To be or not to be

So I was reading this article tonight, in which the writer was talking about good-looking women being ogled at on the roads.

She said, "Do you know what is worse than being ogled at? Not being ogled at."

Funny and unfortunately true at times :)

Being Parents!

Recent conversations that have been taking place between my parents and me.

Me - "The computer crashed?? What did you do???”

Dad/Mom - “I didn’t do anything!!!! Apne aap ho gaya."

Me (on phone with Dad) - "Hello, technical support here. How can I help you today?"

Dad - "Computer is not working. Only a line flashes over and over."

Me - "Okay... describe to me exactly what you see on the screen."

"Now you move the mouse and bring the cursor here in the address field. Okay. Now click here. No. Try again. No. Again. Okay, now type the email id. Very good! Now click on send. See, its not difficul at all."

"No Shalu, don't help them! Let them try to open their inbox themselves."

Before my Mom and Dad headed out for their first international travel:

Me to Dad- "The atm in S'pore will give you S'pore dollars irrespective of what atm machine you go to"

Dad-"XYZ was saying there are SBI atms there, even they won't give Indian rupees?" :-|

Me to Mom- "Always stay with Dad, don't go anywhere without telling him. Anywhere you go, decide a place, you both will come back to, in case you lose each other."

"Wear comfortable shoes all the times. You’ll be doing a lot of walking."

"So did you like the hot air balloon ride?"

"Always have a valid ticket when you travel in bus or train."

"Donot throw any wrappers/waste anywhere except dustbins."

"Mom, always keep some money on you."

"What is my mobile number? Do you remember? You have to put +91 before my mobile number."

"Whenever you go out, carry a piece of paper with your hotel address, okay? Always!"

"If you get lost, ask a passer-by for directions, okay? People there are very helpful."

"Carry a bottle of water along. Don’t buy canned drinks. They are too sweet - bad for your health."

Me to Mom - "You should learn to be independent – learn to take the bus and train by yourself. Look at Aunty X. She saw all of S'pore by herself! Why can’t you do that?"

And finally the most important one, that we could not do without, and they can’t do without either.

“Don’t worry, I'm here.”

First your parents bring you up. And then it's time for you to bring them up.

They say- life runs a full circle. So true!

Freedom

When I get older, I will be stronger..They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag!

Is waving flag a symbol of freedom?

Not really. I don't think so.

It's freedom in confined space. Flag can flutter but it will always be tied to a post.

Our lives are just like waving flags. We're free but within certain boundaries which brings another question in my head- what is freedom?

So while searching (googling, okay!) I came across this which explains the meaning of the song Waving Flag.

One year

29th June2009, it was a important day for me- I started working.

One year later, I am thinking how my life has changed in this one year.

While international community broke away from financial crisis, I got a nice place for myself in Mumbai (ok, rented!). I got my first credit card. I lived in Manhattan for a month. I bought a Blackberry. I went to London and Scotland. I paid taxes. I started writing this blog. I got a LV and Jimmy Choos. I met many new people and left a few friends behind. I was engaged. Anish moved to Delhi which meant long distance relationship for the first time in seven years. AND my neighbor's 4 year old daughter called me Aunty :((

Dad got a little sentimental, he said there are three big days that come in every parent's lives- first, when their babies arrive, second when their kids leave home for first time. We encourage them knowing that its only a beginning, and then the day comes when the kids become independent and it dawns upon us that our little babies no longer need us.

Then he said- "meri life mein aisa din kab aayega, ab to poora saal ho gaya Sonia tujhe kaam karte, fir bhi mera hee khoon choosti hai!"

One word answer to this question my daddy-dearest- never.

You're not so lucky after all ;)

Silence

Sometimes when we are away from the hustle and bustle of life, we get a moment to hear our own heartbeat and breathing.

Up in the hills, as clouds descended upon the peaks (or so they say!) and drifted towards no man's land, I could hear my own breathing.
And nothing else.

Sound of silence, is it?!

Far away some bird was whistling and Sahil was impressed :)
Nothing was moving, nothing dared to make any sound.

I thought about many people, I thought about many places, I thought about many questions, I thought about many answers...

What is it about silence that invokes thoughts?

Swim

I decided to go for a swim in the evening.

I felt very sleepy through the course of the day.

I thought of canceling the swimming plans and heading back home and going to bed early.

I told myself, "Yeah right! As if I will sleep early".

I overcame laziness and decided to stick to my swimming plans.

I called my friend and went for a swin at the club house.

I swam (read played around in the water!) for about 45 mins.

I was really tired and very thirsty.

I was happy with the workout and all the extra-calories I burned.

I decided to treat myself to a nice and healthy dinner at Subway.

I went to Hiranandani.

I got distracted by all the restaurants.

I almost walked into Papa Jones, but then decided against it when I remembered I was there to eat at Subway.

I decided to (only) check out south Indian restaurant Sankalp.

I was amazed at the variety of things on menu and wondered why didn't I come there.

I spotted garlic butter idli and masala medu vada and thought of trying it once.

I was all excited and placed an order for it.

I waited eagerly for the dish to arrive. Gossiping with my friend kept me busy.

I was very impressed with the way food looked.

I loved the taste.

I managed to finish the dish and called for one more serving.

I realized that I just undid the effects of my evening swim.

I felt bloated and fat.

I thunked my head against the table.

I resolved to head straight to home after swim from next time.

Pure-Vanilla

A few days ago my sister sent me a blonde joke. It is the best joke I have ever heard. It goes like this..

One day a high class blonde girl was walking by the river side with her friend when she spotted a crocodile.She turned to her friend and screamed, "Look! Lacoste!" =))

The other day I had gone to Haiko for some weekend shopping when I picked up a new nail paint. Very nice soothing beige color. I came home, kept everything down, switched on the tv, got comfortable and painted my nails. I was doing this girly-girl-blow-on-the-fingernails and admiring my nails when I saw that nailpaint was called "pure vanilla."

I wondered, so they've started making scented nail paints now. Nice!

Surprised that I was, I brought the little bottle close to my nose and sniffed it.

No! It was the same old acetonish smell. It wasn't anything like vanilla!

I saw another nail paint bottle sitting pretty on my dressing table, it was called berry-licious. I never tried to taste it.

It was the shade which they named 'pure vanilla'. Ofcourse! What was I thinking :-/

I guess I had my blonde moment that day. But in my defence I have never seen vanilla :)

T-shirt

So, I am at Palladium and see a pretty girl checking out clothes at Vera Moda. She’s wearing a white t-shirt which had this written across the front:

ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO!

Lol, interesting isn’t it!

D

The very mention of it makes you roll your tongue. Thirst suddenly hits you.

Tequila was the first alcoholic drink that I ever had. The thrill of breaking the good-girl's-code who doesn't drink was first broken when I had a swig from a 60ml shot glass. It burnt my insides.

We were in college then, and in our innocence, even a single shot of tequila was equivalent to more than just a drink... it was an expression of freedom; of breaking the rules... (something we'd seen our dads do) and that was... to have a drink. That's how you know you're now a grown up... you can drink.

Ever since then, you've had the most amazing of memories associated with that magical drink. Of course, some other friends have joined mid-way; there’s the sophisticated looking wine, there's the rum & coke, there’s the beer, there's the ill-fated too-many-vodkas-in-one-night, there's the whisky which you hated the taste of initially...

Of our most special memories (since we turned 21, that is), quite a few are those when you raised a shiny little glass over the top of your head with some salt on the back of your palm and a lime slice between the fingers.

There was that late friday evening when you wished to greet the beginning of a weekend with a couple of tequila shots at the local adda with your closest friends.

There was that hot thursady afty when you wanted to relax with a chilled pint of beer.

There was that lady’s special wednesday night when you could spill it all out with vodka and the girl gang.

There was that fine silent night when you wished to drown someone else’s existence with a glass of rum and coke.

And then there was that night when you celebrated with ordering for a Antiquity for each of your friends.

We all might have the idea of good or bad, right or wrong, happiness or sadness, celebration or grief, relaxation or anxiety, freedom or constraints. Irrespective of that,what matters to me is the feel, it’s the light-head-feeling that keeps pulling me back to it. I drink to get drunk..

PS: Mummy ko nahi hai pata :D

Snow

I am in London. I have been here for the last 8 days. I had awesome fun with Anish.

Anish lied to his parents and came to London with me so that we could see the place together. He had to lie. These days its jhoothe ka bol bala, sachhe ka muh kala :D

London is a nice place or it was nice ‘cause Anish was there. One fine day when he was walking me to work he asked me “Would you like to stay in London?” I said, “I would, if you’re with me.” Now that he’s gone back and I have one more day here I realized I don’t want to live here. London is lonely and cold, weather-wise and otherwise.

I have never seen snowfall, I was hoping to see some when we went to Edinburgh, which is beautiful, but it was plain cold, chilly, dry but no snow. I was packed- two layers on legs, 3 layers on top, cap, gloves and overcoat, how the women out there roam around in shorts is beyond my understanding :-/

This reminds me of a sweetest little conversation I had with sweetest little girl, Sanjana, about a year ago. So, I used to ask Raju Bhaiya if she remembers me after I came back from Reston. I wanted to speak to Sanjana but she wouldn’t talk on phone. She would put the phone on her ear and listen quietly but wouldn’t utter a word.

That had become the routine. On one such one sided conversations, Sanjana took the phone from Bhaiya and ran away. I could hear her little footsteps on wooden floor. Bhaiya picked up other line and said that she’s taken the phone away and she’s staring out of the window. He said he’ll call me in sometime if it gets disconnected and went after Sanjana. I heard Bhaiya screaming, “Sanju beta bua se baat nahi karni?”

There was complete silence from her side and here I was repeating one line endlessly: “Sanjana baby what happened?”

Then the best thing happened. I heard Sanjana whisper into the phone-loud and clear

“Look Son-bua….it’s snowing….”

Bored!

This time, last year...

I was busy working on my DDP. Well, not really :D let’s be honest, I was trying hard to find time for “Stochastic and Population Balance Model for Bistable Genetic Switch” (Wow I still remember the name of my project, pat on the back!). I was super busy with my friends, going out with them for movies, never ending dinner and drinks sessions, pictionary, bowling, go karting, ccd, coffee shack...

There were so many people in Bombay, in h10, in insti that I was always short of time.

This time, this year…

Lots of my friends have left Bombay. And on this particular weekend Anish is in Delhi, my room-mates have gone home, Chinky is in Chennai, my brother has quizzes (and he wants to study! What’s with him and quizzes I don’t understand), Shikha is home, Jain’s busy with her *friend*, Dola is in NY, Bhangi is attending some wedding, Gauri’s busy house hunting, Viks, for a change decided to spend the weekend in Bhopal, Chhi and Sahil are traveling. Sobo trip won’t happen this weekend- Uncle Aunty are busy with few things.

So this weekend it’s just me- I was happy. How often do you get such a chance- I thought! Time to tick mark things from my girly-stuff list and indulge. Hair spa. Facepack with cucumber slices. Threading. Manicure. Pedicure. Body massage. Trying out new makeup. Watching SATC.

Done all that and it’s not even 3pm on Saturday. It's annoying how suddenly I have so much time in the weekend, and no idea what to do with it! My usual weekend can be described very well by Circuit’s expression when he saw Munna Bhai’s room “shuru hote he khatam ho gaya.” In a typical weekend if I manage to catch up on my sleep, I consider it achievement.

Which is why this weekend is really weird. Time just wouldn’t pass! I made myself nice healthy dinner- egg bhurjji , bread, and kesar milk (yes, I call it dinner), cleaned my wardrobe, finished two episodes of Gossip Girl went to sleep.

Sunday morning, made myself pyaaz ke parathe, watched a movie on youtube, chaatofied facebook, spoke to family, went to gym, slept for two hours and its 6pm. I could’ve gone out for shopping but didn’t feel like stepping out in the heat. Stared out of the window.

Stared out of the window.

Stared out of the window. And some more staring :-|

I was bored.

I realized that when we say we have no time for something, we're just bullshitting ourselves. If we really want to do something, we'll always have time for it. I guess that holds for boredom too. If you really want to get bored, if getting bored is important to you, if you truly value boredom, you will surely find one way or another to achieve it.

Saw some tv and like a good girl, got into my comforter at 10 in the night to get up fresh and relaxed for Monday morning. Never have I ever looked forward to a Monday morning like this!!

FRIENDS

Ross: What is Chandler Bing's job?
Rachel: Oh! Oh gosh, it has something to do with numbers.
Monica: And processing!
Rachel: Oh, well... and he carries a briefcase!
Ross: Ten seconds. You need this or you lose the game.
Monica: It's, um, it has something to do with transponding.
Rachel: Oh, oh, oh, he's a transpons... transponster!
Monica: That's not even a word!

FRIENDS fans will know this. While watching this episode tonight I was wondering how true this phenomenon is. How many times have you been asked about your work?

I am faced with certain few questions every time I meet my old friends and cousins. My answers are usually less than five words for each question. A sample conversation goes like this:

Someone: “So, how’s your work going?”

Me: “It’s going good. I love it.”

Someone: “I heard you’re in bank?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Someone: “You’re a graduate in chemical engineering, right, what are you doing at the bank?”

Me: “Yes I know, I didn’t want to go in core chemical side.”

Someone: “Are you manager at bank?”

Me: “No, I am analyst, junior most post.”

Someone: “Which bank?”

Me: “Deutsche bank.”

Someone: “What!?!”

Someone: “What is your work about?”

Silence. There’s no way, I know, to answer this question in few lines and explain them what I do. After I say a few things about my work, I’m cut…

Someone: “So MBA over?" (MBA? Who's doing an MBA? If you mean Masters in Chemical Engineering, yeah, that's over.)

And so on…

After one such conversation it struck me - instead of being glad that most of them at least know vaguely that I have abandoned engineering and plunged into banking, I go "What buggers! They're supposed to be my close friends and they don't even know what I do!" without wondering for a moment if I know for sure what the hell they do.

I mean face it, your friends, your cousins... do you really know what they do? I’ll confess- I don't. I mean I know some are in IT, some are in banks, some are doing their MBA degrees, some are doing random things, but if you ask me exactly what they do, which company they are in, what their designation is, what they are studying, I have no clue most of the time!

When you become friends with someone, the first thing you find out is what they do. The closer you get to your friends, the less it matters what they do, and after a while, it stops mattering at all. And it comes naturally.

Conclusion: That’s why Chandler doesn’t bother whether Monica and Rachel knew his occupation, because he knows they are his close FRIENDS. J

Mails and Emails

So, I was checking my 100 years old Archies polybag. It’s got some greeting cards and letters (these are too valuable and too important for me and like a child I refuse to discard these). I exchanged these letters with few of my friends and cousins from the days when there was no concept of emails. This was about 12 years ago! Omg suddenly I feel old :-|

Then came the www revolution and we all started emailing. I had decided that I’ll keep writing letters because they had their own charm. I remember I exchanged my email id with my cousin and friends through letters. But soon fingers became too lazy to hold a pen and comfortable and soothing sound of tapping weirdly arranged keys took over. I used to wonder why the alphabets are arranged in this random fashion, why not our good old ABCD sequence where we all know that D will come before E and not under E.

Soon everybody got email ids and letters just vanished. Sometimes I miss the non-internet days and feel sad that only envelopes I open these days are credit card bills, phone bills, electricity bills :-|

I used to wait eagerly for postman and the sight of envelope in the letter box would bring an anxious smile on my face. Sigh!

I remember the transition from letters to emails. I used to check my inbox (@rediffmail) once in two weeks and I paid Rs.40 each time I opened it. In the beginning it was fun. Emails were long and descriptive and delightful. I would pay Rs 10 extra to take the printout so that I could show it to my parents. Over the years they started getting shorter and shorter. I actually preferred them longer. Then people who did not know us started emailing us. People who were trying to sell you online university degrees, or drugs to enhance body parts your gender doesn't have in the first place, or promises to transfer gazillions of dollars to your account on no account, or plead for help from 8-year-old Ethiopian orphans who never grew a day since the early nineties when they first started emailing us.

We hated these emails because they were not sent to us - these were not personalised. These were stupid forwards sent from the whole damn world to the whole damn world. We deleted it all. Then came gmail and the spam disappeared. So for all those jobless blokes who checked email just to delete spam and hence have-something-to-do, gmail was of no use.

But we continue checking. I am not even sure why we do it. I highly doubt that it’s in the hope that someone someday will write us a nice long email meant only for us. If we do get a personalized email and we reply, and we get a reply to our reply, and after that, there is not much to say anymore. But isn’t that why we were checking our email in the first place – to receive something meant for us? Didn't we delete like everything else??

We keep checking our email. Day in day out. At home, at work, during the weekdays, during the weekends. From our PCs, from our laptops, from our phones. We keep checking. Several email accounts. Several times a day. Like maniacs. And if we can’t, we get restless.

Can someone tell me - what the heck are we checking for? :-/

B'day Gift

Conversation with a friend over sms:

Friend: What do you want for your birthday?
Happy and content me: That’s very nice of you. But I want nothing, just world peace :D
Friend: Not even shoes?!?
Forgetful me: OMG, yes..how could I forget shoes. Ofcourse shoes! I want shoes!
Friend: Mother Teresa in Jimmy Choos ;)
Me: :D

N things I hate about him

• My sister loves him more than she loves me.
• He is short tempered while driving.
• He claims to be a cook but he can make only one dish.
• He forgets our anniversary and other’s birthdays.
• He folds my pillows.
• He never forgets to say “Babies are so dumb” whenever he sees one.
• In the last 7 years that I have been friends with him, I have told him about all of my one million crushes, but he has only told me of one.
• He's smarter than me.
• He sings the wrong lyrics of hindi songs.
• He's photogenic, camera just loves him.
• He never turns up anywhere on time.
• He’s got a Mac.
• He works late hours.
• He converses in only two lines on weekends: "So, what's the plan?" and "So, what's the scene?".
• He refuses to part ways with his blue shorts.
• He likes Federer more than me.
• He keeps insisting that Kaka is gay, just to bug me.
• He digs his nose deeper when I tell him not to.
• He wants to blacken my eyes so that I look like a panda.
• He keeps losing his phones. Phones just slip away from his pockets/hands.
• He doesn't get haircuts on time.
• He’s got toenails that are always black.
• He cannot play cards.
• He woos my cousins over with ten-minute phone conversations, and then they tell me that they like him more than they like me.
• He gangs up with my sister and brother and takes my case.
• He says “This looks funny!”, when he does not like what I am wearing.
• He’s not taken me out on a date in the last, ummm…5 years.

But in spite of all this - he is the only guy who totally gets me. And that's why he gets me. :)