring, but now it is just different and I have all the fun and playfulness of before, but we have much more too.Yest I went out with him and ate paani-puri and I enjoyed eating the street side stuff after 2 long years.

I have set a new unprecedented good record of sleeping on time and having a good 7 hours of sleep and waking up early,fresh and happy.It makes me feel super good because I have never had good sleeping habits and I might have shift between patterns but for now, this suits me a lot.

I make good poha these days, ma is damn impressed with the little survival culinary skills I picked up along the way.I want to make them some more stuff I learnt and I do indeed cook decently well.I do not know a whole lot,but I think I can manage pretty well with whatever I know.

I am very excited about ’some’ things, ‘we’ are together and a team.

I have been talking to one of my oldest school friends, Swati, almost everyday,I mean chatting.She is such a nice,simple girl, with a lot of good thoughts and absolutely malice-free.I like her very simple way of thinking and it makes me wonder how would I have been if I did not have such a highly  complicated life and all its paraphernalia?Hmm well, may be I would be different, and I think I like who I am,but I admire her a lot. Bless her heart! I also enjoy talking to shals, we randomly scribble stuff, just whatever comes to the mind and get an answer or response which is exactly what one wants to hear at that time.Bless you heart too Shalaka(if you read it )!

I am not going to worry and am going to listen to the playlist J made for me almost last year and start my book!

much <3

My childhood has no special pointers or flagstones.It was like every other childhood I guess.Nice, innocent , loved and a one-time event.But sadly, I have very less record of it.I grew up like every other child born in the early 80s into a typical middle class Indian family, where a camera was a gross luxury.So it just quietly glided by, and was over,atleast superficially, by the time I could even realize its special place in the chronological events of life.

Some of the things I can remember,if I think about it, are the things one would not normally associate with childhood.I guess I am precocious and have acquired a pattern of thinking I now very firmly associate with my family.The trait of analyzing and over-doing it.I remember the various rented houses we moved in and out of all through till we settled into a house for one of the longest interval of time ,4 years.I remember the impact of some of those houses on the undaunting skyline of my childhood.Looking back now, it seems as though houses fell into two distinct categories ,the ones people like us rented and the ones which were owned.And there was a class demarcation between them.All the rented houses looked and felt similar,varying mostly because they had different owners we would deal with over the course of time.I feel like from an early age, it was somehow beat into my system that we belonged to a different species, the ’middle class’ species.We thought and we acted differently.We were always under the scanner and

we were very responsible not just for ourselves but for a lot of other people and external events.It’s like we knew we would forever have to take the long road to reach that place and position where most others had already reached,either by dint of acquired fortune or lineage or by sheer good luck and alignment of their stars. A lot of things were somehow instinctively realized.And it was not entirely untrue.

I remember our sea green vespa scooter.It was one of the first few possessions ,in a series of other worldly goods we managed to gather, to show we were slowly climbing that social ladder of acceptance and ’success’.My convent education , my family’s emphathetic stress on education as the means to getting out and reaching for that big middle-class dream , the hordes of books laying about in our house, the need to wander away and not be able to commit one hundred to the moment owing to the soul’s need to dream on-were all just silent indications of the one most

singularly powerful and subtle existential realizations- that of our belonging to a class that

has its conditions and its exceptions.

I grew up listening to these ever present quiet reverberations.They would bounce off walls and thought processes, off anything that basically posed a challenge by means of trying to bring one out of its conditionings.It made an impressionable dent in my young inchaote mind.It struck me that being in the middle was the worst deal.You could deal with belonging to the lower strata of society, for then no one bothered you with their expectations of you.The higher class always had it easy,atleast so it was made out to me.But being in the middle meant you were forever wanting to get away from being where you were, but never quite fully alienating yourself from your class and at the same time never quite happy with wherever you had reached.There was that restlessness

in which you seethed inside,determined as if you were the only one going upstream.

My family has always been intellectually bent, and education has been of utmost importance.I think the trait of a slightly askewed sense of forward thinking is also as prominent as the paradoxical knowledge of the boundaries and limitations imposed on the thinking.It is this conflicting sense of wanting to think different and having to forcibly exist inside the confines of one’s class and its strong hold on on the mind that have severely dominated my growing up.Be

it always maintaining the ‘good student’ status all through school, or getting good marks in exams, for not making the cut in science and math talent searches, for having to get into a good college, having to take the very important decision of deciding between just two options as a future career.Yes, that was it.Two big options.

That was not all it.And if I had to be brutally honest,which I am most of the times, I would say I belong to my roots,fully and gracefully.I adhere to my family’s ways of the world, a world which is not necessarily punctuated by important milestones ,but the one that has its silent,uncelebrated awakenings, learnings and soul-searchings.I could not possibly have grown up anywhere, without feeling that knotty feeling in my stomach,without losing a certain aspect of my personality and compromising on learning the ‘art’ to have a good life.I am happy where I came from,I am happy I am armed with a heightened sense of things,I feel good that everyday objects dance in a new light in my eyes,thankful for the fact that I do not reduce the gift of really looking to over-looking and for the fact that in my mind I see beyond the horizon,really beyond..

it.

Just wanted to record it, finished reading ‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Very good, like her description of things, simple yet strong and deep.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

just a talk with my girlfriends last night,made me realize something which I knew all along,but on vague terms and unsupported grounds.We were talking about how difficult it is for us Indians, esp we who belong to the great Indian middle class, to break free from the societal grip.We are very tightly meshed with our network of family and extended family and any attempt to try to do something which would involve colossal repercussions, is over-whelming.In contrast, American society is a little lax in those matters.I ,having lived,in both societies and cultures,albeit a shorter stint with American society,take the liberty to express what I think I observed.There the hold that society has on you is weaker, it is present,but it is definitely feebler.It let’s the individual ,just by the way it is constructed or because of the power of an individual’s refusal to let society interfere, have the final say on personal affairs. Is that what the enlightened scholars call a highly individualistic society when they speak of the ill effects of the West? Well, to be perfectly honest, I would rather take my own decisions,on matters that affect my own life and disgruntle a few with the knowledge that I am doing the right thing, rather than succumb to the collective gasps of society.I would want to live in a society which is compassionate to the individual’s need to be left alone, not necessarily translating into loneliness.I would respect that position in society more than just being a forgettable, stereotypical ,just another sinister force in an even bigger sinister clump.

Anyway, I had decided to blog,just blog about anything that came to my mind as I wrote.I started watching ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, now this movie I love.A) I have a sentimental attachment, this was one of the few movies we had recorded while we were living in England,long long back and used to watch in on our VHS-VCR and B) I love the concept of the movie, the spirit and yes I have blogged about this before,so am not going to say the same exact points. and C) I have sung the song by Madonna ‘Get into the Groove’ a lot of times on karaoke nights in America!

I have discovered the soothing fresh smell of cucumber enriched body lotions.It instantly awakens my senses and smells so soft and fresh.Not that I was not a fan,but I used to be so enamoured by the options available back in Raleigh,I had decided to try everything atleast once.

I am also getting a little hooked to facebook,I have begun liking the silly apps, the interface and the general look and feel of facebook.

It’s very hot here, sticky and humid.I get very jealous when I here of my Raleigh friends talking about the wonderful Fall weather and all.Even when they complain about the constant cloudy and rainy days, I feel insanely sad,like I have lost something very inseparable from me.I miss Otto so damn much.I cannot tell anyone how much I love that dog.. Everything else is okay in my land.I am enjoying my time off from the very responsible tasks for now, but I am sure will get back to it someday.I also just wanted to say,Thank you God for John, he is extra good and sweet and kind.And he has good hair