Random Musings

"Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingsolver

2011-11-09T17:54:00.002-05:00

I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by the same author and found it to be one of the best and most meaningful books I have ever read. Then I found out that she also writes fiction, and actually has more works of fiction to her credit. So I decided to try one of those. This was picked randomly from among the choices, but it was a good choice.

Prodigal Summer contains three interconnected but fairly independent stories set in southern Appalachia, where the author actually lives on a farm with her family. There is the story of a female forest ranger who watches over the mountains, the story of a newly widowed young woman who now owns her husband's family farm and is trying to save it from going bankrupt, and the story of two elderly neighbors, a man and a woman, who cannot see eye to eye on most things but do have a hint of underlying sympathy for each other.

In this story, it's not just the people that are significant, it's all the flora and fauna around them that they are inevitably connected to. From moths to chestnut trees to snakes to coyotes, everything is part of the same ecosystem that we are and everything affects us in some way or the other. The author gets that message through to her readers in a very beautiful way. The way she talks about every creature being connected to every other creature, ecologically, is deliciously poetic and a pleasure to read.

All three stories have an important character who is a strong, independent woman who speaks her mind and does what she thinks is right, regardless of what anyone else thinks. A woman perfectly capable of looking after herself and everything else that needs looking after. That is another thing I liked about this story.

Not this minute (I think I should take a bit of a break) but I will definitely pick up more of Barbara Kingsolver's books in the near future.

Reading On

2011-10-11T16:05:00.004-04:00

I have recently rediscovered the joy of reading. Because of my long commute. I do dislike the fact that I have a long commute to work once again, but it's much better than before because I can ride a train from a station that's a four minute drive from home to a station that's a ten minute walk to the office. Sure, they have wi-fi on the train and lots of people use their laptops to work, but I like to take some time to unplug and unwind. I had this one day recently when I forgot to pack another book after I finished reading the one that was in my bag and I felt all restless and fidgety and did bad things to my iPod earphones.

So recently I read two books by Elinor Lipman back to back. I know, it's not the best idea and I don't usually read two books by the same person in succession, but this time I did. The first one was called "The Ladies' Man" and was a fairly entertaining, light read, so I picked up "Then She Found Me" next. Totally not what I'd expect from a book which has been made into a movie by someone like Helen Hunt. Crazy book about a woman who first finds the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago and then tells her untrue story after story about her father. Makes no sense at all. It reminded me of the scene in Chameli where Kareena Kapoor tells Rahul Bose one made up sad story after another about why she got into her line of work.

Anyway, I have now picked up a novel by Barbara Kingsolver. I did not know that she was much better known for her fiction than her nonfiction and that she wrote a bunch of novels before "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." This book feels good so far.

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver

2011-09-16T18:28:00.003-04:00

Barbara Kingsolver is a writer of fiction and non-fiction books who, with her family, decided that, for a whole year, they would only eat food grown in their neighbourhood, grow it themselves, or learn to do without it. That's what it said on the back cover, and I thought, hmm... they probably live somewhere down south where it doesn't snow and you can grow fruit and vegetables all year round.

But no, they moved to a 40 acre farm in Virginia where they can basically harvest fresh produce from April (towards late April with careful planning) to October. Not too far south and not too different from Massachusetts. That is not to say that I am planning on growing my own food in my backyard (Maybe a few plants next spring, but certainly not enough to live on. We'll see.).

The point is, these days we see food being transported halfway across the globe all the time. And when we see California grapes in Delhi or Mexican watermelon in Boston, we think it's a great thing to be able to enjoy all of that stuff. But that comes with a lot of strings attached.

All of this carrying food around uses enormous amounts of fossil fuel. This, of course, always comes to the foreground when a fuel price hike is followed by a tomato price hike. The fuel is needed not just to move the food from one point to another, but also to keep it cool at its ideal temperature. Using fossil fuel like that has numerous consequences for the planet that all of us know about.

But that's not the only downside to eating fruit grown halfway across the globe. In order to help keep fruit from rotting on its journey, it is often picked before it is ripe. Now some fruit, like peaches, will sit at room temperature and ripen for you after you bring it home. But some will not. Consider tomatoes (technically fruit). They are picked when they are not yet ripe, so they are still green colored. Then they are exposed to ethylene gas, which turns them red but does not give them the flavor or the nutrition that a vine ripened tomato has.

Now, since everybody in the world wants to eat exotic fruit and vegetables grown on different continents and wants to eat them all year long, farmers are forced to rely on chemical fertilizers. pesticides, growth hormones for both plants and animals, and genetically modified seeds and animals. These chemicals pollute our soil and water and kill off birds and other helpful creatures which would otherwise aid in natural pest control. The residual chemicals found in the food we eat and the water we drink spell trouble for us, by, among other things, speeding up ageing and encouraging cancerous growths. The growth hormone used for cows, in particular, has been shown to cause premature puberty (as early as age 7 or 8) in girls and to encourage breast cancer. Chicken growth hormones encourage uterine and ovarian cancers, among others.

As awareness of these issues is growing, a lot of farmers are moving back to organic (no chemical pesticides, fertilizer, or hormones) farming methods and large chain restaurants are taking the initiative not to buy meat and dairy treated with hormones. A number of ordinary people are growing some of their own food in their own backyards and buying the rest from local farms and farmers' markets. There are steps in the right direction, but there are still major obstacles to be crossed.

Barbara Kingsolver and her family were not purists in their endeavour, in that they did buy flour and a few other items manufactured outside their community, but they still did a remarkable job. Their adventure involved the whole family, down to the six year old daughter who raised her own chickens. At the end of the summer, they dehydrated tomatoes, froze zucchini, canned sauce and did everything they needed to do to enable them to get through the winter. And they did get through it all.

The book is written very beautifully, in an almost poetic style that is also occasionally humorous. It is a memoir bundled together with a food encyclopedia and a recipe book. The book writing is also a team effort, with contributions from Barbara's husband and her older daughter (the younger one was too young to sign a book contract). It is an inspiration, a joy ride, and definitely one of the best and most meaningful books I have ever read.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

2011-08-23T19:17:00.001-04:00

So there was an earthquake centered in Virginia this afternoon. The epicentre was less than 400 miles from Boston, and CNN reports that tremors were felt even across international boundaries in Toronto. I felt nothing. I had gone out for a short walk by the waterfront, as I do on most afternoons that aren't rainy, overly windy, snowy, or overly cold (and there are not a whole lot of those in Boston). When I was walking back to the office, I saw people gathered on the streets. At first I thought they were gathered around the Children's Museum, and that there was probably some special event going on over there. Then I noticed that not a lot of them were accompanied by children. And then I saw that there were people in the streets all the way to the office. Hmm... maybe they have decided to gather around and protest in order to impeach Obama. That's the first thought that came to my mind. A fairly reasonable one for someone who has been following both American and Indian news and reading bumper stickers. But then I noticed that most of these people were just checking their phones or talking on the phones and did not really look predisposed for a protest.

I ran into one of my colleagues as I turned around the corner towards my office, and he asked me, "Were you scared?"
"Huh? What just happened in here?"
And then he told me that there had been an earthquake a few minutes ago, and the security staff had evacuated the building and we were not allowed to go back in until they were finished "checking the architecture of the building."
"Huh?"
This particular colleague hadn't felt anything either, since he had been on the ground as well. But those up on the fourth floor where I usually spend my weekdays had felt quite a shake and had had quite a scare.

Now I take only my phone and my office key card with me on my walks. I leave my wallet behind to avoid giving myself an opportunity to give in to the lure of the aromas of bakeries and ice cream stands. (On a side note, there is a pretty well known bakery one block away from my office which sometimes smells like a cinnamon explosion when I walk past it.) I saw some of my colleagues, who usually leave the office around four, standing outside the office with their bags packed up and ready to take home in case the building inspection took too long. I was a little concerned about how I would kill time if it actually did take that long. I could not go home without my train pass or any money, and I could not read my book. Oh well, we'll see.

Much productivity was lost as many buildings were evacuated throughout the political and financial capitals of the country this afternoon, but I was rather surprised later, when I realized that all of the office buildings in downtown Boston had been evacuated at the same time as each other, and yet the sidewalk was not so crowded that you had to jostle through the crowd to walk across it. There was not an overwhelming amount of noise, no pushing other people around, no panic. I can't help thinking about what it would have been like if this had happened in Delhi (or even if I had been in New York this afternoon). What if all the buildings in Connaught Place were evacuated at the same time? Would I be able to walk around without getting squashed or hurt or maybe having the straps on my handbag torn off?

This is one of the things I like about Boston. It is a city, but not a huge or overly populated city like New York or Delhi where there are people and more people everywhere you look. Just enough people to make if feel like a city and set it apart from the quieter suburbs. I was surprised an confused by the fact that all the buildings were evacuated, but there was not enough surprise and confusion on the streets to impede pedestrian or vehicular traffic. And everything was back to normal in less than half an hour, much to my relief.

"My Journey With Farrah" by Alana Stewart

2011-08-23T18:36:00.003-04:00

This book contains the memoirs of a woman who stood by her friend for over thirty years, through thick and thin. The part of their lives that it covers, in particular, is from the time Farrah was diagnosed with cancer to the time Alana no longer found herself mentally disposed to write about it, which was only a few days before Farrah died.

Both these women were Hollywood actresses, seen more on TV than on the silver screen, but that is not of much consequence, except to raise the popularity of the book. Not so much for me, since I hadn't heard of either of them. I just read a few random pages of the book and found it to be heartfelt and touching.

The book talks about the emotional and the logistic aspects of cancer treatments, most of which were carried out in Germany for Farrah, since Alana knew of this particular clinic carrying out the latest cutting edge procedures. In the US, apparently, it takes longer to get everything approved by the FDA, before any new treatment or medication can be used on an actual patient.

Cancer treatments can be a very harrowing experience for the patient and also for those close to her, who are, in a lot of ways, going through all of it with her. This woman accompanied her best friend all the way to Germany (from California) and took care of a lot of her physical and emotional needs in a most selfless manner. She did everything she could - call the doctors, find out about newer treatments, bring food, spend quality time - to try to save her friend and keep her happy for as long as she was alive.

Farrah's cancer went through ups and downs, with doctors declaring that it was gone, then that it was back, then that it was shrinking, then out of control and growing to the size of a tennis ball, but neither Farrah nor Alana ever gave up hope. Farrah kept her strong will to live and her sense of humor through all of it.

This is a story of friendship, love, courage, selflessness - all of these are exhibited in an exemplary way. It is a story that reminds us of the value of life and tells us to savor the moments of happiness, while also giving us courage to power through the rough patches.

"A Good Indian Wife" by Anne Cherian

2011-08-10T15:34:00.001-04:00

This is the story of a South Indian woman who has lived in a small town all her life and marries a doctor who is settled in the States but was brought up in the same small town. It walks through her journey of getting used to her new life and new situation, of discovering a new country and a new husband, and of finding out that her husband has had an American girlfriend for a long time and got into the arranged marriage mainly because his old and dying grandfather wanted to see him married to a nice Indian girl.

As the story moves on with the process of the newlyweds discovering things about each other's personalities and actually growing to like each other, it shows the immense strength of the woman's character. It is a strength that I believe a lot of women have and can harness when the need arises, and I have seen it help them get through the toughest situations.

The plot of the book does seem reminiscent of a Bollywood movie at times, but the book is well written and gives a lot of attention to the character development and thought process, which adds to its literary merit. A review on the book jacket compares Anne Cherian to Jane Austen, which, I thought, was, in some ways, very appropriate. The defining quality that I found in Austen's stories is that there was never anything extraordinary in the plot, but the narration and the way the author played with her words made the book worth reading. Anne Cherian does the same thing pretty well, though probably not quite as well as Jane Austen. Even so, this one was a worthwhile read.

"The Sari Shop Widow" by Shobhan Bantwal

2011-07-20T18:53:00.002-04:00

This is probably the first time I have read something written by an Indian living in the United States, about Indians living in the United States. Being set in Edison in New Jersey, which is nicknamed "Little India" and has a large Indian population and all manner of Indian stores selling clothing, jewelry, food, groceries and what have you, it's actually not very different from the way it would have been if it had been set in modern day urban India.

The central character is a 37 year old widow who has devoted her life to expanding and running her parents' sari shop, after she turned it into a more upscale and exclusive boutique. She lives with her parents, having moved back in after losing her husband. The family is a relatively conservative traditional Gujarati family. They are in financial distress and they bring in the autocratic rich uncle to help them out and save their business from bankruptcy. The uncle also brings with him an English-Indian business partner, who develops a love interest in the widowed niece.

As far as I am concerned, the story could just as well have happened in Delhi. I have not been to Edison and have not seen any Indian clothing stores in this country, though I am told that there are a couple in Cambridge in Massachusetts as well. There is only one character in the story who is American, a bar keeper and owner. He could just as well have been an Indian guy from a less conservative family.

Anyway, the point is, there's nothing in the book, as far as I can see, that is specific to the lives of Indians in America. However, it is still an entertaining read with quite a bit of Bollywood style drama and romance thrown in. A bit of suspense, a bit of action, flashbacks from thirty years ago, the works. Enough to keep me entertained and wanting to read more. A colorful, vibrant story and a reasonably light read.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

2011-07-18T18:46:00.004-04:00

After nearly four days of taking care of household chores, being rather bored and being miserable about not being able to go to India at this time, I decided that all of this had to stop. My husband is in India. I know I am not by his side, but he has friends and family by his side. He even has my family by his side. I'm the one who is alone and sad and with nobody around who can really cheer me up. So I have to take things into my own hands and do some cheering for up myself. So I decided to go out for a movie, and Farhan Akhtar's latest work seemed promising. Well, it turned out to be exactly what I needed. A few good belly laughs and some inspiration about living life to the fullest and celebrating the fact that you are alive.

It had been a while since I went out for a Hindi movie. It had also been a really long while since I caught a movie on its opening weekend. I think this may be the most enjoyable movie I've seen since 3 Idiots. Though, of course, I have been watching a relatively limited number of movies lately.

It was nice to see Katrina Kaif opposite a relatively good looking, non annoying actor. A charming actress like her needs and deserves to be seen opposite the likes of Hrithik Roshan and Ranbir Kapoor and to stay away from those of Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan.

The other day I was watching MTV India and they were playing the title song from Rock On!! The words Rock on!! Zindagi milegi na dobra... merged beautifully into the next song, which happened to be Dil Dhadakne Do. Some lovely tracks have gone into this soundtrack, which, like the rest of the film, are reminiscent of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's earlier collaborations with Farhan Akhtar but manage to hold their own.

Performances by the lead trio were all really good, especially Farhan Akhtar. The character he played was also very interesting, with his almost cheesy sense of humor. Almost cheesy but not quite. He had the audience laughing their heart out at various points in the film with his jokes. And he also managed to hold their hearts with his poetry. Farhan Akhtar may be one of the best things that has happened to the Indian film industry in recent times. Although, if I may add, when they screened a promo of Don 2 right before the movie, I was thinking, I can't believe this same guy made that movie too. But you know, he's a versatile guy. He can make a commendable Karthik Calling Karthik and a wonderful Rock On!! so it's okay if he occasionally disappoints with a Luck By Chance.

Random Thoughts

2011-07-14T20:50:00.005-04:00

Does anyone else think that Reese Witherspoon and Konkona Sen resemble each other from certain angles? I was watching a Reese Witherspoon movie last night and I thought that when you see her profile and she is smiling, she looks exactly like Konkona.

I am stuck with quite a lot of food that I need to eat by myself before it goes bad since my husband left for India rather suddenly. The fruit and vegetables I can take care of, and I drink most of the milk anyway, but there were two loaves of bread and I don't normally eat that much of it, he eats most of it. So tonight I adapted from a recipe I saw on Food Network once. I put four tomatoes and four slices of bread in a blender, and used that blend as the base for my lobiya dal. The end result was a thick curry with a rich taste and texture. Not bad at all. Food Network rocks.

Is it just me or does anyone else crave peanut butter when they read the Peanuts comic strip?

Why is that some people spend all day on Facebook and then complain about how people resort to text messages or Facebook posts for things that warrant a phone call? (Bhatti, this is not targeted at you.)

In Memory

2011-07-14T19:34:00.002-04:00

My father-in-law passed away yesterday after about ten days in intensive care. He was quite critical, and all of us were preparing ourselves for this for those ten days. What we were not prepared for was him going from walking about and talking almost normally to being unable to breathe on his own in a single day.

It was less than a year ago that my father-in-law told me that his father-in-law had passed away. I lost my grandfather a few months later. I thought we were at the age when we would have to deal with the loss of grandparents.

I saw my husband off yesterday as he took a flight to India. I would give anything to be with him right now. I cannot travel internationally right now because of visa hassles. I have been trying my level best to console and comfort him over the last few days but I hate that I can't do all that when he really needs me to. Today was the first day in a long time when I ate all three meals by myself. I'm not too happy about that either.

When I was a kid, I had all four grandparents. My maternal grandmother was paralyzed, wheelchair ridden and unable to speak intelligibly, but she still had a presence that could not be denied or ignored. We lost her when I was only eight, and then my maternal grandfather went to be with her only a few months later. But I still have memories of all four grandparents. I can visualize their faces. I can hear their voices in my head. In the case of my other grandmother, I can hear still her voice on the phone. I am sad at the thought that any kids I will have will never get to see and know their other grandfather. As a matter of fact, even I didn't really get to know him all that well, in the limited time we spent together and the weekly phone conversations we had.

Life has its way of reminding us, every so often, that we cannot take anything for granted and that our time with our loved ones is limited and we should do what we can to make the best of it. My heart goes out to my mother-in-law in this moment of sorrow.

Perspective

2011-07-14T19:22:00.004-04:00

For lack of a better title, I put what I put in the title box. This is about my perspective on my little brother's engagement, who, I am beginning to see, is not so little any more.

I was a little taken by surprise when my mother first told me that my brother was getting engaged in June and then they would set a date for the wedding. The first thought that came to my mind was, isn't he too young? I know he's financially stable now and doing pretty well for himself, but, you know, even though I am only a little over two years older than he is, he has always been the little one. When we argued and fought, my mom always told me that I ought to know better since I was the older one. I guess that's true for pretty much every mom. Every Indian mom, at least. My husband had the same sort of experience with his not-so-little-any-more brother.

When I had had a chance to think about it, after they had set a date for the wedding, I calculated that he would be a few months older on his wedding day than I was on mine. Which is, I'll admit now, not too young to get married, although at the time I was constantly telling my family that I wasn't quite ready yet. It's about the right time and the right age. But of course, what is more important is finding the right person. And that piece of the puzzle is in place.

"Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh

2011-07-14T18:48:00.001-04:00

I'd wanted to read something by Amitav Ghosh for quite a while. This book was the one I happened to pick up.

Set against the backdrop of the lead-up to the opium war, the central character is woman with a young daughter and an opium addicted husband. Part of it is set in poppy fields and an opium factory, and part of it aboard a ship. The two settings come together in the play of words that forms the title.

Readers can tell that a lot of research went into this book. The author has taken great care to get all his facts right. He has explored at great length the dialect spoken by Indian and middle eastern ship workers, the cultural situation and the caste divide of the time and the issues faced by farmers forced to cultivate poppies. He's also acquired a lot of knowledge on how every part of the poppy plant, the flowers, seeds, leaves and stem, was used at the time.

The story itself is intriguing. It starts out as four, maybe five independent stories which evidently are going to come together later in the book, but it is interesting to keep guessing exactly how everything will come together. The only downside was that the book was a little long for my liking, but I surprised myself by managing to finish it anyhow. Good read.

The Simpler Things in Life

2011-06-22T20:09:00.004-04:00

After being addicted to e-mail, cell phones, blogger and the like for years, I have been trying to teach myself to take it easy and slow down. I barely check e-mail on weekends and in the evening after work these days. It's much nicer to just relax, listen to some music or settle down with a good book or cook something or maybe just enjoy a meal at leisure. I no longer carry my phone everywhere I go. Unless I am driving by myself, in which case I have to be prepared in case I have car trouble (which, thankfully, has not happened to me while driving alone). If I am out in the neighbourhood taking a walk, I don't need a phone. Maybe an iPod, but not necessarily. I sometimes like to walk at a leisurely pace and see which flowers are blooming around the neighbourhood and how many of them I can name. Or, if I am walking near my office at lunch time, I just visit the waterfront and watch the seagulls and the little kids (I work very close to the Boston Children's Museum. There are always a lot of kids around. At least in good weather, which is a prerequisite for me taking a walk outdoors.) as they play around.

And you know what? It may sound like a cliche, but it feels really good to slow down and smell the roses.

"The Writing Class" by Jincy Willett

2011-05-19T14:00:00.000-04:00

This was actually a book I picked randomly from Amazon and is in a genre that I do not read all that often. It is a murder mystery. Actually, it is a mystery that turns into a murder mystery near the end of the story.

It is about a group of students attending a writing workshop at an extension school, and their instructor. One of the students is someone who has been trying to get published for a long time, without success, and is bitter as a result. This person is always pulling pranks on the members of the group, the instructor, and, as we find out later, various publishing houses. The pranks go from being just a little dangerous but causing no actual harm, to actually taking people's lives.

It is a situation where every single member of the group is a suspect. The story nudges the reader towards suspecting one person and then another and so on, until we find out who the prankster really was. It keeps you glued to its pages and keeps you guessing what's coming next. I managed to finish this book because it was a mystery but it was not spine-chilling scary. Probably because it built up gradually, starting with mostly harmless pranks. And I have to admit that I enjoyed it, though I do not usually like to read books in this genre. This is the kind of thing that would be fun to read again and look for the clues hidden in the story. Maybe I will.

"One Two Three . . . Infinity" by George Gamow

2011-05-13T14:02:00.005-04:00

Another book I'd meant to read for quite a while. This one was recommended by Bhatti a long time ago.

It started out seeming to be a mathematics book. The number theory discussed in the beginning was one of the most engaging pieces of non fiction or fiction I have read in recent times. And then it moved on to talking about relativity, time and space, single celled organisms, genetic structure, and just about everything that makes up part of why the world that we live in is the way it is.

I have to admit, I skipped a few passages which were going deeper into physics or chemistry than I would have liked them to, but I read all of the stuff about maths and genetics. I also have to admit that I may have given up and closed the book if the author had started with the nebulae and stars and talked about numbers later in the book. But the number theory part was interesting enough to make me believe in the book.

This book has a quality to it that I do not recall having seen in any other texts I have read on similar subjects. It made me actually marvel at the intricacies of the functioning of the world that we live in, and the developments that have been made in scientific studies after overcoming obstacles that seemed insurmountable at first. It made me appreciate all of that like I have not done before, even though I actually knew a lot of the stuff that the book talks about.

An Observation

2011-05-09T19:47:00.003-04:00

A few days ago, we were at a food court in a mall and we chose to get some Chicken Teriyaki at a Japanese place. There was a Chinese (or Japanese, Korean, Thai or Vietnamese - I'm afraid I cannot tell them apart) family at the table next to ours eating naan with dal and paneer. I found that pretty interesting. A few days later, on the train, I was reading a random book by an American author whom I had never heard of (but I am enjoying her book so far). The American lady sitting across the aisle from me was reading The God of Small Things (which, I admit, I don't remember much of, but was the only book that, as soon as I finished it, made me think, "I would love to read this again." I haven't actually done that.).

This country has its good and its evil, like any other country, but one thing I like about it is that you can find people of various different cultures and nationalities who enrich the culture with their own contributions and are also, often, willing to take some things from other cultures and adapt it into their lifestyle.

A Thought

2011-05-09T19:37:00.003-04:00

So I was reading this book called Food Rules by Michael Pollan, which, by the way, is an interesting book that you can read cover to cover in under an hour and should definitely read, especially if you eat at all in the States.

This guy talks about highly processed and preservative added foods like breakfast cereal and snack bars, which are alarmingly popular in this part of the world. These foods never go bad, even after their suggested "Best Before" date. They can sit on shelves for years and years and not rot. Pollan suggests that you should only eat food that will eventually go bad.

In a different context, he talks about why food goes bad. He puts it differently from what I've usually read or heard. He says that we are in competition with the fungi and bacteria and what not around us for nutrition. When these creatures get to the food before we do, we say that the food has gone bad.

When you put these two things together, which he doesn't do in his book, you see that single celled bacteria know that processed food items do not deliver real nutrition, but we, the ones with the more highly developed brains, eat that "food" anyway. Something to think about.

More Experiments in the Kitchen

2011-04-11T15:59:00.000-04:00

I have been learning to make my favorite dishes healthier without sacrificing their taste and texture. There's a lot of information on doing that if you look for it on the Internet or in specialized cookbooks. I am learning to use that information to my advantage.

One very popular trick among the health conscious folks out here is to bake food that you would normally fry. They use it for chicken wings, French fries, crispy fish and so on. I tried it with samosas and pakoras. You have to be familiar with your oven to know the best height for your baking racks for something you are experimenting with, but it's a great way to save a whole lot of fat and calories. The samosas turned out pretty well, and the pakoras turned out really well. Maybe because I knew my oven better when I did the pakoras, or maybe because of the nature of the dish.

But the stuff I am most excited about is the almost fat free chocolate cake and the almost fat free dal makhani I made. These are both things I really, really like. I made both of these without any butter, oil or cream. Well, except for the tablespoon of olive oil (for about four servings) that went into the dal to help keep the liquid from rushing out from under the pressure cooker's whistle. I don't really know if you can do without that little bit of oil, and I don't really think you should try to do without it. A little oil, especially the good kind, should always be part of your diet.

Here's what I did with the cake. I replaced the butter in the recipe with pureed prunes in the same quantity by volume. When I first read about this suggestion on the Food Network website, I was more than a little scared, because I have always hated prunes. My grandmother would sing their praises and try to get us to eat them everyday, but I couldn't really swallow them without feeling a desire to throw up.

But after having tried a bunch of food network recipes and cooking ideas, I put a little more trust in these people and decided to try it. Of course, prunes are good for you because they have a boatload of antioxidants. Plus, they are on the sweeter side, especially if compared to the butter they replace, so you can cut down significantly on the sugar in the recipe. You know what? Once you mix up the prune puree with cocoa powder, everything tastes like cocoa. It's all good. Mix it up with some flour and eggs, bake it up, eat it up. You can see some prune bits, depending on how finely you puree it, but you can't really taste them.

And for the dal, I replaced cream with unsweetened fat free condensed milk (or evaporated milk, whatever you like to call it). The milk, though unsweetened, is a little on the sweeter side because its sugars caramelize at the high temperatures that it is subjected to, so you would want to either balance it out with some yogurt, or spice it up a little more than usual. The dal tasted just like my mom used to make it. To me, that's really terrific taste.

Life in the Suburbs

2011-04-07T15:46:00.005-04:00

I was never able to sleep on a moving vehicle while I was in India. Not on a bus, train, metro rail, car, or even a smooth flight on a Sahara Airlines plane, or even the Continental Airlines plane on which I flew to the States, where you couldn't really tell you were sitting in something that was moving. But now, I take a good nap on the local train either in the morning or in the evening or both, depending on how tired I am, at least once or twice a week. It's not a particularly comfortable train, though it is comfortable enough. I don't know if it has to do with the fact that I am getting older and feel the need to rest more. But it definitely has to do with the fact that I feel safe. I can fall asleep with my wallet on my lap, which is where I usually leave it after I take it out to retrieve my rail pass. I'll often have a book and/or an iPod on my lap or in my hands, and nobody will touch it even if I am sound asleep and have to set an alarm on my phone to make sure I don't miss my station.

When my office first decided to move to Boston from the suburban location (which was less than twenty minutes away from my house), I wasn't so sure about how I would respond to the long commute, which is about as long as it used to be when I was in Delhi and travelling to Noida for work. But the good part about it is that there is a mostly reliable train service to get into the city. It lets me endure a long commute since I do not have to put up with the stress of driving or sitting in traffic with someone else driving. It gives me a chance to read a lot of the books I have long wanted to read but never got around to, not because I didn't have the time, but because there were so many other things I could do at home - cook, eat, walk around, or just watch TV, that the reading was often sidelined.

So these days, I am a city mouse by day and a country mouse by evening. During the day, I am in a place where there are lots of people and cars (though a lot less than Delhi or New York City) and there are restaurants and stores of all sorts all over the place. I sometimes go out for a walk after lunch and enjoy the bustling city. In the evening, I take a quiet walk around a quiet neighbourhood where I sometimes don't see anybody pass by at all. Sometimes I do see a car or someone else walking or jogging, but not necessarily. I like the peace and quiet of the outdoors and the feel of the indoors when I come back in to cook something for dinner. I like the wide open spaces in the neighbourhood that I do not see in the city. There are wide open fields all over the place that sometimes seem to stretch out indefinitely. I like the fact that the only sounds I can usually hear are birds and maybe a neighbor's dog. And the ticking of a wall clock. If I am at home by myself and not watching TV, that is. It's kind of the best of both worlds - being surrounded by lively crowds during the day, and getting the peace and quiet you need in the evening.

"All He Ever Wanted" by Anita Shreve

2011-03-21T19:29:00.003-04:00

After I read Body Surfing, I developed a certain idea about Anita Shreve's writing. Intriguing and passionate. The second book I read, however, reached up to expectations only in bits and pieces. Expectations formed based on the earlier book by the same author as well as reviews of this one.

This one is also set in New England (which makes it easier for me to relate to it all), but not in the present day (which makes it more difficult for me to relate to it all). It takes us back to the late 1800s- early 1900s. It is set in a small academic town, with the main character being a college Professor. It revolves around the two things he wants most - to marry the girl he is attracted to, and to be promoted to the post of Dean of the college. He does eventually get both of these things, after some struggle, but each is a bit of a compromise that fails to make him as happy as he had hoped to be.

The most interesting part about this book is that it is written by a female author but narrated in the first person from the point of view of a man. When I started the book, I thought this might lead to a slightly odd narrative, but it was perfectly natural, and a few pages into the book I forgot about this little tidbit of information. There are only a few scattered episodes in the story, however, that generate the kind of intrigue and passion I was hoping to find in this book. The rest of it is fairly mundane and everyday. Towards the end of the book, however, Shreve does manage to generate enough interest to keep the pages turning fast and to keep me from falling asleep on the train ride home after a long day at work. All in all, it was only okay and I would perhaps have had regrets about buying this book if I hadn't bought it dirt cheap at a yard sale.

Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

2011-03-02T19:27:00.000-05:00

When I read The Secret Life of Bees, I did not know that its author, Sue Monk Kidd, was someone better known for nonfiction and that this was her first attempt at fiction. I found that out later. This is one of her nonfiction works, in collaboration with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor.

This is a memoir of the mother-daughter pair's travels spanning Greece, France and Turkey. Sue, at that point, was trying to conceive her first novel (The Secret Life of Bees) and also going through a number of other changes in her life, including menopause. Ann was trying to figure out what to do with her life, trying to sort out her passion for Greek history and for writing.

This is Ann's first book, but Sue was a well-known writer with a number of bestsellers to her credit at the time of writing this. Yet she was unclear and unsure about writing fiction for the first time. Ann had someone like Sue for a mother, who would obviously know a lot about writing and would know lots of people in the publishing industry, but was still unsure of whether or not she could write.

The narrative shows a very human, very delicate side of both the authors. It gives you an insight into how even well known, accomplished people can be less than completely confident about things rather closely related to their area of specialization. It makes you feel that you are not alone in being uncertain about whether or not you can accomplish everything you want to.

The mother-daughter relationship is very beautifully described in the book as well. Sue doesn't want to push Ann into being a writer, even though she believes that her daughter does have the talent. She wants Ann to discover, on her own, her talent and her willingness to write. Ann, on the other hand, doesn't want to be her mother's shadow, she wants to be her own person and she wants to be different from her mother.

It's a great book for mothers and daughters all over the world.

Of Crushes and Dreams

2011-02-22T19:24:00.000-05:00

Remember when you were a teenager and had a crush on the cute guy (or girl) and your world was suddenly centered around that one person? Remember how you thought that it was the truest of true love and that nothing would ever make that love wane? But then, slowly but surely, it did wane. The next time you had a crush on someone, you would think that the last one was just a silly crush, but this time, it's for real.

I was just thinking about the number of times I thought that way. I cannot clearly remember the faces of most of those guys. There were a few on whom I didn't just have a crush, but felt something stronger based on a solid foundation of friendship, and those are the only ones I really remember. But, at that time, it was very hard to say which ones I would remember and which ones I would think back to and laugh at how silly it all seems now.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm happily married, but I do still remember some very good friends for whom I once had feelings. Because those are memories of experiences that have been happy and sad and confusing and have taught me a little bit more about myself and what I actually need in the person I eventually end up with. They all got me one step closer to being able to choose the right kind of guy to settle down with.)

Now think about other kinds of dreams that you had or still have. Maybe you dreamed of being on TV. Flying a plane. Opening your own restaurant. Some of that stuff seems silly now, and some of it, you had to give up because you weren't quite as good at it as you first thought you were. Some of it, you may still be thinking about and may not be completely sure yet. But, once again, you can't quite tell when you're dreaming a dream if it's the one that's quite right for you or if it's one that you'll be laughing to yourself about a few months later. How do you tell them apart?

The only way to be able to tell is to actually go ahead and give it a serious shot. Not once, not twice, but as many times as it takes for you to be completely convinced. This way or that. If this is what you're looking for or if it's just a passing fling. That's the only way to actually find your calling, to be where your heart is.

Winter Blues

2011-02-17T19:31:00.000-05:00

I remember the time when I went to Manali with my friends from the office about two years ago. There was a day of travelling to Solang Valley in rain and snow. It was a lot of fun, but it was certainly really cold. Later that evening, I had a little bit of rum to warm myself up.

It's been a crazy winter which makes me think of that rum just about every other day. I arrive at work chilled to the bone, although I've been out in the open only for about ten minutes - that's how long it takes me to walk from the train station to the office. But a significant portion of those ten minutes is spent in an area that's not shielded by buildings on either side. It is actually right where the Charles river meets the sea. So it's open to sea breeze. Breeze is actually a very mild term for winds gusting up to 40mph on an average day, and even 80 mph on a bad day. I have seen the river freeze over in other areas, but even in mid-January, this part wasn't frozen and I figured it wouldn't freeze because it was so close to the sea. But it did. It froze, then thawed, then froze again, and thawed again. The parts of the river farther from the sea, however, stay frozen and accumulate snow and you cannot tell where the river bank ends and the river begins.

I grew up in a place where daytime temperatures hardly ever, if at all, went below 10 C. Out here, if the temperature begins to approach that figure, the weather service announces that we're going to have "mild" weather and people ditch their jackets. Even I felt like doing that this evening, but discovered that it was more comfortable to wear the jacket without zipping up the front than it was to carry it. I actually saw a guy standing right next to the river wearing shorts.

Every four or five days for the last six or so weeks, the weather service has issued a winter storm warning and predicted eighteen or so inches of snow in our area. Pretty accurate predictions most of the time. At one point, I was sure that if we had a little bit more snow, I wouldn't be able to see out of my windows. The snow on the ground had come just a little higher than the window sill and the icicles hanging from the roof had come down as low as the window sill.

But it's not the crazy amounts of snow that really bothers me, though this winter has seen really crazy amounts of snow even by New England standards and people who have lived here a long time are also rather tired of it now. What I find difficult to get used to is the variation in temperature we see from day to day. One day, we have a high of 23 F. The next day, we have a low of 33 F. And the third day is a high of 17. It's crazy. You have to check the weather just about every day to really know how many layers to wear.

But I am relieved to see almost two weeks pass by without any major snowfall, and quite some snow melting. The sidewalks in the city are almost completely clear now. Our driveway is almost dry, though there is still over a foot of snow in the yard. A foot of highly compressed, very heavy snow. But it's slowly melting. And spring is on its way. Fingers crossed.

If Tomorrow Comes

2011-02-05T21:17:00.002-05:00

This book by Sidney Sheldon is another one I'd been meaning to read for a while, but just did not get around to it. Actually, I'd always meant to try out at least one of Sheldon's books and never actually got to it. This was a recommendation from some friends for a good book to start with.

This book is not like anything I've ever read before. I'm told that Sheldon's books are rather similar to each other in many ways, though, but I've never read any of those.

The main character, Tracy Whitney, is a woman wronged by a lot of people and determined to get even with them. Her initial attempt at revenge against the person responsible for her mother's death lands her in even deeper trouble and ignites within her an even stronger desire to retaliate. And retaliate she does. From then on, everything she does is well thought out and carefully planned. She leaves nothing to chance and no reasons for anyone to suspect that it was her doing.

There are certainly other, fairly interesting, characters in the story who do leave a mark on the reader, but none quite as impressive as Tracy herself. A very intriguing heroine who keeps the reader wondering about her next escapade. A brilliantly crafted plot, or series of plots, makes this book an engaging and difficult to put down read. It definitely takes an extremely intelligent mind to come up with something like this, to create a character who never fails to impress or surprise. She's someone who crosses over to the wrong side of the law, but still has you rooting for her and cheering her on because she is so real, so much a person you can relate to even though you may never have done anything like what she does, or thought about doing anything like it.

"Letter To My Daughter" by Maya Angelou

2011-01-20T18:00:00.000-05:00

This is one of the shorter books I've read in recent times. It is a collections of essays, with a little bit of poetry thrown in, describing life's lessons and experiences through the eyes of a strong, independent African-American woman. (You can read more about her on her website. There's a lot to say about her and I can't say all of it here.)

The author never actually had a daughter, she has just one son. But she sees women all over the world, women of different cultures and races, as her daughters to whom she can pass on her experience and wisdom.

The book, though short, is packed with insights and interesting incidents, often occurring during her travels, which took her far and wide. She talks about respecting other cultures and respecting people who are different from yourself while being straightforward with people who do not deserve your respect.

The book gives the reader a certain amount of insight into a vibrant life of courage and strong will, of refusing to accept things as they are and trying to be your own person and shaping your own destiny. You may not be able to relate to her, because she is a rather unique person, but you can definitely appreciate and respect her and her writing.

Maya Angelou is an inspiration to people, especially women, of all ages and all countries. This book definitely makes a worthwhile read.

Of Commutes and Commuting

2011-01-15T12:51:00.000-05:00

It has been a long while since I used public transport for my daily commute. Now, when my office moved away from the suburbs into the heart of the city, I am doing just that after almost five years. I am no longer used to it and I worry about forgetting something on the train. I am also not extremely pleased with the idea of being tied down by the train schedule. But it beat driving on the expressway during peak commuting hours any day. Plus, when I settle down with a good book on my way back, I find that I am already quite relaxed by the time I get home. On the other hand, when I was sitting in traffic, sometimes for over two hours, during my commute from work in Delhi, I would get home exhausted. There is no way I could have found the energy to cook dinner in the evening after that kind of thing.

But here's what I totally dislike about this commute. That I have to do it alone. In Delhi, I always had friends living close by whom I could carpool with. People I could talk to on the way. Or maybe not talk (I'm not much of a talker, and there were days when I didn't feel like it at all.), but just look at the familiar, friendly faces. I miss some of those people a lot. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

100 Shades of White

2011-01-15T12:36:00.000-05:00

This book by Preethi Nair is something I'd been meaning to read for years, and I finally got around to it. It is the story of a mother who is left to bring up her two young children by herself and struggles at her task. It is also the story of a daughter caught in the turmoil of all kinds of family drama and romance.

The mother's life resembles a Phoenix rising from the ashes, more than once. The daughter has her own struggle to deal with and her own difficult decisions. All of it is set against the backdrop of the abundant variety of flavours found in Indian food. The food and the spices are described with a kind of passion that enables the reader to almost smell and taste them.

The story is very beautifully written and the fact that it alternates between the points of view of the mother and the daughter makes it a very complete and comprehensive narrative. It shows how two different people see the same situation differently, how they deal with the same pain differently, how misunderstandings disrupt the delicate balance of human relationships. It also demonstrates the well known but sometimes ignored fact that parents are always there for their children, even when the children doubt themselves or their parents, though sometimes the child's love for the parent may not be quite as unconditional.

This is a book that has all the colors and spices of life blended in just the right way, without being too light or too heavy a read.

Big City Bustle

2010-12-07T20:07:00.000-05:00

The week before last, I was travelling to see my mamaji's family for Thanksgiving. I took a bus from Boston to New York and another from New York to Allentown. I was in New York City for about half an hour on both days, going over there and coming back.

It's been a while since I've been into a big city like that. And at a bus terminal, no less. There are just so many people everywhere. People, buses, trains, lots of available options for public transport including the subway - we don't have any of that in the suburbs. It reminds me of Delhi. Delhi is a place where you will find people from all over the country, trying to achieve something or the other that they believe they can achieve by being in the city. New York is just so, except that it attracts people from all over the world.

My bus into New York, against all odds, seemed to be entering the city about half an hour early. I looked out of the window and kind of thought we were nearly there, but I didn't really believe it. (Thanksgiving is a time when everyone travels to see their families, so there's a lot of traffic. Plus, there's the big Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, because of which there are a lot of street closures. I'd read that traffic is rather crazy in or near the city because of all that. But it wasn't quite as crazy as I'd thought, though the bus terminal was quite crowded.) But then I saw a billboard. McDonald's McCafe coffee, $1.99 for a small cup. That coffee is $1 for any size out here. Then I knew I was in the city, because that's the kind of price you'd find only in a place like New York.

There's just something about a city like that which draws me to it. It's the kind of place I've lived in for the first almost twenty seven years of my life. I am big fan of the wide open spaces and the green leaves that we see around here where we live, but a city like that is just something else.

In The Kitchen

2010-12-07T19:34:00.000-05:00

You know how some people say that they find cooking relaxing? That it's their hobby? I used to find remarks like that rather weird, and I saw it as more of a chore that my mother did because she had to do it, and skipped every so often when she was too tired.

That was before I actually tried to cook on my own.

There are certainly days when I am tired after work and maybe feeling a little sick and wish that my husband would come home before I did and make me a nice bowl of soup. But when I am well, and only mentally tired from work, I love to experiment in the kitchen. Try things that I haven't tried before. Change some ingredients around in a recipe. Of course, once every week or so, I do make something standard like a simple yellow dal (which I don't really like all that much but my husband can't go without it for too long) or aloo gobi (actually it's aloo broccoli for us, more often than not), but the rest of the time, I make something at least a little differently. Add a little lemon juice to my pasta. Chop some cubanelle peppers into my rajma. Bake my own bread. (I haven't done a regular bread, but I have tried my hand at pumpkin bread from a mix and cranberry orange bread from scratch. Both turned out pretty good.) It's fun. It's satisfying. It gives me a feeling of having created something on my own. And that is a feeling to be savored.

Tangled

2010-12-02T19:52:00.001-05:00

Tangled from Disney is a comic yet heartwarming take on the classic story of Rapunzel. It sees the princess trapped in a tower, not even knowing that she is a princess. She's never stepped out into the sunshine and she is led to believe that her captor is her mother. The king and queen, meanwhile, yearning for their lost daughter, release hundreds of floating lanterns into the sky each year on the princess's birthday.

The princess's way out of the tower turns out to be a bandit the royal guards are chasing, who is actually about as charming as a prince would have been. She discovers with him a whole new world with birds, butterflies, dangerous adventures, and, of course, love (It's a fairytale, what did you expect?).

The funniest part is that after the princess hits the bandit on the head with a frying pan (in self defence), the bandit also discovers the utility of a frying pan as a weapon. You have to see it for it to be funny. But it's an extremely cute and funny movie that touches the hearts of audiences of all ages. Definitely worth a watch.

Losing It

2010-11-30T17:56:00.001-05:00

The byline of this book by Valerie Bertinelli says "And Gaining My Life Back, One Pound At a Time". Kind of leads a reader into believing that it is about how the author lost weight. Well, it is about that. But not entirely. It is a memoir of the television actress's life from the time she began to appear on television. It sees her through a rather early and not very well thought out marriage, motherhood, divorce, ups and downs in her career, and so much more.

Of late, I've found memoirs more interesting than fiction. There's just that much more depth to these books. I love reading authors who are really candid and truthful about the best and worst things that happened to them.

One of the best things about the book is that, even though she does things I would probably never do, I can still relate to her. Because everything that is going through her head is expressed so freely and articulately, I can completely (well, almost) understand why she does what she does.

When I see her on TV (I've only seen her on Hot in Cleveland), it's not very easy to imagine that she's the same person who's been through everything that she has written about in the book. But then, that's what good acting is all about, right?

It's a well written memoir that is heartfelt, though it may not necessarily be very touching. But it's an interesting read, because it is a window into the life of another person who is very different and yet, very similar to me.

Thoughts For Today

2010-11-05T18:25:00.000-04:00

Happy Diwali, people. Belated for those of you in India. Here it's still the fifth of November.

I know I've been away for too long when I start typing blo... and Internet Explorer no longer shows blogger.com in drop-down list. I don't think that's ever happened before.

Life's been keeping me busy. I come home from work and it's time to get down to other kinds of work. Which is, on most days, either cooking or exercise or both.

So anyway, I was reading this article on CNN news today about how modern brides are coming around to wearing colors other than white on their wedding days. Ivory is quite popular, but the article featured someone who wore lime green and blue.

This particular woman said that a wedding day, being as significant as it is, is a day to look your best and hence you should wear the colors that best complement your skin tone. I was thinking back to the time I was in the CTC Plaza picking my wedding lehenga. I picked the pink that I totally love. Pink with silver sequins and trims. Everyone who knows me knows I love that pink. I picked it because my mom and I both thought it complemented my skin tone beautifully. She and I don't agree on anything all that easily.

What that led me to think was, isn't it slightly strange that in India, where people are so much more reluctant to let go of traditional beliefs and rituals, especially when it comes to important occasions like weddings, we have been so much more flexible about which colors a bride can wear for her wedding in recent times? In my mother's day, it was usually restricted to red or pink. With gold trims. But these days we have all kinds of colors, ranging from the traditional reds and pinks to the less traditional baby pink, green, orange, purple, gold, silver-grey, and various combinations of these. I haven't seen anyone wear blue, but I'm sure people wear that too. Just a random thought that came to my mind.

In Memory

2010-09-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

My paternal grandfather was the one grandparent of all four whom I was the most attached to. I did spend a lot of time with my other grandfather too, until he passed away back in 1991, but somehow never developed the kind of attachment, the kind of fondness, the same sort of relationship.

My grandfather took my brother and me out to the neighbourhood park in the evenings. Sometimes it was my grandmother who did that, sometimes it was both of them. He went with us to the PTA meetings at school when my dad could not take time off from work. My mom could hardly ever make it to those meetings because she was a schoolteacher herself and often had a PTA meeting at her own school on the same days.

My grandfather would often secretly give us extra pocket money without telling my grandmother. He would play with us inside and outside the house to the extent that he could. He was a talented athlete in his day, but weighed down by arthritis in all the years that I knew him. He would sit in the veranda of the house, sipping his tea, reading his paper, and talking to us in the mornings before school.

In recent years, he had been in and out of hospital for serious health issues often enough for us to be kind of mentally prepared for the impending eventuality. But you never know how well prepared you are until it actually happens. It hasn't really sunk in for me, even though it has been four days now. Because I'm so far away from my family. I haven't seen what the house is like without him. I haven't attended a family gathering when he was not there. I haven't really had a chance to say goodbye.

Eat, Pray, Love: The Book

2010-08-22T11:09:00.000-04:00

As some of you may be aware, I often read a good book after I watch and like or am intrigued by the movie based on it. I think it started with Sense and Sensibility when I was about thirteen years old. I'd tried to read that book two or three times but never managed more than six pages. Then I watched the movie, basically for Hugh Grant, and liked it and then made it all through the book soon afterwards.

So anyway, I'd decided that I'd finish reading Eat, Pray, Love before they released the movie, but I overshot by about a week. On the other hand, I didn't watch the movie in the meantime.

The book contains the memoirs of a woman, Elizabeth Gilbert, who goes through a divorce that leaves her with very little money (A divorce is generally a very expensive deal for whoever makes more money of the two people involved. In this case, Elizabeth was already a celebrity writer and making a lot more money than her husband.) and little or no mental balance. She decides to visit three places she's always wanted to visit. She wants to go to Italy and learn to speak Italian (not to mention eat all the pasta and gelato she can find), to India and practise meditation, and to Indonesia to learn from a medicine man. She could afford to travel for a whole year because her publishers gave her an advance on the book she would write about her travels.

The book is beautifully written, with a great amount of spiritual and emotional depth to it. The writer is candid and fearless in expressing her innermost thoughts, but never in a gross way. She touches the reader's hearts in a very unique way - she's doing all this stuff that her average reader couldn't possibly do for a whole year, but, even so, her average reader can relate to her because she's very human with the same kind of flaws and mental confusion like the rest of us.

She does have the kind of ideas about India that Americans often have - that we are a nation of extremely poor people for whom it is a big feat to be able to speak good English. That was the only part of the book that was a turn-off for me. But it certainly helps that she just mentions it in passing and doesn't dwell on it. She focuses, in all three parts of her journey, on the good things about her travels and the things she gains and learns from them. She demonstrates an extremely positive attitude and a willingness to improve her self and her life, especially for someone who has so recently been through so much pain in her life. Definitely recommended.

Memories

2010-08-18T20:04:00.001-04:00

When I was coming from India to the States with my then new husband, some of my friends from my workplace came to the airport to see me off. It was there that Aman gave me a CD of videos and pictures of my farewell from that job, which had happened a few weeks earlier.

That day, at the airport, they had a bunch of technical difficulties and their X-ray scanners were replaced by staff members manually checking every passenger's carry-on baggage. After I got home and unpacked over the course of the next few days while recovering from jet lag (Actually, I don't think I was ever really jet lagged. But I was kind of in a trance from weeks of sleep deprivation during the wedding planning, the actual wedding, and everything that needed to be done in the meagre, and now extremely blurry, ten days between the wedding and the flight to the States.) and adjusting to a whole new environment, I never saw that CD and thought I had lost it in all the commotion at the airport.

Then, a few days ago, I was cleaning out some stuff and I found it. I'm not sure where it was for the last fifteen months or so, but it was obviously somewhere in the house.

So, on Sunday, my husband and I watched the videos which showed me laughing and talking with my friends and then colleagues, accepting gifts from them, singing and laughing with them and threatening to beat them up at the slightest provocation.

My husband tells me that I was very lucky to find a group of friends like that in my workplace. The work culture here is drastically different, of course, but he never experienced that sort of thing in India either. It's a different industry, and perhaps that makes things different.

I had some really beautiful times at my old job. The team I worked with has since undergone a whole lot of changes, including reorganizations, new hires, and people leaving the company for bigger and better things. And, luckily for me, I left at a time when they were just reorganizing things in a big way. So I remember things for the way they always were - totally fabulous. I would never have wanted to work for a different boss or with a different set of coworkers after being in that setting. I would not trade the teammates who routinely made fun of me and passed all sorts of comments about me for anything else. Because they made the job worth doing.

Of Food, Travel and TV

2010-08-17T19:32:00.000-04:00

There is this thing called a lunchtime poll on the CNN news website which is a poll about people's eating habits and preferences. They'll ask you questions on things like how often you like to experiment by ordering something new and different at a restaurant.

So the other day, they had this poll on where you would like to travel to try out the local cuisine. They had a long list of options that covered almost every country whose cuisine I've ever heard anything interesting about. Except, perhaps Peru. So the leading choice of the users was, quite predictably, Italy, which I voted for. Next in line was France, and not too far behind, the second runner-up, was India.

Indian is actually a rather popular cuisine in a number of countries throughout the world, as I can tell by the number of non-Indian patrons at the good Indian restaurants here, and by the growing number of Indian cookery shows on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel. Now I've never actually seen these shows, because they air during time slots that are usually not convenient to me, but I have seen their recipes on the channels' websites and there are lots of good ideas there. They have this reality show where they hold a competition to choose "The Next Food Network Star" - someone who will have their own show on the Food Network - and this time, the winner was an Indian who is going to start another Indian cooking show soon.

Strange, then, that Indian television doesn't have an exclusive channel for food and cooking. There are so many different cuisines within the country, specific to various geographic regions, and people are increasingly open to trying out recipes from all across the country or even across the world that they haven't tried before. I've gathered a bunch of ideas from the Food Network shows and tried new ways of cooking pasta and doing new things with strawberries. If they had something like that in India, it would be something I would willingly watch. And I am someone who never really watched Indian television shows out of my own free will, I watched the Indian channels for the movies and the music videos, but I was mostly confined to Friends and The Big Bang Theory and Mr Bean as far as shows went.

Hachi: A Dog's Tale

2010-08-17T19:11:00.000-04:00

This was actually a random movie we rented this weekend. We saw the preview on another DVD we rented earlier, and we thought we might like this one. Based on the preview, I thought it would be kind of like Marley & Me, a fun and sweet story of a dog and its owner which saw the two of them through various stages of their lives and became kind of emotional towards the end when the dog died. Well, I was wrong. This story has a different twist to it that I never expected. It took me by surprise. Even more so when I thought about the fact that it is based on a true story. I am not going to give that away for the sake of anyone who doesn't know the story and might want to watch the movie, but I do want to say that this was one of the most beautiful and emotional movies I have ever seen. I think my husband watched it thrice over in two days. It's a story that is all about loyalty, love, and always being there for those who are important to you. It's a story about all those qualities that we, humans, stand to learn from dogs. Definitely recommended.

It's Been So Very Long Since...

2010-08-11T19:18:00.000-04:00

...I had a wardrobe in which everything was just the right size for me. It's been close to four years that I've been losing weight, then sitting on a plateau (For the uninitiated, that's a widely used term for when you're trying to lose weight but your weight is more or less constant for a few weeks or longer.) for a while, and then losing again, and so on. I go shopping for a few outfits every time I drop a dress size. But there are always other things in my closet that are fairly new, too nice to throw out or donate, but a size (sometimes two sizes) too big.

There was certainly the time when I got married and didn't pack too many of my old clothes with me, but there was this thing about necessarily needing to buy 21 outfits sponsored by my parents and 11 sponsored by my in-laws. There was a point when I actually grew sick of fitting rooms and picked up a few things without trying them on. Naturally, a few of them were the wrong size. Some of those worked out well for me, though, because they were too small then and are just the right size now. But there really hasn't been a time as far back as I can remember when everything was just the right size.

It's Been So Long Since...

2010-08-10T19:58:00.001-04:00

...I danced at a wedding. Getting all dressed up for a wedding, dancing, feasting... it's all been so long. I have actually not worn Indian clothes in a really long while either. It just occurred to me that I wore a salwar-kameez exactly twice in the last fifteen months that I've been in the States - once on Karva Chauth and once on Diwali.

...I ate chikoos. We don't get them here at all. They have frozen ones at the Indian grocery store, but I'm not a big fan of frozen fruit. Frozen veggies are okay (actually they're good in some ways because they're already cut and peeled and have a longer shelf life) because you cook them and then they no longer feel like they were frozen to begin with.

...I ate burfi. We do get all kinds of sweets here, but they're not fresh like you would get from a local halwaai or a Haldiram's. They're often exported from Canada and they just don't taste like what burfi would taste like on the day you bought it fresh. We get good halwa and gulabjamuns and rasmalai and kheer at Indian restaurants, but not burfi or cham-cham or milk cake. It just occurs to me sometimes, usually I'm quite happy with my Boston Creme Pies and Chocolate crumb cakes and brownies.

The Great Thing About Window Shopping...

2010-08-10T19:40:00.000-04:00

...is that it's one of the few things that I know of that can help me relax and that do not involve spending any money or adding on any calories to the day's tally. Sometimes, exercise does all that too, but it's not something I would really want to do towards the end of a tiring day, which is when you really need to relax. I've discovered that, if I'm at home, listening to music or reading, and there's food that's readily accessible, I'll want to stop what I'm doing and eat. I know, I think about food a lot. But that's just who I am. But if I am in the middle of a huge store browsing through clothes or shoes or books, I feel a certain amount of laziness when I think about going to the mall's food court or the bookstore's cafe. That is the good kind of laziness. And that's why I love window shopping.

Calming My Mind

2010-07-19T18:20:00.001-04:00

Over the last week or so, I've had a bit of trouble with my sleep. I can fall asleep at night easily, but I get up and can't go back to sleep. The sun sure seems bright even at 4 AM and slips in through the blinds on our windows. And I can't fall asleep when the room is lit.

I am reading this book called Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. These are her memoirs of her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia - in that order. I am on the India bit right now. I'll write more on the book once I am done with it, but there is this interesting part that I want to talk about now.

She talks of this concept of a "monkey mind" - a mind whose thoughts behave like monkeys, jumping from one tree limb to another, stopping in between only to scratch themselves or howl. If you tell the monkey to just sit still in a corner, it just will not. But if you give it a pile of 10,000 buttons and tell it to move them from the pile to a new one, it just may do that.

If you try to meditate by just not thinking about anything, it's pretty hard. For a lot of people. Certainly is for me. But if you repeat a mantra over and over in your head, it kind of does the trick. The mantra doesn't have to be Om Namah Shivaya or something religious, it can be any random word that you pick up and choose to repeat. And you know what? It works. It's strange how I needed an American writer to re-enlighten me on the ancient wisdom from my own country. But it definitely helps relax my mind and fall asleep.

By the way, when I bought the book, I knew it was being made into a movie but I didn't know that the movie stars Julia Roberts. Now that I come to think of it, there was quite a stir in the Indian media surrounding her visit to India for the filming. This is one of those rare instances when I am reading the book before watching the movie.

Words to Eat By

2010-07-06T19:02:00.003-04:00

I've learnt a lot about myself, food, and healthy eating in the last few years while trying to lose weight. Some of them were things that I kind of always knew at the back of mind, but let them stay at the back of my mind. Some are things that I learnt from other people who have gone through the same kind of thing, through online communities, and literature.

I was just thinking, a couple of days back, about how my friends and I used to eat at McDonald's all the time and not think about it. Now I've been reading up about the ingredients they use, the kind of oil they fry in, and the nutritional stats of their food. I still eat there occasionally, but only occasionally, and only because they are sometimes the only choice at freeway rest stops. I do like their barbecue chicken wraps a lot, though.

I've learnt that it always helps to know what you're eating and what goes into it in what quantity. If you're buying packaged food in India or another country where they don't always print the nutrition information on the package, they probably do still have a list of ingredients in there. Ingredients are generally listed in a logical order - the one listed first is the one that is used in the largest amount. That list does generally give you a pretty good idea about things.

I've learnt that the first bite of dessert tastes the same as the last bite. Unless it's a layer cake. What that means to me is that I don't need to eat a whole brownie, a whole bar of chocolate, or a whole cup of ice-cream to satisfy a craving. I can eat whatever I want, as long as I can practise portion control.

I've learnt that the pleasure derived from eating comfort food is a momentary and fleeting pleasure, while the pleasure of being able to fit into a size 8 (sometimes even 6!) top after years of wearing unmentionably large sizes is a pleasure that is a lot more permanent.

I've been too large for too long. When I go out shopping, I will sometimes still pick up a size "L" shirt to take into the fitting room, realize that it is too big, try on the medium, and finally settle for the small. It's a little more time consuming if they have the numbered sizes, because that means that I work my way from 12 all the way to 6 or 8. But I'm getting used to it. And it's a great feeling.

Of Food and Wisdom

2010-06-24T20:54:00.000-04:00

How often do we come across customs and traditions that seem silly, or useless, or even counterproductive to us? Well, I, for one, certainly feel that way about a lot of Indian customs. But I'm not going to talk about those here. I'm going to talk about some that do make sense to me. Food and fasting.

We have this concept to Navratri where we eat only specific kinds of foods for nine days. It's supposed to prepare our bodies for eating differently with the onset of the changing season. Think about it. We all eat differently in the summer, in comparison to the winter. We could all use a few days of detoxification in the spring and in the, well, autumn. (Digression: It's not really autumn if the trees don't shed their leaves, is it? But let's just use the term to refer to the transition from summer to winter.)

One of my colleagues in India used to religiously observe a fast every Thursday when she would only eat fruit and vegetables from sunrise to sunset. Well, I am not sure of the technicalities, but you get the idea. Me, I always knew about the health benefits of this kind of thing, (If done right, not if used as an excuse to eat mounds of halwa and puris before sunrise and after sunset.) but I never really tried it myself. Sure, I always ate a light lunch, but I tried to include at least a little bit of protein - legumes - and a little bit of grain - rice or wheat - in my lunch. And I would allow myself to eat dessert whenever they made fruit custard in the cafeteria. It worked for me most of the time.

A few months ago, I had a couple of days of digestive distress and I got around it by eating only strawberries and carrots for lunch for two days. It works better than any medicine. It also tastes much better.

Ever since, I got into this habit of observing a detoxification day approximately once a week. Some weeks, I don't do it. Those are the weeks that I didn't go out to eat and didn't eat anything particularly fattening at home either. Some weeks, I do it twice a week. I don't have a fixed day of the week, but I do often end up doing it on Thursdays. Just like I would so often end up showing up at work in a yellow outfit on Thursdays (Apparently, that's what you're supposed to wear when you are observing the aforementioned Thursday fast.) when I was in India. Sometimes it's Tuesday. Sometimes Friday. It doesn't matter, because I don't do it to please a supernatural being. I do it to keep my digestive tract from turning into an overpowering being. It works really well for me. My rule for those days is, no processed food from 8 AM to 8 PM. That means no bread, chapatis, oil, or milk. No cookies or cake or ice-cream. Milk is pasteurised, so it is a processed food. Plain rice with vegetables without oil is allowed, but generally not eaten. I don't fret if I happen to break the rule. Because even if I did it for the last four hours, or will do it for the next four hours, some good is going to come out of it.

I like the way I follow the ancient wisdom without the rigid rules. Because that's the only way that it's a good thing for me.

34 Bubblegums and Candies

2010-06-15T18:15:00.000-04:00

So I've been reading Preeti Shenoy's blog for quite a while now but I never got around to reading her book. Funny, since I actually started reading the blog after I heard about the book. But I needed something to get me back on track with my reading. I needed something I could read in just a day or two. And something written by an Indian.

The book is a collection of thirty four real life experiences, each with an insight into human nature. Each is told straight from the heart, with no frills or flowery language. Just a simple, usually quite touching, true story. She talks about her children, her friends, her husband, her father, just about everyone who is anyone in her life. It's all so honest and so beautiful.

In the last chapter, the most touching one of all (for me, at least), she talks about how she became a writer and blogger. She talks of her great personal tragedy that spurred on a series of events that led to the book. It's a beautiful chapter, one I can sort of relate to, because I also started blogging after a rather sad incident in my life (though a much smaller tragedy than what Preeti talks about) which led me to become something of a reclusive, sad sort of person, very different from my usual self.

On the back cover of the book, it says that you will probably recognize yourself in some of the thirty four real life incidents. I did. And for me, that was the best thing about the book.

I do have a word of criticism here, though. The book could have used a little better editing to take care of a few minor grammatical errors and some unnecessary capitalization. Sorry, but that's the kind of thing I have the strongest urge to point out!

Out in the Open

2010-06-12T15:26:00.000-04:00

In Delhi, I used to work out in the gym because, more often than not, it was too hot and too dusty to go outside. Here, I like going out in the open for a walk or a jog or, usually, a combination of the two. It's a lovely 64 F (18 C) outside. But it's been raining almost non stop for five days now.

Remember the bit in Pyaar Ke Side Effects where Mallika and Rahul Bose run into each other at the mall and he tells her that he came there for a walk, because in Mumbai there's more room for walking about in malls than in parks? It's also true for Delhi, I think. I used to go out to malls on weekends all the time. But it's certainly not true for suburban Massachusetts. I have a beautiful water reservoir (like a lake, not like a tank) about a mile away from here and I love taking a walk along its banks. But there is such a thing as too much rain.

Song of the Week

2010-06-12T11:56:00.000-04:00

I have never been a big fan of Shakira's music, although I do think she has a really cute and charming smile. The Whenever Wherever or She Wolf of Hips Don't Lie kind of music is really not for me. But I happened to hear the Gypsy number recently, and I totally loved it. It has this wonderful, soothing feel to it. The music is not quite the kind you would play at a dance party, but the kind I listen to when I need to relax. It has a wonderful Latino flavor to it. And it has lyrics that, when I hum to myself, make me feel free of worldly worries.

Speaking of songs, I only recently got around to listening to the songs from Raajneeti. The Mora Piya number does not hold a candle to Mora Saiyyan by Fuzon (I can't help compare. Can you?) but it is a great song in its own right. It's one of those songs that is actually supposed to be sad, but somehow has a good feel to it. It makes me want to dance.

Prime Obsession

2010-06-10T19:55:00.000-04:00

Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire is about the Riemann Hypothesis - one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics. I read about a dozen or so pages of the book before I bought it, and from that preview it seemed to be a book along the lines (actually, it seemed to be a lot better) of Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh - a book for people who don't need to have a background in advanced mathematics but do have an aptitude and an inclination towards the subject.

In the first chapter or so, the author explains his basic mathematical concepts so beautifully that even someone who has little aptitude for the subject can understand what he's talking about. He has his readers interested and waiting for more.

But after that preview is over, it gets rougher. Perhaps because the subject of the book is a lot more complicated than Fermat's Last Theorem or any of the other popular unsolved problems in mathematics. Perhaps because the author talks too much about the history of all the mathematicians and the places involved. It doesn't hold my attention that well.

I'm about halfway through this book - and this is the first book in a few years that I feel like leaving halfway - and I can't understand some of the mathematical ideas in it. Not like I don't know how he arrived at a certain conclusion, but like I firmly believe the conclusion is wrong. Well, some of this is because he's not presenting rigorous mathematical steps in a book that's not meant for rigorous mathematicians, but, even so, it leaves gaps in my understanding.

I must say that the author has made fairly commendable attempts to explain rather complicated concepts to readers with insufficient background in the subject. It just seems that a reader who wants rigorous mathematical proofs should look for a different book.

Shrek Forever After

2010-06-07T18:25:00.000-04:00

I'm going to put down some random thoughts on this movie here. I'm not in the mood to write an actual review.

This one was quite different from the others in the series before it. It had a dramatically different theme, and a different moral of the story. The others were mostly trying to put across the fact that beauty is more than skin deep, and so is ugliness. But this one was about counting your blessings and being happy with what you have.

Isn't it strange, and yet so very common, for all of us to want exactly what we don't have? When Shrek was a feared ogre, he complained that nobody wanted to talk to him and everybody ran off at the sight of him. That they judged him even before they knew him. And when he had great friends and a loving family, he wanted to live like an ogre and be feared.

This movie puts forth a previously mostly unseen (except a little bit in the third episode), fierce, aggressive side of Fiona. I know a lot of people are going to find this weird and/or make weird comments on this, but this side of Fiona was so much more appealing to me. It showed her as a more independent woman who knew her own mind and did exactly as she wanted to.

This movie is not the kind of thing you would expect from a sequel to the first three movies. It seems to be a slightly different genre altogether. But it has its own appeal. And it is still a must-watch for Shrek fans.

Out Shopping

2010-06-05T15:49:00.000-04:00

After a really long time, I went shopping today because I wanted to, not because I needed to. I wanted to buy myself a dress. Because I've wanted to wear dresses for a long time, but I kinda felt that they didn't look good on me when I was rather pudgy.

Now, having shed at least fifty pounds and four dress sizes in the last three years, I am in the mood to wear dresses as often as I can. Of course, the warm weather here is very short lived, but, as they say, make hay while the sun shines.

But guess what? I didn't find anything I wanted to buy. I don't want to wear the kind of dresses that American women wear so often - halters or spaghetti straps or 33 inch lengths (that's too short for my liking). I did, however, find a few that had none of these disqualifications and also appealed to me otherwise - in terms of fabric, print and fit. Well, almost fit. I didn't find the correct size in any of those. But you know what the great thing is? All the sizes were too large for me. I could fit into the smallest sizes for a few styles that I tried on, just to see if what size would fit me correctly. Now, of course, the smallest size in an American clothing store is not the same as the smallest size in an Indian one, but this is still a big, huge deal for me.

So I'm happy today. Even though I didn't buy anything after a three hour shopping trip. So what's the problem? How do I celebrate? I don't celebrate this kind of success by eating something special. Shopping for something nice to wear was the only way I knew!

Thoughts For Today

2010-05-12T17:54:00.001-04:00

So now we've moved to our new apartment and things are beginning to settle down. We spent our first week in an apartment with no cable TV and no Internet and a lot of our stuff waiting to be unpacked. After the weekend, things are beginning to shape up.

In the midst of all this I achieved a personal milestone which most of my good friends will know the significance of. For the first time since I was a little kid, I'm now in the healthy weight range for my height.

I was grossly overweight through most of my senior school years and college. I've been trying to make amends for about three years now. In these three years, I've been through weight loss phases, plateaus (that's when the weight refuses to decrease any further), and also put some of it back on around the time I got married. But early in 2010, I found a renewed resolve to take the weight off and keep it off. I still want to tone up a little and drop another ten pounds or so, but what I have now is a big achievement for me.

Trying to lose weight in the States is not the same as trying to do it in India. It's a lot easier here. You can actually eat all your favorite foods, because they have reduced fat or fat free versions of everything, from chocolate brownies to ice cream. The government requires manufacturers to have nutrition information printed on all packaged food items. A lot of restaurants post their nutrition information online. It's also easier to find whole grain pasta, brown rice, and other whole grain food products. Whole grains are a big help if you're trying to lose weight or just eat healthier. They have more vitamins and minerals, they have more fiber, which means you feel more full, and whole grain pasta actually has a lot of protein too.

This is not where I'm going to stop. I'm going to drop another few pounds and then keep it all off. But, of course, once things settle down at home, I'm going to go shopping for new clothes first.

Reflections on a Year Gone By

2010-04-19T10:55:00.002-04:00

It's hard to believe it's already been a year since I stepped into the pink lehenga and out of my parents' home. We set up home here, in a foreign land, and are about to take it apart and set up a new one. Such is life.

The year has taught both of us a lot. About each other and about marriage and relationships. About learning not to sweat the small stuff. And to tell the small stuff apart from the big. About being patient with each other. Doing little things for each other.

I know this is a bit of a cliche, but you don't really understand it until the time you experience it for yourself. Marriage is not always smooth sailing. You have to make adjustments and compromises. But it's all worth it. When you see the smile on your partner's face when you do something special for him, that makes it worth it. When you feel the warmth in your heart when he does the same for you, that makes it worth it. When you know there's at least one person in the world you can always count on, no matter what. When you know there's one person with whom you can discuss all your fears and worries and share all your joys.

That's what marriage is about. Knowing that you have a companion on the journey called life.

Bloodsuckers

2010-04-08T20:59:00.003-04:00

We’ve had a major bed bug infestation in our apartment. I'd never really heard too much about this kind of thing, because it's not very common in India. They can't survive above 45 C and they don't like dusty places. Ha. You would think you were less likely to have bugs if your apartment was clean.

Apparently these little vampires spread over from neighboring apartments - that's one of the many ways in which they spread - and they reproduce so fast you really can't imagine it. A female can lays about 5 eggs a day. Plus, they can live for 18 months without food.

The building management has had the exterminators come in and treat the apartment twice and we did it once ourselves. But it doesn't really help too much. Strong pesticides like DDT are illegal here. The others don't really kill them, because they can go and hide in the neighbors’ apartment and then come back once the pesticide wears off. Now you have an infested apartment and infested neighboring apartments. There’s also some rubbing alcohol that can be sprayed on them, but you have to spray it on the bug to kill it. It’s just not humanly possible to spray every single bug, given the rate at which they multiply.

They can nest in anything wooden, paper, or fabric. Now we're going to move and discard everything that might be infected and cannot be treated. Clothes can be treated by running them in the dryer on high heat. But that's about all. Clothes, kitchen utensils. That’s it. We can't take anything else with us. We have to part with almost brand new furniture that we spent thousands of dollars on. Plus we have to part with bed linen, some of which was a gift, and stuffed toys, greeting cards, picture frames - just about everything of sentimental value. We’re not even sure how safe it is going to be if we take our passports, academic certificates and other papers with us, but that is a risk we have to take.

Anyway, we have been apartment hunting and we have found a couple of places we like. We’re just trying to get out of here as soon as we can.

Anyway, I know I'm rambling on too much about this, but that’s how life is these days. But hey, what has happened has happened. Can’t do anything about it, can we? Just trying to accept it and move on with life.

A First - A Weird One

2010-03-26T18:01:00.001-04:00

In Delhi, I've stopped my car because there were cows in the middle of the road, even donkeys or pigeons (right in the middle of the DND flyway, when I was coming at almost 80 kmph, and the car behind me was at 80 kmph), but I did not expect that kind of thing out here. Well, what do I have? A big, fat, probably quite juicy turkey crossing the road in a leisurely fashion just inches away from my car! Now that's a first.

The Choice

2010-03-21T19:04:00.000-04:00

After the disaster called The Inheritance of Loss, I sought comfort in the soothing familiarity of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The Choice is about a loving couple whose lives are turned around by a car accident in which the husband escapes with minor injuries but the wife slips into a coma, leaving him to take care of himself and their two young daughters.

It is a typical Nicholas Sparks story with all the usual elements - undying, relentless love, hoping against hope, lasting togetherness through sun and rain. Well written, as usual. With a twist in the story near the end that tells the reader of the choice that the husband is faced with. Like the other Sparks novels, a twist appears near the end of the story which makes the readers feel for the characters even more than before, makes the readers weep with the characters. A beautiful story that touches your heart.

But, well, I think I'm done with Nicholas Sparks for quite a while now. His stories are way too similar to each other. Plus, the promos of The Last Song that I see on TV all the time kind of put me off. I don't know why Miley Cyrus has that effect on me. But this post is not about her. I was talking about Nicholas Sparks. Speaking of whom, I did watch Nights In Rodanthe recently on TV, and it was pretty good. Okay, now I'm just rambling. So here's the thing. If you haven't read anything by Sparks, you must read The Notebook, and The Choice would also make a good read. If you've read a lot of his work already, there's nothing much that's new here, but it's still a good read.

Eat Healthy, Think Better

2010-03-15T17:53:00.003-04:00

I don't understand the eating habits of Americans. I mean, they'll eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch (which is not entirely unhealthy but not the healthiest of lunches either), with a side of pretzels or chips, and a cup of yogurt. And they'll pick the fat free yogurt. I mean, hey, there's a bag of pretzels that you're eating, there's all this other stuff loaded with fat and carbs, and how many calories can there really be in that tiny 6 oz cup of yogurt?

I was just thinking, today, that it's so much easier to pack a healthy lunch than one that is unhealthy, if you're preparing either from scratch. Chop a few veggies, boil some chicken in water, mix it all up into a soup or salad (save the chicken broth for later). But there are all these processed foods and takeout lunches loaded with stuff that's not good for you which make people choose convenience over health.

I heard something about how McDonald's switched over to using peanut oil for frying and then switched back to using animal fat and how people who were vegetarians or those who were worried about their health made a ruckus about it. Hello, if you're concerned about your health, why are you eating at McDonald's in the first place and why are you picking the one thing that contributes a drop in the ocean?

A Winter Like No Other

2010-02-28T16:56:00.000-05:00

It's the last day of February, for crying out loud! If I were in Delhi, I'd have put away my warm clothing almost a month ago. Those who know me well would know that I generally dress less warmly than those around me. But now I'm surrounded by people who are used to the -5 F weather that we had around here for a while, and who are now roaming about with very light jackets in 40 F weather. These women will wear mini skirts, Capri pants and open sandals in this weather. And it's still snowing. Well, not today, but it was snowing yesterday. So I'm still wearing boots (Boots! I never wore anything other than open toed sandals in India, except in the gym or on trekking trips. I would never even wear socks. I didn't even own a pair of socks!) most of the time, and fairly warm jackets which protect from the wind.

And here's the worst part. It rains the day after it snows. The snow melts. So I don't see the pretty, white, Christmassy scene outside my window. I see dull, brown, withered grass and trees. When will spring come?

The Inheritance of Loss

2010-02-20T11:22:00.000-05:00

It had been a while since I'd read anything by an Indian author and I happened to pick up The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. To say that I was disappointed would be putting it mildly.

I don't know how or why I managed to read the whole thing. It was a huge waste of my time. The book does not entertain, it does not grip the reader's attention, it does not have any life lessons for me to learn from it.

It's set amidst the Gorkha movement for an independent state for the Indian Nepalis (or Nepali Indians, whatever). I've read and liked stuff set amidst riots, like Lajja, and also, Mr and Mrs Iyer is still one of my all time favourite movies, but this one just did not speak to me. It has a narrative that keeps jumping back and forth between three or four different times and places in a way that just fails to grip the reader's attention or keep the pages turning. I mean, The God of Small Things also jumps about, but Arundhati Roy has her own way of keeping you glued to the book and making you want to read it again the instant you finish reading it. Kiran Desai doesn't. In various parts of the narrative, she's not sure whether she's addressing an Indian audience or an international one. Her characters are very difficult to relate to. She doesn't develop them well enough. It's hard to believe that a group of Indians living in a small town at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the 1980s, even those who have returned from foreign countries, would be eating tuna fish and bacon and pudding and scones all the time and would be celebrating Christmas properly, complete with the exchange of Christmas presents.

Then there are certain episodes in the story which do not add to the plot development and are just plain gross. Only a perverted mind would add such episodes to a novel when there was no apparent reason for them to be there. Disgusting.

A Special Evening

2010-02-15T19:58:00.000-05:00

So yesterday my husband and I were celebrating Valentine's Day and also the anniversary of the day we first met. It's hard to believe that it's already been a year. One whole year of loving each other, annoying each other, of just being with each other.

We went out for this spectacular Boston Harbour Dinner Cruise to celebrate the occasion. Dinner on a cruise ship, champagne, roses, chocolate dipped strawberries (those were so yummy!), live music (Great music. Nothing like the cheap sounding live music you hear at Indian weddings sometimes.). And amazing views of the Boston coastline. We went upstairs all the way to the observation deck, which was open from all sides. We were chilled to the bone, obviously, given the 26 F weather, the 20 mph wind, and the fact that it's always colder at sea than on land. But the view was worth it. And so was everything else.

Very Indian

2010-02-05T17:49:00.000-05:00

Why are Indians so overly eager to deem things to be Indian or to classify them to be made by Indians? I just read something on one of the Indian news websites about how Couples Retreat is a movie with a soundtrack by A. R. Rahman. Really? Two songs out of fifteen make it his soundtrack, do they? Much as I like his music, this is just not true.

I'm sure everybody recalls how Slumdog Millionaire was plastered all over the Indian press as an Indian movie that got recognized internationally. The producers, screenplay writer, and director were all English. True, they did have an Indian assistant director, and a number of Indians in the cast, but you know, that doesn't make it Indian?

Being a country that's well on its way to becoming the most populous nation in the world, don't we have enough things that are actually ours? And if we don't, what does that say for the country?

The Secret Life of Bees

2010-02-03T17:23:00.001-05:00

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is the story of a girl who lost her mother at a very young age and later, in her teen years, sets out on a quest to find out more about her. Set in the 1960s in South Carolina, a time when the Civil Rights Act had been passed but not yet actually enforced, it speaks of a time dotted with incidents of black-white discrimination. The protagonist, Lily, has a governess, Rosaleen, who is black, and a father who is often mean and even cruel to her. Lily and Rosaleen, through a series of events, end up in the house of three black sisters, the eldest of whom knew Lily's mother quite well. The sisters agree to house, feed and clothe Lily and Rosaleen and teach Lily about beekeeping, which is their own little business.

A beautifully written, powerful, compelling story about mothers and daughters, about the idea of family, about breaking through the barriers of race and colour. Although ridden with grammatical errors here and there, (It's hard to break that habit. I do notice them and they do bother me sometimes.) it's a story that will appeal to women of all ages and ethnic groups, to mothers and daughters everywhere. The writer takes us on a journey through her protagonist's mind and her thoughts, showing us how messed up her life is, how flawed and human she is, just like the rest of us, and also, how much she needs to be loved and to live a life of dignity. The narrative has the mark of a good book, which is to make the readers feel the characters' pain and joy as they go along, and this is a quality that makes the book hard to put down.

Love The One You're With

2010-01-28T17:26:00.000-05:00

Love The One You're With by Emily Giffin is the story of a married woman who runs into her most serious ex-boyfriend on the street and revisits her feelings for him. He sends a wonderful professional opportunity her way, and it leads to the two of them spending time together and keeping in touch over the phone and e-mail.

Set primarily in New York City and Atlanta, this is a story filled with incidents, which, if looked at independently, would lead you to think that the heroine was selfish and disloyal. But the character development in the book is so well done that you connect to her, you relate to her, you know why she's doing what she's doing. Not like Love Aaj Kal, where the character development is so pathetic that the heroine looking for her first love after she marries someone else comes across as selfish and a little ridiculous.

When I shut the book closed at the end, I felt good about it all. There's a certain feel-good factor to it all. It's a story that tells you that everyone is human, everyone makes mistakes, but if you want to, if you really want to, it's never too late to make amends.

I really like the last sentence of the novel where she says that love is about the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.

Do You Know How Much You Eat?

2010-01-25T17:25:00.001-05:00

I recently began tracking my food intake throughout the day in an attempt to analyze my diet. I've only been doing it for about a week, and there are some surprising things I came across. Even with my diet consciousness and efforts towards healthy eating, my total calorie intake in a day was just above the recommended daily allowance of 2000 for the average adult female. How come? It's pretty simple, actually. Unless you actually write down everything you eat, you're more than likely to miss out adding up the calories in some of it. I generally worry about the calories in things I eat for pleasure, like chocolate. I don't count the calories in the milk I drink every morning. They are still there, of course.

Then there are the little snacks at various points of time in the day. There are hundreds of options for healthy (and otherwise) snacks which come packaged in 100 calorie snack bags. Even the healthiest of these will add calories. Normally, the average person would overlook counting those. But they do add up.

Have you ever tried to see if you're getting enough of every kind of nutrient in your diet? Enough protein, enough fat, enough carbohydrates? Or, for that matter, enough water? Most of us don't get enough water during the day. I realised that I eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but I don't eat enough protein on most days, except the days when I eat chicken or fish, which is only about twice a week.

I think everyone should do this for at least a week. Write down everything you eat. Absolutely everything. And then see how much of what you're eating. You may be surprised at the result. You may see something very evident that you need to change about your eating habits.

Google it!

2010-01-20T16:52:00.000-05:00

Last night, there was this documentary on one of the news channels about Google. We didn't watch the full one-hour feature because it was late and we were sleepy, but in the middle of it, I asked my husband, "How did we live before Google?"

Google has become as everyday as food and water for most of us. Stuck with a coding issue? Google it. Want to find a fancy restaurant for a special dinner? Google it. Want to know where to learn to play the guitar? Google it.

Well, of course, Google has become synonymous with searching the Internet, but there are so many other things I probably can't live without. Gmail. Google reader. Google news. Google maps. Picasa. YouTube. And, of course, not to forget, Blogger. And this is true for a large percentage of educated people, ranging in age from school children to those in their sixties. Barring those like a certain friend of mine who use Windows Live for blogging and react in strange ways when enquired about the existence of a Gmail account in their name.

Google is what we turn to when we need information for something we're doing at work. It's what we turn to when we need entertainment. It's what we go to when we need to express ourselves. It's also where we go and Google our own name when we have absolutely nothing better to do with our time.

Friends, Marriage and Other Such Things

2010-01-19T17:05:00.000-05:00

A few of my friends from college (and I) keep in touch with each other through a regular exchange of e-mail messages. That's been a significant mode of communication for a while now. It helps get things across to everyone at the same time.

When we started out, none of us were formally engaged or married. In the last twelve months, five out of the six of us have taken the pheras and the sixth is now about to exchange rings. What struck me as interesting is that everyone now signs their e-mails with a "Avantika & Mrinal" (both fictitious names) type of sign-off, rather than just their own name. The thing is, it's not just about the signature, is it? It's about just about everything under the sun. What you do, what you eat, when you sleep, when you get up, where you go, where you don't go, what you buy, what you don't buy... just about every decision is now made together. Sometimes that makes the decision easier, sometimes that makes it more difficult. Sometimes it makes life more interesting, sometimes it makes it duller. Either way, it is what constitutes the essence of marriage. Togetherness. Doing things together. Having dinner together. Going out together on weekends. Being together. That's what it's all about.

My Cup of Coffee

2010-01-15T17:31:00.000-05:00

In India, I'd never really experienced the idea of coffee waking me up. It was always mostly psychological. I would think that a cup of coffee would wake me up, and it would. For about half an hour.

I don't know what it is, if the coffee here is that much stronger, or if my body is no longer quite as accustomed to the caffeine, but a single cup of coffee early in the morning keeps me wide awake until about ten in the night. A cup after noon leads to restless sleep.

I remember how we would sometimes make cold coffee on summer evenings at home and sleep peacefully after that. I would drink cold coffee as often as I could, as opposed to hot, except at work where we didn't have cold coffee. There was the time when Abhinav conjured up a cup for me with water from the water cooler, milk powder, coffee powder and sugar.

The reason why I'm rambling on about this is that I like coffee. The aroma, the flavour, the feel of it. I like the variations we get at Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. The peppermint mocha, the caramel latte, the hazelnut flavour, the cinnamon... I have a strong urge for a cup right now but it's half past five in the evening. It feels like much later than that because the sun set an hour ago and I'm not yet used to that kind of variation in the length of the day - it goes from fifteen to sixteen hours in the summer to nine hours these days.

Anyway, the point is, I feel like drinking coffee but it already feels like nighttime and I know I won't be able to sleep if I get some right now. Maybe just a sniff at the jar of coffee powder. Or maybe a hint of it in a hot chocolate drink. Hmmm...

Song of The Week

2010-01-15T17:11:00.000-05:00

After I saw the promo of Veer with the sight of Salman Khan putting me off more than ever before, I had no inclination to listen to the music of the film. But I happened to listen to a few tracks, and it is one of the most soothing albums I've heard in a while. There is a song or two that does not sound like it belongs in a period film, but all of them are good in their own right.

So I really liked Surili Akhiyon Waale. I haven't heard anything new by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan in a few months (The last time was probably Main Aur Mrs Khanna or Dekh Bhai Dekh), and this is a good track to break the spell with. As long as it's just the audio. I haven't seen the video, don't want to see it. Don't want to imagine that this song is in praise of Salman Khan's eyes!

Random Little Things That I Miss...

2010-01-14T11:53:00.000-05:00

...about my single life in India:

Having someone to cook for me. I mean, it's good to be able to cook for yourself and make exactly what you want to eat, but at least once in a while you want to eat something cooked by someone else who does not cook for a living, and you want to not know what's for dinner.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling sleepy towards the evening and I debate whether or not to get some coffee, I miss having friends and colleagues around me who would get it for me without even asking me.
This doesn't get said enough. I miss the Hindi radio channels that make you listen to all sorts of useless bantering about movies and movie stars, and songs that you love and songs that you hate.
Easily available chaat and other things savoury that you don't have to put together yourself.

And the stuff I think I will miss when I go back to India:

Low fat versions of just about every food item. Low fat salad dressing, reduced fat Oreo's, reduced fat muffins and doughnuts and what not. And the milk that comes with exactly as much fat as you want - skim, 1% fat, 2% fat, or whole.
Easy access to Mexican food.
Snow outside my window.
Easy access to original DVD rentals from Netflix.
The huge bookstores.

3 Idiots

2010-01-11T18:29:00.003-05:00

I read somewhere that 3 Idiots has made more money in the US than any other Bollywood movie. It sure looks like it. In our neighbourhood cinema complex, where Hindi movies rarely last more than a week, and where I saw Wake Up Sid in an auditorium with about twenty people on a Saturday night, this movie is still running with packed audiences in its third week.

Totally worth it. In spite of Kareena Kapoor, who had suddenly turned into a tolerable, almost good actress with Jab We Met and then began to go downhill again. She's done a good job here. Though, of course, not half as good as Sharman Joshi and not a quarter as good as Aamir Khan. I love the way he works on just one film every year and then delivers a wonderful film towards the last few weeks of each year. Last year, I went out to watch Ghajini in theatres twice. The year before that, I went to watch Taare Zameen Par twice.

Aamir's character in the film is just so great. He's innocent, dreamy, inventive, innovative, and super intelligent. And he has this huge desire to actually learn. And he's also a little mischievous. He's about as close to a perfect guy as you can find. But the way the story has been handled is so crafty, nobody steals the show single handedly. Each character has their own importance in the plot, and it shows. Boman Irani with his Daffy Duck like slurred speech and his crazy scientist hair is just so funny. And the character they call "Chatur" adds a new, fun angle to the story.

When we came out of the movie hall, I heard a teenage boy humming All Izz Well as he jogged towards his car. It's been a while since I heard someone do something like that. Made me feel all the more at home.

Random Questions

2010-01-10T13:46:00.000-05:00

What, exactly, is the whole point of decaf? I mean, people drink coffee to stay awake. They drink it for the caffeine. Why would someone want to drink decaf?

What happened to the days when I could eat all kinds of stuff without worrying about how I look or what I'm doing to my health? Those good old days of childhood and early adulthood.

Body Surfing

2010-01-03T16:44:00.000-05:00

Body Surfing by Anita Shreve is another book I picked up based only on the pitch on the book jacket, without any feedback from anyone I know. This is the story of a woman, Sydney, who, at age twenty nine, is already once divorced and once widowed. She finds herself a job tutoring a high school student, Julie, with whom she strikes up a good friendship. She finds, with her student's family, a sense of belonging. She takes a liking to Julie's father and also develops a romantic attachment with one of her brothers. It looks like this just might be the happy ending Sydney had always wanted and deserved, but fate has other plans.

Anita Shreve has a unique storytelling style, which takes a while to get used to. In places, her narrative does not flow linearly, jumping back and forth in time. She pays close attention to the descriptions of mundane details like the flowers in the garden and the linen on the tables. She also pays a lot of attention to everything that goes on through her characters' minds, whether or not it directly contributes to the story.

Once you get the hang of it, her story flows easily, keeping the pages turning quickly. She gives you characters you may or may not be able to relate to, but ones you care about. She makes you want to find out what happens to them next.

I think this is only the second book I read that was set in places I know and have been to, the first being Five Point Someone. Well, The Sari Shop was set in Amritsar and I've been there too, but I was there only for a few hours and I never went to the bazaars that the author talks about, so I don't think that counts. This book is set mostly in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and I've seen the places mentioned in it. Helps visualize things in my head.

Anita Shreve is apparently the author of more than a dozen bestselling books. This is the first one I read. I'll say I liked it enough to want to try out some of her other work.

What I've Been Doing

2010-01-01T10:58:00.002-05:00

I always knew I wanted to write. I always wanted to publish a book, and I still do. But I have discovered that writing fiction is very different from writing non fiction. And my talents lie in non fiction. I have exclusively been writing non fiction ever since my school days. In recent times, I spent a lot of my time doing some freelance writing. You will see some links on the sidebar on my blog. Those links are there so you can read whatever I write in various places online.

But before I started doing all that, I did spend some time trying to put together a story. I started out with one, and went on to write two. Neither one was quite as good as I had hoped. But I would still like to share both of them with my friends, who have also been loyal readers of my blog. And I would still like to continue to work towards my dream of being a published writer. I am going to keep my friends and readers updated on my latest adventures and misadventures. Until then, keep reading my blog, and read my stories at your own risk.

Love, Marriage and Other Such Oddities is a semi autobiographical account of the phase when I saw a lot of people around me get married, and was led to believe, by my family, that it was high time that I did too. There are arranged marriages and love marriages happening in today's India, and there are about as many distinct stories of, and as many distinct reasons for getting married, as there are people.

PS: Certain people I know were rather interested to know who I would or would not thank in the acknowledgements section. The thank-yous are at the end of the book.

PPS: The cover picture is from my friends' engagement, and I sincerely hope they do not mind the fact that I used their picture for the cover.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

2010-01-01T10:48:00.000-05:00

This movie is the sequel to a movie about three chipmunk brothers who can talk, and even sing, and become international pop stars. In the squeakquel, as they call it, the three find love in the shape of three unbelievably cute and charming female chipmunks who can also sing. They also learn a thing or two about life, about the importance of teamwork, caring for others' feelings, and being there for each other.

I would have to say that I liked the first movie better, but I guess that was mostly because of the novelty factor. The second one has too many people in it, which creates a bit of a jarring distraction. Even so, it has some really cute scenes, especially the conversations between Theodore (the littlest male chipmunk) and Eleanor (the littlest female chipmunk). And the one where Alvin tries to kiss Simon. Cute family movie which has a little something for everyone.

Random Musings on 2009

2009-12-30T15:47:00.003-05:00

Those who know me personally or through my blog will probably agree with me if I say that it would be an understatement to say that this has been an eventful year for me. Getting married, moving to a different country, quitting my job, learning to cook, learning to do a lot of things for myself. This has also been an almost equally eventful year for a number of close friends who got married or engaged, quit work to get another degree and/or moved to a different city or country.

Five things I did this year that I didn't think I would do quite so soon:

Got married
Moved to the States
Learnt to cook for myself
Quit my job
Spent time pursuing my real interests - reading and writing

Eight movies I watched this year (I watched them this year, some of them are older ones) that I liked a lot more than I expected to:

Barah Aana
Mumbai Meri Jaan
Welcome To Sajjanpur
Aagey Se Right (I'm gradually becoming a big fan of Shreyas Talpade.)
He's Just Not That Into You
Dr Seuss' Horton Hears A Who!
Oh, My God
Avatar

Twenty favourite Bollywood songs from 2009 (roughly in chronological order):

Rehna Tu - Delhi 6
Dil Gira Dafatan - Delhi 6
Genda Phool - Delhi 6
Paayaliya - Dev D
Emosanal Attyachaar - Dev D
Ranaji - Gulaal
Tune Jo Na Kaha - New York
Khudaya Ve - Luck
Ajj Din Chadeya - Love Aaj Kal
Chor Bazaari - Love Aaj Kal
Ore Sawariya - Aladin
Sapne Bhaye Hain - Dekh Bhai Dekh
Pehli Baar Mohobbat - Kaminey
Rabba - Main Aur Mrs Khanna
Meherbaan - Ada (I'm not sure if this counts as a song from 2009, but anyway)
Iktara - Wake Up Sid
Tu Jaane Na - Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani
Mere Paa - Paa
All Izz Well - 3 Idiots (and all the other tracks from the movie too)
Gadbadi Hadbadi - Rocket Singh

Okay, this was a fairly random post. But life is just so - fairly random. Happy New Year everyone!

Avatar

2009-12-28T15:42:00.000-05:00

Avatar is probably not the kind of movie I would have chosen to watch myself, but my uncle took everyone out to watch this one the day after Christmas. I must say I liked it more than I expected to like it.

It's a science fiction/fantasy film about a place inhabited by blue skinned humanoids. People are trying to get them to move in order to lay their hands on a rare and expensive metal, vast reserves of which lie underneath their land. These people create creatures by mixing human DNA with the DNA of the natives and use the minds of the humans to control these creatures. Makes me wonder, yet again, how Hollywood comes up with all these weird and interesting stories. And oh yes, how they manage to pull off all those special effects.

Interesting film. Definitely recommended.

White Christmas

2009-12-28T15:35:00.000-05:00

When we were in primary school, we would always decorate the classrooms for Christmas and deck up small bushes to look like Christmas trees, using cotton to give them a snowy look. This was the first time I saw the real thing. Real conifers with real snow. Baubles, tinsel, and an array of ornaments. My aunt actually likes collecting bird ornaments. She has a separate, smaller tree where she puts up ornaments in the shapes of parrots, pheasants and peacocks. I helped her find a little bird's nest to add to the collection this year.

The weather was rather kind to us on our trip to my uncle's place. It was only cloudy on Friday when we were going there, and bright and sunny on Sunday when we were coming back. Saturday, on the other hand, was a dreary day of non stop rain which melted out all the snow.

It was a great Christmas with some nice family time and great food. And making use of the after Christmas sales. Good times.

Song of The Week

2009-12-24T13:29:00.000-05:00

I just happened to hear Akela Dil from Dulha Mil Gaya. The name of the movie suggested to me that this would be the kind of movie I would neither want to watch nor listen to the songs of. For the most part, the soundtrack lives up to my expectations. But this Adnan Sami number is just great. Makes me want to get up from my chair and dance. And the lyrics are quite cool and kind of amusing. What is the first line, anyway? I thought (still think) it was "Akela dil all nice happy" but all my online searches for the lyrics come up with "Akela dil online savvy." It does kind of sound like that too, but my version, seems to make slightly more, albeit not perfect, sense.

Anyway, I liked the line that says, "kisi ke dil mein kyon rahein ghar apna chod ke." Rather cute. A nice, peppy number in an otherwise mostly boring and forgettable album.

Tourist Season

2009-12-23T13:05:00.000-05:00

Birds fly south for the winter. Bhatti flies north for the winter.

I mean, this is really not the time that someone would normally want to be touring Boston. Yesterday's high was 27 F (that's -3 C) and that's a fairly accurate representation of the weather patterns over the last few weeks. And we were out touring Boston and Cambridge in the lovely weather. We happened to go down to the banks of the Charles river and saw that even the river was frozen over. I mean, I know lakes and ponds do that, and I've been looking at them the last few days. They have a layer of ice all over them and snow accumulation on top of the ice. So you can't exactly tell that there's water underneath instead of land unless you've seen it in the summer. But I thought the river would be different because it flows. Not really, as it turns out.

Anyway, too much rambling about the weather. It was fun to see an old friend after a long while. It was fun to see bits and pieces of the city I haven't seen before. I'm hoping he will write a post on his own blog about his adventures and misadventures here in the Boston area some time in the near future.

The Joy of Reading

2009-12-17T19:50:00.000-05:00

After I finished reading Dear John, I was just browsing the publisher's page (Hachette Book Group) and read what they said about Nicholas Sparks. They say that he does all this athletic stuff and attends church and reads approximately 125 books a year. That's one book every two to three days. And he also has a wife and kids to spend time with. I read one book every three days or so last winter when I had ten days off from work and was curled up in my bed all day reading, pausing only for absolutely essential things like eating and taking a bath (in my world, that is absolutely essential), and for blogging about the books I was reading. This was a time when I had no responsibilities and could choose to spend all my time by myself in my room.

Now I pick out about that many books that I want to read, by visiting Barnes & Noble stores (The great thing about them is that they have comfy chairs where they let you sit and read and then decide whether or not to buy the book.) and previewing books on my Kindle for PC app, but I can't actually read them. For a short time, books can have you glued to them and keep you turning the pages as fast as you can, but after a while you still like reading them but you're no longer all together hooked to them with a touch of insanity. Or are you? Maybe, if you're Nicholas Sparks.

Dear John

2009-12-16T11:10:00.001-05:00

Dear John is the second Nicholas Sparks novel that I read. Though not quite as touching as The Notebook, this is also a beautiful, touching, very well written story.

The story is about a young man who enlists in the army for lack of anything better to do with his life. On one of his vacations from the army, he meets a young girl and falls in love. They promise to marry each other when he comes back from the army. Then the events of September 11 lead him to prolong his enlistment in the army and things change between the two of them.

A lot of the twists and turns in the story are rather predictable and the reader does know what is going to happen next. Even so, the author describes everything in a way that makes you relate to the way the characters are feeling and brings them vividly to life. His language is distinctively poetic in places, and the metaphors and similes that he uses add a certain charm to his writing.

This is essentially a love story, but it also has a strong focus on the protagonist's relationship with his father. It's a story of human relationships, and a story of love, both romantic and otherwise. Definitely recommended.

Great Things About Salads

2009-12-14T16:27:00.005-05:00

Traditionally, at home back in India, salad was about sliced cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cabbage and carrots drizzled with lemon juice. I never liked the lemon juice, actually. And I never liked eating the onions or tomatoes raw. I would eat the cabbage by itself. And sometimes the cucumbers and the carrots.

In recent times, I've discovered how versatile and fun salads can be. I always liked the cabbage, but it often had a rather sharp flavour. Lettuce, on the other hand, has a much better flavour and comparable, if not better, health benefits.

A lot of people here make a salad into a lunch, by throwing in some grilled chicken or tuna or bacon. I've discovered that it's a great lunch. It's easy to make (just throw everything together in a bowl), it's light so it doesn't make you feel drowsy right after you eat it, but it's still quite filling. So you're not hungry or drowsy in the afternoon or evening. Something like grilled chicken would need to be heated up, but tuna can be eaten straight out of the refrigerator. You can make your own variations by adding cooked chickpeas, sweet corn, olives, jalapenos, tortilla chips or what have you, and mixing and matching the dressing. I keep bottles of low fat salad dressing in my refrigerator at all times. I think it's one of the greatest things you can buy in a bottle, after bottled water.

The Other Side of the Coin

2009-12-09T13:42:00.000-05:00

I have a beautiful view outside my window that looks like a Christmas card. We had about five inches of fresh snow accumulation this morning. I also drove in the snow storm a little. That's the not so beautiful side of it.

As it happened, the apartment complex's and the state's snow ploughs and trucks were rather late this morning and my husband had to pull his car out of a parking spot surrounded by five inch deep snow. And drive through slippery roads whose metalled surface showed only where other cars had tread before. I actually accidentally drove on to the wrong side of a smaller road because I couldn't see where the road actually was!

But well, once you're home and dry, it's all still very beautiful.

Snowing Away

2009-12-07T13:44:00.000-05:00

Saturday evening saw a lot of snow for Boston and the surrounding areas. It's Monday afternoon, and the view from my window still looks like a Christmas card with snow covered pine trees and a sheet of white where the grass used to be. Saturday evening was something of a storm and was rather unexpected, being a little early in the winter season for something like this.

I've been to places where it snows, and I've been in snowstorms before. But those were short vacations where the hotel was in a warmer place and we visited a snowy place and came back to a place where the grass was still green. This is the first time that I've woken up in the morning to a snowy scene outside the window. I wanted to take pictures as soon as I got up on Sunday. I didn't know we'd have about three days to do that. Everything is almost intact, except that the roads have been cleared and there are a few footprints of the children who wanted to play in the snow. It's still all so pretty and yesterday was surprisingly warmer than the day before. And not that difficult to drive either. Not like we're snowed in. The little bushes and pine trees look like the ones we would decorate with cotton wool for school plays and Christmas. Only this time, it's the real thing.

Shopping Away

2009-11-30T16:04:00.004-05:00

Before I came to the States, I knew what Thanksgiving was all about, and I knew that they have crazy “Black Friday” sales the day after. I knew that people camp outside stores in the night so that they can be first in line. But I didn’t know just how crazy it all gets.

The stores open at about four in the morning for shoppers. (Toys ‘R’ Us actually opened at midnight this Black Friday.) And there are already hundreds of people queued outside, waiting for the doors to open. There’s no parking, the place outside the stores are all lined with Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and people are just crazy. Apparently one of the salespeople who opened the doors to a Wal-Mart died in a stampede last year. Now they have special training for people who open the doors.

By six in the morning, most of the good deals are gone, but people are still trying to find parking spots and waiting for hours in the checkout queues for most of the day. There’s also a “Cyber Monday” sale in most of the larger stores, where they have great online deals for a day. That’s what I’m restricting my shopping to!

A Thought

2009-11-30T15:55:00.001-05:00

You know how, when someone lives in a foreign country like the States or England for a while, they pick up the local accent? The younger they are, the faster and more apparent the transition is.

And then there are the African Americans who have lived here for generations and still have a distinctive accent. Why are we Indians trying so very hard to fit in?

Happiness Sold Separately

2009-11-30T15:34:00.001-05:00

Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston is the story of a marriage undergoing extreme trials and tribulations. It’s the story of a couple battling infertility and infidelity and arriving at a point when they no longer really know how to be there for each other.

The story is about the complications of life and relationships, about dealing with everyday and not-so-everyday stress. It has characters who are confused and not completely sure of what they do or do not want. These are characters almost everyone can relate to.

The story is well told, with subtle humor and adequate descriptions of human emotions. It makes for relatively quick and easy reading, in spite of the fact that it is a heavy story. Nothing very new or unique about it, though. The characters are slightly stereotypical in a lot of ways. On the whole, it’s an average read, reasonably appealing but lacking in novelty.

Fantastic Mr Fox

2009-11-30T14:48:00.001-05:00

Fantastic Mr Fox is based on a Roald Dahl novel, which I never read. Dahl was and still is quite a popular author but I never got round to reading anything he wrote. I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though, and I liked it. We went out for this one because my uncle is quite fond of movies with animals, especially canines. I think that runs in the family, because my mother and I share this sort of liking.

This particular movie, however, did not live up to my expectations. Not that it was a bad movie. It was a reasonably entertaining family movie with family values nicely woven into the story. And it does have its occasional dose of witty humor. But somehow it comes across as a movie for adults trying to disguise itself as a children’s film by simply changing the characters from humans to animals and not changing much else. The animals behave just like people and the story has a mundane, everyday theme with not much appeal or novelty to it. It's like they took a few days out of the life of an ordinary family and made it into a story. Nothing fantastic about it. Just okay-ish.

Giving Thanks

2009-11-30T14:28:00.001-05:00

I went to my uncle’s place for Thanksgiving, which is, in case you didn’t know, a major holiday in the US and an occasion for family get-togethers. The traditional Thanksgiving Day meal includes a whole turkey and pumpkin pie, among other things. I’d never has turkey before, except in a sandwich or two, and they don’t put too much of it in there. I got to see how the whole meal is prepared, how the big bird is marinated overnight and roasted in the oven. My aunt made pumpkin chiffon for dessert, a lighter, fluffier variation of pumpkin pie that I absolutely loved. This was probably the first time in my life that I had dessert that was delicious and did not make me feel over stuffed and heavy in the stomach.

I like the way Americans plan their meal for this day. They start out with the turkey and everything else at about three or four in the afternoon, and eat slowly, for an hour or so, then take a break before dessert. It combines lunch and dinner into one meal and doesn’t leave you feeling heavy at the end of it. It’s a lavish meal with a number of dishes, but none of them use a significant amount of oil or butter or anything of the sort. The turkey is roasted; the mashed potatoes are baked and then mashed, as are the mashed sweet potatoes. I don’t know about traditional pumpkin pie, but the pumpkin chiffon was lighter than air.

The weather is quite cold now. My aunt ran out of space in both of the extra large refrigerators that they have, and she put the turkey and some other stuff outside on the deck overnight. I’m thinking it was cooled better than the stuff that was actually refrigerated.

The point of this holiday is to count your blessings and be thankful for them. I am thankful that, in spite of being so far away from home, I have a place to go home for the holidays.

Song of the Week

2009-11-23T14:19:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already, you must listen to Mere Paa from Paa. It takes a while to recognize the voice, if you don't already know that it's been sung by Amitabh Bachchan. Of course, he's been singing a lot of his own songs throughout his career, but this is in a league of its own. It captures the innocence of a child with in the ageing voice of the character whose physical growth is accelerated but mental growth is normal. Absolutely amazing.

By the way, can somebody remind me of the name of the Robin Williams movie with a similar storyline?

While we're talking about songs, if you haven't heard the songs in the soundtrack of Couples Retreat, it has a few tracks by Rahman which are rather different from his usual stuff. One of them is in Tamil. This one is in English and Hindi.

Italian Cuisine

2009-11-23T10:51:00.001-05:00

The Italians sure know what they are doing when they're in the kitchen. I think theirs is some of the greatest food in the world. Even though I've become slightly partial to Mexican food lately, nothing beats Italian. Pizzas, pastas, and oh, their cakes and pastries are just out of this world.

I've discovered that it's really easy and economical to make your own pasta. You get great marinara sauce (and in a variety of flavors) in a bottle, and all you need to do is boil the pasta and mix it with the sauce. And maybe cook some vegetables to add to it. It's quick and easy, and if you buy the whole grain pasta and the all-natural sauce, it's pretty healthy too.

The Domino's guys have this unique dish on their menu. They give you pasta in a bread bowl. That's a bowl made out of bread. So you eat the pasta, and then you can eat the bowl too. Saves space in the dishwasher.

All these Italian places have some sort of molten chocolate cake on their dessert menu. It's a soft cake with a liquid centre. I tried it in only one place, but it was just amazing. Normally, they serve you huge platters of pasta and don't leave you any room for dessert. And then they come along with their dessert trays and try to tempt you into eating it anyway. That's right, they don't bring you a menu, they bring a tray with a sample of each kind of dessert so that it's all the more difficult to resist the temptation. I've learnt to resist anyway. But sometimes I do give in and, I must say, it's worth it.

Holiday Cheer

2009-11-23T10:34:00.001-05:00

The Holiday season is visibly approaching now. With Thanksgiving this Thursday and Christmas just over a month away, the whole place is looking different. There are special discounts and sales all over, and people are out shopping with their kids all the time.

One thing I really like about this season is all the great food. The Pumpkin Donuts are just great (They don't beat the double chocolate donuts, but they come quite close.), as are the Peppermint Brownies (They beat the double chocolate brownies.). There are all kinds of pies and cakes and chocolates all over the place. It's the perfect time to ruin your diet.

Changeling

2009-11-20T10:35:00.000-05:00

I normally write only about movies that I watch in theatres while they are still new, but Changeling is an extremely exceptional movie and I don't think that too many people I know have actually seen it.

It is a period drama set in the late 1920s - early 30s, primarily in Los Angeles, California. It is based on the true story of a mother looking for her missing child and not getting enough co-operation from the police. At first they tell her that, in line with their policy, they do not dispatch search parties for lost children for twenty four hours because ninety percent of them turn up by morning. Then they find her a child, not her child, and tell her that she is unable to recognize him because she is in shock and not thinking clearly, and that the boy lost weight over the past five months when he was missing.

The LAPD's appalling acts do not stop there. When the mother continues to insist that the boy is not her son, they accuse her of trying to shirk her responsibilities as a mother by turning the boy over to the state, and deem her mentally unstable and throw her into an asylum.

This film showed me a world I'd never seen before, or known that it existed. This is an extremely riveting performance by Angelina Jolie in the lead role, which was definitely worthy of the Academy Award nomination, perhaps even the Award, although I should probably watch The Reader before I express an opinion on that.

The Sunflower

2009-11-18T20:08:00.001-05:00

The Sunflower by Richard Paul Evans is the first book I picked up based only on what the book jacket said; no book reviews or peer recommendations went into this one.

The story is set in Peru, and is about a woman who goes there from America on a humanitarian mission, hoping to be able to mend a broken heart in the process. She meets a man who came to the place with a similar purpose in mind, who takes her on an adventurous journey comprising of activities like crocodile hunting, caring for an orphaned girl with all her heart, and coming down with dengue fever.

It's a beautiful narrative that takes the reader into a different world, geographically as well as otherwise, a world largely unknown to the average reader. It's something that appeals to the adventurous at heart and also to the romantic, sentimental reader. Some parts, such a description of a camping trip, took me back to some great times I had when camping out with my teammates.

The story is written in an artistic, slightly poetic style which makes it a little more appealing. All in all, a pretty good read.

With Best Wishes

2009-11-12T16:24:00.005-05:00

This is for all those friends of mine who are getting married this season. I have seven wedding invitations and counting for the next two weeks, and I am not going to be able to attend any of them. Because they are all in India. And, in case you didn’t know, I am not.

I remember, when we went to Tanu’s place for her mehendi function in February this year, we knew that Kavita and Anuradha were getting married within a week of each other in November. Ruchi mentioned that we would then be able to apply mehendi only once for the two weddings. Nobody knew then that Ruchi would be the one to get married first!

Ruchi’s been a close friend for nine years now, being classmates in college, in the postgraduate years, and also, briefly, a colleague. We’ve been out together to watch movies that nobody else wanted to see, and shop when nobody else wanted to shop. Hers is one wedding I never would have liked to miss.

Kavita, Ruchi and I had some wonderful times together because we lived close to each other’s houses and travelled together by bus in our college days. We talked of everything under the sun on those journeys. On a rare occasion when our bus was practically empty, we passed the time in a traffic jam by playing antakshari and singing at the top of our voices, unworried about the few but existent co-passengers staring at us. The company of friends makes even the DTC buses you travel by and the subway you use to cross the road, memorable, doesn’t it?

And Aman, who, as most of my former colleagues are only too familiar with, has been like an elder brother to me. Teasing me, pulling my leg, and also watching out for me and being protective.

This is for all of you, Ruchi, Kavita, Aman, Anuradha, Pavitra, Surbhi and Manoj. Don’t let the geographic distance fool you. My heartfelt wishes are with all you people. On your special day and forever after.

Life Lessons From A Diet And Exercise Plan

2009-11-10T15:40:00.001-05:00

It takes a lot of courage, persistence and willpower to follow through with a diet and exercise plan and achieve your goals. But then, doesn’t one need all these things to get through just about anything in life? There are some things that I learnt as I went about my own weight loss regime. Things which are equally valid and applicable to other things in life.

If you really want something in life, you have to sacrifice something else. You can’t have everything. You have to choose. You cannot eat all the foods you like and still be the weight that you want to be.

In life, you can’t have a high powered, extremely successful career and an extremely fulfilling family life. You can’t have all the money you want and all the leisure time you want. You have to learn to strike a balance between the things that make you feel good in the short run, and the ones that are good for you in the longer run.
If you put your heart into doing something, you achieve a lot more than what you first set out to achieve. When you work out a healthy diet and exercise plan and stick to it, you don’t just lose weight, you develop a healthier, happier way of life.

If you find a job that makes you happy, if you like what you are doing, you don’t just make a living out of it, you make a life. If, on the other hand, you like being a mother and choose to do that full time, that can turn out to be more fulfilling than any job that you have ever held.
If you feel like you don’t have the energy to go on and just want to stop and give up, don’t stop. Slow down, but keep moving towards your goal, slowly and steadily. Working towards a goal requires you to be persistent and regular in your efforts. If you think you don’t have the energy to complete your usual thirty minutes on the treadmill and are feeling tired after just fifteen, don’t stop at fifteen. Decrease your speed to a more comfortable level, catch your breath and go on. Even if you didn’t burn your usual three hundred calories, burning two hundred is better than just one hundred and fifty, right?

When you feel that the stress of your job is getting to you and you want to just throw it all away and quit, just slow down. Discipline yourself to adhere to strict limits on working hours. Know how much work load you can take on, and politely but firmly refuse any more than you can handle.
Achieving something significant does not have to be about depriving yourself of all pleasure. It is about making sensible, better choices which lead to a better output in the long term. You don’t have to stop eating all the things you like if you want to lose weight. You don’t have to give up chocolate and fried food all together. But make it a point to choose grilled meat over fried as often as you can, and to reduce your portion size when you have dessert.

If you want to go back to college and get an advanced degree, that doesn’t mean that you will need to live on a tight budget and have very little social life. Eliminate unnecessary expenditures, such as designer labels. Choose the more economical places to buy your clothes, stationery and breakfast cereal. Watch movies on DVD at home. Cook for yourself as often as you can instead of picking up frozen dinners or takeouts. Make a few small sacrifices now and reap great benefits in the future.
If you slip up once, that doesn’t mean that all is lost. If you gorge on pizza and chocolate pie one day, that doesn’t mean that your diet is ruined. Just don’t let that thought take control of your mind and pick up from where you left off.

If you betray a friend’s trust once, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person and a terrible friend. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Even the people we trust the most will let us down once in a while. Just don’t let it get to you, apologize and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Weekends are for fun, relaxation, for being yourself and for doing the things you love doing. When on a diet, eat normally on weekends. It prevents you from putting the weight back on when you go back to normal eating. Plus, it ensures you don’t feel deprived.

Spend weekends with family and friends, watching movies you like, going out to places you like, and generally doing things that you like. Don’t ever work on weekends or worry about what you’re going to be facing on Monday. This is your time. Enjoy it.

Timeless Charm

2009-11-09T15:40:00.000-05:00

Some things just seem to lose their charm over time. The TV shows you follow begin to fade in their appeal, the food you eat begins to taste bland. But some things live forever.

Sometimes I find myself getting bored of just about everything around me. How I Met Your Mother is becoming an unnecessarily long, stretched out story, and The Big Bang Theory's appeal, it seems, was only in the novelty of its theme, which is no longer new to me. There are times when I don't feel like shopping and I don't feel like watching movies.

And then, there are those things that come to the rescue. Like writing for pleasure, without worrying about what anyone is going to think of what you write. Having the time and opportunity to do exactly what you want to do. Reading a good book. Achieving something people thought you couldn't. Achieving something you thought you couldn't. Like when I finally got my rajma to taste just like my mom's. Doing something for someone else, and seeing them happy that you did. Some things are just made for that - making you and the people around you happy. They don't bring in money or food or fame, but they bring a renewed sense of self and achievement.

Foliage and Flora

2009-11-06T13:24:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, my mother had a collection of about two hundred potted plants. She would spend quite a lot of time with them, adding fertilizer, trimming them, planting new lily bulbs. But watering them was my job. For as long back as I can remember. It was my own special time, when I would be out in the courtyard, all alone, spraying water on the plants and also on the warm cement floor, cooling off in the summer evenings.

My mother had a special affection for plants with colored leaves. Purple leaves, red leaves, multicolored leaves. She still does. She says she would love to see an autumn like what I’m getting to see this year.

We had to give up those plants when we moved into our own apartment, because there was no room for them in our single, tiny balcony. They went to the village with my grandmother, and wilted away soon afterwards because her health did not allow her to take good care of them.

But they still live on in my memories. That garden has always been and will always be a part of my childhood memories. It will always be the place where we took pictures of my brother and me when he was just starting primary school, and had put on his new uniform for the first time. The place where we sprayed each other with the watering hose. The place where we played with kittens that the alley cat had in my mother’s closet. Where we learnt to ride our tricycles. Where we were children.

Daylight Savings Time

2009-11-03T15:09:00.002-05:00

I never really experienced jetlag when I first came to the United States. But I did experience a very mild variation of it when they turned off Daylight Savings Time on Sunday. I woke up in the morning to see that it was daylight outside, though not yet bright and sunny. Checked the time on my phone to see that it was only six in the morning. That struck me as strange, because I distinctly remembered that on the morning of Karva Chauth, about three weeks back, it was still dark until a little more than half past six.

I got out of bed to see the clocks that were set automatically, such as the ones on our phones and the one on the cable TV set top box, showed a different time from what the wall clocks showed. Well, what do you know, we have a forty nine hour weekend, don’t we?

It was a little disturbing to see the sky turning completely dark at only a quarter past five in the evening. And it’s not even really winter yet. I remember reading the classic tale A Christmas Carol and the fact that it said that Scrooge was going home at about four in the afternoon and it was beginning to get dark. I thought that kind of thing happened only in stories, just like the leaves turning red and orange and being shed. Now I’ll get to see it with my own eyes. Around Christmas we’ll get only about eight or nine hours of daylight, and none too bright at that too. But of course, things will be nice and bright with all the red and green decorations everywhere.

Advertising In America

2009-11-01T15:19:00.001-05:00

One thing that really strikes me when I watch TV here is how people advertise their products and tell you that they are better than their competitors. In India, it's like, "Your favourite detergent can't remove this stain. But Tide can!" Here, it's like this: "People say Honda is America's most fuel efficient car. But the Chevy Malibu is more efficient than the Accord, the Chevy Cobalt does better than the comparable Civic, and model X (some SUV type car from Chevrolet whose name I can't remember) is more fuel efficient than the Honda CRV."

And that's only the beginning. These people insult the competition like anything. The insurance guys, the breakfast cereal guys, the soda guys, everybody. They come with actual figures that represent an actual product from a competitor. They're aggressive advertisers who know just what they're doing. It's a very different style of advertising from what I've been accustomed to. I'm not saying that either is better or worse than the other, but it certainly stands out.

Halloween

2009-11-01T15:01:00.002-05:00

I've always held a certain amount of fascination for this festival that I'd seen in so many movies, stories and TV series. On Saturday I got to see for myself all the kids dressed up in costumes, going trick-or-treating all over the place.

We happened to be out, and I was window shopping at a mall. I wasn't too interested in that, because I didn't really need to shop. But I was interested in the adorable little kids dressed like pirates, witches, Darth Vader, Superman, Superwoman, Tinker Bell, Snow White, and whatever else you could think of. Even the little ones, the ones too young to understand what was going on, were dressed up by their parents and taken around in their strollers. There was this baby dressed up like a kangaroo. Another one was a ladybug. The cutest ladybug I ever saw, that's for sure! Chinese and Thai babies are just so cute in general, but they are even cuter when they're dressed up in a Disney Princess costume. And there was a pair of twin babies, in a twin stroller, dressed as identical pink bunnies. I saw another pair of twins in another twin stroller, dressed as pixies.

I watched the kids go from store to store, graciously accepting the candy that was given to them, with excited "Thank you!"s. I was a little surprised to see how disciplined these kids were. They were rushing off from store to store, but not trying to run around and create chaos, and when somebody held out a huge bowl of candy for them, they'd take one or two pieces and make way for the next kid in line. I mean, that's a little more than I expect from a child of four or five.

This celebration is apparently a pretty big deal to parents and children alike. The shops have been selling Halloween stuff - pumpkins, ornamental black cats, costumes, stuff to make costumes out of, hollow plastic pumpkins to collect the candy in - for a little over two months now. I've seen mothers looking around for feathers and beads to decorate their daughters' costumes. I've heard them discussing how they want to dress up their kids for the day. It's a beautiful, large-scale fancy dress party, and everyone seems to be having a good time!

A Home Away From Home

2009-10-30T14:04:00.000-04:00

My husband and I were recently talking about how easy or difficult it will be for us if and when we choose to go back home to Delhi. Of course, there are the good things, being near family and friends, feeling more at home in the city, but there are definitely going to be issues.

We can hardly imagine water or electricity being an issue for concern any more. Americans are completely taken by shock if there is a blackout. Tap water adheres to very high sanitation standards and is completely safe for drinking, but these folks still buy bottled water. We drink from the tap, but in Delhi, is there any telling what the bottled water may be contaminated with?

I am now used to cars stopping for me when I want to cross the road. I get a bit of a surprise when we visit the Boston city area or New York City, because those are more disorganized in terms of traffic and pedestrians wait for the traffic to stop. But they are still way more organized than Delhi. Yesterday, my husband had to wait for seven minutes to cross a red light and he was agitated at being stuck in a traffic jam. Both of us have been stuck in Delhi traffic jams for about an hour at time.

It's so clean and cool over here that I find it easy to go without taking a second shower at night or dusting the house for a week. I found those things rather difficult to do in Delhi.

And of course, I will miss the huge Barnes & Noble bookstores (An average store is about the size of an average Shopper's Stop in Delhi. They let you sit right there and read peacefully for as long as you want.), which are something of heaven on earth for a person like me, the huge variety of restaurants with international cuisines - Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Indian - whatever you can ask for.

But, of course, nothing beats buying books off the pavement in Connaught Place, eating roadside chaat and shopping for trinkets at Janpath, does it?