Just so you know...

I'm having a really awesome Christmas break at home! ;)

D and I on Christmas eve at the Leela Palace doing some last-minute gift hunting! :P

Sayo and her youngest son, John, conspiring on what present to choose at the Christmas breakfast with Radiance! I just love this picture!

Me (in a saree after a pretty long time!!) and the parentals all set to head out for a scrumptious Christmas Dinner and D's folks' place...

Dada and me on Christmas night...

Good friend and fellow Hebronite, Arjun Durr came to visit for a day! 'Twas a good time!

Hope ya'll are also enjoying the last few days of 2009! :D

Favourite things... (1)

Grocery shopping at Spar!

Beauty from Ashes.

This term has been pretty crappy. Things seem to be going wrong one after the other. There’s been plenty of fun but very little of work (I know, you're thinking why is she complaining about that!?! But you try not having classes for a month - it's not so fun!) On Tuesday, the teachers’ strike completed a month. A month. Even though only one of the teachers from the Sociology department is on strike, she covers 50% of our syllabus so we haven’t had 50% of our classes for a whole month. This is not at all a good thing because the syllabus is pretty vast and third year flies anyways and so whenever this strike ends (probably next week) we’re going to have to start cramming a whole lot of stuff in very little time.

On top of that; the whole H1N1 scare from Pune has overflowed into Bombay too. The mortality rate of this virus is only something like 1% but everybody is still scared; understandably - given the freaking population density of this city (19 million!?), appalling sense of hygiene of Indians generally and Mumbaikers specifically and the very contagious nature of the flu. Starting today, the government has ordered all institutions to shut down for a week…

The Domino-effect of all of this is that we’re about 90% not going to get a Diwali-break or a Christmas break this year. Our mid-year exams will be postponed and yesterday our Principal met the K’Scope workforce to tell us that our college festival also has been postponed to November.

Those are the ashes.

The beauty is that I’m going home tomorrow! Home Sweet Home! I’m tired of non-classes and the thought of sitting around not going to college at all for a week is beyond what I can take at this point. So things have been pretty bad – but if it weren’t for the strike I wouldn’t have been able to think about going home even though there are a couple of public holidays coming up.

Also, since I will be in Bangalore I get to go for a wedding this weekend and meet another friend from Hebron after 3 years and also Grace was supposed to leave for Korea today but she postponed her flight so I can see her again before she leaves!

So yeah. Beauty from Ashes. And it’s pretty cool when you can actually SEE how things do work out for the good sometimes…

I go to sleep in Mumbai tonight and blog from home in Bangalore tomorrow.

Toodles!

Here I go again...

So here I am, back in Mumbai on the brink of my last and final year of college! After that I will be a college-graduate! Doesn't that have a nice ring to it!? I am excited to be getting started with third year of college. Hopefully there will be lots to do...

Leaving home doesn't get much easier apparently but I'm trying to be positive. This is life and I am just so grateful for an awesome summer holiday. Here are some of the highlights:

- Trip to Kerala (esp. the elephant ride in Kerala!)
- Trip to Ooty with D
- Catching up with Hebronites in Ooty
- Salsa classes (although I never did get around to going to a salsa party!!)
- Spending time with Doris
- Catching up with Tripti
- Going through old stuff and photos
- Time and access to broadband to post stuff that I can't easily do in Mumbai
- Movies (and I've brought many more on my laptop to keep me occupied till October!)
- Trying out new recipes
- Earth Hour India 2009 (so glad my parents were enthusiastic about this as well...)
- Free summer afternoons...
- Voting and then watching the drama unfold in the news with my parents...
- Discovering that cross-stitching is a lot of fun!
- Grocery-shopping with my parents at Spar (I don't know why I love doing this so much, but I just do.)
- Sleeping over at my brother's place
- Discovering new artists (Brooke Fraser is my current favourite!)
- Bangalore weather (heaven, compared to Mumbai!)
- The "micro-mini Hebron Class of 2006 reunions"
- Cubbies* with Taryn and Grace
- My "fun-aunt" visiting from Calcutta (she always has hilarious stories to tell!)

See what I mean? It's been a fabulous holiday and I'm glad that I did most of what I planned to do at the beginning of the holiday... Except I kind of lost all my gusto with the Hindi and German half-way through. Oops! Oh well, I'm sure Vini will get me going with my hindi again once college starts and I brought some German resources as well but I'm not going to get too ambitious with that right now... There's a time for everything under the sun!

*Cubbies is what we used to call Sleepovers at Hebron. I have no idea why!

Time is a funny thing...

See the resemblance? :) One year old --> 7 or 8 yrs old --> 16.

I like going through old photos, especially when they're in albums - REAL photos and not just a bunch of pixels on the monitor. So I try to get my digital photos printed even now because I like to imagine my own kids/grand-kids sitting down and flipping through a pile of photo albums and asking me questions about the people in them. Anyway, I'm getting a little ahead of myself there!

I've been a sort of "quasi-nomad" for the past 8 years. Living at home for a few months and then going back to school/college in another city/town so I only get to look through these albums when I'm on holiday at home so I decided to convert a couple of them into soft-copies so that I can look through them (thanks to the internet) even when I'm not at home. At first I took digital photos of the old photos but not all of them came out clear. So last night I used the scanner at Dada and D's place and added a whole bunch more... Ah! Technology, that double edged sword!

Scanning is a lot of fun actually! After I finished scanning the 20-odd photos that I took with me to my bro's place, I started scanning stuff from my wallet! He he :D Here's some from my wallet...

Taryn, Me and Grace, Bangalore:. This one is actually a TINY little sticker stuck on the back of the photo below. We took this in one of Korean(?) photo-sticker machine thingys outside a bowling alley in Bangalore. Anyone know what I'm talking about? I have no idea what those machines are called... Don't remember exactly when it was taken...

Freesia and Me, Ooty, 2004 (i think): This one was taken in one of those passport photo-booths in Ooty. I love this machine! Sadly, the people at the photo shop saw how much we enjoyed this and stopped allowing more than one person going into the booth at a time! Thankfully we got to it before that happened!

And now for some fun with Photoshop! That's the three of us vegetating on the couch, watching the first innings of the IPL finals (while D Facebook-ed on the laptop!) just before we got down to eating some of that Lasagne my sis-in-law is famous for! ;)

Meet Georgia and Gina...

Usually when it comes to crafty things, I get all excited, convince someone to teach me, start in a frenzy with great big goals - which peaks on the second day - and then I start losing interest... It's happened with knitting, stitching and crocheting... So when I bought this little counted cross-stitching kit from Ooty, it was with plenty of hesitation because I wasn't sure if I would actually ever complete it...
Well, I'm happy to say I did! And also I like this so much better than knitting.
So meet Georgia and Gina! Aren't they cute!?
Tea-time. More later!

One summer afternoon in the garden...

"A flower is an educated weed" -- Luther Burbank

"There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story." -- Linda Hogan

"The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do." -- Galileo

"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain." -- Henry David Thoreau

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature." -- Anne Frank

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves." -- M. K. Gandhi

"In summer, the song sings itself." -- William Carlos Williams

"Keep your sense of proportion by regularly, preferably daily, visiting the natural world." -- Caitlin Matthews

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us" -- Iris Murdoch"Summer afternoon . . . summer afternoon - the two most beautiful words in the English language." -- Henry James"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite..." -- e.e. Cummings

All photos taken in my parent's wonderful garden. The above picture shows a part of the garden on a very rainy day last week!