Tea & Dark Chocolate

Phew. As I type this post in an airport lounge after having done 12 trips to and from the airport in the past three weeks, I can feel the fatigue of the travel. I have had a great year, no doubt, but it is normal to feel like this once you've said your byes to your loved ones... all you want to do is to get to your home, and lie down in your blankie there. In a bid to keep my promise to my family and friends that they'd see me once every six months, the husband and I, IMHO have overdone the India travel bit. Thinking about the 14 hour long haul flight kills all joy of travel for me these days, and it is extending to other travel too. I know that at the other end of the travel is love and home for me, and I also know that I make it big in my head, but just the thought of being cooped up in the flight for so long gets to me, these days.  As always, this year also has been great. We didn't travel outside of our current-home as much as I'd have liked to, but we've ha...

Roots... this is something that has always had my interest. No, not the kind that trees/plants have. Or the kind that grow out of your head and show your age. The kind which makes you feel like you belong to something - a place, a human being, a time period , a culture group or anything at all. Of all these categories, I feel I've had the most trouble being at peace with 'the place'. The question - "Where are you from?" always catches me off guard. Anywhere abroad, I can get away with "Am from India" and most people wouldn't ask me another question. But anything more granular than this, and I stumble... I have trouble telling where I am from . [ Image Courtesy - Google Maps ]

Some random thoughts that popped into my head this week... Of all that a person can go through, the feeling of not being wanted is the worst. [I read a quote from a book meaning this a long time ago, cant recollect what it is now!] "You want to know what love is? Its the thing that ruins you." - Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen "Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done" - Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen "You should always be with someone who wants you, not with someone whom you want." [I've always found this statement by my Mom absurd. Why be with someone merely because they want you, I thought. But as with many things in which I've realized that Mom is right, am realizing this is right too, in its own screwed up, manipulated way of the world!]

A while ago, I realized that there are only two types of experiences in life - 1. the kind that will make for think back and chuckle with pleasure and 2. the kind that would be so appalling that they'll make people beg you to tell the story. So, in effect ,the outcome is just the same - you have a great story!   Now, don't go all out and tell me how we shouldn't be living for other people and shouldn't care for what they think of us, and hence a story shouldn't matter to me. Sorry, but it does. Not what people think of me. Not because it will increase my self-worth in my audience's eyes, but for the sake of the good story. Just that. A good story. Yes, am quite romantic that way!

As a teenager, I used to LOVE key chains. God alone knows how much pocket money I spent on buying silly key chains in various shapes and sizes ... that the money I spent on books, but the latter is something that gives me joy even today. The key chains, well, they don't... they make me realize the follies of youth. Those Chuimui-si-tum-teddy bear key chains, the ones that stick to the shirt, the shoe-shaped ones and what not... :) This love , I noticed, didn't entirely go away. Instead, there is a transformation in it now. I now carry items that remind me of happy times and sometimes people in my key ring at all times... and this morning, as I was sorting stuff in my handbag, I noticed that the bag was heavy only because of the heavy key ring, and just how many charms I carry on me! Presenting to you, the contents of my key ring...

For years I've walked past this building, always telling myself that I am going to come back here someday and take up one of their courses. I didn’t know then that this was some kind of a learning institute. The building only evoked a strong feeling of I-HAVE-go-inside-and-sit-here. It is from this building, and from those years that a seed to learn Urdu was planted in my head, I guess. I even acted on it for a while, honestly. It helped that the husband had a similar thought, the linguistic couple that we are , and so we both set about learning it.

This is one of those happy, peaceful, contented Sundays. For all the impatience I have in wanting to get out of the kitchen and hence having to finish up early, there is something very nice about a bustling kitchen, even if the food being cooked is just for the two of us. Bread pudding is being tried, some of which will be treated to office friends, there is sabudana khichdi for breakfast and some karela fry stuffed with yummy nutty paste is being attempted to by the cook, and am sitting on the table in my place, reading some obscure stuff. I hid the the wine bottles that were on the table to not scandalise anyone. These was supposed to be made into sangria  by the husband, who being the busybody  that he is on some weekends is taking an interview in the study, and was supposed to be taken to a friend's place where we are brunching !

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 aske...

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]

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 f...

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 return...

  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 literar...

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…