"Listen to me, please..."

A couple of months ago, a fellow-blogger and friend-that-I've-never-even-met (shout out to Kari! :D) recommended this documentary called Home made by a man called Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film had recently been produced and was on offer for free viewing for a couple of days online. But I didn't watch it. Not because I'm a cynic who doesn't believe in the importance of protecting God's creation. Not because I think those people who preach about the big, scary 'G' phrase (Global Warming) are just a bunch of smart-asses who want to freak us out and are really taking it too far. But because I was in Bombay and my internet connection there is appalling so it would possibly have taken me two weeks to stream the 1hr 33min film. (Not to mention the hefty cost of using said appalling internet connection)

Thankfully though, my brother had a copy so I finally watched it this evening.


I really don't know what to say.Shall I talk about the beauty of this planet that we live in? Shall I talk about the horrible horrible things that we have done to it? Shall I talk about man's incredible selfishness that will lead him to any extent just so he can live in "comfort", no matter what consequence that may have? Shall I talk about our 'blindness' or 'stubbornness', call it what you will.

If I had to describe the film in one word, it would be - *Shudderific*

I know, that's not really a word, but it works quite well for me, thankyouverymuch :P


I don't know what it is. I mean, I don't think that people don't know about Climate Change or understand what Global Warming IS... but somehow, it seems like we've all been numbed into inaction. Why don't we believe that we have the power to make a difference? Why don't we believe that this is important? It's not just about saving those beautiful corals, or the fact that "species are dying out at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate" or how hot our summers are getting. We are human beings, we invented the computer, the internet and so many more fantastic technologies. We can get around hotter summers - we'll just convince ourselves that ACs are necessities. Like a child we'll moan and groan till we get what we want at our convenience and at our timing.

But at what cost? There is so MUCH at stake, it's staggering! It's about world hunger. Poverty. Losing the Antartic. Drinking water. Agriculture. The spread of diseases. Drought. Flood. New diseases. War. Health. LIVES. Maybe not yours directly right now but can you, for a moment please, just put yourself in the shoes (not shoes, he probably doesn't have those) walk around in the skin of a farmer in rural India? He goes to sleep hungry along with his family - also hungry. He sows his seeds in anticipation of the monsoon that never comes. And when it comes, it does more harm than good. Another year gone by, no money, no food, no apparent light at the end of the tunnel...


This situation is OUR doing. WE are directly responsible for his plight. WE have shortened the monsoon. WE have created record-breakingly HOT summers. WE have created unusually early and cold winters. WE are systematically and consistently ruining our own planet. Our own habitat. It's like sitting on the very branch that you're sawing off.

That's dumb, isn't it? Surely, we're smarter than that?

I think so. We just need to wake up. Open our eyes. Stop shirking off responsibility.

Like the film says, "It's too late to be a pessimist".

There is still hope. It seems pretty dismal sometimes but it's there. I believe that.
"Our ecosystem doesn't have borders. Wherever we are, our actions have repercussions on the whole earth. The atmosphere of our planet is an invisible whole. It is an asset we share."
- HOME

p.s. The documentary is still available for FREE viewing here: Home - A Film By Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Two Hands

The kind that speaks to you...

Listen to this song.

Mollycoddle.

Tina:

• Watched Away We Go last night. So honest. So funny. So brilliant. Sam Mendes does it again (remember Revolutionary Road?), ladies and gentlemen!
• Joined Twitter recently and hasn't yet figured out what the hype is all about.
  
• Installed Ubuntu on her laptop last night (I lie, I mean yesterday morning...) and is wondering why is there not more hype about the brilliance of it! It's simple, it's FREE, it's so much less fussy and buggy than Windows... Try it!
• Has been cycling for the last three days and re-realising how much she loves it! The wind in your face, the control... awesome!
  
• Does not know what she's going to do after college next year. Surprise surprise!
  
• Made flash cards to make studying more fun today. It works!
• Loves reading the dictionary! It's so enlightening. She learnt some new words such as mollycoddle and many other funny words which she really should have written down because she can't remember or find them now :/
• Is enjoying Bangalore weather but hating the dryness which is doing horrible things to her skin! Hello moisturizer!
  
• Has run out of things to say... :)
  

Picture this!

So I posted this picture that I took on Facebook a couple of days ago and had a lot of fun reading people trying to guess what I'm reflecting off! It's a black and white picture of a reflection (not a shadow) and I took it on the terrace.

Any takers?

(No Nandis or any other people who lived in this house and Facebookers - if you've read the comments on Fbook - are allowed to play this game! :P)

Treasure Hunt!

You know one of the things that I LOVE about this wonderful world of blogging?
Sometimes, you find such treasures on other total strangers' blogs!
Here is one such treasure!
It's a song called 'Beautiful You' by Monk and Neagle. The video is compiled by some other total stranger on YouTube and it's not that great but just let it load and listen to the song!

Beautiful You
I can’t imagine life without You
Beautiful You
I can’t imagine being alone
Beautiful You
The only thing I ever wanna do
Beautiful You
Is have You hold me in Your arms
Beautiful You

-- Beautiful You by Monk and Neagle

Shine for you.

Guess who I saw yesterday?

TAZZO!Taz and me catching up on the couch at her aunt's place

She got leave for a couple days and came to Bangalore. I wasn't sure I'd get to see her because she left for Ooty the morning after I reached Bangalore and then had to fly back out to Delhi yesterday evening but then it worked out really neatly and I went over to her aunt's place in Kamanahalli and we got a couple of precious hours together!

I also got to see her mom and her little brother which was so great cause I haven't seen them in so long!

Taryn and her brother, Micah, who is one the sweetest 12 year old boys I have ever met!

Taryn is so very special to me. We started school together at Hebron almost 9 years ago and went through all the highs and lows that come in the life of a bunch of teenage girls together! So very glad I got to catch up with her and so excited for the awesome things that God is doing in her life right now! :) I'll get her to guest-write about that on the blog one of these days! ;)

Celebrating Light!

Light the fire

In my soul.

Fan the flame,

Make me whole.

HAPPY DIWALI!

Favourite things... (1)

Grocery shopping at Spar!

Singin' in the rain...

This song... Never fails to make me smile :D

To the sun...

On the plane, in my bag! ;)

One of the best flight's I've had in a looong time! The two seats next to me were empty and it was the middle of the afternoon, so the sun was shining in ALL ITS GLORY and the clouds - oh the clouds. So gorgeous. I was like a little kid peering out the window being awed!

Photosynthesis

Cocoberry!

Apparently you're not allowed to take photos on planes and at airports or something like that but that just makes it all the more intriguing so I tried surreptitiously to take this photo on my last flight back from Bangalore. Didn't work out so great because my batteries were dying so I'm going to give a try again today ;)

p.s. can you tell that my internet bill cycle just started up again? sometimes i feel like i live from bill cycle to cycle. paying bills are a pain-in-me-arse! internet should be free! how are we to live without googling things!? just yesterday, my friends and i went out for lunch and after that went to this place called Cocoberry where they serve 'frozen yoghurt' (it's supposed to be a healthy substitute to ice-cream... well, it is a pretty pathetic substitute to ice-cream!) and we were debating the difference between curd and yoghurt and the conclusion was to "google it!" :)

original flavoured frozen yoghurt with kiwis, dried figs and chocolate shavings...

Jo, me, Antu and Sonu at Cocoberry

incidentally, what IS the difference between curd and yoghurt? is there a difference. jo insists that there is, but she's biased :P

Jo and me at 5Spice - the chinese restaurant we went to for lunch. Amazing portions, good food and works out really cheap if you go in a group.

Jo and Antu went out and cast their vote yesterday! And before you start wondering why I didn't vote - I very much do believe in voting but I'm not a permanent resident here so I'm not allowed to vote here...

Only in India (Part 4)

Today was as a disastrous and good day all at the same time. Too tired to narrate the story right now though...

I noticed this building while Sonu and I were waiting at a bus-stop in Bandra this evening. Just love all the colours contrasting against the cement walls...

Where: Mithibai College Bus-stop, Bandra

When: 13th October, 2009

What: An incomplete building...

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Oops!

On the train at 8:10am this morning. Late for class. Oops!

That's it! No more classes for me for atleast 2 weeks! :) Tomorrow is election day in Maharashtra so no college (PLEASE GO VOTE - SENSIBLY!) but we are going out to lunch! ;) And my flight is at 2pm on Wednesday so won't be going to classes.

Life is good! No, seriously. Life is really good.

6th of October

-- Today is my mom's birthday. And I forgot. I know, shame on me right?! Now, I'm not making excuses here but in trying to figure out how I did this I came up with the following reasons:

1. I'm actually generally really bad with remembering birthdays and also names. Names of anything - places, movies, songs, bands, people. Just don't ask me.
2. All the associations are wrong this year. Everything is wrong this year in terms of schedule. I went home in August for two weeks. K'scope should've been over. I'm supposed to be having exams now but I'm not... Etc, etc.
3. Facebook didn't remind me. Neither did my phone. Or any other technical double-edged sword for that matter. If you think about it, thanks to phones and the internet - if you use them a lot (and I do) - you don't actually have to remember anything for yourself nowadays. I remember before the world of cellphones, I knew all my friends' phonenumbers off by heart. Ask me today and I'll be frantically looking for my phone and searching through my contacts! Heck, ask me for my own number and I'll probably stumble and give you a missed call instead so it gets directly saved on your phone :P And the same goes for birthdays, I usually rely on Facebook to tell me when somebody's birthday is which doesn't work when that person doesn't have a Facebook presence. Like my mother.

-- Anyway, thankfully my dad reminded me and my mom forgave me ;)

-- While I was out forgetting my mom's birthday, Antu, Jo and I went to watch Wake Up Sid! which is the movie that got caught up in the "controversy" mentioned in my previous post. And I figured that maybe the reason they had to pick a fight on this film (because I'm pretty sure that MOST characters in most films based in Bombay still call it Bombay) is because it's a HAPPY movie and they don't really come off as a happy bunch of people. They're more into violence and havoc. Because I mean, they didn't make a big deal out of Kaminey and in that, they're actually portrayed negatively but then again, maybe they weren't intelligent enough to figure that out. Just my twopence.

-- The movie was great. I enjoyed it to the core. It's one of the those sit-back-and-relax stories told clean and simple. Fun fun! Some really good photography in the film and Ranbir carries around this awesome camera which had me going "I WANT!!" Konkona is gorgeous and brilliant as usual. Ranbir was impressive. And the other guy - so cute! :P Also, we spotted a couple (two) girls from our college acting as extras in the film!

-- Going home again in 8 days! :D

What's in a name?

I made the mistake of reading the paper early in the morning before leaving for college today.. I don't usually do this because I know that what I find in the paper is probably not the first thing that I want to read at the beginning of a full day of college if I intend to be in a good mood so I leave it till I get back and have shed the stress of the day. So it was a Big Mistake. I was so disturbed that I forgot to put on my kajal, didn't brush my hair and almost missed the last of the 'last-minute-fast-trains'...

I knew the story already thanks to Jo who sometimes gives me real-time news updates because of my lack of 24/7 access to 24/7 news channels (which is actually a blessing a lot of the time) but to actually read it first-hand in the paper this morning really did me in...

Here's the story:

One of the sad sad saddest things of living in BOMBAY. Why can't they actually do something constructive!?

To me Mumbai is Bombay just because I'm used to calling it that. Thiruvananthapuram is Trivandrum because let's face it, Thiruvananthapuram is mouthful to say (and a handful to type) and Udhagamandalam is Ooty for the same reason. I call Calcutta, Kolkata when I'm speaking in Bengali because it just fits, that's what we call it in Bengali. When I speak in english, I'm most likely to call it Calcutta because that fits better for me too. Bengalooru is Bangalore for the same reason that Mumbai is Bombay and it will remain that way. And they can send me to jail for it if they want to (as you can see I'm still pretty fired up with the whole Arundhati Roy's "one day in jail story":))

Of course I know that officially Bombay IS now Mumbai and where official matters and bureaucracy is concerned I will call it that and I have no problem with others calling it that and I'm pretty neutral to the fact that the name was changed. But what I just fail to understand is how somehow the character and essence of Bombay/Mumbai is changed according to what you call it? How does it matter? Does calling Bombay Mumbai somehow make all the real and pressing problems of this city disappear? Does it somehow change our history? Rub out the British - the bad and the good. Rub out all the other people who are not "sons of the soil"? Does it somehow prove to the British colonialists and the rest of the world that we...? I can't even finish that sentence because it baffles me. I fail to understand what this proves because some politicians obviously feel that it does prove something. Or maybe they're just being politicians and making huge issues of complete non-issues because they haven't been in the news for anything worthwhile and bad publicity is better than no publicity?

Again I ask. Freedom of expression still is a basic human right, right?

Sigh. All I can say is that they could probably do with some exposure to Shakespeare:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

-- Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Listening to Grasshoppers.

Gestern abend bin ich mit meine Freundinen zum Rathaus gefahren.

You know when you start learning a foreign language they teach you how to say some of the basic places in a city that you might go to like "city centre", "theatre", etc. Well when I started learning German, Rathaus was one of them. It means Town Hall and although I often inserted it in those sentences where you have to talk about where you went when you went to town, I can now say it and it wouldn't be a lie.

Bombay has a Town Hall. And I went there yesterday evening for the book launch of Arundhati Roy's Listening to Grasshoppers.

An evening spent with friends on the edge of my seat listening to Roy who spoke so eloquently with a voice that you want to listen to all night long on issues ranging from Kashmir, Climate Change, Narmada, displacement of tribals, terrorism, etc. to the first sentence she ever wrote (which is hilarious) and her night spent in jail...

I came away ashamed and enlightened. Ashamed because I haven't actually read The God of Small Things yet and also because I know so little about so many things in general. I read a lot but I realised that it's not near enough. There are so many things that I have no idea about, that I ought to know about my own country. Things that might not directly affect me but that's no excuse for ignorance.

And enlightened because I learnt so much and I had to put on my critical thinking cap and you just gotta love an author who can make you think. Widen your horizons. Don't just accept everything at face-value. Question. Test everything, hold on to the good. That sort of thing...

Ahhh! This is definitely going in the "Best of 2009" list :)