Saturday, November 25, 2006
Blog with a bang!!
Well let's see what all I have been upto..there was diwali last mth which was celebrated as usual with a lot of house cleaning and lighting and decorations and some fire crackers as well! Brother was here for the week too and me n mom had this great idea that we'll make idlis for him when he comes and poor guy was just not willing to look at them after having to eat idlis down south all this time! I had even made a list of things I had wanted to do during the diwali hols but did'nt get around to actually doing most...but no fault of my brother, he was'nt even around to get in the way cos his friends kept him busy ...except for the one day we went shopping together and had a pizza n sat and watched TV in the evening..! The week just flew by before I knew it and he was gone again..
Interuption by mom...to be continued.
Friday, October 13, 2006
What I want in a man....
This was so cute, I just had to share it with u all..What I Want in a ManOriginal List (age 22):1. Handsome2. Charming3. Financially successful4. A caring listener5. Witty6. In good shape7. Dresses with style8. Appreciates finer things9. Full of thoughtful surprises10. An imaginative, romantic lover
What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 32):1. Nice looking (prefer hair on his head)2. Opens car doors, holds chairs3. Has enough money for a nice dinner4. Listens as much as talks5. Laughs at my jokes6. Carries bags of groceries with ease7. Owns at least one tie8. Appreciates a good home-cooked meal9. Remembers birthdays and anniversaries10. Seeks romance at least once a week
What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 42):1. Not too ugly (bald head OK)2. Doesn't drive off until I'm in the car3. Works steady - splurges on dinner out occasionally4. Nods head when I'm talking5. Usually remembers punch lines of jokes6. Is in good enough shape to rearrange the furniture7. Wears a shirt that covers his stomach8. Knows not to buy champagne with screw-top lids9. Remembers to put the toilet seat down10. Shaves most weekends
What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 52):1. Keeps hair in nose and ears trimmed2. Doesn't belch or scratch in public3. Doesn't borrow money too often4. Doesn't nod off to sleep when I'm venting5. Doesn't re-tell the same joke too many times6. Is in good enough shape to get off couch onweekends7. Usually wears matching socks and fresh underwear8. Appreciates a good TV dinner9. Remembers my name on occasion10. Shaves some weekends
What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 62):1. Doesn't scare small children2. Remembers where bathroom is3. Doesn't require much money for upkeep4. Only snores lightly when asleep5. Remembers why he's laughing6. Is in good enough shape to stand up by himself7. Usually wears clothes8. Likes soft foods9. Remembers where he left his teeth10. Remembers that it's the weekend
What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 72):1. Breathing2. Doesn't miss the toilet
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Daddy Long Legs
Dear Daddy Long-Legs,
Day 3: Still suffering from the cold and sleepless nights..and today, m suffering from hunger pangs too but lunch is a good hour away..
Ofcourse there's work to do at office..will people please stop asking me if I do any work or get paid for free? U know daddy, I wanted to go shopping last evening but I guess i'll be going next week now cos I don't really feel upto it right now. M still wondering what to buy for a few close friends for diwali! Maybe I'll get some good ideas in the market but the problem is that I can't even look at the shops and show windows as I walk by cos I have to look out for the crowds and the cars n bikes on the road or the market corridor instead!
And daddy, how bout organising a lunch at home pre-diwali?
Your's truly,
VS
P.S.- This letter is a dedication to Jean Webster, the author of DADDY LONG LEGS...really cute! I dont know how she wrote an entire novel full of letters ...I could'nt write one damn para. :(
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Mid-night Sojourn
So here I am, after watching "The Mummy Returns" for the 'n'th time (it's soo cute), taking a walk in the driveway n talking to a friend, exchanging SMSes with friends, reading Seema Goswami in Brunch about why today's generation can't be caught dead in the kitchen and tossing in the bed for an hour with my red nose (and t-shirt to match incidentally) ! That reminds me, I saw some awesome silver jewellery n t-shirts on a shopping site...so I'll just shop around till I drop I guess...which is probably going to be at about 4am now...thank u e-commerce...I luv u with all my nose..:)
U know what, I just spotted a black n white dengue mosquito in this room..let me just run n get the anti-mosquito spray.....bye!
Friday, September 29, 2006
Chutti hai!
And oh ya, my friend Sinu sent me an awesome saree..a traditional keralite saree in ivory with a maroon n gold border...looks cool ! How nice of him to think of me on the ocassion of Onam na? But he's a cool guy anyhow and an awesome photographer too..check out naturemagics.com n u will know what i'm talking about!
Acha toh hum chalte hain...phir wednesday ko milengi...i suspect my net connection at home is gng to expire one of these days too...! Cheers to Gandhiji n German Re-unification!
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Sunday...
Then ive been spending a bit of time with the trainee from abroad at office too, guiding her to good stores from where she can shop and check mark her shopping list !! We've also done a bit of shopping together n we got her a saree, some silver jewellery, hair accessories, jaipuri jootis, bangles, bindis and gorged on masala dosa too! oh and in the process I got myself a silk scarf and silver jewellery too. Too bad she's leaving this month end and won't be around till diwali.
And this reminds me, I wanna get a new suit for diwali and am also thinking of picking up a gold bracelet but this time with pretty precious stones...what say?!! Ofcourse there's a lot to be done at home too in terms of preparing for diwali!! Brother's comming home for diwali too...yippee!!

My uncle's built a new house too recently and tomorrow is the greh pravesh (house-warming) party..they plan to move in around diwali. I guess that's pretty much an overview of all that's happened recently...signing out!!
Monday, September 11, 2006
War paint!!

Hey! Like I promised....here's a snap of the gate as it look now after the fresh coat of paint! It's a golden brown shade..we did'nt do the deep red or maroon intended earlier as that looked too bright and reminded me of the paint they do on the gates of some temples! Well, I did'nt really save any money by doing it myself I think...as I bought fresh brushes, two tins of paint, dusting cloth, a primer, etc which the painter would have bought with him anyway I guess..infact, I spent 3 days on it cos first it needed scrubbing a bit to take off the rust which had started to appear at some places, then we had to clean the surface and apply a coat of primer and after that dried, we used two coats of paint!! Actually, I had first bought a litre of cherry red paint but when I did a bit of that, it looked way too bright so I changed my mind and bought a more sober looking "golden brown" ! So this is how it looks now...after three whole days spread over two weekends! Oh and my old pair of jeans graduated to being a working-jeans! Coupled with an old t-shirt and a scarf on my head I was prepared for the task!
I'm proud of my handiwork and it's definatly the largest thing I ever painted too...I can give any painter a run for his money now..lol! It might have taken a lot and is probably a once in a lifetime project but it gave me so much satisfaction n i'm sure it will last much longer than the coat of paint a painter would have splashed on it in a hurry without cleaning the gate and applying primer on it!
So what do u think? Yea, I know i'm kinda crazy...but I meant what do u think of my picasso?
And now if u wanna find me, u know which gate to knock..:)
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Update..
The other news is that it was a colleague's b'day at office yesterday n we had a nice little pastry party at tea time...:) He's the kind of guy who's generally liked by people and is usually a genuine person except when he's a bit diplomatic...but yeh bhi ek ada hai! But he had sure had this awesome smile on his face all day yesterday which comes from knowing that people who matter to u love u and remember u on ur special day. That brings me back to the pasteries...4 out of 6 people wanted "something with less fat" when we wanted to make a note of who wanted which pastry...so fruit tart was settled on but unfortunatly the pastry shop did'nt concur and we had to settle for fresh fruit pastries instead ! Everyone's calorie concious now u know...someone's going for regular evening walks, another one's paid a dietician, then again someone has a "fruit-day" and as for ur's truly, I also have some plans....I will soon buy a pair of addidas, track suits, matching hair bands, water bottle, wet tissues, .....n then I will surely loose something, is'nt it?
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Shut 'em out!
Imagine being stared at everytime u go out to receive a courier or greet a visitor or just to stroll? Even new entrants to the colony are so rude that they will pass by staring at u as if I was intruding in their personal space! How very ill-mannered! Well we decided to work on the problem & add some height to our existing gate and block some view to the house and the result is the additional 2 foot height that u can now see in the picture ...this was'nt so easy u know. Each one of us instantly turned into a designer and had very different ideas about how it should be done. Mom wanted to add a plastic sheet to it and Dad n me wanted to have an iron sheet about 3 feet high and various designs were mulled over and guess what, but the end of this exercise, which lasted about 2 weeks, mom n dad were so fed up that they just gave up n said "Oh just do something with it, we dont care what!" :)

So finally, the additional two feet of gate was put in place last weekend but the painter never turned up until yesterday...and guess what, that was me !! Actually, there was a power cut last evening when I reached home so I was outside as it was cool and decide to go ahead and just paint the gate myself...! I can paint u know..fabric paint, oil paint, water colours, done it all!! Dad helped too...I poured water on it n scrubbed it clean first n then waited for it to dry n then dad started with one portion of the gate n me at the other end !! And typical of him, he quietly sneeked away after he saw that I was engrossed in the work and left me to do the rest. :)
The reason y this is looking an untidy red right now is cos so far it's only had a coating of red primer which I think is reaclly zinc oxide...u do that on iron first cos it's anti-corrosive !! Have'nt decided about which colour I should finally use on the gate though...but wanna do it over the weekend n will show u my work on monday for sure...m all charged up !! You should have seen the looks on the faces of the guards n the rest of their clan !! Haha..that was fun !! I slept like a log last night ...
Next project--the iron grill on the terrace....maybe ;)
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Bull Race,Kerela

Just look at the sheer energy involved and imagine the rush of the adrenaline it infuses in the crowds !!





Hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I did ....and that also reminds me that I must share with the pics I took on my trip to Kerela.... chao !
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
15Secs
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Green Days


End of another rainy weekend and this one rained a bit of money too as I got the cheques for Rakhi already...!! Ofcourse I promptly did a bit of shopping and spent it all too. Once an uncle read my hand and said " U'll never lack money, but u won't be able to retain it too long either" Oh what the hell, as long as it keeps comming !! :)

Another thing I did was to try to landscape the lawns which seem so overgrown and messed up in this season..though I love the bright flowers around me !! I did'nt do too well there though ...I barely ever know what's growing in our lawns! It needs a neighbour to point out some pretty variety of flower growing in our lawns, like this purple flower in the pics here..it's called "Morning Glory" and for good reason too...cos when i woke up on saturday I noticed the lovely flowers but in the evening when I was on my way out, the flowers were all lying in the grass and I though 'what a pity they did'nt last too long, they looked really nice' , but Sunday morning there they were again blooming away exactly as earlier...mom then told me that they bloom in the day time only..!! So much for landscaping....but hey u remember Rans from my office? She can rattle off the names of plants easily and knows exactly when to grow which one and how to treat 'em right !! Well Happy Greens ! and Happy Friendship Day too....ah and today I reached level 3 at Yahoo! Answers...yahoooooo !!!!!!



Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Injurious to health..
Warning : Any person, living or dead, related to me in any way, specially Sinu and Sushmita, are barred from blurting out the ID ...got it?
I'm pretty sure you guys remember my ID even if you dnt remember your own IDs...it's a tendency to remember gory details about others and be tempted to reveal them rather than talk about one's own self! Oh wait a minute, what am I saying? I write a whole blog about me.. :( EEKS..

But talking about memory power, I was at a family function recently and they had made a small stage and arranged for a mike and speakers for music and people were being invited to sing ...well some sang well like my nephew, and some were horrible...but almost everyone sang old songs...strange !! Everyone suddenly suffers from short term memory loss when asked to sing ! Quick, think of a song to sing on stage surrounded by boored relatives.... ???.....???


Saturday, July 29, 2006
Festive week!
It's been raining nicely here for the last 2-3 days and besides the discomfort of having to put the clothes to dry in the hallway and the staircase, the rains have been pretty much welcome !
Went to a Teej fair the day before too at Dilli Haat and everything was so nice and colourfully decorated with the row of stalls selling a variety of handicraft stuff and oh the stalls selling colourful lak bangles from rajasthan just looked divine ..! There was a food festival too with the traditional daal, bhati, churma in a rajasthani thali and the usual stuff like gol gappas, pao bhaji n all too..plus, there was a cultural program too with tradional dances being performed and the whole lot of cameramen could be seen shooting various events from different TV channels and asking people if they were enjoying themselves.....Teej was yesterday and they must have telecast that on TV yesterday though I did'nt get to see it..
Unfortunatly I was not carrying a camera and my cell too ran out of battery or I would have surely shared some colorful pics with u..but for now m only putting up pics of two things i picked up from there....one was a set of 3 men dressed in traditional outfits and paying various musical instruments like u can see here...it's actually made of clay I think, and colorfully painted ...everything about rajasthan is so colorful !! This I have kept in the front lawn of the house..perched on the wall..


Monday, July 24, 2006
MoNdAy:(
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Retro!
So ive actually not been upto much lately, still go to work as usual n back home as usual..but m enjoying the free time at home right now as my next semester classes are still a few weeks away..meanwhile ive been juggling ideas about renovating my room at the lowest possible cost ...what do u think of textured walls? I wonder how much that would cost and how long will it last...gotta do a research on that one...and oh yea, I did buy that cell phone i wanted, but instead of the really high-end models I had thought of initially, i bought the Samsung X-650..VGA cam, FM Radio and Infrared..not much but then it costs less than half of other models I was thinking of earlier but was still not convinced about .. go on, say it..I know i'm hard to please !! ;)

So the idea is now to use this one for some time, and get a new one next year and sell this one off ..waiting for the Sony Cybershot camera phone now...
Oh n I also discovered Yahoo! Answers quite by accident but have been surfing that quite a bit recently...quite interesting and amusing too ! Notice that questions relating to relationship problems get the most answers? Moral of the story...man is a social animal....and he's lost in the jungle of his own making.. I put in a hypothetical question too ofcourse, and I got 40 responses to it...wow !! Most people did a psycho-analysis on me...won't wanna tell u what they said though..but i'd like to stress that i'm sane !!!!!!!........
Hey time to eat..gotta go..aaj tiffin mein curd rice hai...yummy..i should have been a south indian! Chao !!
Sunday, July 16, 2006
GoodNight!
Chao!
P.S.- If i sound a bit crazy right now, it's just my chocolate fudge and Fruit Punch talking.. ;)
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Mera Mobile..
Yea, it's not even in the markets yet..this whole cell phone buying thing has me perplexed(dunno what to buy), anxious (I wish this ordeal is over soon!), appauled( most good cells r really expensive), tempted (just wanna buy a really cool one, whatever the price!), eager( and wanna get it fast) and upset (still can't decide..ugghh..!)...life was so much easier when I bought the Samsung R220 which i'm using till now...there were just about 3-4 models of Nokia and two models of Samsung available here..and I loved the elegant looking Samsung.
Been through all Nokias, Samsung, Motorola and Sony phones !
So far ive seen some booring looking Nokia; they were never my fav. brand, though 6111 was a loaded model and the 6030 is a good basic model with a bright screen and an FM radio, costs about rs. 4300, some Samsung models..I initially wanted the Samsung D500 but when I saw it in the showroom, the screen did'nt look as large as it did on the website or the ads! Plus, the slide screen made the keypad look forsaken and difficult to reach..and other models did'nt seem too attractive after owning similar looking phone for 4 years..! Then there are the Motorola models which are either very old models and look like a drag or there's the ultra-slim SLVR or V3 priced at 10k and 13k resp. but both have a VGA camera and no FM Radio ! :( I'd rather pay Vandana Luthra to make me slim..!!!
Sony is the only brand which has some phones i wanna consider now...it's walkman range of phones are good...like the W700i which is a golden colour phone and has a 2 MP camera, FM Radio, MP3 player, has 35 MB memory (i think) and comes with a 256 MB extra memory, can play music even in flight mode,ie, when the phone is switched off, Mega Bass and u can buy flash for it for taking pics in the dark...all this for about 13k! Not bad, eh?
But when I do get my new phone..the first picture I take I will surely put that up on my blog ! Promise..!! Or maybe i'll put up a picture of my phone first !
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Tell tale rains!!
The odysey was obviously intended to be a hush hush affair but since the car was danaged, we had to tell the parents that it happened cos a big flower pot toppled over it..ofcourse they did'nt really buy the story but we did get the benefit of doubt !! ;)
Friday, July 07, 2006
Gang Bang!
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Just back from a sumptuous lunch and m going to have a coffee now to keep me awake so that the office can benefit from my services for a few more hours...!! It's so damn hot n humid in the city n that makes me all the more sleepy though ofcourse i'm sitting bang under an AC in the office! India's perpetually in a state of imbalance and a case in point right now are the very heavy rains in which mumbai is drowning and in contrast the parched city i'm suffering in ...!!
(Both pics downloaded from the net)


No rains n therefore very hot weather...meaning higher electricity demand... meaning power failure of an average of 5 hrs. a day in the poshest of areas and no driniking water either cos the motor won't run so that I can pull water into the house to use and store..which means that i'd either stay at home on the weekend and suffer from heat and loss of sleep or go to a shopping mall with backup and lots of restaurants and shopping...which means spending lots of money...which means uncomfortable situations when the bank statement arrives...which means generating heated situations between mom n me...Oh! when will the rains come??!!
We're having bets in the office almost everyday..no not about football...but about when is it likely to rain..but today we also did one other interesting thing ...we gave everyone nick names...and i'm mighty pleased cos i never thought that my name was also capable of being squeezed any further...but now we're a gang of four letter words...puns intended...:) the new and improved versions at all work stations are now called Nans, Rans, Pans, Vans, Reds, ofcourse all the versions are Windows XP Professional compatible!