Little Joys.

I was re-reading Taryn's post on my blog this summer and was reminded of this note that I'd sent out on Facebook asking people to write down 5 of their favourite things:

Little things that make me happy:

1. Walking on grass/sand/mud barefeet
2. Watching the stars
3. Dancing (salsa!)
4. Wedding photos
5. Afternoon naps (especially during exam-time ;))

What about you?

List five things that make you happy and pass it on.

I went back to read it and it's so uplifting! Here are some of my favourites from what people wrote:

• Looking at pictures of my childhood (Ribhu)
• Letters from friends - I re-read them (Sushi)
• Coloured straws. They're so bright and colourful how can you not be happy when drinking with them? Or... at the thought of drinking with them... YAY pink straws! :P (Alisha)
• Movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's (Sharan)
• Eating pani puri (Siddharth)
• Finding old photographs in the most unexpected places (Adrian)
• Babies/baby pictures (Sonu)
• The way my hair smells after the shower (Alva)
• Fresh laundry (Abi)
• Long car rides with good company and familiar music playing (Taryn)
• The weather before a HEAVY downpour - crazy winds (Dinah)

So what about you?

Do tell! (If you answered on Facebook, I'm sure you can still think of another five!)

I'm adding one more: Converse Shoes.

Photo credits:
1. summer: my barefeet in the grass, 2. Toesies 2, 3. Untitled, 4. Up Where They Play, 5. Would you like to dance salsa?, 6. Day One Hundred, 7. Pani Puri Lunch! (365-126), 8. Omaggio a Audrey Hepburn semplicemente divina!, 9. Wash Day, 10. Guitar, 11. Baby C in the Teacup, 12. - Mail Day!! -, 13. Candy straws, 14. Congratulations Missy and Charlie!, 15. Day 90/365

Another long weekend...

Back to the grind tomorrow. Today is Dussera which is a pubilc holiday which is always good when it's a monday cause it means you get a long weekend. Weekends are the best because I get to sleep in but not really for any other other reason. I'm happy on weekdays cause I'm busy and I get to see my friends but anyway, this weekend has been full and interesting!

Today, Antu and I went to Sonu's place in Kandivli and watched Dirty Dancing as a sort of 'tribute' to Patrick Swayze. I remember watching this movie in Std. 12 and we were all pretty crazy about it. We would have dancing sessions in my room to Do You Love Me. Ah, those were the days! ;)

Yesterday I went to the Art Expo 2009 at the Nehru Centre in Worli. It was pretty awesome. It was basically like an exhibition of different art galleries from around India but there were some other exhibits too. There was this whole section on Jawaharlal Nehru with all these old photographs of the freedom struggle and Independence Day which was really fascinating. It was like walking through history and I learnt a whole lot.

I also met two fellow Hebronites there. Both of them graduated wayyy before me but thanks to Facebook... Anyway, so one of them happens to be a celebrity now (Kalki Koechlin, she acted in the film Dev D) and it was pretty interesting just listening to her talk about this world of Bollywood and modelling that I have pretty limited knowledge about. I kind of felt out of place but she was nice and she even gave me a lift after we left from there...

And then I took the long commute back home and had a nice long phone conversation with Taryn (in Delhi)and had a Skype date with Natasha (in the US) around midnight and wrote in my diary about how thankful I am to have such wonderful friends. Friends who are so good at listening and make you feel like you are as important to them as they are to you. Friends who have been there for 8 years...

And then I gave in to sleep. As I am about to do now.

Toodles.

Atticus.

Love, Love, Love this film.

At the American Centre they screen movies on Fridays and Saturdays. Today I went to return a book (The Time Traveler's Wife - Excellent book btw!) and found out that they were screening To Kill A Mockingbird. I've read the book and watched the movie once before but it was a Saturday afternoon, had nothing to do and their auditorium is really nice so I thought what the heck!

And I'm glad too. Atticus Finch, I have decided is my favourite book/movie character ever. Have you ever seen such a level-headed, patient, persevering, wise, kind man?

Please watch this film if you haven't. Better yet, read the book by the same name by Harper Lee.

Red Tape Alert.

Wow, today was pretty exhausting. Besides the usual – horrible weather and all the other ‘perks’ of living in Mumbai – we had to fill out our examination application forms in college.

Alert! Red Tape Ahead!

Bureaucracy and I don’t get along very well. He/she/it has been pretty nasty to me in the past (ask me about the passport incident) and so I like to avoid it as much as I can. But today was pretty unavoidable. Generally I’m never available to fill out forms and one of my wonderful friends does it for me while I’ve escaped home. Today we had to fill out our University Examination Forms which is a pretty serious thing because it’s the University and you have to be perfect because they are far from it so you can’t give them any chance to find fault because they will and then you’re pretty much in a pickle.

[Enter frustration.] It was pretty unorganized and I thought we’d get some sort of spoken instructions but that didn’t really happen and it was confusing and chaos.

I guess this was a unique experience for me in a sense. I’ve never had to fill out a form for an Indian exam before and this will be the first time I will ever give an Indian board examination. So picking centres and filling out codes and all that is new. (We all picked South Bombay centres because we’ve heard horror stories about some of the centres in the suburbs...)

Everything was different for me because my school mark-sheets don’t have a lot of things that my friends’ do. For one, I have two mark-sheets for my final year of school because my German exam was Edexcel and not Cambridge. Secondly, my mark-sheet has my name on it. That’s it. Not father’s name/mother’s name or anything else. Priyanka Nandi. That’s it. So I had a bit of a dilemma in the part that asks,

Father’s/Husband’s First Name:
Mother’s Name:

(Yeah, let’s not even start on the ‘husband’s name’ part.)

Because apparently what you put in here is what you get on your degree and I’m Priyanka Nandi everywhere. My passport, all previous exams, probably my birth certificate… (except maybe my driver’s license but that’s a joke anyway) So I decided not to fill out that part at all so I am just Priyanka Nandi.

Anyway, it’s done. (And now we just have to hope they don’t find some other nitpicky problem with anything...)

..and to wash away all the stress, Antu and I went and had a refreshing plate of Pani Puri each once we reached Andheri. Works like magic, I tell you ;)

Mercy.

Its raining!!!!

Only if you live in Bombay, will you know how much of a relief this is.

In the last two weeks or so, Bombay has turned into one big oven.

It's

SO

freaking

HOT!

Today after we were done with classes, Sharan and I took a bus to go to the American Centre Library and we were pretty much roasting in there and coming back home in the afternoon is the most dreadful part of the day. For one, you never get cabs willing to go to the station for some mysterious reason and buses are so crowded that there are people literally hanging out of them. Ok, so somehow we finally make it to the station and if we're really lucky we might get a place to sit and if we're just lucky then you might get a place to stand. It baffles me sometimes. How? How are there just SO MANY PEOPLE in this city? And how am I still alive? :)

Alive and kicking.

Thank God for new mercies every morning.

(Commute with me?)

As the rain and the snow

come down from heaven,

and do not return to it

without watering the earth

and making it bud and flourish,

so that it yields seed for the sower

and bread for the eater.

So is my word that goes out from my mouth:

It will not return to me empty,

but will accomplish what I desire

and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

-- Isaiah 55:10-11

the curious incident...

... of the missing seat on the local train to borivili.

No joke. We got on the train and a seat was missing!

Ah, all in a day of Bombay-life!

Haribo!

Haribo macht kinder froeh und erwachsene ebenso!

Ja! Aber sind wir kinder oder erwachsene?! :P

(Sonu sharing her goodies from Germany)

Just a glimpse...

I know I promised to put up photos last week but in my defense, I have laptop issues! So here's a teaser from Jo's dance performance last weekend! :D

I wish...

... that camera belonged to me :P

The Good and the Bad.

:) I enjoyed another awesome theatre experience yesterday. Jo and I went to the NCPA to watch Ismat Apaa Ke Naam (II); another production by Naseerudin Shah’s theatre group – Motley. It was brilliant, albeit a little difficult to understand because it was in Urdu which is quite similar to hindi but not the same. The play is basically three short stories written by Ismat Chugtai which has been converted into a play form by Shah.

:( I have a 7am class tomorrow and we had almost four hours of non-stop classes this afternoon. so. tiring

:) Thanks to all the extra classes there seems to be some hope of a short break in October after all. Nothing is confirmed yet, but there is hope…

:) I came home and found a surprise! My darling friend Niru who lives in Melbourne sent me flowers and a box of chocolates… just like that. Because she loves me. Isn’t that sweet? Totally made my day.

:( My laptop is acting funny again… more signs of its imminent death... :(

:) Tomorrow is the last day of my internet bill cycle.

:) I actually had time to go to the American Centre Library this week and return my book. It was a few days late but the nice librarian didn't penalize me for it and I got two new books to read: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. This library is actually one of my favourite places in the city and I can't believe I only got to take advantage of it in my last (hopefully? maybe? who knows?) year in Bombay. The paranoid security on the outside can be a turn-off but once you get inside, it's just wonderful. I can spend hours at this place...

:( I need to be off and write notes on Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton...

Toodles!

I Know This Much Is True

I would really love to post pictures from the weekend but my internet is being annoying and I'm busy trying to finish the last 100 or so pages of this big fat book that I've been reading for almost a month now. It is now overdue at the library (darn it!) so I have to finish it tonight...
It is a brilliant book by the way. Granted, it took me a while to really begin to appreciate it (around 650 pages to be precise! :P) and it's intimidatingly long but I would highly recommend it. The characters are really beautifully developed and they just grow on you... I'm actually kind of sad I'll be finished with it soon.

"We'd all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time."
-- Wally Lamb (I Know This Much Is True)

p.s. I know you should never judge a book by its cover but isn't it just beautiful?

Everything and More.

Yesterday was absolute brilliance! Like I mentioned in my last post, it was Jo's birthday and her performance in the evening... What I didn't mention is that we had planned to turn up at her house at 7am to surprise her!

L-R: Sonu, Antu, Sharan, Vini, Gauri, Jo, Tina, Madhuri

Initially the plan was to do it a day before her birthday because it was supposed to be a public holiday and so we could go over to her place early morning but then it turned out that we had classes on Thursday morning so we had to shift it to Friday morning. "Okay, all the better to have it on her birthday anyway," we thought to ourselves. So we'd wake up really early and aim to reach her place at 7am and THEN go to college. (haha! we can be pretty ambitious sometimes :P)

So Thursday came, we went to college, pretending like we didn't really have any plans for Jo's birthday and as far as she knew we'd all just meet at college in the morning... and then it rained. It poured. In fact it was probably in the top 5 wettest days of this "monsoon". We woke up in the morning and it was raining, we went to sleep at night and it was raining and we woke up on Friday morning and it was STILL raining. So we conference called each other and had to rearrange our plan again to accommodate for the rain because Bombay is a mess when it rains - trains get delayed, everything is unpredictable... the works. This was at around 6am. We decided to wait and see if the rain subsides and then leave after that. Anyway thankfully, the rain did subside enough for us to be able to make a decision to leave and we finally all got there by around 7:45am and waited below Jo's building while Gauri tried to stall her and prevent her from leaving her apartment to catch a bus to college!

We went up, rang the bell. Jo's mom opened the door and let us in. We all sat in the living room and we can hear Jo getting ready in the bedroom and looking for things and then she steps out...

SURPRISE!!

Gosh, it was awesome! She didn't have a clue and it all went off so well! Obviously we didn't end up going to college after all. Jo's mom made us breakfast (she was our co-conspirator of the entire plan), we ordered Chinese food for lunch and we just hung around at her place pretty much the whole day (we even had a much needed nap in the afternoon! :D)! And then in the evening we went to watch Jo perform!

Jo's chaddi-buddy, Madhuri was also there which was really great! We got to interact with her quite a bit over the last few weeks as we planned and coordinated the whole thing. She put together this really great scrapbook for Jo with little messages from all of us and lots of photos and we got a gorgeous little dress made for her.

So it was a fabulous day! All of us just being together has been a rare occurrence this year so it was just great to hang out and relax!

There are plenty of photos but for some stupid reason I took my camera cable to Antu's place on Thursday and I left it there and haven't been able to get it back yet! I got some awesome shots at the programme last evening on Jo's camera but I haven't got those yet either! :( So it'll have to wait till Monday...

The above photos were taken by Jo's dad and Sharan respectively. The first one is a group pic of all us including Madhuri and the second is from the scrapbook!

September!

I should be more careful what I ask for. Since the beginning of the this academic year I've been complaining about college is not challenging enough and I don't FEEL like I'm in college and I want to be able to say things exaggerated things like, "there are not enough hours in the day!", "I have TOO MUCH TO DO!" and of course experience the guilty pleasure of facebooking and blogging when I should be reading or writing something (like now! :P)

Well, I got my wish. My goodness. I've only been back about 6 days and it feels like it's been two weeks or atleast I think we've probably achieved two weeks worth of work in these few days. The boundaries between one day and the next are beginning to blur... You know what I mean? Like I'm not sure where one day ends and the next starts it just seems like they just sort of flow into each other and you keep going!

Besides having to stay back in college for extended classes (till 4:00pm on some days!), there are assignments and projects which all sort of piled up during the madness of the strike and the H1N1 days when nobody was motivated to do anything. So all in all, LOTS TO DO!

But I'm not complaining! I am a tired but happy girl :)

Besides, it's September and I have things to look forward to!

For starters, it's this girl's birthday on Friday!Joyee, before another programme at the NCPA last month

And she's going to be performing in a dance/drama called Chitrangada on Friday night. It's an annual programme by Shahana which is a Centre for Tagore Music and Culture here in Bombay. There was a little picture of her in the Bombay Times yesterday! So proud of her! :D