February 28, 2007

Chalo Chalein Mitwa...

Watched Billy Elliot last night and cried when I saw the National Express bus! And he performed at Theatre Royal, Haymarket! Boo Hoo Hoo and then some!

Dying here. Must. Travel. Someplace. Soon.

February 27, 2007

Chaand Khaarish Kyun Karta Humaari....

I am unable to get over the fact that someone (Flimfair) chose “Chand Sifarish” as the best written song of 2006. It's not just the fact that they overlooked Omkara (beedi, dude!), but they chose like the yuckiest muckiest song that I bet Prasoon Joshi secretly regrets writing! You could award Rubarooo if you wanted to scratch Joshi’s back, or Crazy Kiya Re if you wanted to scratch Chopra’s back (in his own backyard, which explains Kajol for Fanaa and Hrithik for Dhoom).

But you cannot play with “sifaarish” so lightly, or you end up in knots, which the husband and I untangle through parody quite regularly. Here are some we came up with:

Chaand maalish jo karta tumhari, deta who tumko chamkaa

Chaand parvarish jo karta tumhari, kehte tum usko pitaa

Chaand baarish jo karta tumhari, lete hum raincoat silvaa

Tch Tch Tch

Feel free to add your own.

February 22, 2007

Khimchi-Ben

Is the name of this quick and dirty recipe for when a daal-paalak and rice dinner for two needs to turn into a meal for three:

- Heat one and a half teaspoon oil in a kadhai.
- Throw in half a fistful of raw moongphalis.
- Let Fry.
- Add a medium sized chopped onion.
- Let Fry.
- Add a finely chopped quarter of a cabbage and half a capsicum.
- Let Fry.
- Add Salt and Pepper.
- Let Fry till Dry
- Add two slit green chillies somewhere along the way.
- Cook till, well, cooked
- Serve

- And oh, remove slit green chilli from husband’s spoon one millisecond before it makes its way into him…

February 20, 2007

Ballooney

Once upon a time in ancient history I was in kindergarten. Before Sports Day, our teacher told us all to get a balloon each the next day, for the selection race for the grand final balloon race on sports day. So Mamma and Papa Inkspill bought me a balloon and sent me off with a hug and a kiss.

For the uninitiated, a balloon race involves running up to a chair on which a balloon is placed, sitting on the balloon and bursting it, and then running to the Finish line. Mamma and Papa Inkspill were definitely among the uninitiated, because they bought me a huge, industrial strength balloon that Godzilla could have sat on and not busted!

So during the selection race, we all ran to the chairs and tried to squash the balloons. Everyone who had got the holi-water balloon type contraption or the extremely tacky and mostly self-exploding birthday balloon was done in a second and ran to the finish line. I, however, sat and sat and the balloon would not bust. My face progressively became pink, red, purplish red, reddish purple, purple, tear-stained purple, but the balloon refused to bust. The selection race was over but I was still sitting on the balloon. I am sure people must have been laughing at me but I could not see anything. A teacher came and rescued me eventually.

I don’t know why this incident came back to me today. Maybe that was the day I was thrown out of the race (by which is implied the balloon race, the racing sport, the rat race, and, I am afraid, the human race)

February 19, 2007

Misc.

As I grow older, the profile of the people who bully me gets more and more pathetic! While it was the big didis on the school bus when I was about two feet tall, when I was in the twelfth standard, I was slapped on the selfsame school bus by a kindergarten student! And now that I am much, much older, I was held hostage yesterday by … a kitten!!!!

Locked out of the house without my key yesterday, I waited for my knight in faded t-shirt to come and rescue me. Near the elevator of my building, a cutesy looking but not cutesy behaving little kitten furiously drew a lakshman rekha around me and my bag of veggies, and with very angry mewing refused to let me get our of it! I tried to reason with it in English, as I (unsuccessfully) do with the rooster (who lives on the top storey of our building and thinks he’s Michael Jackson), but the kitten was clearly in charge of affairs and thoroughly enjoying the angry circling and mewing.

At forty, I’ll probably be knocked to death by a feather at this rate!

In other news, a cool friend sent the boy a digital photo frame as a wedding gift! It looks like a harmless photo frame but when you just connect it to your laptop or put your camera’s card into it, it shows you a slideshow of all your digital images! Best of both worlds I say! Too much excitement in a single gadget for a stepchild of technology like yours truly!

February 18, 2007

Quote From Mr InkSpill

(On being told that the current design of this blog was the first and only to be made without my interference)
Darling, if something productive ever comes out of a man, it will have to be without your intervention….

February 14, 2007

Skeptically Yours, on Feb 14

What he said:
Rose’s lips are red
And Violet’s eyes are blue
‘Ole Mary’s willin’ to wed
But my heart belongs to you

What he meant:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
And invested in mineral water
They got richer than Warren and Bill
And you’re their only daughter

What she said:
Humpty Dumpty just sits on the wall
For Valentine’s he did nothing at all
All the kings are horses, as are the king’s men
So let’s fly away and never see them again

What she meant:
Twinkle twinkle little star
The scheming golddigger that you are!
Our mineral water springs are dry
And you’ll pay our debts by and by

February 12, 2007

Belawadi Bytes

Found these while browsing through my picture collection yesterday…

I went to the Belawadi Hoysala temple at the peak of the recent language dispute in Karnataka , and look what I found sitting comfortable between the stones of the ancient temple… (Apparently the language dispute was not acute but chronic. Thanks D.)



At Belawadi, you are greeted by an obscure signboard saying that the temple is under the aegis of the ASI and the heritage monument is hajjar old. Workers are nonchalantly ripping up pieces of the temple and repairing other pieces of it, and the sounds are of a road-construction site, not those of an archaeological site by any means.

Surrounding the temple are homes of the villagers, separated from their heritage by a hesitant iron wire fence, which succeeds not because it is strong, but because nobody seems to want to pass through it in any case. We were the only tourists there, and immediately on our landing, we were greeted by faceless cries of “Pen please! Pen please!” As the children appeared, we gladly handed over our stationery, and I got this bright picture in return…

February 06, 2007

One Flew Over...

I’ve flown often enough inter and intra-nationally in the past two years to have become a privileged member of Jet or Kingfisher (which I didn’t because I always flew their cheapest fare and my boarding pass practically said “Class: None”). However, I still cannot help feeling all important and grown up when I take a flight, especially alone. I know it’s stupid in an age where practically everyone’s resorting to air travel, but I’m just a child of the age when flying was a huge deal!

So yesterday I flu (which means flew with a bad cold) from Bengaluru to Dilli, seated between two (other) executives from the telecom industry (coincidence?) who were not just acting cool like me, but were actually pretty cool about flying. The uncle promptly fell asleep and the girlie replied to an inbox full of mails on her laptop all the way. I just blew my nose and sneezed, and did not even get a chance to look important and grown up, but across the aisle was a girlie who was affected with the same syndrome as me, to an even greater degree.

When the air hostess offered her buttermilk/orange juice, she asked for the choices to be repeated maha-eagerly and then chose buttermilk with such enthusiasm that I felt like bopping her on her head! Idiot! Even I’m cooler than you…don’t you know it’s always buttermilk on Indian and Tomato Juice on international flights? (I think that’s only my rule, but what the hell?)

When my cold-infested ears popped painfully while landing, and my nosy-tissue and eye-tissue and cough tissue all became pulp by the end of my flight, I sighed at the lost opportunity to be cool, decided to fly more, and to think less highly about it from now on. I’ll become the laptop-murdering girlie on the right, or the sleeping uncle on the left, or the female version of the husband, who flies so much that I’ve had to cut slits into his vests where he’s sprouting evolutionary little wings, and who treats flights like auto-rickshaw rides.