Thoughts.....

Surprised? I am :-D.


Wanted to write a lil' something today. Its been a long, long time since i made an appearance here. Sometimes, words appear and then disappear, before you can string them together.....The silent scribbles in the diary of the mind. Sometimes, thoughts flash like a firefly in a corner and then fly away. Other times, you do end up finding words and then shaping them into a definitive something. The something, that will tell it like it is.



This just happens to be one such moment, and i am making sure that i catch the thoughts before they dissolve :).

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Few days back, i had a lil' trip back in time, with this beautiful piece of poetry and music. Its a musical rendition of a poem by Faiz (The video link is from a TV drama called Dhoop Kinare, which was popular even in India). I am not attempting to translate the poem, because no words can accurately translate its depth and the beauty.

It is one of the most beautiful combinations of poetry and music, ever! I first listened to this when i was really young, barely a teen-ager. The melody grew on me and so did the lyrics. The lyrics beautifully and poignantly describe the soothing effect that long-forgotten pleasant memories have. And few days ago, when i listened to this song, i felt soothed, blessed by the beautiful, long-forgotten memories.....
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I've recently caught up with my reading, and have been reading Murakami like an addict :-D. Besides some of his novels and short stories, i have also enjoyed reading some really inetersting books about mind and music, neuroplasticity, paranoia and the concept of self. Which means (or atleast there is a lil' bit of likelihood) that i would write about them at some point :).

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Oh, and the pictures that you see here, are from Santa Monica (where else?). Love the Santa Monica pier and the promenade.

These pictures were taken when MD was here in winter.



The ferris wheel in the picture is the old one. The new, solar-powered ferris wheel was inaugurated this week.

So, i did manage to capture some thoughts, didn't i :).

She likes it ;).

Ms. Moon, my dear dear friend, recently announced that she likes this diary blog better :). While many of you many not agree with her, i perfectly understand her reasons for this verdict :)). Its always more enjoyable when you know a bit of the backstory, eh? What say Ms. Moon :)). After all this blog has all those cups of chai, chit-chat and Boston stories.

While it is interesting to share what goes in my plate, for me its equal fun to write what goes on in my mind.....and that sort of nudges me to look at the posting stats! One post a month!! My inner voice says, "Sharam Kar" (have some shame)! where have i been! and i promised to Ms. Moon not to proclaim myself lazy anymore :)). So take it as those pages of the diary which remain empty, because there was too much to say.....or may be just nothing. How else do you describe emptiness.....Oh well, moving is a part of life.....Golden Girl has headed eastwards.....MD back to Europe.....One moment so full and the next one hollow! Takes time to reassure oneself that they are still there with me.....in thoughts, and yes, on Gchat and Skype ;).

Its funny, this whole definition of being close! Ms. Moon and i chat almost everyday even as we go about living in different continents. But while i was home, we hardly got a chance to talk much!! So draw your own conclusions :)).

And yes, not to leave you in this web of words, i present you with some pictures, for your viewing pleasure.....Enjoy :).

Sheetal, Manjul, Komal.....

Sheeta, Manjul, Komal.....

These words convey heartfelt emotions.....emotions of comfort.....comfort felt by the soul.....soul that was touched by the soft, comforting emotions.....

Yes, and these words belong to a song so melodiuos, so poignant that it evokes the same emotions in you.....

Y'day, while chatting with MD, we discussed about Sharatchandra's books.....and the one that i felt most about that moment was "Chirtraheen".....and as all of his books, this book to has strong female protagonists, my favorite being Kironmayee.....

And i remembered how i had found her character so striking, so well etched.....

and then, i thought of the song, that belonged to the televised version of this book. i came across this song through Sukhan's blog that links to this wonderful archive of Sh. Salil Chowdhury's music.....

and this song played on.....just as beautiful as the lyrics are.....i thought i would share this song (below):

Sheetal, Manjul, Komal

and i am still humming this song to myself.....feeling nostalgic.....

Tasveer.....

Ms. Moon e-mailed some old pictures to me y'day.....

Pictures from the days when she was here.....pictures before she left Boston to head back home.....pictures of a long walk near Jamaica Pond, and that picture in which she labeled me as a dreamer.....pictures of her, Arshi and me.....a few pictures from Arshi's mehndi ceremony.....

The random chit-chats, the thoughts, the feelings-it all came alive.....

it was just another lil' trip we all took together.....

Moongphali :)

I simply can't stay away from talking about food for long :).

and right now all i am thinking of is.....Moongphali, yes-my favorite winter-time snack.

This word itself is evoking nostalgia.....ah! the smell of roasted moongphali, with the chilka (shell). you could buy it from kiryana stores in bulk, or small packets from the rehdis/pheris/carts.....hmm, buying moongphali at the bus-stop while waiting for the bus after college used to be a favorite pass time. interestingly, this wonderful thing is also popularly known as "time-pass" for these very sentiments. i recall, how as a lil' kid, i used to bother my Dad to remove the shells for me.....that taste and aroma of moongphali from Desh is something out of this world. i have not found that slightly sweet and milky sort of taste, much desired if you want to eat plain mongphali, in the varities sold here.....the local varieties here go well with salt, while i don't recall having relied on salted moongphali alone back home except for the occasional fried moongphali with masala, besan wali moongphali, or the different namkeens with moongphali. the desi moongphali infact tasted equally good plain! roasted and with shells, or boiled (in salt water) like we used to get it in Bangalore.....the closest anything got to desi moongphali is something dry-roasted from Trader Joe's. I also love their spicy Thai Lime and Chilli moongphali. its yummy.....Golden Girl and i often munch on that with tea.....just like that, for time-pass ;).

Oh! i am missing my favorite snack.....

Searching the search ;)

I came across this bit while surfing Slashdot, and decided that i had to share this.

Apparently, "Yahoo" has become the #1 query on Google! also, a lot of people seem to be searching for the term "Google" on Yahoo.

Now, you may ask, whats the point.....hold on, i am still SEARCHing for it ;).

So, what may sound so funny when you read this, isn't actually that funny. plz. read the post on the link for more details, while i just summarize by saying that a lot of people are using search boxes rather than address boxes to surf the net.....many of them probably not aware on how to go otherwise, may be because one or the other web page is their home page and so on. its an interesting observation, and well, something that i personally won't make fun of. There are plenty of people (like some of our elderly folks, e.g.) who may not understand the nitty-gritties and do what just works for them (as many people point out in the discussion linked above). Interesting to me is the fact that what people just do on their computers shows up as a funny statistics for these rival search engines :).

and these kind of interesting links are cropping up! This one is really worth a click, just try! The name suggests to me that it promises the best of both seARCH rivals!

and yes, i am throwing in some nostalgia here :)).

lets start from the beginning.....when people would use (and many still do) Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, MSN with almost equally; when Yahoo used to be powered by Google (am i right, i sort of recall that) and there used to be a google.stanford.edu web-page :).

or when we used Netscape Navigator (and that its sort of a forefather to Firefox :).

Aha, and how i can forget about using Telnet for email, which via Pine was my only way of emailing long ago :). yes, those official email addresses.....before i discovered, um well, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Gmail and many more :).

and well, there used to be this 'Broken Pipe Error" while surfing the net ;). and then"Connection to host lost" message after logging out from the email.

How was that for some nostalgia :)).

Bas ek cup chai.....

Last night, i so felt like having a cup of tea.....late in the night, when i was so tired, i longed for that cup of warm and soothing elixir.....

i did get up and make myself a cup of hot masala chai. and as i was sipping on my chai, a few thoughts were brewing in my mind.....oh! i was nostalgic again.....

What is it in this cup to make me so nostalgic-besides milk, tea, sugar and the spices.....what is that magic ingredient.....

That magic, that warmth comes not only from this wonderful mix having reached the boiling point, but all that goes along with it.....

A lot happens over a cup of tea.....tired minds try to find excuses to unwind-all in the name of "bas ek cup chai".....its not chai that one craves for, its what comes with a cup of chai thats most comforting.....if you are alone, you mull over things, giving yourself enough space. The chit-chat, the sharing of thoughts, when you have chai with friends.

The countless cups of chai that i had with my friends late in the night.....dicussing the projects, the work, the movies, music festivals and a lot else.....the chai in that canteen may not have been the best, but the comfort it brought, definitely was.....we all used to share our thoughts over that cup of chai, in that canteen which everyone knew as the Tea-Board.....ironically so named, because there was another cafe' in the campus run by the Coffee-Board, which people simply referred to as the Coffee-Board!

The chai that i shared with Ms. Moon, even though sometimes it was just Dunkin-Donuts' vanilla chai.....or the plain chai at home, as Ms. Moon hates elaichis in her chai.....the thoughts mattered most.....the thoughts that secretly brewed along to make the chai a magic chai.....

The tea-party with Arshi, which was special in everyway, because it gave us time to talk and share books, thoughts and indulge in plain movie gossip sometimes :).

The chai with Ms. Doll, when we both sat silent and just sipped on.....for friends understand without words, what goes through each others mind.

The countless cups of chai at our favorite Indian corner or Starbucks, which MD and i shared.....discussing the latest news and work.....and which we both miss a lot, now that she's in a different continent.....

The chai that Golden Girl and i enjoy during our weekend brunches, watching her four year old daughter play.....and sometimes during the week, the hot chai/coffee brew that we buy from the vending machine.....just because we are lazy to walk a bit, and get "better" tea/coffee.....it doesn't matter. we just sit in our favorite corner, and the chai just tastes as good.

its that something extra in this cup, that makes me nostalgic.....

its that something extra in this cup, which adds a flavor that lasts a lifetime.....

Hope you are enjoying your cup of chai.....

My lil' vacation :)

I had been having dreams.....vivid, rich dreams.....crazy dreams.....

I poured out nostalgia all over this blog, and held some close to my heart.

I longed to sit outside that Starbucks, on the benches.....in my dreams, i saw cob-webs in the elevator that i used to take to go upto my office.....

and much contemplations later, i decided i had to be there.....

and thus my trip to Boston.....

every city has a distinct smell.....a distinct flavor, a distinct style.....that brings those who love the city back into her lap.....

and i got a chance to feel it all.....

the Longwood Medical Area, the food-court where Ms. Moon and i used to share our thoughts, where Ms. Doll (who played my host this time) and i chatted over coffee and even that CVS, where sometimes we would just walk in, to de-stress.....

The smell of Green Line T.....the familiar sights of Brookline and Coolidge Corner.....

I had never been away.....

and through that week, i lived in the same apartment where i used to live before.....the same apartment where i played a host to Doll, when she just came in from India and now she was playing my host.....the same apartment, where Moon lived before us both.....the same apartment, where Arshi and i lived together.....the same apartment where Doll lives now.....

I had come home, my second home.....

i dusted those cob-webs indeed.....writing to some friends after ages and seeing the sparkle in their eyes, when i met them.....and i have lots to share on that.

Friends :)

I know, i've been away for a while.....infact, i've been missing the blog :). thats height of narcissism ;).

Have been meaning to write since last weekend, but first i got sick and then there were few other things to take care of. Yeah, i finally got cold too. Oh, hold on, i am fine now-and anyway, you don't get sick reading a blog :)).

This week, a very dear friend of mine said bye-bye to the City of Angels, as she moves to Europe in a few days. needless to say, i am missing her and our adventures together.

We met a lil' more than a year ago. She was returning home from work, i was getting back to the lab after getting my evening coffee. As we waited for the walk sign, we found someone familiar around us.....yes, familiar. and then suddenly, we exchanged a smile and we both went "are you from .....". We exchanged phone numbers and email ids. Aha, and that was the beginning of what turned out to be a great friendship, spiced up with lots of food, movies and chit-chat. Thats why i like these desi-desi "where are you from"s.

We happen to be from the same graduate school-different departments and would have barely noticed each other in the campus.....(barely enough ;) to light up that faint spark of familiarity. The other common zing-thing we discovered within 5 minutes of our conversation was that we both had spent great time in Boston at some point :).

A whole year of good things, shared and experienced together-would last us both a life-time.....not only through the millions of pictures we madly clicked everywhere around, but also through the warm words, both spoken and un-spoken.....

i wish you a wonderful future and hope you make great friends in your new place.....

MD, this city isn't going to be the same without you, and i hope you would be back sometime-our favorite desi restaurant (and the friends we've made there), the Fox theater and the rest of Westwood awaits us :).

Boston, Tea-party.

One of the things that i miss most about Boston is the tea-party.....and i am not talking about the Boston tea-party. Way past the midnight, Arshi and i would have our own little
tea-party :) .

Arshi attended Art School during the day and worked in the night at an apartment help-desk in Prudential. But there were days when she would have a day off from her work. and those were the days we dedicated to the mad tea-parties :). Sitting outside near the apartment entrance, in the cold midnight that Boston so lovingly presented us with, we would sip on chai.....we would share pakoras, namkeen/nimko and many a dream.....endelessly chatting about how we wanted the things to be and how they actually had been. We would passionately talk about the books that we had read, the movies we enjoyed.....and the songs we so loved.....we would play on the same songs again and again, and never be tired of them.

we would talk about her workshops and my experiments.....the nice and the mean people at work.....and about the things that bonded us the most.....like our language, Punjabi and our passion for food. She loved sooji-halwa and would often ask me to make some.....yes, that what we were upto, making halwas and frying pakoras in the wee hours.....she would sometimes bless me like an octagenerian Bebe ji "Tere bachhe jeevan".....and we would burst our laughing. sometimes she would just make some mehendi and would insist that i also apply some.....we talked about mehendi a lot and tried to recall the Punjabi wedding songs :). she was like an elder sister to me, always so caring.....

few days back i was looking for something in an old bag.....and i found some notes on yellow stickies.....i had saved them when i left Boston.....those were the notes Arshi used to leave me.....our schedules being so different.....one of them said "Dear, the daal and sabzi in the fridge were yummmmmmy, promise to make you some aloo-parathas over the weekend, and BTW, thanks for the book-its great." and a B'day greeting card for me, which had a picture of me that she had clicked.....and another note about missing the tea-parties (written during the days when she was working towards her exhibition at school). we had many tea-parties after that.....we moved on with life.....any clue when will there be the next tea-party.....

Diwali stories

Happy Diwali, everyone. I am sure you are all having a wonderful, colorful and a thunderous diwali :).

I just woke up-had real great dreams about Diwali.....Oo wow, all the phooljharis, chakris and anaars. As I call home, I can hear the sound of fire-crackers in the backdrop. and friends are writing from home abot what they are going to do for diwali. am I jealous ;) . what do I do for Diwali? ha, ha-go to the lab :) and go out for lunch.....

This year my family welcomes two new members: my nephew (brother’s son) and my niece (sister’s daughter). Their parents are a bit worried that the diwali dhoom might upset the lil’ ones.

And I am thinking about how I spent my Diwali last year-it wasn’t anything great, especially with the happenings in New Delhi. and I felt disgusted with one remark from an Asian colleague “Oh, they had such trouble for a festival, innocent people targeted-why? India is not an important country”. and I went all GRRRRRRRRRRRR. well, umm, not that loudly and rudely. but I challenged her to explain what she meant!! I turned out that she meant politically neutral and with her English not helping her enough she uttered the unsavory!

But, there’s one Diwali that’s very close to my heart. Boston, circa 2003.....

its a Diwali weekend-am back home after finishing a bit work in the lab. as I sip on some masala chai, the door-bell rings. Hmm, she’s home-my house-mate Arshiya. She looks at me and greets “Happy Diwali ji”-and I greet her back with the same. as I serve her some chai she quips “where are the lights”. and that makes me think, hmm, yes, its Diwali today. But then, am I supposed to celebrate this year.....Mom has left us for the heavens this year.....i think. I am quiet. and Arshi asks me, “kahan kho gayin aap”-i remind her that Mom is here no more. She smiles and hugs me and echos what goes on in my minds just as she hugs me. and we understand that my being happy and enjoying is only going to make Mom happier. She would actually not like it, if her child isn’t happy. I look up and break into a tearful grin and I hear my sweetheart Mom say “Chal uth, aiwayein na ro-ja uth ke kuchh kar. Aapni saheli naal bahar jaake aa” (”get up, don’t cry like this-go, do something-go out with your friend”). Thanks sweetie, I chirp, as Arshi looks on if its for her. She knows the answer.....and goes to set up the X’mas lights on the windows.

Dressed up, Arshi and I go out. Its quite chilly and we decide to walk upto the Bombay Cinema for a Hindi movie from our apartment in Brookline. I am told that theater no longer screens Hindi movies. On the way, we stop at Kashmir, an Indian store and buy some diyas and sweets. We pick up a coffee from Dunkin’-Donuts and buy a cpl of samosas after we reach the theater and get the tickets. The tickets are for “Pinjar”, a movie based on Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam’s novel by the same name. We anticipate a great movie as we both are Punjabis.....from the two sides of border. We munch on samosas while watching this movie that revolves around the story of a girl Puro, set in the turbulent times of India’s Partition. We are both a tearful shadow of ourselves, crying in bucketloads.....the movie ends and we both come out with a heavy heart and begin walking home. But as we walk, we feel lighter.....we laugh at this situation-an Indian and Pakistani girl watching and crying through this movie together. its a hindi movie like situation, we joke :).

We reach home, its another round of chai, this time with aloo-paranthas. We light the diyas and then sit and chat and within five minutes we realize we need some therapy.....we break into tearful grins again and pick up the casette for Chalte-Chalte and enjoy our beloved SRK dancing to “Gumshuda.....”

Dada Dadi Ki Kahaniyan

Few days back i was playing with my friend's four years old when she just jumped into my lap and nudged me to tell her a goshto (a story/tale in Marathi). and i did, the story i had heard so many times, over and over again from my Mom and Grandmom.

And that took me down the memory lane..... the different stories, told and retold by the elders in the same wonderful style. the stories were told with masterly sound effects and perfect expressions, recreating the whole scene.....how vivid the imagery was-one could just see the cute kittens and rabbits, the mean wolf, the pretty princess, the graceful queen and a lot more right there.

Sitting in Grandma's lap and enjoying the warmth of her shawl's bukkal (bukkal: throwing one end of the shawl over the left shoulder, known as bukkal maarna in Punjabi) in the winters or just enjoying the gentle humming of her pankhi (hand fan) under the starlit sky in the summer , every night, i would enjoy countless tales of courage and bravery, beauty and riches.....she would tell stories and riddles or bujharataan/baatan on demand :). in her mock anger, she would say "i told this story even y'day", but i would go on requesting. there were many folk-tales about phool kumari, the queen and her maid-servants, the gith-muthiyas (mythic dwarfs who live in paataal-lok,meaning below the ground), jal-pari (the mermaid like mythic crature), panchtantra, Alif-laila, Bhagat Pooran ji, stories about the legendary warriors and saints, peers and faqeers, religious stories about Krishna ji, Ram Chandra ji and the Sikh Gurus. There were stories from her own times also-stories about Netaji, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, The World Wars and 1947. and whenever i would request her for a story during the day-time, she would say "you are not supposed to tell stories during the day-time. the travellers lose their way". sure, with such wonderful stories, they would!

Here are a few stories and i am glad that i found this link to share (God bless the people who compiled this).

I just mentioned about Punjabi tales, because thats where i come from. But our culture is a treasure-trove of such wonderful tales, in different languages.This tradition of narration and dramatic rendition is fading slowly. if you/ your elders have such tales to share, please come forward :). Lets hope that "Once upon a time" just doesn't become once upon a time.....