To God...

Finally I have downloaded app for blogger and now this is my first post through my phone :P and guess it's for whom?
I haven't blogged for a while and for the first time I didn't felt like it also. The time has been hard and this is something which is not new to me . But this time it's different. The heaviness cease to go from my heart no matter what I do. I have always felt that I am surly not the God's favourite child but then I am his baby and I need him now by my side :(
Where are you God and why you always make me believe that you favour your naughtier children more. I did everything to make you happy and still I think I lost to them :( . I have even passed the stage of questioning you that why it's me everytime. Like other times I have to face it and fight back and I will , as they say "something that won't kill you , will make you stronger" .

Just wishing that someday you will look upon this girl of yours and realise how much she wanted you to be by her side. I wish that day to come soon ...

Lemon Fresh from Office Cafe's Menu ;)

Misspelled :P




Heights of creativity !!

Que Sera Sera

It's tough time here and hence the absence.Just wishing for things to go alright . This songs is apt for the moment :

Idiot Box Latest

I realized that I am getting a way too infrequent here :( . It’s something which I never want. Writing here gives me inner peace ( Master Chifooooo’s secret :P). The last few weeks have been turbulent , both personally and professionally. I felt like losing on both the front and that was one of the major reasons behind my absence. Sometime I feel that I should blog as anonymous and pour my heart out over there.Share my grief and take suggestions from all you beautiful people :) . As for the present, I got a diversion and that is my television.

I love watching TV (One thing that I have inherited from my mother: P) and it really proved very fruitful at coming up in terms with the life. I have picked few soaps and following them. I love “Bade Achhe lagte hain” on Sony and while watching that I saw the promo of “ Kuch to log kahenge” . I didn’t like the promo much but loved the title song and it is just so awesome. I researched for it onlineand found that it is a remake of famous Pakistani serial “ Dhoop Kinare” . Now , that’s really a news for me. It bought back immediate nostalgia.

Flashback, sometime in early 1990s. It’s sometime before the cable TV . The favorite pastime for children used to be playing outside(quite different to today’s children) and for the housewives it would be watching Pakistani serial cassettes on VCR. Do you remember this device? This device will only appear in the scene either when we will have our vacations or when we have to watch somebody’s marriage cassettes :P . We used to live in a rented accommodation at that time. So, whenever a movie used to be played in VCR, the entire neighborhood would gather and watch it . When the men would leave for office and we children for school, ladies would gather and watch “Dhoop Kinare”. Till date it’s my mother’s favorite serial. This year, when she visited me , she asked me if I can get her some old Pakistani serial CDs. I opened youtube and found it there. She completed the entire series of 51 episodes in just 2 Days!
So , when I realized that “Kuch to log kahenge” is a remake of “ Dhoop Kinare” , I immediately called my mother and told her this . And this was her reply “I knew it from the time I watched first few episodes”:P . Sorry Ma, I forgot that I have inherited tele watching from you: P .

Here is the title song , Enjoy !!

The Seven Year Itch

So if you are wondering what exactly is the meaning of “The seven year itch” , here goes the explanation: The seven year itch is a term to describe a married man or woman. After seven years of marriage, the eyes tend to wander. It refers to the inclination to become unfaithful after seven years of marriage. The term was coined in 1955 by the movie with the same name "The seven year itch".

Even I didn’t know the phrase till few days back. It was when I was reading this article in the newspaper about the growing divorce rate in china and the Chinese post office’s unique policy to address it. The couple can write a letter to each other on their wedding day and it would be stored by the Beijing post for seven years. The letters would be sent to the couple on the occasion of their seventh anniversary. If the couple is undergoing martial problems then this letters will tell them the vows and love they have for each other seven year back and perhaps will help in saving their marriage by rekindling the romance. There are many loopholes in the process though like: the seven year itch research dates back to 1950s in US, which perhaps is irrelevant in these times. Today is the couple is unhappy in a relationship; they won’t take time to come out of it and proceed with another one. Getting a letter from and ex will not be taken on a brighter note then. Secondly, in the time when people are breaking up even on social networking site, how relevant would a letter bee in saving a relationship? Thirdly, when you are getting married, you are all in awe for the person. Marriage is a different ball game altogether. You come to know a lot of newer things about the person you had married to and these things either strengthen your relationship further or start breaking it. And lastly, is the couple sure that their address is going to be the same even after 7 years? These are just the few of many questions which are needed to be answered.




I however love the concepts of love letter. No not an email, but actually a letter. It’s probably a curse of technology that today even though we have all the means to tell a person how we feel but still we won’t and even if we will, it will be a card tagged to your love in Facebook or your proclamation of love through a twitter. Don’t you think that it lack the warmth of a real letter? A letter which is perfectly calligraphed for you with each of the words distinctively penned the warmth of holding it in your hands and the scent of love. You can read it umpteen numbers of times without bothering of opening your system/laptop/cellphone/tablet. You can keep it under your pillow and feel as if the person is as close to you. You can keep it forever and ever and treasure it for your grandchildren to show off: P.

I have never received a love letter (sighs and sobs) and as for a normal letter goes, I think I have received a one twelve years back from one of my aunt. So, even though getting a love letter is very good idea, getting it at right time at right place and by right person is very much important. I hope the Chinese understands.

Gastronomical Delight: Palak Paneer & Makki Di Roti

Last weekend my classes finally got over (and i am still sulking over the amount of reading i have to do now). There were so many things which couldn't do due to these weekend classes. So, this weekend i got up very late, watched a movie in the multiplex after a very long time, had dinner at my favorite place and finally managed to cook(I loved the this part the most :)) . I decided to cook "makki di roti and sarson ka saag". But when i went to shop for the food items i couldn’t find the rest of green vegetables except spinach so i changed the menu to "Palak panner and makki di roti". Here is the recipe :

Palak Panner:

Ingredients:

Spinach : 2 bunch

Panner: 200 gms

Onion: 2

Garlic : 10 cloves finely chopped

Ginger: 20 gms finely chopped

Green chillies: 3

Method:

Heat ghee in a pan and add cumin seed to it . Add ginger, garlic and green chillies to it. Add onion (not finally chopped) to it and sauté for a while. Add spinach leaves and salt to taste. Sauté for a while and den add half cup of water and put a lid on the pan. When the spinach become soft , let the mixture cool and then grind it in a mixer. Put some ghee in a pan and fry the paneer cubes (you can however skip this step and just take panner cubes). Add the fried panner to the mixture and let the gravy boil on a slow flame for a while. Once done, season it with butter on the top.

Makki di Roti:

Ingredients:

Makki ka aata (don’t buy the white corn flour, ask specifically for makki ka aata)- 1 cup

Coriander (finely chopped)

Wheat flour( it’s difficult to knead just the makki aata , so it’s always better to add wheat flour)-1/3 cups

Method:

Knead makki and wheat flour and add coriander while kneading. Put a ball of kneaded dough on a polythene sheet and keep pressing it with your palm till it become round ( it’s better not to use “belan” as the dough will keep on breaking ). Put the roti on tawa and heat it like normal chapatti with help of little ghee. Serve hot.

I hope you like it , till next recipe Bon Apetit !!

Leh & Ladakh by Pixel Factory

Ahhhhh , Leh and Ladakh. Seems everybody is visiting the place except me (and i am reallly hating it) . My college friend send me the picasa link of her "girl gang "adventourous trip there . Monika also posted about her visit and i am eagerly waiting for her travelougue.One of my collegue (and the best budding photographer i have ever seen )has just returned from Leh and shared few of his awsome pictures with us. His photography comes under the name "Pixel Factory" and you can just get a glimpse of his photography skills by the pictures below .

Here is his short travelogue :

Ladakh Landscapes

It was a wonderful road trip and that i can remember forever. We left for Delhi ...on 25th evening and on 26th to Leh by flight.

Day 1 : We visited Shanthi StupaDay

Day 2 : All the monasteries near by leh. Starting with Hemis followed by Thiksey, Shey palace, Sindhu Nadi and Stok.

Day 3 : Start of an adventurous road trip by bikes. We rented 2 bullets, 1 Thunderbird, 1 Avenger and a Pulsar. This was the day we all experienced altitude sickness at Khardunga Pass, the highest motor-able road in the World. Our journey continued towards Nubra Valley(Near Indo-Pack LOC)

Day 4 : Back to Leh from Nubra Valley.


Day 5 : Pangong Tso Lake(Near Indo-China LOC). This lake is of 135kms long and 2 Kms wide. 45Kms of it is in India and rest is in China. In winter it will be frozen and no one except indian army is allowed to be at that place. Stargazing in the night near the lake was an unforgettable experience.


Day 6 : Back to Leh from Pangong Tso Lake. We passed through the Third Highest motor-able road on the way.

Day 7 : Journey towards Tsomo-riri Lake (Near Indo-China LOC). Beautiful place near the border. We had a wonder tea time with nomads near this place for half an hour.

Day 8 : Back to Leh from Tsomo-riri. This time it was Second highest motor-able road on the way.

Day 9 : The best and scary experience of Rafting in Indus river. Many whirlpools, hot sun and finally ended with raining experience while rafting :D :)This is gist of our 9 day Leh Trip. Once our travel log is well written will share it soon :) Thanks guys :)

Disclaimer: All the pics above are the copyright of Pixel factoryand clicked by Karthik Vn.

Tit Bit

This post is totally random :P , there were so many things going on my mind that it became difficult for me to pen it down separately , so here it goes:

I realized that I have become super lazy. I am in bench from past two months and I think it has added to my laziness. So much so that I find it extremely difficult to get up on time and catch my company shuttle. So, last month I paid double the amount for transportation. One for company shuttle and one for missing it, paying 130 bucks to the stupid autowallah created a big hole in my pocket. Thereby today I finally cancelled my bus pass and decided to take public transportation for work. Sigh! I feel relieved now :)

My year resolution of losing weight is still left and I am nowhere near to it. At the start of every month, the guilt of gaining weight reach to all time high, so much so, that I would run to the gym and pay my monthly fees. That day i would work out like Sylvester Stallone and sweat like pig, only to return after a month to pay the fees again.

My reading habit has gone haywire and the credit goes to my iPhone. From the time I have got it, I am totally occupied by the big apple. Games, apps, movies, Face book and so many other think. I think the fad will soon evaporate and I will get back to my favorite hobby.

I haven’t posted/scraped/walled about Janlokpal bill at all (plz consider this as an exception). It seems all my friends on Face book were as much excited about it as their wedding. Everybody was giving their opinion about it when even half of them wouldn’t even know completely about it. I totally respect Anna and think he is did a great job. But wouldn’t it be better to show the solidarity towards him or the bill by participating in the movement real time rather than being opinionated in the virtual world?

I have pets at my place and they are cute little fish. When i got the fish bowl i bought two goldfish but they died soon after. Later after lot of googling i found out that you shouldn’t keep them in fishbowl. My manager, who is from Kerala and has a huge aquarium at his place, got me few fish. Last week while changing the water the bowl slipped from my hand, however we were able to save all the fish miraculously. But after this incident i have decided that i am never going to have fish as a pet again. I am better with dog ;)

And finally, I am hooked to KBC. I watch it just for Big B. I love his immaculate Hindi and the way he connects with the participant. I think it was the major thing lacking in SRK‘s KBC. And now, since i am watching it , i am replying to all the questions for audiences religiously. I know it’s a bit teenagish but then it’s worth a try. Wish me luck!

Treat them Fairly...

It was all going smooth, my cousin loved this guy in her office and she introduced him to her parents. They were ready in spite of the whispers from the relatives of the marriage being an inter caste .Her parents decides to meet the guy’s parents and then inevitable happened. His mother decided to walk out of the relationship when her husband’s abuses became extreme. Though not divorced, they are living a separate life. Hearing this, my cousin’s parents decided to call it off. The reason was the stigma of woman left by her husband (even though it is the opposite). Unknowingly, they became a part of “Educated yet orthodox” community who, still consider it to be a women’s duty to carry the weight of a dead relationship full of abuses. And yes, most of the women still do so, just to protect their children from being stigmatized. And if they do something as brave as the guy’s mother has done, they would be stigmatized for life by the society.



One of my friend’s father left her mom and the kids (She and her brother who is physically challenged) to marry another lady. He had an extra marital with the lady and when the wife found this out, she was given a choice to either compromise or he will leave her. She walked out to make a life for herself and her children without any support. The father neither gave the alimony nor visited the children even being in the same city. Yes, seldom he calls them, just to shower them with abuses. She started working and gave her children the best of education and everything. Today, her children are faring well and are proud of their mother and so are we, her friends. We visit her mother whenever she is in town and just get mesmerized by the strength of the lady. Today in our generation, majority of women are educated and independent. We know our rights and society is coming in terms with non-stigmatizing separations. Think of the women who faced this in the earlier generation, when every decision was taken after considering about what the society will say? They didn’t even have support from their family who will always ask them to compromise. Majority of them were not educated and seldom were they independent. The only options available before them were wither to take abuses all through their life or to end up their life. But still there were few brave ladies who decided to take a brave stand and yet when we should acknowledge this fact we are mistreating them. How fair is it? Aren’t we encouraging violence towards women by acts like these? If we won’t stop this attitude towards women then probably, woman will keep on enduring pains and abuses just for not ruining their children’s life which, obviously will be ruined the same day when she will take the decision of being in an abusive relationship.

To my Father

Mom called me yesterday and told me about my dad retirement which is in November. It came as a surprise to me ,as everyone of us in the family was positive about his service extension to two more years i.e. to the age of 62 . Whenever i would talk to my father about his retirement he would always be in denial and non acceptance mode. So yesterday, when mom and he went to a photo studio for taking his picture for the retirement, he was very silent and my mom has tears in her eyes. My mother was upset because my father was about to get promoted to a position which he has always deserved in the next few months and which he cannot get now because of the retirement. My dad was upset because the sixth pay commission took a way too long time to revise his salary to a respected one only last year and only if the extension would have happened, he would have been able to perform some of his key responsibilities. I know it sound like a typical middle class attitude but it’s so true for a person like him.

My father was born a few years after independence to a family of a govt teacher. My grandfather died young and being the eldest of the six siblings, he fulfilled all his responsibilities. He funded for all his siblings educations and kept all of them with him for their higher studies as he was the only one from the family living in a big city. He took care of them till they are settled. Once that responsibility was settled then came us, the family. He worked his entire life providing all of us a good life and feels that only if this retirement would have extended he could have done better. I don’t have a heart to talk to my father about this, as for me he has done the best of whatever he could do with the limited resource and unlimited responsibilities. He should see the affection in my grandmother’s eye for him being the best son , the gratitude in my uncle/aunt’s eyes for being the best of a brother and a father figure, the respect in his subordinate’s eye for being the most honest employee in the organisation. And if he still think that there are few things still left undone then we , his children promise him to accomplish those :’)

Kathakali

On my vacation to Kerala in February this year I got an opportunity to watch “ kathakali” , the traditional dance form of Kerala. It was indeed a very heartening experience for me as I always wanted to see this dance form which I have only seen either in TV or during republic day parade in New Delhi . The best part with the performance was that they allowed us to see the live makeup for the artists and also narrated the history of its origination along with the nitty gritty of dance form. Kathakali derives its meaning from “ Katha” meaning story and “ kali” meaning dance, that is telling a story through a dance. The dance form has five elements:natya meaning dramatics; nritta meaning pure dance; nrithya meaning dance with expressions: geetha meaning vocals and vadyameaning instrument .The dance are based on mythological stories expressed through dance in various mudras and bhaav.

The performance which I watched in Munnar was “ Naraktundhi ko mila dand” (Punishment to Naraktundi). There was a brief narration before the show about the story , which goes as: Naraktundhi was a demon and fall in love with incarnation of Lord Vishnu . She disguises as a beautiful lady and tries to attract Lord Vishnu. Lord Vishnu however rejects her offer and asks her to leave. This make Narakthundi very angry and she comes to her original form of demon. She start the fight with Lord Vishnu and gets killed in the end. After the narration of the story the character played by narakthundi showed us various bhaav and the meaning of each one of them. After this narration the performance started.

The Performance poster of Kathakali and Punjarani :

The makeup :

Vadya at the starting of the show:

The character explaining Bhaav : Surprise:

Happiness:

Sorrow:

Anger:

Pain:

Various Mudras:

The performance starts:

Entry of Narakthundi:

Entry of Lord Vishnu Incarnation:

Narakthundi in disguise as a beautiful women perusing Lord Vishnu for marriage:

Narakthundi gets angry and comes in her original form leading to a fight:

Lord Vishnu finally kills Narakthundi :

Close up of the artist :

The artists after the show: