Where am I?

Right here. On Earth. In India. In New Delhi. :)

I've the same excuse which I've been giving every now and then for not blogging and nor not reading any of you. And the excuse is "Office is HECTIC". But then its true.

Whatever little time I've besides slogging at office I spend that time with Betu, making him practice some number writing and number names writing. And the rest I try and read a bit. And yeah..I am also learning Jive these days. So another 2 hrs in a week gone.

I'm trying to get back here and have loads to talk about. Trust me. I will be here soon. Very soon.

And those of you who thought I was pregnant after reading this post, no..I ain't. So stop jumping around in excitement and just calm down. I will tell you when I'm upfront. No guessing games for me :)

What do you do when...

...you find that in your passport photograph the photographer has made you like you have just seen a ghost and lost all your color? Or as if you have put on loads of powder/foundation to look fairer?

*rolling my eyes*


~~ Keep Smiling! ~~
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Feeling totally blank...

Am sitting at the airport waiting for the boarding announcement for my flight to Delhi. And I feel this complete void in myself. It didn't feel nice at all leaving Betu here. He was getting upset too. He didn't want me to leave without him. He asked me to either stay on or take him along. It broke my heart. All his excitement of spending some days of his summer holiday with his Dadi-Dadu and his cousins who would be arriving on Tuesday seemed immaterial. I would have probably taken him back with me if I didn't knew this was just parting anxiety.

So after clinging to me and little pacifying, although upset, he agreed to me going. But he still didn't come out to wave me bye :(

On my way to the airport he called me saying he will stay for just two days. That is making it a bit difficult for me right now. I'm feeling this bit of "khalipan" inside me. All my excitement of some me time has vanished into thin air. It feels like I'm leaving a part of me behind. It doesn't feel nice at all...not even one bit...

Looking at all the airplanes standing, I can almost feel his excitement on seeing them upclose. He would have been glued to the glass walls overlooking the bay. The moment we would have stepped in the plane he would have demanded to eat something :)

Anyways. Betu I know you will miss me a little bit but I alo know you will have fun. This is the start of spending summer holidays with grandparents just like we used to do.

But whatever said and done, I'm feeling this void inside me.

P.S. He just called me again and

Betu: Aap plane mein baith gaye?
Me: Haan Betu.

Betu: Aap kya kar rahe ho? Aapko khane ke liye mil gaya?
Me: Nahi. Abhi nahi. Thodi der mein milega.

Betu: ok. Bye.


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What do you do when...

...you are relishing those "Puremagic Chocolate Biscuits" and just then the astrology alert pops up on your phone saying "You are leaning towards unhealthy snacking. Focus on healthy snacks and your health will skyrocket." ?

Do you stop munching that half eaten biscuit and put it away? Or do you press 'escape' key on your phone and continue to munch away just as I did? :P

My rendezevous with book reading

I had started reading books regularly when I took the subscription from BookMeABook. And because of that I was able to read an average of 2 books over a span of 1.5 months. I know this is a very very minuscule score if I compare it to other avid readers. But for me this was a big achievement too :)

The books I have read were all quite diverse when it comes to their genres. And the titles along with my start rating are -

1. "A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings: Collected Stories of the Supernatural" by Ruskin Bond (**)
2. "Almost Single" by Advaita kala. (**)
3. "The Tunnel of Time" an autobiography by R K Laxman (***)
   
4. "Thorn Birds" by Colleen McCullough (*****)
   
5. "You are Here" by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (**)
   
6. "Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson" by Mitch Albom (****)
   
7. "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga (****)
8. "Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh (****)
   

As you can see some of them I really liked and some were just OK OK. I really loved reading "Thorn Birds". It was one un-put-downable book. "Tuesdays with Morrie", although philosophical in nature, but was quite interesting. "The White Tiger" was pretty good too. Next one that I'm going to start is "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling.

With office so hectic, I don't get much time to read these days but I still managed to read one book last month and I hope I manage to improve this pace.

So any of you has read any of these books? And how would you rate them?

Oye! Main to famous ho gayee...

Poppins and Meira both wrote to me that one of my posts has been plagiarised. Copied word to word and posted as own by one of the bloggers. I was surprised as well as amused. SO after asking Meira how she figured that out she told me how a very personal post written by Kiran was also copied by the same blogger and in one of the comments to Kiran's post she saw the link of my post. Someone had left both my link and the copied one as a comment in response to Kiran's post.

But when I tried to open the link http://2writeornot2write.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/wierd-observations/ I got a message that the blog has been deleted. I was pretty sad that I couldn't see it by my own eyes. But then our smart Boo managed to dig out the post from cache and sent me this link - http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:jgLN5ODFKiwJ:2writeornot2write.wordpress.com/tag/observation/+2writeornot2write+weird+observation+lipstick&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ch

And my original post is here - http://doiwrite.blogspot.com/2008/12/observations-about-some-people-in-my.html

And frankly I've only one grudge against the person who copied my post. She had copied my post which was a total time-pass, fully-faltu kind of a post. So my post being highlighted in this fight against plagiarism makes a bit embarrassed. I've written much better posts and how I wish she had selected one of those :P

But must say, she did correct some of the mistakes that are there in mine :D

Jokes apart, I can very well empathize with Kiran for she had written that post from the deepest of her hearts for her hubby dear. If one of my personal posts had been copied I would have been completely outraged too.

Apparently a lot of her posts were copied from other bloggers. God only knows if it was just only a few posts that we managed to figure out or was the entire blog made up of posts picked up from other blogs.

All this makes me wonder why would anyone want to do it. It defeats the whole purpose of writing/blogging. Reproducing a post is one thing and copying and calling it your own is another.

I'm sure that person has learnt the lesson well and will be too scared to attempt something like this again :D

Common sense is REALLY not common at all

As I came out of office to leave for the day, the parking guy told me that the person who had parked the car in front of mine had not given him the keys. And he added the car owner told him that he knows me very well and he will let me know.

I was raving mad at the parking guy as well that car owner. After futile attempts at tracing the owner of the car for good 20 min, the parking guy managed to open the door of the car. But then that also didn't help as this guy had put a gear lock as well.

I blew up the parking guy once again. While I waited patiently, the owner of the car parked next to me came. And thankfully after some efforts I managed to take the car out.

But whoever owned that car will not be able to save himself from my ire. I'm gonna give him big bashing in "meethi chhuri" style.

I'm still so so so mad at this lack of common sense in that guy.


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I'm alive...

...and kicking as they say :).

Its just that office has been really REALLY hectic leaving me no time for blogs. Be it reading or writing.

Even after coming back from work, I've at least one client call to take. Sometimes the number goes up to 3 calls in the evening. And the situation is such that Betu takes a status of all the calls scheduled for the evening when I pick him up from his daycare. And the big smile on his face tells how much he wants my time when I tell him only one call today.

But I hope to be back here soon. My reader tells me I've good 800 unread posts. I know time and again I have been away from blogging but then I've come back every time. Right everyone? :D So will it be this time too. I just need to figure out how.

The bundt marble chocolate cake

Remember the bundt cake I had written about in this post but couldn't post pictures?

So I made that cake again yesterday and here is the pic of it :)

Looks beautiful na? :D

Edited to add: The recipe had been posted long ago here. I made 3 times the portions mentioned in the recipe.

Debate: Scolding other's children

I would like all of you who come to this Blog to openly debate on the topic "Scolding other's children*".

I've always been on the 'against' side. And thankfully nothing had happened so far to make me move to the 'pro' side until yesterday.

I've always believed in telling the parent about how their kid was behaving and how they should talk to their child about it. Same way I expected others to do the same. But yesterday, at Betu's daycare something happened that I broke this rule of mine and went ahead to scold the child right in front of his mother. The other kid pushed Betu in the splash pool right in front of us even when his mother was telling him not to continuously. If I had not grabbed Betu by his hand on time, he would have totally been in the water but thankfully he went down inlt till his knees. I took BetU out of the pool and bent down to the other kids level and on the top of my voice shouted at him.

Me: why did you do that?
Kid: *no answer*

Me: How many times did your Mumma tell you not to do that?
Kid: *no answer*

Me: How many times?
*the kid tried to look away*
Me: look into my eyes and talk when I am speaking with you.

Kid: 10 times
Me: Then why are you not listening to her?

Me: If I push you in the pool would you like it?
Kid: No
Me: so he (referring to Betu) wouldn't like it too. Nobody would like it. So you will not do it again.
Kid: ok
Me: Now go to your Mumma.

The kid was slightly shaken up after this and I could see my scolding did have some effect him. He has become totally immune to his mother's scolding.

This kid has the habit of troubling other kids and laughs when he sees them in discomfort or not liking what he does. He is just a bit too bratty and I know there are kids who are like that and its normal. But at times it gets too much and today was the day when I felt I had to intervene.

But I know for sure that if Anirudh had done something like that I would have done exactly what I did with the kid myself. There would not have been any need for other parent to scold my child.

I have also seen other parents who react badly to other parents pulling up their kids even when they know that their child has done something wrong and take their side. I find that very wrong. I agree no one would like their child being pulled up but then we have to see the reason and how the other parent is handling it.

I still stand by my rule as I had mentioned above and will not say anything to other's kids directly minus such situations.

Now you tell me what are your views on the same. What would you do and what you won't do? How would you do and how you won't? Any real life examples would be great too.
~~ Keep Smiling! ~~
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