Life's Onward Journey...

Lovely song. There is something very sweet about the way the lovers are communicating by 'using the eyes only' in the midst of a big family function. Why I remembered this song today is far from the reason for loving it. I have got an irritating eye infection which might be allergic or viral and it is supposed to be contagious. I am scared that I might transmit it to other unsuspecting people around me. My buddy's eye was aching this evening. Of all people, I don't want to give it to her. So, I am trying to stay away from humans for the sake of humanity. :) In case I do manage to pass the virus to somebody, please accept my sincere apology. And enjoy this song which talks about other kind of ' gustakhiyaan ' of the ' aankhen '.

That is the book I recently read and not my current 'relationship-status'. For the latter, I will have to replace 'almost' with 'completely'. :) Though the tone of the book is comic it deals with a serious problem of dearth of eligible men for thirty-something-working-women-in-metros. Trust me it is a serious problem. Advaita Kala successfully weaves a believable story of 3 such women and characters around them, at work and at home. The first fifty pages seemed like just any Mills & Boon story. I have read 2 and a half and another half of MB to know this. The girl, single and ready to mingle. Enter the guy, rich, snob, and mysterious. The chemistry begins with a kind of discomfort and then leads to an inexplanable attraction. Surprisingly at the moment I was wondering why the author has written an MB in an indian context, she apologised for the turn of events in the main protagonist's life for being very Mills and Boon-ish. I liked that. Other character...

Pictures: Courtesy Suman K. Guha . Thanks a lot Suman :)

It is not that I believe in a 'special day' dedicated to love. I am basically a romantic at heart so any or every day is fine by me. But this year it was different. I got to see my latest 'crush' or 'heart-throb' or whatever you may call it. Its him... ...and unfortunately there were just too many (way more than too many, actually) people around, so I could not grab all his attention. Its ok...I can live with this. I was telling my friend about this latest development and I asked her if it was abnormal that I am getting such 'teenage-type-crushes' at this age and she confidently told me that it is completely 'normal'. So, I am happy... :) The Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy Concert at the Kala Ghoda Festival was really good. It was the first time I attended an event like this and I enjoyed a lot. My buddy had told me 10 days back that Farhan Akhtar is going to perform Live this year. She read it somewhere and then we could not relocate the source. So we conc...

After watching Dev D. my blood-movie level is going to be high for a long time. It had been a long time since I saw a movie which does not take the viewer's intelligence for granted. I loved this one. I was a little apprehensive before watching it since the media was calling it "a sexed-up version of the original Devdas". But I sat through it without flinching even once. Replace 'love' with 'lust'/'sex' and rest of the story is same (almost). And this new version is more easy to understand. This time the reason for the separation of Dev and Paro is not family or the rich-and-poor-divide but the ego clash between the male and the female sexuality. If the male does it, it bears no significance but if the female loses it, she is a 'slut'. When Dev realises that there was more to his relation with Paro, she is married and happy. The late realization drives him to self-destruction. He meets Chanda/Lenny, a russian hooker. He hates her and she f...

Last week was near perfect. 2 movies. Dance class thrice in the week. Dinner at a friend's place. Visit from another dear friend. A new technique which seemed to have worked in my hands. And an improvement in my sleep-wake schedule. Since the day I have returned from Pune, my whole routine is changed. I have started sleeping early and getting up early too. I am feeling good about it and hope to retain this habit. The only thing I am missing because of this is blogging. Mostly I used to write my posts late night or early morning while struggling to fall asleep. But now, sleep comes uninvited around 10:30-11:00 and I am dead by 12. Tonight is an exception, so i decided to write this post. Saw two movies last week. Luck by chance and Slumdog Millionare. I didn't like the latter. Will write about it in the next post. As far as the former is concerned, I am in love with Farhan Akhtar. The movie is not great but I really like the guy. I have still not seen Rock On. Will do that when ...

Goli maar bheje mein... ***Sparkle*** Hum aur Tum Ek tha thoonth Aaj khush to bahot hoge tum... K2 did you tell me about this? Guess who was there too... :)

Woke up very early today. Finally I made up on all the sleep deficit that had accumulated over the past few days. It has been a long time since I wrote something on my blog. I was busy with the presentation which didn't go well. And after it got over I was left with many thoughts which I wanted to sort out myself. I know what went wrong from my side and what needs more attention. I will work on it. Learning from my mistakes...but I haven't learnt how not to make mistakes. Picture courtesy: Senthil I have climbed this far and so I will manage to cross the next few steps and the hurdles that come in the way. There were so many things which came in my mind in the last 2 weeks and I made a mental note that I would write about it here, but now I have forgotten most of them. Also, I have not seen a movie for a long time. My "to watch" list includes Slumdog Millionare , DevD and Luck by Chance. Just came to know that Luck by Chance has Aamir Khan in a cameo. More reaso...

An old friend is in town. I have been excited since the day I came to know that she will be visiting Bombay. It is always fun to be back with old friends. In the 7-8 hours that three of us spent together today, we did everything from sharing updates in our lives to exchanging gossip stories. Actually I didn't have any gossip stories, instead I was just listening most of the time. There are few friends who are both elder and wiser than me... This one fits that criteria :) After spending five and a half year at the same institute for finishing this degree, obviously I hardly have any of my seniors around. Even many of my batch mates have left the place. And currently I am one of the seniors in the department. So I am bound to be excited when one of my seniors is here. I have been jumping around and telling all that "Didi is here" :). After such a long time I am getting a chance to behave like a kid and now with her around I can even throw a tantrum. It is not that I don...

Avoiding people when I am in a bad mood is not a new phenomenon for me. I have been doing this for quite sometime. I can feel that it is worsening and my tolerance for people is decreasing. At such moments I just try to stay alone. I don't want to get irritated and scream at people just because I am not in the best mood. These days, I would say that I am in a contemplative mood and not actually in a bad mood. Too many things on my mind and then there is a major presentation to give in 2 weeks. So, I am just trying to keep myself away from anything which might irritate me. I was just thinking that with every passing day I am becoming less and less adaptable. I mean I am living alone and have become accustomed to this situation. I don't have any other responsibility apart from my own. I make my own plans. If one of my experiment is coming in the way of an outing, i just manipulate my work somehow and take time out for the outing. Nobody is there who can ask me to change my plans ...

Nothing is coming in its way now. I cleaned up my room (more importantly my fan) and now the environment is conducive for me to sit and study and speculate. All the clutter is also gone (or hidden). I just need to concentrate and study now. I will do it... Another thing which was pending was the review for Ghajini. I finished writing that too (see below). Now my mind is free for other more important things. Also, my mood is a little better now. After last week's failed experiment I was feeling so low. I didn't do anything except deciding what reagents and other materials are required to make this experiment a success. The cheapest and best option costs Rs. 30,000 only. Prepared the indent and kept it on boss's table with shaking hands, praying that she doesnt scream at me and blame me for the failed experiment. Like most of the time, she didn't say anything, just signed the paper and gave it to me. That was the war I won yesterday. I felt like a school kid trying to get...

Finally I am writing about the movie I waited for so long. It took so much time because I was searching for a decent photograph of my hero :). Of course that's not the case. First of all I managed to watch the movie on 25th itself. How that happened is a very big story which i am not going to write here but it was a big adventure in a strange city. Had i been in Bombay, I would have watched the preview on 24th. So, my record didn't break. Just that instead of first show, I saw the second show of the movie. The peak of joy was getting the tickets and then with every scene the joy diminished. :( If Aamir Khan accepts a movie, there is a certain kind of expectation from it. This one was completely disappointing. It is a complete 'masala-movie' for the regular brainless-movie-goer. Why did he do this? It is not that the Tamil version was so great that he got tempted to do the remake. No point talking about the story here. I think everybody knows this "revenge saga of a...

Let thy love play upon my voice, and rest on my silence. Let it pass through my heart into all my movements. Let it shine like stars shine in the darkness of my sleep, and dawn in my awakening. Let thy love... This was my favourite hymn in school. The composition which we were taught by Sister Coletta was very "happiness inducing". I still sing it when I am feeling low. Reminds me of old days and also cheers me up. The year is coming to an end. Last year at the same time I was wishing for all the negativities to disappear from my life in the new year. After a bad 2007, I so wished for a change. 2008 provided no respite. Neither on personal front nor in general. This is Moshe, son of the Rabbi who was killed at Nariman house during the terror attacks. He is just one of the orphans created by the acts of terrorism in the last year. The more I think about it, the more it disturbs me. Those who are indulging in such violent acts in the name of God or religion, have never known ...

I had been waiting for long to write this special post. However, I had not decided what will be the content of this post. I wanted to write something which I have not written before. But then I didn't get enough time to put in more thought. So, I decided to write about my blog on my blog. I came to know about blogging from my friend K2. She was a regular blogger and I loved reading her. One day I was remembering another friend of mine who is no more amongst us and I decided to express my thoughts in words and the result was this post . My second post was about the first love story of my life. Then I started writing about a subject which I love the most-"Movies". I am a complete movie-buff and all those around me can vouch for this fact. The first movie review i wrote was for 'Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna'. It became the most popular post on my blog but I deleted it sometime earlier this year. With the post all the 'fantastic' comments were also lost. I regret do...

Finally there is something which i am beginning to like about Ghajini . It's the song "Kaise mujhe tum mil gayin, qismat pe aaye na yaqeen..." The lyrics are not great but the tune is very sweet and has a certain kind of calmness. And the picturization seems to be good. It shows Aamir Khan in a pensive mood, going away from Asin (no idea about the situation), he first takes an auto, then is seen in a car, getting down at the international airport and then is seen sitting in a chartered plane which finally the takes off.... It reminds me of the similar scene in the "Tanhaai" song from Dil Chahta Hai . The way things are moving, mostly I won't be able to watch the first show of Ghajini. Will try to catch the movie on the first day or the latest by the first week :(. My record of several years is going to break... :( Picture courtesy: aamirkhan.com

http://www.johnclearygallery.com/pics/smith/couple.jpg The other day I was talking to a friend of mine and the topic of discussion changed to "Marriage". This friend of mine is very different from me and he often introduces me to alternative perspectives. The good thing about him is that he doesn't impose his point of view on me (sometimes he does that with other people though). We talk peacefully, he speaks his mind and I speak mine. I was telling him how much I am scared of getting married to a 'wrong' kind of person. By wrong I meant a person with a personality conflicting to mine. e.g. I like movies and he is a movie-hater. I like to be organized and keep my workplace and home clean and he turns out to be a person enjoying the mess around him. There can be different kinds of mismatches on different levels of personality and I won't name them here. I can't live with and share my life with a person who is so different from me. Actually "different...

The End of Innocence is not an extraordinary story but it is worth a read. One of the negative points of this book is its similarity to Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man . I have not read Sidhwa's book, however I have seen 1947-Earth which is based on it. The theme of both the books is similar. A child sharing space with the adults and trying to understand the world of grown-ups. In the End of Innocence Laila is the 9 year old girl who reads Enid Blyton and wants to 'solve a mystery' like the Five Find-outers. She has dreams of a child but wants to grow-up fast so that she can talk like one of the adults around her. She finds a friend in Rani, who is 6 years older than her. Rani, a teenager, has a different world. She dreams of falling in love and getting married. She shares her feelings with Laila who is too young to understand it wholly but still she acts like a good listener and poses to be excited in front of Rani. But the truth is that she does not understand the gra...

I went for this movie with zero-expectation just to watch SRK after a long interval of more than a year and I didn't get disappointed. Seriously, it is a very ordinary movie which takes up an age-old idea (of arranged marriage) and adds all kinds of 'spices' and SRK to it just to cater to a very specific kind of audience, which includes SRK fans and YRF loyals or time-pass movie goers. Surinder Sahni cannot be 'one' single man. There are many contradictions within this character. The man leads a dull, boring, monotonous life with his yellow suitcase, yellow tiffin, yellow car and a yellow bed sheet... (i might have missed other yellow objects around him). And he accepts the fact that he is indeed a boring person. Now, he decides to change his personality just to surprise his young, vibrant, newly-wedded wife. He turns himself into the "movie-hero" who makes his Taani ji smile. The surprising part is that he looks extremely comfortable in this new transfo...

I was going through the current issue of Science journal and got stuck on this article. The article is " The spreading of disorder " by Keizer et al. This article discusses the spread of disorder and criminal behaviour in surroundings which are already marked by signs of pre-existing disorder in the form of litter, graffiti etc. A theory known as "Broken Window Theory" was given by Wilson and Kelling in 1982. According to this theory signs of disorder induce more disorder and petty crimes. This theory is controversial since it still has to be proved (i guess mathematical proof or something like that). Although there is a report that when in early 90s New York city was cleared of such signs of disorder, the crime in the city underwent a sudden drop. (Quite interesting!!!) The authors of this paper carried out 6 different experiments on unsuspecting normal crowd and found that people do litter more when they observe some sort of disorder or a law broken around them...

My school SLS Now I am on this side of the door... (still i sneaked in with the help of my friend) The lab and the bench where some degraded RNA was isolated followed by some weeping followed by a trip to canteen with the seniors who pampered me. The 3rd floor corridor which I identify with an eversmiling face gesturing me to enter the classroom and stop loitering around The classroom and the hangout place in between the lectures. The stop for frequent chit-chat Gateway to the university "The Administrative block" (reminds me of the first day) The bus stop where hours were spent not waiting for the bus. I remember this was the place where a feeling of being alone in the big bad world first came to me after my dad left for home leaving me alone after the first few days of settling down. Sabarmati Dhaba. The refuge for a cup of tea and a mouthful of pakodas. The road which goes to Tapti. Don't know how many times this road was crossed everyday.