When I'm 64

No romantic song by the Fab Four this.
Instead it's an ambition.
When I'm 64, I want to be a spiritual leader to whom people donate their 5-figure monthly salaries.
I just heard of someone who gives up their sizable monthly income to a swamiji. Every month!
I don't know what he/she gets in return.
So why will I wait till I'm 64? Cos I think I'll look more trustworthy with grey hair and wrinkles. (I refuse to admit to either till 63).
What will I give in return? A kind look, and a gentle pat, and a "Sab theek ho jayega."

Where from you hail?

I've always been interested in accents and trying to determine where someone is from based on how they speak. Sometimes it gets difficult cos people who live near the state's border can just as easily sound like someone from the next state. But I've found a great way to tell their place of origin. Put them on speaker phone on a bad line. From the inflections in their English, you will be able to pick up intonations peculiar to their native tongue It really works. Very recently, I was in a training that was being conducted over the phone, and it seemed to me that the facilitator was from Bengal, but couldn't tell for sure. In half an hour or so, I got tired of holding the phone to my ear, so put the call on speaker. As is common in long trainings, my mind started wandering and in a while I stopped really listening. The voice receded to this drone in the background, and after sometime I thought the guy was talking in Oriya.
Voila !!!

Jeez! - I mean Cheese!

In Jan this year I put 12 photographs into a customised calendar to commemorate a family vacation. It was quite an effort, as I found that most of the pictures I'd taken were of the sky, mountains, winding roads, birds, insects, flowers.....well, anything non-human! I wouldn't have minded a calendar based on the inmates of Mysore Zoo, but the rest of my folks lean towards pictures of the two-legged variety. 

So after that bit of difficulty, I vowed to take more people pics whenever I'm on holiday. Staying true to my promise, I kept asking to be photographed when the husband and I took a weekend off last month. You should see the results. Gosh! The torn-winged moth from last June's holiday looked more animated. I have this impatient "hurry up and snap already" look in all of the pictures. Aargh, I hate it. I'm ok in group pics, but the ones alone - I have bared teeth in some semblance of a grin, or upturned corners to my lips, but cold eyes - gaaa. Horrific! The only time my pic comes out OK if I pretend to be someone else, and that's just too much effort.

I'll leave you with the pic of the torn-winged moth. It's not pretending to be someone else.

Under Pressure

The whole world's crazy about it, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I'm talking about Facebook, which at this time seems to be the center of the universe !

Why?

All my friends are on it, and under duress I signed up, but gosh! It's like a busy Bangalore street. People all going here and there, and doing this and that, and all talking at once. Random folks bumping into you. So why am I still there? Probably cos I invested a lot of time setting up my profile, and ocassionally I do get to hook up with old friends I'd completely lost touch with.

Like recently, when I managed to locate a childhood pal after 24 years! So worth the noise, isn't it?

Je Ne Sais Quoi

For the past year and more, there's been this pain that visited my tummy every so often. I thought it was from eating crap all the time, so I would cut down on one type of yum food a week to identify the culprit. I could never pin it down, but the general consensus was that it's the 4 teaspoons of bournvita in one glass of cold milk at bedtime (the erstwhile highlight of my day). So I gave that up. But the pain persisted. So I went to the doc, who through a series of tests discovered that I had a little unnecessary piece of benign being inside me. I had that removed with the hope that I had bid my pain goodbye, but oh dearie me, no! It was back. By then I'd had enough of doctors so I ignored the whole thing for a few weeks. The pain would come and go, till one day it was so bad that I had to rush to emergency, where the doctors wanted to prove their prowess by taking out the least complicated body part - the appendix. Of course, I stood up for its rights and said no way are they doing any such thing, esp when all the tests were negative. So with great reluctance, they let me out with only an injection. Then I figured it was time to see another doc, so I went to one who referred me to another, who gave me some meds, which made me better. So I was happy and I went home for a week. Then I came back and the pain came back. Every day. Lots. So I went to ayurvedic doc cos I thought at least that won't have side effects. I have to have the stinkiest meds on the face of the planet and rub an oil on my tummy. But I think that's better than popping pills all day, which I am prone to do. But the next day the pain was so bad I went to emergency again. They made me wait for two hours. So I figured it's cos I wasn't screaming in pain. That's a useful lesson for anyone who wants quick attention. Please scream. Well anyway, they checked for many things but it was all clear, so I came home. The next day I went back to the doc who made me better for some time. He gave me the same meds. I am better again. I think I will be better for 2 weeks cos that's how long this course is. After that, when the pain comes back, I will go to an astrologer and ask him what I should do. He will tell me to wear a red stone. I will not wear it cos I don't like the idea of surrendering my health to a piece of jewellery. By then there will nothing else to try. And I'm sure, being the loyal thing that it is, the pain will still be around. So I will have to start the alternative healing that I used to practise all those years ago. A valid question at this point would be why did I not do that all this while. The only time I think about doing it is when I am in pain. And then I am in so much pain that I can't focus. So I don't do it. What then? Sigh. What a pain.

The Simplest Recipe

I was channel surfing this evening and stopped at scene showing a group of 4 women curled up around a coffee table drinking vodka and eating chocolate. It was obvious that they'd had a crappy day and were trying to make themselves feel better - and succeeding from the looks of it.

Greatly inspired, I decided to google a chocolate fudge cake recipe. I found plenty, for cake as well as for chocolate, but the strangest one by far is this one for sugarfree dark chocolate:
Ingredients: 500 g - melted & tempered sugar free dark chocolate
Method: Melt and temper Sugar free Dark Chocolate and put in a mould. Cool in refrigerator for 25 to 30 minutes. Tap each chocolate out from the mould. Arrange nicely on a serving tray and serve.

How can the ingredients for a food be the food itself? This is like saying I make great biryani. I get it from Hyderabad House!

Cinema सिनेमा

I watched a movie on TV called The Transporter. It's about an ex-special forces operator, Frank, who now lives in France and works as a transporter making not quite legal deliveries of people/cargo. I'm not going to provide the whole plot here; suffice it to say that Frank gets involved with one of his packages, a young, attractive Chinese girl named Lai, and all hell breaks loose when they attempt to rescue 400 Chinese people smuggled into the country to be used as slave labour.

I must confess I kind of enjoyed it. It was fast-paced and reasonably gripping. No great acting - the characters were true to type. The strong, silent, I-work-better-alone hero; the young, vulnerable-but-gutsy heroine; the handsome villain known only as Wall Street; the I'm-tough-but-I-have-a-heart middle-aged cop. It was good watching if you had something on the stove and had to get up periodically to stir without missing much.

But all through the movie I kept thinking that this was actually a Hindi movie made in English by mistake. I could almost see the writer explaining "Is mein sub kuch hai. Action, romance, comedy, family drama. Fight sequence mein hero ka body dikhaenge, highway mein car aur truck ka chase dikhaenge. Superhit fillum banega!" And seriously that's what it was - an out and out Dhoom 2. I am happy to say that Hrithik and Aishwarya are way better looking and had better chemistry than the lead pair in this movie, but the fact that Lai didn't have that silly giggle was a huge factor in her favour.

So my rating, 2/5. For Dhoom 2, not The Transporter.