I just wanna thank you, for reading my blog .. taking time out to hear me out …. It meant  a lot to me . Thank you so Much .

I wanna give you a warm cyber hug.  May you have a happy , romantic 2012.

My favorite scene was the one where the girl stands on the tip of a branch. Even a bird wouldn’t be able to do that. Another was where she flies from one terrace to another…she literally floated in the air.

Now I know it was the camera. But then I thought it was real. And I believed it all that. I was like,won’t it be amazing to be like her. My that year’s resolution was to become a Taekwondo or Kung Fu girl.

On searching, it turned out that there was this karate school near my place. I literally begged my mom to send me there.My mom has her own ideas about what “a girl” should learn and  I was sent to music, singing and painting classes.

Interestingly my bro got sent for karate classes. He had these different colored belts for different ranks showing how much they’ve learnt. God knows what he learnt coz even as a brown belt,whenever we fought it was always me who won.

That was then. Something happened in between. Now he’s double my size and my chances of winning are slightly less…something like zero percent.

As if not getting the karate classes wasn’t bad enough, the singing class were at eight in the morning…and on Sundays. I mean, couldn’t she find any better time to hold the class?  Our teacher claimed the morning air would awaken the “singing spirit” in our soul.Half the class would be so drowsy and sleepy. Maybe the ‘singing spirit’ thing happened when we were feeling drowsy and we didn’t notice it.May be.

Photo courtesy: http://calyxdesign.com/

Since the time I was in first grade. Throughout my school years my new year’s resolution was the same thing: to stop day dreaming. Everyone has their own vices. And mine is daydreaming. I just go on dreaming.

So we had to make this classroom chart . You know those chart everyone at school tells you to make about your new year’s resolution and stick them on those colored sheets of paper.

Making it was fun. That was the easy part. The difficult part was to carry it out.

I would make these huge to-do lists of all the things that I’m going to do today.

I would divide it by the minute. …6:43 pm to 7:54 pm. The first target would be met. Then I’d tell myself I’m going to take a “well deserved” short break. The short break would eventually stretch itself into the whole day.

It was around high school that I stopped making that as my New Year resolution.It made me feel less guilty somehow.

I eventually got around to stop daydreaming. Ironically it happened at a time when I had stopped believing .

It was when I realized one cannot force things. You should not force your heart to do what you think you should do. Instead you should do what your heart feels like doing. Just let our heart guide you the way.

It was all about finding what I really wanted to do. Maybe I daydreamed because my heart was not in the work I was doing at that time.

I’m thinking of a good resolution this time. I think it’ll be to write more. Or maybe something else….Aaargh . Why does it take so long to make up my mind?

Photo Courtesy: http://www.reslife.com/Default.aspx

I thought she’ll feel happy seeing that she looks so cute. You know, I had these beautiful ideas of how she would  admire herself in it. I could never have imagined her real reaction.

Who's that Purring Back At Me?

It started with the fist fight (or maybe I should call it Paw Fight). First, standing on her hind paws, she pressed her front paws against that of the mirror one. The eyes then narrowed to slits as she pressed her nose to the mirror cat.

I, hoping for the positive, assumed this to be a closer appreciation of her looks.

Then she just leaped back Bruce Lee-style .  She crouched, head ducked under, jumping all of a sudden at the mirror… Guerrilla tactics, no doubt. It really perturbed her that no matter how fast she jumped at it, the mirror cat was always there.

The fight stretched so long that I finally had to cover the mirror with a cloth . The mirror was under her surveillance for two days. She clawed and chewed away at the cloth for a while.

Finally, she left it alone. Seeing the mirror cat not appearing, I guess she assumed her victory and went searching for other braver conquests.

By chance, I’m one of those lucky people who got to meet the best poet in the world ….and got to have her as a best friend too!

Some days back, this genius poet friend of mine tells me that she was going to write a poem on me. I thought it was one of those b’ful sweet dialogues which she is full of. Or maybe she was just joking.

And then I saw it. It was written in  Devnagari. I saw the title . And it was my name.

I have a very rare name. Spelling it is difficult, and pronouncing it is tougher. When I was  a kid, people used to wonder how I was so good in spelling.   Well, if you have a name that is as difficult to spell and pronounce as mine, other words naturally start sounding simpler.

Now coming back to her poem. ..Her poem always has that pied piper effect. Irrespective of what was going through your mind, you just hear her poem , and you’re transfixed. Well, at least that’s the effect it has on me. And every time. Every time.

I sat there losing myself in her world.

And after I read it she’s like, “you have to comment”. I didn’t know what to say. Her poems leave me too spell bound. You know there are those moments when you feel so emotional, and no words come out.  I  keep talking all day long, and when those moments come when I really wanna say something, all that comes out is a silence.

I’m just too bad at finding words to express the intenser emotions. Contrary to me, she’s the kind of person who can find words at any emotional state and can compose a poem even in her sleep.

Her poems have a world of their own. It’s like a faraway world, stolen by her words, entrapped in the curly loops of her devnagari writing.

Over that, she is a moving dictionary of words. And she assumes everybody to be one. Since my Hindi proficiency is pretty much on second grade level, she’s used small words this time, to match my vocab.

She breathes out art. She herself is like a moving piece of art. Her poems being read out in  her words: they’re too enchanting for poor mortals to resist.

In case you don’t know by now, she’s something sort of a Narnian. Yes and she’s living on top of the clouds in a house made of clouds. She has an elfin face with tiny elfin ears. And these innocent childish eyes which you shouldn’t go by.

She’s a mix of many unique qualities rarely seen together. She is an amazing badminton player, a researcher, a poet, a model and can cook well enough to give any chef a run for his money. She’s the Geminiest of Gemini girls.

Don’t know if it has anything to do with her badminton practise, but there’s this match going on between the two sides of her mind. And it’s so comical to watch. It’s so difficult to not laugh when you’re around her.

I don’t know what else to say. Guess I’ll just end abruptly.

I just wanna thank her for being such a good friend:  Thanks, Rashmi.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.zodiac-signs.org/

There are theses twelve of these according to the year in which you’re born.

It’s different from the Aries / Taurus/ Gemini …zodiacs…

Like… we know Taurus is a bull, Pisces is a fish. But you don’t go around saying “I’m a bull,I’m a bull”, do you?  No, coz if that had been the case, people would never be talking about their zodiacs in the first place. Well, that’s  exactly what happens in  Chinese zodiacs.

What Animal are You?

I found out I’m a sheep .It had a pretty quiet reaction. Thank God nobody sang some silly stupid nursery rhyme about some silly stupid woolly sheep.

I was hoping to land up in a braver zodiac and can’t say I was too happy about it when I first heard it.     But that was before I heard what the others were.

The girl sitting next to me got asked, “Ok. What do you think you are? Rat?Pig?Or Dog?”   As expected, the range of options sounded too good for her to respond immediately, and she just sat still, mumbling something that sounded more like “I don’t wanna know” than“I don’t know”.

I mean it was so funny and you can’t help laughing at it.  I mean how many times can you actually tell someone to their face that they’re a pig….and say it with a  very serious expression.

My mom who I thought would definitely turn out to be a horse, turned out to be a cock. A cock?    My aunt, not surprisingly, turned out to be a rabbit.

It turned out my best friend is a tiger. I wonder what’s the friendly connection between them. Are tigers and sheep supposed to be best friends? (Try explaining that to a sheep.)

Anyway, chinese zodiacs were very fun(ny).

Photo Courtesy: http://freechinese.org/

I always  get confused between Aladdin and Ali Baba.

It all started with the picture book I read as a kid. It was a big pink one called ‘My Big Fat Book Of Fairy Tales’. It had these beautiful paintings which I would sit and gape at as a child. The illustrator had drawn Ali Baba and Aladdin similarly and they even wore the same costume. (May be he had the same confusion as me.)

Anyway so the confusion began .

Besides, personally I like Aladdin more. He has a cool flying carpet, a magic lamp and that too with a genie in it. Ali Baba couldn’t boast of that, could he? All he does is say Open Sesame. And though there sure is something interesting about the cave opening thing, seriously it’s no competition to magic carpets. Aladdin even got the Princess.

Maybe that’s why the pro-Aladdin part of my brain bullied Ali baba out,while I was writing the previous blog.

This Poor Ali Baba Got Renamed Aladdin. (May be that's why he's looking so confused)

Generally, I get confused with words that have the same starting sounds. In this case the ‘al’ beginning of both their names.The same goes for ‘cardamom’ and ‘cinnamon’. Same for ‘ginger’ and  ‘garlic’.

Maybe that’s why, when I cook, food ends up tasting pretty contradictory. And I keep wondering what I did wrong. You see, it’s a pretty risky thing, getting a dinner surprise from me.

It starts like this. I’ll come across some  word in a movie or a mag. And I’ll be like “Wow .This sounds great. Why not have it as my email id?”  And I’ll make it.

The Modern Day Aladdin 

And then comes the Aladdin moment when you have to choose the password. There’s something so fun about this: A great secret place which is password protected where no one but you can enter. There’s something so Open sesame–ish about it, that magical effect. Movies and books completely romanticise it. And then you think, “Aaah let me keep an interesting password, one that will be too difficult for anyone to guess. And then I keep some strange ambiguous word, thought of at the spur of the moment which usually has its share of garbled mysterious letters. And then I’ll store it as my super-secret, super-safe password. And after setting my gobbledygook password I’ll feel so proud of it.

I’m gonna go “inside “and decorate the interiors of my brand-new email account. It’s like that brand new book effect. you buy a book, and you’re so completely smitten by how it looks that all you wanna do is decorate it and stare at it. So you give it a nice shiny cover , put a nice smart label on it , and then write your name beautifully on it and then pack it and keep it away safely… to be discovered 6 months later and then used like any normal book.

And then I’ll send emails from my own accounts to my other accounts since my friends find it too difficult to adjust to my constantly changing email ids, which rarely last more than a week.

After some days when I come to have another look at my ‘infant’ account I’ll find that I’ve forgotten the password. It’s that feeling when you’re standing outside your room door and fumbling in your bag for the key, too scared to think what’s happened of it. It’s a bad feeling and I don’t like it. I feel so sad then.

Even the email guys tell you to keep something no one will be able to guess. They keep emphasizing it. They never mention that it’s equally important that at least you yourself should be able to remember it. Maybe it’s bcoz I take the instructions too literally.

I’ll then spend some one hour at the machine writing garbled letters hoping one of them will click. It’s so ironical: my own password protecting my account from me!

And then? Then what?  I’ll get up and start thinking of a name for my next email id.

The Way Cats Would Like It

There ‘s a shop owner , who has a huge love for his pets and likes to carry his huge pet love filled heart on his sleeves. So his pets accompany him to his grocery shop.

So when you go to his shop you see the cat sitting solemnly in a sphinx like pose on top of the weighing machine. Yes of all things in the world, the weighing machine. Maybe she‘s checking her weight. You have to request her to shift if you want to weigh something. After a lot of deliberation and coaxing she finally hesitantly steps down.

There is also this big Saint Bernard who’s sitting right at the doorstep. Saint Bernard’s are the sweetest of dogs. I know that. But their size can be pretty deceptive of their true intentions. For people who are scared of dogs(and there are many of them over here), seeing one who is 4 times the size of a regular dog  isn’t really heart warming.

Maybe that’s why his sales are falling. But I don’t think that bothers him.

It didn’t matter that he was a character in a book, and not a person. ‘Love is love’ was the philosophy ,even if he just existed in the black and white print of a library book. It was worse in case of a movie crush.

I really have to roll my eyes when I think about the silly things I used to do as a kid. Next in the crush cycle would be the ‘secret’ thing. Have you noticed this, once something becomes a secret, it become so interesting? It doesn’t matter what it is , as long as it is a secret.

So I’d be looking at the clouds from my bedroom window and daydreaming about my crush, when suddenly this thought would come : I’m gonna keep it a ‘secret’! I’m not gonna tell ‘anyone’ about my ( silly) crush. And then I would proceed to write the name of my crush in the safest place a secret can be written in: inner fold of my skirt’s hem.And then would be that jubilant feeling. Yeah It’s a secret now. I wrote my crush’s name down and no one knows about it.

The Secret About Skirts and Their Pockets

Then would follow those backbench activities like  Love percentage calculators and flames, where you go around typing different lengths of your name to see which one gives the highest compatibility. So it’s like, Okay I typed my first name and it says 46 % compatibility. Too low. Let me see what happens when I type my full name. Ah now it says 76 % . That sounds nice. Let me try my nick name now. So you just go around trying different variations of your name to see which one works.

There’s so much of hype around this soul mate and love compatibility stuff as if somehow if you just knew who your soul mate was, a big mystery of the universe would get solved.

Then come all the things that follow all hypes : zodiac books that claim to know exactly where your “one and only true love” is. They should rename their books: How to make a confused person more confused. At least that would be honest.

Somehow when my mom enters the picture, the scenario really changes. There is this instance of this rude bully at high school, who I didn’t like at all. There was this certain photo of him somewhere in school. Since fighting him was beyond me, I decided to fight his photo, meaning tore it off and then pushed it deep into my pocket.But by the time I came home , this was all forgotten about.

The Likeliest Place To Find The Unlikeliest Secrets

This is the thing about pockets . You don’t see pockets and think they don’t exist , and so forget to empty them. While my mom was doing the laundry, she checked the pockets and found like six photos of this guy.She jumped at the most exasperating conclusion. That he was my bf. In couldn’t have been further from the truth. But she’s always so sure she knows everything, that you might as well kiss ‘explanation’ a goodbye.