As the year wraps up, my blog post counts stands at a dismal .75 post/ month . 09 for me has not been as good as it has been to Mamata Banerjee or Ranbir Kapoor. From an almost lousy Pujo to lousy Christmas. Most of my friends who graduated have moved out of the city in the 2nd half of 09, and each day there were new photo albums or status updates of newfound life to look forward to.

Now, one of the happy things to have happened to mankind in 09 is Farmville. Cows moo, daffodils sway, horses dance, elephants jump, potato pos up. Though I have almost got bored of it, nonetheless I can hardly deny the initial excitement of ploughing , sowing , harvesting and brushing !



Some scary things are up on television right now like Raaz pichle janam ka but more scarier is the forthcoming swayamvar of Rahul Mahajan.
Some trends which I could understand after watching a few episode in bits and parts is :
• Your gender remains the same as that of your last birth
• You remain a human
• Shekhar Suman was from Scotland and Monica Bedi from Portugal.

Its winter, and only when its winter, I suddenly feel this very urge to get up at 5 and go for morning walks. And since there is National handball championship going on at a stadium near home, there are ample hot guys roaming around in the vicinity. Btw , how exactly is a handball game played?

Mirror , mirror on the wall; who's the sweetest of them all?











The resounding beats of Dhak



In his ads, Dhoni was as omnipresent as Durga!

Escapade from sudden rain !

The part of Calcutta where we used to live earlier, is predominantly inhabited by people who during the independence were known as refugees. People who left their homes in erstwhile East Bengal , now Bangladesh. People for whom the mirth of independence was marred by the agony of partition.

Our family was one such. My grandma used to recount , how she, as a young lady along with my grandfather , had left behind her land of birth and set for an unfamiliar city with a lot of fear, pain , hope and anticipation. Initially they had taken shelter in a building at Park Street, which today stands tall a premier hotel.

Slowly , by laws of adaptation, their uprooted life began to find grip in the new soil. Land was bought , house was built. Moving out there, my grandma realized she was far better off than her neighbours. The neighbours were seven members , only five came to the city. The parents were witness to their daughter and son in law’s death. On the common note of anguish , they started to bond soon. So if Ilish was cooked for lunch at one home, the whole neighbourhood got a taste of it. They were complimentary to each other’s ordeal.

Along with stories of tuntuni, Ramayan, Mahabharat, alibaba, sindbad, tales of Dhaka and Borishal used to occupy the central place of my imagination. Maybe more than that. The places seemed like magical. The stories of unbound lands, ponds, playgrounds, Durga Pujo in courtyard, school journey admidst fields- perfect recipe to see a 7 year old’s eyes gleam.
“You know I got a double promotion in school”. I used to laugh.
During lunch, in the bed, I heard stories of a land I have never seen and formed images myself.
“ You know, there was this turbulent period of the late 70s , when curfew was imposed. Your Uncle’s marriage was a low key affair. People were not allowed to have illumination lest planes surveying understands that there is a city.”

Its tales like these, that my grandma used to tell me almost everyday, more so on the 15th of August...

I'm kind of having this syndrome, to coin a fancy name, it would be ,'going to a plex and watching a movie' block. Its basically the fear of going to the plex, wasting some 200 hundred bucks , straining eyes for 3 hours and coming out unsatisfied!
Now it has been literally ages since the last time I went out and watched a movie, and the trailers of Love Aaj Kal looked kinda nice, hence I chose to say yes and head for a morning show. And it has been ages since I last updated my bloggie, so that was another reason , to say.
Anyway jumping inside the theatre, things started moving very fast-leching, poking, kiss, and finally a cool breakup. And then you have Rishi Uncle talking about love in his zamaana, and things start getting desi, with Calcutta and Delhi being the cities in question instead of London. Here our Rishi uncle is struck by the thunderbolt when he sees Harleen Kaur ( the character which provided good laugh and reminded people of pre-Alam Ara days)for the first time. Soon after, he stands under a tree and swears that “is janam mein aur har janam mein.... watever.Transport plays an important role as both the heroes keep shuttling between cities to meet their love. And finally our modern day heroine gets married to Rahul Khanna but if you have watched Ekta Kapoor serials, you know that everything can be alright even after that.And thats what exactly happens.Hero number one comes down to Calcutta to take away our dear Harleen and Hero number two comes down to Delhi to get his girl. And happy ending.
The problem with this film is rarely does one feel any excitement as to what will happen next.
Music is kind of dud. Nowhere close to JWM. Maybe Pritam's keyboard's ctrl+c button wasn't working while he was surfing through various sites. Chor Bazaari makes a nice watch though.

Now there are obviously some sweet moments in the film. Like, like , ...like when Veer and Harleen meet outside her Calcutta residence ,she brings along with her his favourite black tea and he has brought along with him sweets from the same shop where she used to go to shop. And a few others :)

p.s: Sorry for this extremely badly written review , but since today is 31st July, I wanted to post something :(

Earlier my mom used to get shocks at the very mention of offers like 500 sms for 51. These days I resort to smaller numbers like 110 for 11 , and spare her from further jolts.

1)Faltoo Forwards. Forward pathetic jokes, utterly boring friendship/love statements and even promo messages from your service providers.And if you are one of those souls who is a fan of sending those 32 hearts to 10 people to get the person of your life in 1 hour, free sms schemes may be the right thing for you.

2)Use messages as twitter,tell friends 'what are you doing right now?' Be prepared for the gali-ful replies after some time too.

3)Be a good kid to your parents. Inform them of your every move, like having ice cream now, coming back after an hour, classes over etc!

4)Take another mobile, send an sms to it,start a stop watch, and measure the sms transmission time.Repeat it for accuracy. Its around 7 seconds.

5)Send missed sms on the line of missed calls, when you have no balance to call somebody.

6)Be a well mannered person, Wish people good morning/good night just like that!

7)Act as news feed.Inform people about important happenings, about tv shows.

So these more or less , will suffice a jobless person to exhaust his/her free sms scheme.

I could be...

1. someone dejected with the ways of life, but happy taking her dog out for a walk,watering plants, talking to birds and playing the guitar.

2. someone running an ice cream parlour at one busy corner of the city.

3. someone still plagued with dandruff and hairloss troubles and using facewash 9 times a day.

4. someone happily settled , playing with kid and husband , shouting at maids while hurrying off to office.

5. someone who has finally managed to graduate from microwave to gas cooking.

6. someone happily single, ruling workplace in the day and parties at night.

7. someone who does/doesnt get excited about train journeys or about checking co passengers' list.

8. someone who is plain happy.

9. Or someone else.


Sigh!
Btw, Happy Father's Day.

During the semestertime, several blog post ideas used to swim in the upper lobe of my brain,but as the semesters have ended,it seems that someone has hit me with the Ghajini rod and hence I've forgotten everything and can't even write a single post.

With the blog ideas, have also vanished my post exam resolutions of getting up for morning walk at 5 am and rejoining swimming classes. But my father being out of town and my maids being on leave, my mom has made sure that at least I get to see the Sun at 6 and make my way to the market.The vegetable market being a place where I have several embarrassing moments to recount,I am not particularly happy to make my visit there , a daily affair.[ Okay, I've embarrasing moments at every public place , be it banks, post officetelephone office :( ]

Cutting vegetables is also an art where you make sure you save your nimble fingers and yet not turn your product into a geometry lover's delight.

To draw a conclusion, if its Wednesday , then I spend most part of the day with vegetables. Big Bazaar has some amazing marketing strategies.Months back , they had this offer for people who shopped for more than 999 and having fulfilled that criteria , we were bestowed with an offer which said 'you get a year long supply of aloo and pyaz' .So the rule is that every Wednesday , you need to shop for 99 or more and you get to carry a kilo of aloo and pyaz each , back home.Now it so happened that my mom suddenly remembered about this offer and since she thinks me to be a jobless fellow, sent me off to BB.Little did I know that standing in the cash counter would turn out to be one of the longest queues of my life and that an entire civilization would turn up to get aloo and pyaz!

Tough Maggi still doesnt have competition in its proximity, Idli can come close if you have an idli mix and microwave handy.All one needs to do is stir the mix with curd , wait for a few minutes and then put the mixture in the idli container and you have it ready in a couple of minutes. This is again a realisation during semestertime.

P.S: This is a very stupid post.Was just too desperate to write anything:(

Since in this semestertime, all I'm doing is contemplating about blog posts, hitting the new post button, writing a line and saving as draft,and fearing that people will forget my blog, I hereby ask you not to forget my blog, and that I'll blog sometime soon.

So after endless traffic jams , road blockades , processions and other various means of disruption of public life , here came the elections in the city. The last couple of days have been quite peaceful.The campaigns had ended and the heat waves made way to the much needed rains.
The one very question which I've been asking people in any conversation in the past week is that, "vote dichhis toh?"
So here's one such silly conversation with a neighbourhood friend on ym:
me:Bol, you've got your card na?
friend: yes! And I'm voting!I'm really excited!
m: yeah, same here, heh!
f: Hey so, dont you think we should plan our V day attire?
m: mane??
f: See, as it is we dont know many people out here and I think V day is going to be like Ashtami morning , the only time I get to see all the guys in our block.
m: God!

I did not have much hassles in getting the voter's id card.My mom had to stand in a long queue though , but just once.And it was completely error free.Unlike people's whose father's name has been written as husband's.Or age has been doubled.
Talking about constituency awareness, I knew about 5 contenders,and about the rest you have to go and find out!

There is this sheer joy in exercising your right for the first time. And excuses such as 'I dont have faith in the system','I dont have interest in politics', 'Its too hot', 'Its raining' blah blah...do sound boring !!

I lost yet another umbrella today :( :( :(

The News: "Cat 2009 goes online.The test will be conducted in a window
of about ten days sometime at the end of the calendar year."

Reaction of a classmate: "Window of about 10 days? So that means it will be like the board exams? Like we go and give the quant section one day, then we have a study leave for 1 or 2 days and then go for the english section...like that?"

Other people trying hard to control their emotions: "No, window of 10 days means you go and get the paper from a test centre on day 1, solve it at your convenience, and submit it on the 10th day".

Its mid April, and all I've been thinking is coming up with a sensible post . Nah :(

Teasing the teaser
It was some months back.Some Saturday afternoon.I had got up in the bus from my stop and got a window seat. A couple of stops later, a man got up , and sat beside me.A few minutes later he started behaving as if I'm his newly wed wife, putting his hands around the seat and odd stuffs suchlike.So. I turned towards him and asked him to behave properly.He called back his hands and tried to sit properly, though he kept pushing inside.I was on the verge of praying to God that this chap gets down somewhere near, when he called the conductor and got a ticket for Park Street. Gosh!
Now I thought that I was wasting the window seat by thinking about this idiot and started looking outside.Now again this man started pushing and trying to put his hand around.That was too much , I thought.Even the most wild billi of mine listens to me, but this man was worse. I just turned towards him, and said, "Why can't you just behave properly??" I don't remember whether there was something exceptional in my tone. The man said, "S-sor-ry" and promptly ran out of the bus. The place was some 8 km away from Park Street!

In the family
At times I wonder why both of my parents are engineers?
I tell you why.
On a recent trip to a seaside holiday, in the train. Conversations.
Me and my brother , as usual and as expected, talking crap.
-"Hey see those lotus leaves in the pond".
-"Hey remember how we used to count cows on our way to Jamshedpur?"
-"Not me idiot, you and Mithudidi used to."
-"What are those scarecrows made up of?"

Now my Mom gets excited seeing something.
-"What are those? Beside the scare crows?How come the utility poles are so wide apart? Doesn't that violate the norms?"
Now my father steps in.
-"Thats a three-phase leakage transformer, right? Its okay, you can't expect better mounting, at least in villages."
-"Last dat I was checking the 98B clause of the Electricity Act,it does mention the implementation of APDRP. blah blah.
And this the general scenario everywhere, in the dining table, in the car :(


Beginner's guide to Bargaining
3 simple steps: (from a Mtv program)
1> Shock shock shock---> Whatever price you are told at the beginning, just convey to the man , that you are simply shocked by the high price.
2>Know your maths---> You need to be really quick.
3>Half is full---> Remember this thumb rule. Even if you can't gauge the exact price of the product , just bring it down to half an your job is quite done.

No Eureka
Most of the cities have banned people from sitting beside the autowallah in an autoride. I don't mean to sound like robbing a privilege though.Now suppose you are sitting either on the right or left of the autowallah and the auto takes a winding turn.Are you going to fall towards the autowallah or will have a possibility of falling outside.
On this futile note I end this post :(

Alert: The following stuff was written for a technical love letter writing contest , some days back. After reading this, if you feel like puking, throwing rotten eggs or feel its gross, I won't object.

To the Faraday of my heart,

I still remember the day I met you while surfing from one college ground to the other, and realised that you are the site I was googling for. My life was just a mere uncompiled program without you,but after I met you, the p-n junction of our hearts broke down and recombination led to the formation of a bond as strong as the Nitrogen molecule.

Since then, I'm like this happy electron, making revolutions around you, the central tendency of my heart being always towards you,every bit of my mind responding only to the signals from your function generator. Integration and differentiation of my crystallized feelings for you have been polarized to the direction of your heart and believe me, they don't have any finite limits. Whenever your image is formed in the yellow spot of my optical system, the periphery of my oblate spheroid heart experiences a unilateral force which provides the necessary support for the projectile motion of my feelings towards you with constant accelaration.

What I wish to transmit through this letter is that, if we finally manage to establish a link in the remote future, will you be able to provide me the necessary standard library functions to lead a syntax error free life? I just pray to God that you have the lattice energy to break the electrostatic hate-bond between you and my father and finally agree him to our electrifying union. I have this full faith in you , that you have not given the password to anybody else, other than me, to log in to your heart.

Since we know our life is like the Wills ad (made for each other), all we can wait for , is a peaceful equilibrium as propounded by loveguru Le Chatelier, when finally the distance between us will be a straight line, giving way to perfect mutual inductance following laws of electromagnetic induction.

Yours Curie.

Tagged by Amrita.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

1. I absolutely hate lipstick,especially when people wear the shiniest and most shocking colours. Now, this is not the best way to start a post.

2. To balance that, I love kajal and kohl.Though I find both the same, only that one costs double the other.But no liner, shadow, shade and whatever else exists.

3.As children, me and my brother's one of the many questions to our parents used to be query about their respective ages and salaries.

4.I can play the harmonium an a little bit of guitar.And I can whistle.

5.Bhuchi was the name of my first personal cat.I have saved many a kitten and pups in distress.

6.I didn't hate History in school and I'm pretty good at mythology and I used to love the Engg Drawing classes in first year.
.

7.Like some people are obsessed with their snaps, I sing , record , re record songs and listen to them.

8. I love doing household chores like keeping things dust free, washing my own clothes, arranging books.

9.My neighbours are pretty lively. On my right lives a family which has 6 dogs of different breeds and on the left are a family with two kids whose screams and fights make me nostalgic !

10.I have an inclination for subtitle while watching a movie. Even if its a English, Bengali or Hindi movie , with a subtitle, I will invariably look down to read them.

11.The only monetary earnings in my life are 1000 bucks from a FM contest,400 at a one act play competition and 100 each from a few group singing competitions.

12. I'm not a religious person , but I do pray and thank God at times.

13.I hate most reptiles.Lizards, snakes.I have watched very few horror movies, that too mostly with a group of people , where most of the time I kept scratching my eyes.I kind of get paranoid when the train crosses a river over a bridge.

14."There are very few men who haven't lost an umbrella in their lifetime" I'm not one of those, I've lost , umm, 4 umbrellas till date.

15.On the cullinary front, I make excellent chilly/yoghurt chicken and awful cake.Yes, my mom has banned me from making any further experiments with cakes.Not my fault though, got hold of a bad recipe on the net.

16.Every night, yes every damn night , I either have nightmares or some weird dreams. Last night was about Obama playing Holi in our lane.

17.I almost have never watched the first part of a movie which has sequels. Like Dhoom, POC, Spiderman. I finally managed to watch Princess Diaries on Sunday, after having watched Royal Engagement,say, 20 times.

18.I get maniac about wastage of food and water.

19.I love writing with chalks and pencils. I've never been able to write well with the Parker pens and Cello Gripper or even the 3 rupees pens suit me the best.

20.I love walking. Be it casual morning or evening walks, or walking to a place, under sun or in the rain, I don't complain.

21.I find it easier to do certain things for others, than for myself. For example, bargaining.

22.I'm quite sick of going out with girls whose committed halves keep calling every 5 minutes , instructing them how to cross the road, what to eat and what not to, where to go , where not to. I'd rather go around with single girls, bitch about people and laugh at PDAs.

23.Nobody likes their name to be misspelt or misprnounced, and I'm no exception.

24.I have lot of characters in my mind. And I look at things at a very unitary method kind of way. I can't possibly explain the points.

25Noddy was the first book I took from the junior school library.Little Women was the second one. I have pretty good memory when it comes to remembering petty stuffs.

I would like to tag ad libber, What's in a name, Preeti and Amrita~ams.

In an age, where one speaks one language with his boss, talks with his fiance in another, and his parents in yet another language, how much relevance does 21st February hold? How much significance does the fight of those hallowed martyrs of Bangladesh several decades back, who laid down their lives for the sake of their love for their mother tongue, still count? 21 st February is widely celebrated all across the globe as the International Mother language day, since UNESCO's declaration in late 50's.
Being a Bengali, it gives me an immense sense of pride that lives were laid down for the cause of my mother tongue. But 21st February is not only about the Bengali language. Its stands for the victory of every language, be it Hindi, be it Gujarati, be it Tamil or be it Tulu. Its about tolerance. A friend of my had once expressed her view that she used to think that mother tongue is the language of the land where a person is born. Thats one interesting perspective, though. So after living in a place for , say, 3 decades , if one says that I still don't know the native language, there's no act of smartness in it.So. if one says , to live in a place , you need to learn the language of that place, one can not be completely ignored. Learning the language of a place you are staying in gives you better understanding of its culture, of its essence and a sense of security.
Barring a chunk , most, dream in their mother tongue and resort to peace of mind in it.
Some years back,I had watched this Bengali movie , which few of my generation has watched. There a character , seeing that the protagonist was speaking only in perfect Bengali, asks him, 'You don't like to speak in English, right?'The protagonist's reply comes as "Actually , since I know both the languages perfectly, I don't feel the urge to mix them up and converse". That essentially justifies the cause of khichdi language that we at times resort to.And since the main aim of a language is communication, getting the message across is what matters. But when a mother says to her son, "Beta bottle ta pick it up kore okhane put it down kore dao", ("Beta,woh bottle wahan se pick it up karke wahan pe put it down kardo" , you wonder , whether its too much?

My Dida thinks that my cousin who is 27,has reached her marriageable age, and since she has not managed to find a groom for herself, its the elders who should take up this mammoth task . So every Sunday she makes it a point to go through the matrimonial columns in a vernacular newspaper , scan them and put a tick mark beside the ones which can be considered.So it was this Sunday,while I visited my maternal grandparents house, that I picked up the matrimonial supplement and started reading some of the ads:

# Alliance invited for Bengali girl,26+;mother senior college lecturer,father senior bank officer,brother settled in USA,cousin working in mnc. Mob:--, box no--- .
Now, we all know that its about loving your family, but where is the minimum information about the girl in question?

# Match for B.sc(h) girl, 23, Ghosh,5'4 , complexion dusky( like Bipasha),parents self employed,own house.Contact ---.
Dusky like Bipasha? What next? Husky like Rani?

# Match for businessman, 45(looks like 30), divorcee(with no fault of his own),passed 10.Bride should be extremely beautiful and educated.
!!!

So, I had enough of my entertainment and put aside the newspaper.
On other news , porshu is Valentines day. I was planning to get hold of somebody and venture into some parks , malls and places suchlike, but have this damn gd sessions in college. The blog was there on V day last year, but it didn't have any reader. But this year it has at least a few! So my dear readers , I love you all , Happy Valentines day .

Being literally tired of my grand ma's repeated approbation of my cousins' cooking skills and how that corroborated the fact that they have grown up to fine ladies, my mom's repeated dismays at why I'm not eager to learn making tea, I decided to enter the kitchen in creative mode.
So, here's the first chocolate cake I made in the microwave oven.


The chilly chicken was made from Macadamia's food blog.



This was a simple aloo-onion stuff.


Now, the following are geometry lover's delight,the final product taking various shapes.Don't ask me what they were, I want to forget their taste as fast as possible.




And some random escapades:
Thank you A and R for bearing with my coaxings of visiting Prinsep Ghat.


This is how the city looks from the 13th floor.

This one is from Mads. Thank you :)

1. What does your user name mean?
Vanilla sky? I think I was watching the Tom cruise movie of the same name , some days before I created this blog. Liked the name, so kept it.

2. Elaborate on your user photo.
A girl dancing , I think. Was given by a friend.

3. How many comments do you have?
On what?

4. What's your current relationship status?
Current? always single.

5. What exactly are you wearing right now?
White pant, black tee.

6. What is your current problem?
The link of the modem going on and off.

7. What do you love the most?
Roaming aimlessly, travelling, singing, books, blah blah.


8. What makes you most happy?
Walks. Good food. Music. Friends. Family.

9. Are you musically inclined?
Yes, yes.


10. What would you do if you woke up one morning and found out you were on cocaine?
First brush my teeth ....then will think about it .


11. If you could go back in time and change something, what would it be?
Let me think....


12. If you MUST be an animal for ONE day, what would you be?
One animal only? Pigs, donkeys, squirrel, zebra ..whom will I disappoint?

13. Ever had a near-death experience?
Yes. In dreams. Every night I almost die.


14. Name an obvious quality you have.
Modesty :P

15. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
The trailer of Delhi-6.

16. Are you happy today?
Yes. No particular reason though.

17. Who will cut and paste this first?
I think everybody has done this by now.

18. Name someone with the same birthday as you
Let me google.Ok, Greek philosopher Plato .(427 BCE; d. 347 BCE).

19. Do you have a secret crush on someone?
Umm..maybe !

20. Do you have a garbage disposal in your kitchen sink?
Below the sink, I think.

21. Have you ever been in a fight?
Recently, no. But had those fights in school bus lines, in class.

22. Have you ever sung in front of a large audience?
Yes, many times.At times, forgot lyrics, then audience started prompting. Too embarrassing. Chorus performances are safer.

23. What's the first thing you notice about the OPPOSITE sex?
Height, shoes, hair.

24. What's your biggest mistake?
With each passing day, it gets bigger and better :(

25. Say something totally random about you.
Being confused all the time.

26. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
Mayawati is a celebrity. Maduri Dixit is a celebrity. And about the answer, No.

27. Are you comfortable with your height?
Yes. Though would n't mind being an inch taller.

28. What is the most romantic thing someone has ever done for you?
*sniff*

29. What are your favourite smells?
My shampoo, vanilla essence, my bed, petrol, paint.

30. What's something that really annoys you?
People spitting, littering.


31. What's something you really like?
Roaming, travelling, singing.

32. Do you give random hugs and kisses?
Well...random hugs to mom.

33. What's the latest you have ever stayed up?
20 hrs maybe.

34. Have you ever been rushed to the emergency room?
No , no.

By the way, this bloggie has completed a year today. I know I write shamelessly bad, but thank you all for dropping in here.