Inscrutable Americans

I was looking through some old blog posts in my other blogs, and saw what went through my head after I had finished reading this book. I don’t just have a review of this book, I also have an example of how I felt after I read it…
Here is one half of that blog post. The other half is all about how this is just a passable read etc, but this part is my favourite. Written 6 years ago, I LOLed again as I read this…
Dear Brother,
My respects to our Respectable Parents! I am doing fine here. And I am thinking that you are also doing fine there. Or is somebody fining you for what you are doing? Hahahaha... I am joking only of course. I am hoping you are not minding this.
Tell our parents that I am doing only prayers and office work and not doing anything that they asked me not to do. Also please inform Mother that I am feeling well and eating well too. I am not eating in any of the outside hotels because I am getting scared that the cooks there are not Brahmins. Dearest loving Mother asked me not to eat outside food as the cook will mix non-veg food in my khichdi and do dharma-bhrashtachar. I am hoping that you are also not doing the same thing. We are the proud descendants of this great caste system and so we should keep up high morality.
Also please inform dear Mother that I am putting lot of oil on my head before going to the office. I am also preparing breakfast and dinner for your dearest respectable Jijaji. I am taking good caring of him as Mother said that taking care of respectable patidev will take me to the heavens directly. After completing these 2 months of taking good caring of your jijaji, I am feeling that I am eligible to go to the heavens. I am not calling him with his name as dearest Mother asked me not to. I am daily praying to him also after my prayers to the Lords. And I am not reading anything bad or watching those bad channels on the TV where the woman will be wearing only two pieces of cloth. I am reading only the devotional books that Mother has asked me to read after I am coming from office and cooking for dear patidev and watching only the devotional channels where all the people wear just one coloured clothing.
Please tell these to respectable Mother and please ask her from my side if I do anything more to go to the heavens. I am also having a doubt if I should be doing prayers first to your jijaji (I am feeling shy to say his name also) and then to the Lords. I am getting this doubt because I am reading in one of those devotional books, it says that 'Patiye pratyaksha daivam'. But please do not mention this to Mother as she did not tell me to read this book as this book does not follow our dharma correctly. If she is knowing that I am reading other books, she will get angry on me and come here to pull my plait and hit me on my head. So please help me, my dear brother.
But dear brother, I will tell you something only if you will promising not to tell respectable Mother. I am falling sick yesterday and so absented office. I am just hoping that my lead there does not mind my absence. Of course, I am calling him and telling him about my incapability to attend office. But I am still thinking about what he will be thinking and all this thinking has made me more sick and my head is aching and aching yesterday.
Other than the ones I am writing above in this letter, I am having nothing more to tell you.
I am hoping that you are studying well and not doing any of the sins that are mentioned in the puranas. It is our responsibility to take care of this great dharma and keep up the respect of our parents. So please do not drink anything other than buttermilk in your college canteen. I am hearing these days that there is some drink called Coca-cola and Pepsi which is tasty, but I am not knowing and I am doubting if it is good taste or not. I am asking your jijaji to get me some of this drink and will taste it. After that, I am telling you if it is a good drink for growing students like you to drink. Till then, please do not mention this to our Father that I am planning to taste this drink. Dear Father does not like such things.
And please eat only bun in your college canteen. I am seeing many people eat bun-like eatables called burgers and pizzas in Hyderabad and in our office here. But I am not knowing how good it is for you. I will do the same as above and telling you if it is good for you.
Ok dear brother. I am hoping that you are taking care of yourself now.
Leaving you,
Your Dear Respectable Sister.

My first love…

is this – My mortar and pestle.

After having gotten over the excitement of having this awesome looking pitcher, am back to being in love with this… :-D

What’s yours?

[Also cross posted at my food blog, The Meal Algorithm here]

Of journals and nostalgia…

There is something about reading old journals or dairies and nostalgia, isn’t it?
While they all take us on a good nostalgic trip, the journals also remind us of what we were back when we wrote them…

Like how I am feeling right now as I am reading my journal (blog) which I wrote when I was 25….

All the songs I liked back then which I don’t like anymore, my opinions on many important things around which have obviously changed in all these  years, the things I was attached to and which do not mean a thing to me anymore, the kind of problems I had in life back then which look like child’s play now, the things that hurt me and made me cry don’t mean the same anymore…

The 25-yr-old-me thought that -

JKR would keep writing Harry Potter novels
I would be valuing the colour-wire-bracelet that the best friend made for me in the Basic Electronics Lab when I was in college
The transistor I stole from the Electronics lab would be with me forever, for all the great conversations I had with friends after stealing it
I would not ever throw away the pyjamas that I wore when lil Bro got his job
Those huge pile of Hero pens that Dad got for me claiming he ordered them to be flown in from China
And all those memories of college that I cherished and stored away so deep in my heart
I would never get over not being in the lives of some very important friends

Yes, she thought they would stay forever where they were.

And then the Law of Impermanence happened.

5 years thence, a much-more matured me will say that these things have all passed. I don’t have any of these saved anywhere. Not the Hero pens, nor the bracelets nor the pyjamas. Or the memories related to any of these. Somewhere in all these years, something snapped. I stopped holding onto these.

This person now thinks that all these have had their time, they were much loved and cherished during their day, but it was time to let go of them. They meant a lot when they were in my heart, but then their presence in my life was to end there… That’s just till where I was to have them in life. All those things, and all those people also.

As I was reading a post I wrote back in March 2006 talking about practising The Art of Letting Go, when I felt a myriad of emotions at having to move from a place I called my home for 2 yrs, my bachelor-pad to a place that would be my home forever , I couldn’t help but think of how much I’ve changed over these years. Heck, even my style of writing, the things I write about, my language , all of these have changed.

A little DIY…

We had a lot of glass liquor bottles from the wild days (that’s what I’d like to think of them, please don’t burst my bubble, now :-)) up the attic for a long time. They would’ve been there had it not been for the idea that we could use them to store water, and get rid of the plastic bottles. So that’s what these bottles have been useful for, scaring away innocent teetotallers who visit us for the first time, giving us enough gaalis from the family for having finished off so many bottles, and enough jokes for the both of us to laugh about thinking of all these.

Dad particularly bought into this idea a lot and started collecting these bottles for me. He’d give them to me every time I visited, the empty ones, of course, and I used these to grow my plants. The bamboos and the money plants, the low-maintenance ones which look beautiful when grown in these bottles thus giving a new purpose to their existence.

After that, I’ve started asking the husband to get me liquor when he was returning from this abroad trips which would look good when I place a plant in it. It didn’t matter what liquor it contained as long as the bottle was pretty, I told him, coz I wasn’t going to have it anyways, neither was he (This guy now sticks to his good old Kingfisher, and an odd rum these days) So this time again, I gave him this request, and an ultimatum to not come home empty handed. This time he came home with this bottle.

A beautiful blue coloured tall bottle of… Vodka, something that none of us ever had. Vodka had never been a favourite, and I lost all hopes of ever getting the bottle for my poor little bamboos. But then, due to the generous contribution of some good-natured friends, this bottle became empty in no time, and I got my bottle. Its mouth turned out to be too small to host any of the plants, so its primary purpose had been to store water, until this friend gave me an idea that it could be a lamp too.

So this is what we did – Coil in a long series of LED bulbs into the bottle and plug in power to them. Not great in spreading light, but this lamp is a sure-shot attraction to the corner where I work.

Now that there is something more we can do with these bottles, I am waiting for the husband’s next abroad trip. :-D

One down!

 

So that’s one item off the bucket list! Yeah, putting an item as silly as this on The List is downright silly, I agree. But it still means a lot, for someone who grew up in a small town and could not step out of the house without male company. (Most times it was my brother and we thoroughly enjoyed that short time off from studies, but then Dad once sent his watchman along with me and my friends to the movie, he was plain scared that some harm would befall his precious daughter, you see!)

And the item was – Watching a movie alone.

And yes, I did it today! :D

Well, I watched a movie all by myself quite a while before , during my stay in Hong Kong, but then, that was HK, and I literally went every place by myself (blame the ever-busy-not-today-I-have-a-call-why-don’t-you-go-by-yourself-here-take-a-100-HKD husband!). So one afternoon I get out of the apartment to walk two blocks to the nearest movie hall showing, guess which movie – Twilight New Moon (Twilight is my only literary guilty pleasure, please forgive me!). Turns out it wasn’t just me watching the movie by myself, I was also the only one in the entire movie hall watching the movie, if you can ignore the presence of two necking teenagers in one corner of the hall, and then, they weren’t really watching the movie, right? I digress, the point of the matter is – Yes, I watched a movie all by myself, albeit in a different country.

That was when the doubt struck my head, would I be able to do a similar feat in India? With stories abuzz about how men misbehave with women if they find them alone (*touchwood* never ever happened with me) , I wanted to see how the whole experience would be. Like many other things that I wanted to do, this one also went into The Never Ending List Of Things I Would Do Someday But Will Never Do!

With the husband not being in town, and with me getting plenty of much-wanted-anticipated me-time which I am thoroughly enjoying (oh don’t ask what I’ve been doing – amidst all the work, I still found time to listen to all my pending music, watch mind-numbing TV shows, read a book or two and oh, sit pointlessly in the balcony wondering about Life, Universe and Everything, and the Answer, of course!), and with the weather today being absolutely fantastic, I decided today is the day I would watch a movie by myself, and who else by Captain Jack Sparrow it should be!

Oh, who am I kidding. I knew that the husband would never watch this one with me, and with most of my friends having watched it already, and my love for the Captain beckoning me, I had to watch this one myself!

Now, even this one did not come without its share of challenges. First, there was work, tonnes of it, which I had to finish today. And then, the damned BookMyShow site does not allow any internet bookings for movie halls in Hyd which means I was never sure if I would get the tickets at all, and the last of all, I have never stood in the movie ticket queue to buy a ticket. Yes. Never. I had a deprived childhood and teenage. (For this, blame the Dad and the Internet!)

I finally overcome all these challenges and the temptation to eat an ice cream to which I succumbed by treating myself to an Oreo Shot (just a fancy name to a whole load of vanilla ice cream with Oreos and fudge but which tasted exceptionally awesome!) and get to the movie hall, only to find that my seat was surrounded by a bunch of men, no boys - All college boys, who wondered what this single woman was doing there at all. It was certainly not what I wanted/expected out of the evening. After the movie started, I got up to see if there were vacant seats in the hall, I found that more than half the movie hall was empty (ah, the perks of movie-watching-on-weekdays! Must remember for next time)
That’s it, I found myself one solitary corner, put on my 3D glasses and enjoyed the movie - giggling to myself at Jack’s jokes and hugging myself when the objects on the screen flew towards me. And boy, what fun it was! And this is just the beginning, am gonna watch many movies like this by myself! :D

And now am back, typing this as a reminder to how I felt when I did something for the first time, and getting ready for a night full of work!

A new start…

Its going to be 6 years that I started blogging. Mostly casual blogging, I have had my ups and downs, bloggers blocks, and many many blogs. Each of the blog urls and blogger nicknames would be based on what the flavour in my life was, at that point. So I have had blogs as juvenile as having the word ‘Smiling’ in them, to as weird as ‘Chocolate’ and also some related to Ayn Rand!

All of them were personal blogs, I’ve written about various aspects of my life, about various stages I was going through then and about all the people I’ve come across during those phases. And they were not for public consumption :)

After all these years, I’ve felt the need to have an open blog, where I could/would write about what I love that day , the song of the season, the crushes I am having and in general the different moods. Like a expanded version of my FaceBook wall :)

And here it is…