Alot of Crap

I'm going to make this a mixed post, although i'd have liked to take up each thing in a different post. I don't think i can elaborate too much, considering there are quite a few things i'd like to put in. Ok, i better start! Get prepared to yawn. If you're reading this, it means you don't have anything else to do! So yawning wouldn't be too bad ;-)

• You know how it feels to taste victory as a team? *heaven* The past few days has made me realise how important it is to play as many sports as possible when one is young! I thought of all the times when i had to play cricket by force, with my brother and the other guys around (i almost always miraculously happened to be the only girl!). I most definitely played more guy games than girl games! Climbed trees, and the likes! But well, i never really thought the cricket would come in handy till we lifted that cup today... :) Some victory! Medals, the trophy, faces tanned black and red, sour throats from screaming and teethy smiles! YAY!


• Sometimes prayer is magical. Magical in a way that one has never experienced before. When i first saw my juniors last year, i realised why seniors feel like ragging juniors! Every single thing they did seemed so irritating, and one had a strong urge to rag! But ofcourse that didn't happened. But the way they prayed before our matches...and made us pray...has opened up a new found respect for them, and their team spirit! And there's always the magic of silence...nothing but the whistle of the wind...and 15 pairs of eyes closed...


• I believe i was born on this earth for the sole purpose of eating, and eating alot! I love babycorn. And i love getting them off their covers as much as i love eating them. Ever noticed how remarkably smooth the fibre inside the cover is? If you haven't, you're missing one of nature's finest creations!


• Music is such an integral part of life... *sigh* I'm currently addicted to the song named 'Maula Mere' from the movie anwar. And...and...and... i've developed a new liking for the piano! An instrument that has never been too close to heart. I was always crazy about the violin, and still have plans of learning how to play it (yeah right!). Maybe i've just started noticing the small piano pieces here and there in songs... nice :)


• I'm hearing too many love stories nowadays. Real life. And its been a smooth realisation that cinema is inspired from real life! And real life is sometimes beyond things cinema portrays!


• Mira Nair is directing the Shantaram movie, and Big B is acting in it. :( :( :( Johnny Depp, are u reading this? :( :( Can't you pick a better caste?!


• I watched "Water" yesterday. A mixture of beauty and poignancy. A movie that gives you hope till the last 20 minutes... and ofcourse it'll make you wonder 'now, is that really John Abraham?!' Lisa Ray looks lovely. Brilliant perfomances by Seema Biswas and the kid, Sarala, as Chuhiya (I found the name immensely cute). And the song 'aayo re saki' seems so much more wow after watching the movie...the movie is worth watching for some very well placed, well shot, well written and aptly portrayed scenes :) A bold attempt - sensitive, humourous, romantic, hurt-ful, poignant...but beautiful.


• Lesson for the week - Do not read in between lines when all that is required is to read the lines alone!

Well, thats it! If you're not already sleeping, you could comment :)

Yours "A white so pure, life so ironic"ly

Signing off....

Plays and Puppets

Offering flowers in prayer is a Hindu tradition that is followed flawlessly at home. Buying flowers for the next day's pooja was an amusing cause of quarrel between my brothers, who are now blissfully settled in places where flowers are probably used for any purpose other than prayer! Why quarrel? Because either of them had to chauffeur my grand-dad to the flower cart of the old lady sitting outside a small temple at the corner of a street 5 minutes away from home. And of course there'd be times when my grand-dad would walk right out on them and walk it up to the flower woman and buy his flowers! But well, times change. My stubborn grand-dad, who staunchly believed that the best flowers in the place were sold by the old lady, had to settle for home delivery of flowers by someone else becuase it didn't seem feasible for him to walk down everyday, and nobody was ready to do the chauffeuring everyday anymore (maybe that means I didn't make the trips for him after my brothers left!). That is how it all started... the flower lady began to come home every evening with her basket of flowers.

There's some unknown force that links our flower lady to dinner time. Her timing is indeed commendable, considering we have no fixed time for dinner everyday. She makes it a point to ring our door-bell atleast when my grandparents are eating, if not the whole lot of us. And they have to leave their plates and slowly walk to the door, where she is comfortably seated, gaping at the television, and asking for a change of channel to catch glimpses of her daily soap - more commonly known as 'serial' here! You can just about assume that her eyes have forgotten how to blink...she's anyway too busy cursing the lead character or the villain! One evening i caught my grandmother in deep discussion with the flower lady. It was a little weird, considering my grandmother (a) Didn't have a plate with half-eaten food on the table and (b) wasn't calling out names of flowers with the amount she wanted. What was worse was that the discussion was almost a whisper, and my gossip-craving soul was instantaneously attracted to the hushed tones and the definitely drawn expressions on my grandmother's face! Maybe Flat no.2's servant maid's sister-in-law's cousin's daughter got pregnant before she got married? What disappointment my poor soul had to face when my ears made it clear to my brain that my dear grandmother was catching up on some episodes she'd missed from the 7 O' clock soap! Does this have any limits? *sigh*

Apparently, it doesn't! Gone are the days when i tried the tricks of elongating my round face to make it clear i don't approve of the remote control resting its half-broken back on my grandmother's hands rather than mine. Now, we accept the fact that the remote control belongs to her on week days, and even better, watch the soaps once in a while because something's better than nothing! And it has been my immensely useful discovery, out of true experience, that it is enough to watch one episode every 2 months to follow the story of every soap! Of course the finer details can always be skipped, or in desperate situations, brought out as a narrative from dear grandma! Thus the daily routine continues... they laugh with the characters, cry with the characters.... after all, all world's a play!

Thasall...

To those who were once here, and now dwell in a more wonderful place....Rest in peace. You'll be remembered forever, in the depths of our minds, in the smiles of our eyes, in the fogged memories that may be hazy, but never too unclear to see what we wish to see. God bless.

Yours "All world's a play...and all mortals, puppets"ly
Signign off....

Yours inspirationally...

What inspires? A speech? A story? A quote? A movie? A person?

Sunsets, war movies (old style, with the horses and swords!) always inspire me! Braveheart, The last samurai, Lord of the rings, and even troy imparted that feeling...! Some nut eh? ;-) I remember being inspired by the story of 'the race for dna'. Being a biotechie, i found the story of a how an aspiring ornithologist,James Watson and a physicist (measuring viscosity of liquids!), Francis Crick came together to crack the structure of the secret of life, dna, that too after years of competition with a pioneer in the field of protein structure computation, Linus Pauling. Other stories, other quotes or single lines, even songs... they just make you stop for a while and think, and marvel, and wonder...they make you want to do something significant! I still dont know why inspiration is such a short-lived feeling. When it is present, it is overwhelming with its presence, but when it leaves, it leaves you devoid of a feeling of worthiness!

Long hours of travel to our destination, the heat and the distance should have put off anyone among our group who was attending the workshop on toxicology at kancheepuram. But at the end of the 2 day affair, we stood there applauding, wanting more. It is my strong belief that i wouldn't remember more than half of that workshop had it not been for this 20 minute speech by a prof. It was a mix of biology and philosophy, the best vote of thanks i have ever heard. It is very rare that a live speech makes you cry because of the sheer beauty of its contents...this one moved most of us to tears, and was talked about for hours in the bus. It inspired me to the extent of picking up the mic and thanking him for the speech - something i've never done before, and never ever dreamed of doing. So i'd like to say, to Dr.Venkatadri, the look in your eyes when you talked about the sunset and the rhapsody, the fools and the world, plato and biology...that look, was inspiration. And like one of my friends put it, Philosophy was never so beautiful till we met you!

There's this movie i watched today which in its own way was a little inspiring. A movie from which emanated so much postive-ness that even the most determined pessimist would remain optimistic for atleast sometime after watching it. Mozhi. We don't see too many tamil movies like this one these days. Light and floaty, but very beautiful, and very thought provoking, not easily forgotten, good music, excellent perfomances and characterisation. Its like a new genre of movies has evolved with the 'prakashraj production' tag. And every movie is getting better...while you can expect a good story and good perfomances from a mani rathnam movie, good entertainment and commercial cinema from a shankar film, prakashraj gives us the hope that his movies will be classic feel-good, with an under-current of very good humour. I reccomend this movie, highly.

And then there's this story of someone's life. Someone i respected for her experience in the field of cancer research, and her dedication towards the subject till i heard other things... After hearing her story, there's so much more respect and so much to learn from. Though the story of how she waited 2 years, and worked so hard just to get into the lab of her dreams, to satisfy her passion for cancer research is awe evoking, and very inspiring, the other side of her story makes one realise how much the choices we make in life matter, and how important it is to make the right decisions. It seems impossible that a person who has made so many sacrifices can exist...but there she stands, teaches, sits among us like she were one of us, jokes around about students, not ever allowing us to acknowldge the fact that we're blessed to have ever met her, and sit with her and hold subject talk and small talk. One wonders why her story had to be so complicated, why she had to undergo so many trials, why she had to deal with more than she could ever handle... but again, some things, some stories are just not meant to be understood...and we may spend a lifetime trying to understand them. Like a friend once wrote

"kuch kahaniyan, kuch daastayein, jo kabhi kisi ko samjane ke liye na banayi gayi ho, jise samajhne main kabhi shayad puri zindagi lag jaye"

Yours inspirationally
Signing off....