Reading On

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.

Random Thoughts

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.)

The Simpler Things in Life

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.

In The Kitchen

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.

Eat, Pray, Love: The Book

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.

It's Been So Very Long Since...

...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...

...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...

...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

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

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

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.

Out Shopping

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

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.

Do You Know How Much You Eat?

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.

My Cup of Coffee

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...

Random Questions

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.

Random Musings on 2009

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:

1. Got married
2. Moved to the States
3. Learnt to cook for myself
4. Quit my job
5. 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:

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

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

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

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

Timeless Charm

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.

Disastrous Beginnings To Good Things

Quite often, I've met with fiasco when trying out something new. For instance, the first day of my job back in Noida, I took a chartered bus that a friend of mine had told me about. It found itself stuck in a bad traffic jam and took a diversion which turned out to be even worse. It took us through rickety bridges that I never before (or after) saw in my life.

Then there was the first time I drove myself to work. I didn't tell too many people about this, but that morning, I missed a turn and had to take a U-turn and go about three extra kilometres in the process. That was quite okay, but the second time I drove on that particular road, a cab driver driving a Maruti Omni hit my front bumper from the left side. I chose not to stop and argue with him, because I knew that no good would come out of it anyway.

After that, I would drive to work every now and then, but not on a regular basis. Later, when I began to drive every other day, we got stuck in a horrible chakka jam the first morning I drove my car, and we were there till a little past noon. Okay, that was not really my fault. I had warned the other members of my carpool and suggested that we start out a little earlier that morning, but they didn't believe me.

I drove to work regularly for a long time after that, carpooling with different people. An old friend of mine, whom I'd known for about eight and a half years then, joined us at the beginning of this year. Her arrival was greeted by one or the other of my car tyres getting punctured on three days in one single week.

When my husband and I were boarding our flight to the United States, the X-Ray scanners at the Indira Gandhi airport broke down and they checked everyone's luggage manually, delaying the flight by an hour, making us miss our connecting flight from Newark to Boston.

I've come to take such things in my stride, and I no longer think of them as setbacks. I think of them as a signal that something really good is about to happen. That things are about to look up. And, quite often, they do. I had some wonderful times in my three years at my job. I learnt to drive myself to and from work with the greatest ease, so much so that I did it on an impulse the week after I left, just to see my friends. I like being here with my husband. It's the loveliest place I've ever lived in.

Randomly Generated...

What exactly is random? I have had a few encounters with random number generation in my software engineering career and I've seen that it's generally not exactly random. You can make it as close to random as your imagination lets you. But the thing is, your imagination also has its limitations. Here's something to try out. Think of a two digit number, both digits odd, both digits different from each other. This is something I picked up from a TV show called David Blaine: Street Magic years ago. Eight out of ten people will pick thirty seven here.

I had a music player in my car in India which had a randomisation feature. If I asked it to play stuff randomly from my pen drive, it would do so. It had a very strong affinity for Indian Ocean's music. Now I carry an iPod to the gym with me. It seems to really love Shania Twain's You've Got A Way With Me and Mera Jahaan from Taare Zameen Par. I want it to like Mar Jaawan or Khudaya Ve (I really like the remixed version) but it has a mind of its own.

I have another thought for you to chew on. We meet lots of people in life. Is it just a set of random coincidences, or is it all pre-planned for us by a supernatural power?