Thoughts Unleashed.....

Happy Birthday Chennai

2009-08-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

Happy B'day dear Chennai! I love you so much that I share your birthday :D Will soon come back to you.

hot..hotter..hottest

2009-07-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

The weather here is awfully bad with temperatures around 100 F :(
I have always missed Chennai not for the heat but for everything other than that. The fate is such that I could only get the Chennai weather here in Seattle. Worser than worse, there is no AC at home. Heard there is no AC in any community here. That means the current weather should be a record break. I am really not fond of breaking records in such bad ways. *sigh*
Bearing all this, staying at home full time makes it even worse. Got to cook full time too.
The city just emulates Chennai now. I see temp in Florida lesser than this which irritates me even more.(folks from Fl, pardon me. I should admit I am jealous of you ppl)
So folks calling me on my home phone, forgive me if I babble more than I normally do. All becoz of the terrible weather.
For people who don't know how much I blabber normally, right now I am sitting in the comfort of an AC at my apartment's club house and rambling all this. You can also quickly check back my archives to know that and make me happier.

Good thing is I have discovered a remedy for the heat and I am gonna come to the club house daily, to beat the heat.

PS: Whoever said it rains a lot in Seattle? I'm waiting to pounce on you. Hope there is no connection between absence of rains and me moving here! Believe me; I am not so bad a person.

I wonder

2009-07-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

how some people could live without even the slightest tinge of conscience. I do understand I don't live in Utopia and there is no perfect human on earth. One need not be perfect and can have million flaws ; but why hypocrisy? In my humble opinion, hypocrisy is the biggest of all flaws. Don't ever try to portray yourself as someone who doesn't even remotely resemble you. Okay, you do that for some reason. Maybe,to win a job or to win a heart. Whatever it is, you should atleast change yourself to live upto the expectations. For a slice of time, pretending to be God sent angels and when you reach a time or position and feel you are no longer at the mercy of the other person, breaking the mask and showing the real you - ridiculous, atrocious, barbaric. Doing all this and finally getting away without any feeling of remorse is definitely a great crime. When breach of trust happens in a business relation, the outcome is different. The loss is more of monetary in nature. When such thing happens in a relation, the outcome is even more worse. The person who committed the mistake would not bother at all. Would move on and live a happy life. But the pain experienced by the person at the receiving end is excruciating & inexplicable.

I wonder how some people could live without even the slightest tinge of conscience.

PS: Thankfully, I have never been at the receiving end and people whom I trusted so far have never broken the trust. All this is the outcome of my empathy.

North-east to North-west

2009-06-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

Last couples of days kept us busy in packing stuff and moving. Yeah we have moved to the west coast now; to the land of Microsoft - Redmond. I am happy that I could explore the Pacific and see a lot of places. We have quite a lot of friends here; specially a couple of school friends and its always fun to catch up with our childhood buddies. How many ever friends we get, the comfort we share with our childhood friends is totally different. Plus, Roshan's aunt stays in Vancouver and we would be visiting each other frequently. I really like the evergreen state and emerald city. The whole place looks like a planned city and there is greenery everywhere. One thing I dislike is the frequent showers but still it is good to experience a diff climate. Winter and snow is not as bad as Mass; atleast that's what I heard. We haven't found an apartment yet and we r in a hotel room as of now. Soon, expecting to move to a new house.

Only flip side is, I would be missing some good people in Mass but still this is life and we got to move on. Good to keep moving and exploring new places. Looking forward to an exciting life in the Pacific.

No idea

2009-05-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

what to post. I wanted to update my blog and I thought of posting a recipe on my cookery blog. Just got back from a brief outing and do not have the mood to post anything serious or eloborate. If I venture out posting some recipe, I got to post a pic,step by step recipe and a short intro for the dish which sounds tiresome. Oflate, I have become addictive to blogging and ideally wish to post everyday. It's such a pleasure to see my words going online, someone reading it and taking the pains to leave a comment. This has become such a great outlet and makes my life eventful. Thanx to all those who visit my blog and a special thanx for the people who take some time off to leave a comment. You all make my day!

Good memories ...

2009-05-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

There are things which made you shed tears at some point in your life and which seems trivial and silly now, that you laugh out aloud or even just smile inside with embarassment without letting the outside world know. Ofkors, it is not applicable to everything in life. There might be things which made you cry and keeps you crying till the end of your life for eg., losing a beloved person. This is something quite normal.

There are also things which made you happy, jump with joy once upon a time; but now makes you cry. The happiness can be related to a person or a place. In a nutshell, if you know you are never gonna get back the things which once gave you happiness, that's a great distress. I just am describing the attitude and not the magnitude of distress. So, what does this indicate? Does it mean that you don't have to always cherish all the good memories and it is better that even some of them perish? Is it really possible to erase some good pages of your life from your memory? I guess warding off evil things from the memory is a lot easier, than to keep away from certain good memories. This reveals that good or bad is relative; it doesn't just vary from person to person also it changes from time to time. What is good today might not be so after a period of time and it is better to free our minds from things that might affect our current mood and stability.

Vacation

2009-05-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

I was away on a vacation to Orlando and hence couldn't post in between. After the break, I feel like I'm new to blogging (that's actually true :)) and my own blog seems unfamiliar to me. :P Just returned this morning and I'm dog tired. Quickly fixed a meal as we were tired of eating out. It was an awesome vacation and enjoyed every bit of it. We have been to sea world, universal studios and NASA. I will try to post more about the trip later. As of now, I wanna get out of here and sleep like a log.
So signing off...

Trip to Washington DC - Part 2

2009-05-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

Cherry blossom is known as sakura in Japanese and it is quite famous in that part of the world.
The trees in Potomac park were donated by the Japanese govt. as an effort to enhance the growing friendship between the two nations. It was definitely an experience to witness the beauty of cherry blossoms. That comes as the first breath of spring - a signal of greener days to come. The whole place seemed like a dream land. Take a glimpse of those lovely flowers here.

Cherry flowers at peak bloom around the Tidal basin

Surprisingly, it was not just the cherry flowers that marked the beginning of another spring; we saw a lot of tulips. Infact, I saw them for the first time in my life and was all excited. Spring had not yet sprung in Boston then and therefore I saw my first spring in DC. First spring because we dont get to see any marked differences between seasons back home. (Chennai) Majority days, we have scorching sun there with a little rainy and cold days. As I am nearing the completion of 1 yr here, I can now say that I have experienced all the seasons. Infact I have taken pictures of different seasons and planning to post them as a separate blog entry. Something to cherish for a lifetime. Catch the bright bulbs here.

Tulips at the Potomac park

Yellow tulips near the white house

After getting to see enough of these flowers, we headed straight to the white house. I wanted to see the building at dusk and so we relaxed in the nearby lawn waiting for the sunset. The next day we covered the monuments and museums in the National mall and I should say it was boring. I am not a kind of person who enjoys visiting museums and much to my irritation, it was raining consistently. But one good thing is, it was sunny the previous day and luckily we got to see the cherry blossom - goal achieved. On the whole, the trip was nice and successful.

Trip to Washington DC part 1

2009-04-27T08:19:00.001-07:00

Awesome it was! I came to US last june and visiting DC was definitely top in my must-see list. But we were just waiting for the spring, so that we can also catch the famous cherry blossom. It is like 7 hrs journey from where we stay and so we wanted to tick off things in a single trip. Whenever I saw pictures of ppl posing with the white house in the background, my eagerness grew. I read Savi's Washingtonil tirumanam some time back and I got so much engrossed in the story that I wanted to visit the places mentioned. Finally, my turn came and thanks to Roshan for making it happen. As usual R drove all the way while I sat relaxed commenting on other drivers. He controlled the car while I took control of the ipod, playing song after song. Good that I didn't sleep off to glory and was up and active to make sure that he was awake. See how repsonsible I have become!
On the way, R wanted to have his fav biriyani at a restaurant in NJ and in the process, we lost our way and it consumed more time than expected. Finally when he lost his interest on the food, we found the place and quickly finished our dinner. Well, I had to settle for a dosa, which I think is safer in a non-veg restaurant for a paranoid like me. We started our journey again expecting to reach in 3 hrs. But we had to wait in a toll plaza for about an hour and a guy irritated me by jumping the line. Such people always get on my nerves and it took sometime for me to understand it is not an ideal world. Well, I never remember the lesson. So finally we reached our hotel at 2 AM and managed to catch some sleep. The next day was very eventful. Yes! we saw the cherry blossom. Will continue in my next post.

Moments in life

2009-04-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

Read this post in Srivalli's blog and found it inspiring. Noble thoughts. I feel it takes lot of wisdom to practise this and if we could implement it successfully, we would be the happiest souls on earth.

There are moments in life when you miss someone
so much that you just want to pick them from
your dreams and hug them for real!

When the door of happiness closes, another opens;
But often times we look so long at the
Closed door that we don't see the one,
Which has been opened for us

Don't go for looks; they can deceive.
Don't go for wealth; even that fades away.
Go for someone who makes you smile,
Because it takes only a smile to
Make a dark day seem bright.
Find the one that makes your heart smile.

Dream what you want to dream;
Go where you want to go;
Be what you want to be,
Because you have only one life
And one chance to do all the things
You want to do.

May you have enough happiness to make you sweet
Enough trials to make you strong,
Enough sorrow to keep you human and
Enough hope to make you happy.

The happiest of people don't necessarily
Have the best of everything;
They just make the most of
Everything that comes along their way.

The brightest future will always
Be based on a forgotten past;
You can't go forward in life until
You let go of your past failures and heartaches.

When you were born, you were crying
And everyone around you was smiling.
Live your life so at the end,
You 're the one who is smiling and everyone
Around you is crying.
Don't count the years - count the memories

Tag

2009-04-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

No one has tagged me till date. So took it up myself.
1. Name one person who made you laugh last night?
Heard a cute kid on tv which made me smile
2. What were you doing at 0800?
Just got up and brushed
3. What were you doing 30 minutes ago?
chatting with a friend
4. What happened to you in 2006?
I got a bonus at work as a partof my company's silver jubilee celeb which I used to get myself some jewels.
5. What was the last thing you said out loud?
screamed something at R with my earphones on :) Well that's only an excuse ;)
6. How many beverages did you have today?
My fav filter coffee
7. What color is your hairbrush?
I usually use a comb but also have a brown hairbrush which I never use
8. What was the last thing you paid for?
nachos
9. Where were you last night?
Home
10. What color is your front door?
Green
11. Where do you keep your change?
In my wallet
12. What’s the weather like today?
Raining
13. What’s the best ice-cream flavor?
Vanilla
14. What excites you?
filter coffee
15. Do you want to cut your hair?
no
16. Are you over the age of 25?
Yes. 25
17. Do you talk a lot?
yeah
18. Do you watch the O.C.?
what is that?
19. Do you know anyone named Steven?
nope
20. Do you make up your own words?
not really
21. Are you a jealous person?
sometimes becos I always wanna feel important
22. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘A’.
Anu
23. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘K’.
Karthik
24. Who’s the first person on your received call list?
Roshan
25. What does the last text message you received say?
No mobile
26. Do you chew on your straw?
nope
27. Do you have curly hair?
I have a combination of straight and curly. It curls at the edges
28. Where’s the next place you’re going to?
nothing on my mind
29. Who’s the rudest person in your life?
dont want to mention
30. What was the last thing you ate?
lunch- rice sambar rasam and curry
31. Will you get married in the future?
not again
32. What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the past 2 weeks?
nothing
33. Is there anyone you like right now?
yes
34. When was the last time you did the dishes?
an hr back *sigh*
35. Are you currently depressed?
nope or shud I say yes since I hate doing what I did an hr back :(
36. Did you cry today?
nope
37. Why did you answer and post this?
wanted to have some fun
38. Tag few people who would do this survey.
Brinda
Joe

Happy

2009-04-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

is my general feeling now. May be becoz I'm listening to my fav songs. Nice way to round off the day!

Are you able?

2009-04-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard people telling "can you be able?" or "I cannot able"? If not, you are really lucky. I really get shocked of such usage and sometimes people from a good education background also do that. Other common words I hear are lended, hurted etc. The formula is adding 'ed' to any word to get the past tense. I also see people messing up with 'high time'. High time should be used with a past verb and I remember my english teacher teaching me this, way back in middle school. High time people changed! One more common mistake I have encountered during school days is adding 'itself' to he, she and everything under the sky. Thank God, I don't see this anymore. Also, using dearest with a name. Eg. Dearest Vidya
Should be either Dear Vidya or Dearest friend
However, exception is, you know many ppl by the name Vidya and i am the dearest of all :)

i am not trying to portray myself as a peter(local slang to refer to a person flaunting his english skills). I admit I am not flawless but I always take the pains to be perfect with my language be it english or tamil. Everytime I am confused with a spelling or usage, I try to google and find out the correct thing. If I go wrong and someone corrects me, I would graciously accept it and thank the person for educating me. But I fear to do that to people, excepting few really close ones.
In the case of misuse of 'able', it used to be my team lead or manager and i didn't wanna risk my appraisal :)

I have also observed few other things related to this. If a person's tamil is corrected, he feels happy to accept it and infact he sees it as a virtue. He takes pride in not knowing his own mother tongue. But if u correct someone's english, people tend to take it offensive and start criticising you or even talk behind your back that you are a Peter or Jane. Actually I feel, you have an easy excuse if your english is wrong - "Afterall, it's not my mother tongue". I do not know what makes people feel bad. May be most Indians (or all?) have the attitude that people speaking english are learned and superior. My only point is, whatever language you speak, try to be perfect and be open to criticism. Accept and correct your flaws. That's the only way to master it. Nobody is born with an oxford accent. They are just passing something to you which they learned from someone or somewhere.

Now, lemme get out of the preacher mode and try to appreciate some really commendable people. I have seen a lot of tamil medium students in my college who worked really hard to get through. I have seen people who were confident right from the first day and also some who felt inferior initially but overcame the obstacle by sheer hard work.I would like to salute all of them. I feel those people have an open mind and urge to learn it by some means whereas some of us get stagnated after our school. Incidentally, I have an example from my own family - my mother. She has told me how much she struggled in college after finishing her high school in Tamil medium. She was placed in C section (least) based on her english knowledge with several other tamil medium students and she just felt like running back home everyday. She had always been a good student and she couldn't digest the idea of being tagged as poor. Not only did she persevere but also outperformed her convent educated batchmates. At the end of her college life, she was in A section! Later in her career, many a times, people(who are lit. grads) had mistaken her for a literature grad. Even now, she takes pleasure in honing her vocabulary. Oh, this is becoming another long post. When I start writing, ideas just pour in. Lot of hyperlinks and I never get back to the home page. So, lemme conclude this post by dedicating this to my mother :) (sun music romba patha ipdithan :P)

Incredible India

2009-04-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

We had an awesome trip to DC and it was very eventful. We also made a stopover at NY to see the auto show happening there right now. More about the trip later. Meanwhile, take a look at the pic, Roshan managed to capture.

Ain't it cool? Ad for India on a NY city bus!

Raining...

2009-04-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

It is raining consistently here for quite sometime now. It is not one of those heavy raining days but generally it is gloomy and the daylight is dull. I am seated in my couch in such a way that I could see both the dark clouds and the wet ground with a lot of trees. Spring has still not started showing its effect and there are lot of barren trees as well. Occasionaly, I see people parking or walking up to their cars fully protected against the rains or probably the chill. There are like a dozen houses in my eye sight and that gives you the probability of such an occurence. Very rarely do I see a chipmunk or a bird hopping into my patio.I happened to capture one such chipmunk a couple of days back and it was hugeeeeee. I had to be so quick to catch it before it jumped next door.

All this kindles my nostalgia and I am walking down my memory lane travelling to those good (some even bad) old rainy days back at home. One great thing about pondering over old memories is we would mostly remember the good and a very little bad things.The more we travel back, more is our ability to forget bad things. Whenever we think of our school days, we would describe them as carefree days forgetting the pain we underwent in the form of exams and homework. If we could implement this even while thinking about just yesterday or the last minute, we would be the happiest souls. I would rather say a happy present makes you forget your sad past and only at the time of adversities, do we start wondering how happy we used to be till sometime back. As of now, it is the rain and loneliness that makes me think of the past.

My earliest association with rains dates back to the day I was born. I heard from my mother that it was raining cats and dogs and the beauty is all this happened during a dry weather amidst water scarcity.The earliest I could think of is the one in mid 90s when we had 5 days holiday declared in lieu of bad rains. What else could bring us more joy than such unexpected vacation? I love the evening showers and it was fun to walk or cycle back home getting drenched inspite of number of warnings from my parents to stay sheltered.But I hate it when water stagnates on the roads messing up our dress and shoes. That I would say is the flip side. During the college days, it was total bliss to walk in our sprawling campus(Anna univ) with light drizzles.I enjoy walking in the road from RCC to AC Tech chit chatting with friends sipping a cup of tea. During the time of counselling, there used to be a small coffee shop set up near the hall and we made sure to walk up to it everyday.Other days, we went to the canteen which served a moderately good(read worse) tea for 2 bugs. Sometimes when we were totally vetti, we used to walk till the CLRI campus to have an economical tea.(1 re I guess)One other place to relax is sitting under the tree shade outside our library overlooking the big play ground.I would say one of my favourite roads in Chennai is the Sardar Patel road and I can picturise how it will look on a rainy day, even years after I left college.Once I got settled in the confines of brick walls in a software company, many a times, I had no clue it was raining outside.Oh,only till we walked out for a break.(That happens every hour ;))We used to chat away to glory over a cup of coffee alongside the swimming pool.Sometimes, the whole of our team got together for the event euphonizing it as 'team building'.So much fun it was and looking back has made me relive those moments.

PS: I just observed that two of my recent posts are about seasons. That's a coincidence!

Spring is here

2009-04-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

finally... That's quite something to look forward to after experiencing the biting cold winter. Especially for a person like me who is born and brought up in Chennai for the major part of my life, (lived in Hyderabad for 2 yrs when I was 6 yrs old. That shouldn't be any different :)) it was an experience. If mercury falls below 25 deg (celsius of kors! I am still an Indian), we call it winter in Chennai. Hailing from such a background, it was surprisingly shockingly cold. But thankfully, I am at home fulltime and so didn't have to venture out like an eskimo. One good thing is temperature is expressed as fahrenheit and that helps in reducing my shock since I dont take the pains to convert it to celsius. Oh yeah, I definitely remember the formula but lost interest in testing my arithmetic skills. Google for everything.

All said and done, it was really nice since I kept reassuring myself that this is something temporary(the spelling challenges me everytime) and sooner or later I will get back to my heaven aka chennai. Yes I am an hardcore chennaite who enjoys going to the beach, window shopping at spencer, shopping at pondy bazaar platform inhaling all the dust and smoke. To me a perfect weekend is, eating at saravana bhavan, scanning the road side shops in pondy bazaar from dawn to desk picking up all useless items ofkors after bargaining and planning strategies as to how to hide them from my mother. And mind you, I do this all alone. I never need a company to shop. Oh why am I bragging so much about Chennai and my shopping skills(?) which is no where related to the topic? A spark is enough to ignite my passion about Chennai. But it definitely feels good to be in a all new place with added responsiblities(was i ever responsible before?). This is a welcoming change which every person must undergo to prevent stagnation.

Getting back to the topic, what is new with the spring? We both have decided to go for evening walks enjoying the weather. We did walk for about 3 km (how many miles?) the first day. That is a good start but however it was raining consistently for the past 2 days and we had to refrain from our daily ritual. (so much after walking for a single day) Not to mention the icecream and fries I had while walking bac home. :) Though I don't care about burning calories after a heavy meal, I make it a point that I eat well after a heavy workout. (read simple walking). Going forward, I hope to practise our daily walk definitely after changing the path such that there is no mc D or friendlys on the way! Well, cannot avoid spotting a dunkin donuts though. Every road here has a dunkin and they normally occur in pairs ; both the sides of the roads have an outlet. America runs on dunkin and I being a chennaite dont bother to get inside. So that should not be a showstopper.

We are also planning for a brief trip to DC next week to see the cherry blossom and welcome spring. Hope i will have something interesting to write about after we come back.

Long time...

2009-03-31T10:03:00.000-07:00

I created this blogspace sometime last year and I never came back to update this. Now, do you call this a writer's block? :D Well, after showing all my writing skills for my first blog, I suffered a block and having said this you can imagine how good a writer I am! Hoping to hone my writing skills and dreaming that I would become a superlative blogger someday, I will try my best to update this space frequently. But, I have already started my food blog and going strong on that. Something atleast to keep me going. Oh I have already done 2 posts for the day! Hope it is a good start.

Survival of the fittest...

2009-03-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

I feel the phrase itself has evolved so much than the actual biological evolution. Every other person uses this to justify their deeds. You got to be able and strong to survive in this highly competetive world but does that mean you can get to the top by hook or crook? The concept of ethics has become diluted and it has now become a fashion to call oneself 'practical' and 'fit' after doing all sort of things to snub others. Practicality is something you should use for yourself to console and bounce back at times of adversity. It shouldn't be used as an escape tool to get away from problems you create for others. 'Survival of the fittest' means you getting strong along with empathy and care for others and coexisting peacefully. It doesnt mean you have to kill others to rise to the top. You got to be able and good to 'live' in this world otherwise it would be mere 'survival'. Afterall, that is what differentiates us from animals.
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you".
Let us not ruin others' life in the quest for survival.

My first blog

2008-08-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

Hi all!!!
Wanted to do this for a long time.
Finally... here I come with my random thoughts - some profound some shallow.
I have no clue what is gonna come outta me.
Do catch up with me .

Cheers,
Vidya