Volunteer work

Ever since I started earning a couple of years ago, I had been very interested in giving back to society through volunteer/charity work. At my first job, I had signed up to donate a small sum every month to the non-governmental environmental organization called Greenpeace. I was happy to have been doing that and kept telling myself that I was indeed helping give back something to the world in my own little way. But always, there was something amiss. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the automatic monthly debits to my account which was, I must say- quite mechanical and did not produce the true feeling of satisfaction that I craved for. I longed to personally get involved at a volunteering event. Usually most of us are content with the donations we make to such charitable organizations/non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We go about our daily lives, satisfied with the fact that we are doing something good for the world without ever wondering how and where it materializes. But trust me, that feeling of satisfaction when you do volunteer work only magnifies if you are personally involved.
I am not saying that people at the charitable organizations around the world are swindling your money and use them to buy a new Porsche or to fly to Hawaii for family vacations. No sir, I have the utmost respect for every one of these organizations for what they are doing.
But this is a blog about ‘My’ perspectives on issues and topics that I like to talk about and that is what I am doing.

Let me explain it from another angle-All through school and college, I’ve been the kind of person who falls in the category of those who learn better while performing a task practically, rather than mugging up facts. I realized that the same applies to doing social/charitable work too.

Last week I had a beautiful opportunity to do just that. A small team of seven from my office went to help at a place that provides housing and food for families who have  children being treated at hospitals and other local medical facilities around the city. Now, we all know that hospital food is not exactly considered a delicacy. So the thought of providing fresh hot food to these people came across as a very unique and an extremely thoughtful way to help. This place is called the Ronald McDonald House.

Our team was to prepare food for at least forty people. At the Ronald McDonald house, the expense for all the ingredients is borne by the volunteers themselves, who get a fully equipped (and must I say- beautiful) kitchen to work their magic in. Our small group consisted primarily of women who had perfected their culinary skills with years of cooking for their families. I, on the other hand was just an over-enthusiastic lad amongst them who wanted to be involved in the volunteering in any way possible. 

Everyone in the group was super-duper-efficient and we ended up dishing out quite a spread for our guests.
Here is the complete menu:
-White Chicken Chilli
-Beef Chilli
-Vegetarian Chilli
-Corn bread (two varieties)
-hot dogs (three varieties again)
-Green garden salad
-cheese and crackers.
-fresh baked brownies and cookies
-fruit salad
-ice-cream cups
-and something that resembled a peach souffle

Ha! My colorful salad.

And if you must know, I made the salad. Yeah, yeah-- I know you will probably snigger at this and say “A salad?! That’s not called cooking!!”. And I agree. BUT, in my defence I’d say that it was an effort in my own little way, that came from the heart and I did contribute to the platter. I am extremely pleased about it, to say the least.

The experience of actually cooking for families and helping them savour fresh and homely food was just beautiful. This is because I actually got to be a part of doing something that was immensely rewarding (mentally).

One other thing that I liked about the evening was that we actually cooked all the food there. None of the aforementioned items were pre-packaged (read: canned) food that was just heated up in a microwave and served. It was actual homely food (I have used those two words side by side on two occasions now and am beginning to doubt if that’s even grammatically correct...but you get the point).

I went home that evening with the widest smile on my face, having done my part and having experienced immense satisfaction while doing it. I also had the company of some of the smartest and hard-working women I have come across in my life. They have been working at our company for years (some have been here for more than 10 years). Their work in the kitchen that evening was as sharp and spot-on as their work is at office. And each and every one of us cooked with the same level of passion and enthusiasm. 

I realized that I will volunteer to do this again and again in the coming years because I know with the highest degree of certainty, that I will never get tired of being a part of something so nice and satisfying.

I urge every person who reads this blog -to go out and volunteer in your city. It can be any kind of volunteer work- It could be helping care for abandoned animals at a shelter, spending an evening caring for the less privileged of our society or even a small thing like cleaning a street or planting more trees. I urge you because you will experience the wonderful feeling of having helped someone in your own way and that feeling will stay with you for the rest of your life.
:)

Thanks Mr.Lee for proofreading this for me. I know this isn't the first time you've done this for me. Just wanted to let you know that your proof-reading skills are beyond awesome and I will continue to exploit them for a long time. :D

New Year 2013

For all the people I haven’t wished this year—Wish you a very Happy New Year. I mean it…I hope you have a good year and have some amazingly good things happen to you this year.  Needless to say, smelly-poop-filled-things will continue to happen to us all this year too but I just hope and wish for us all, that the awesomeness of the good things in life overshadow the negative ones.

This year started out rather well for me. I had the rare chance of welcoming the new year with my mom, grandma , my uncle and his family. There is really no alternative to spending a good time with family. No matter how ‘hip and modern’ I’d like to portray myself, or how badly I want to impress my friends by putting up pictures of myself at the outrageously overcrowded Time’s square—I’d still pick spending a New Year with my family members.

This year is going to be no less challenging than the past one for many of us. We will again vehemently try our best to impress our boss at work and earn some tasty brownie points (I actually don’t mind being rewarded with brownies for a job well done *nom nom*), some of us will strive to conclude our education with a thesis defense (and Good luck ), some will get married this year  while a small portion of us would again wish to find his/her ‘ soul-mate’ at least this year and last but not the least—most of us will continue to sit on our bottoms for more hours than we want to, while leaving senseless comments on facebook and/or wishing some distant old friend a ‘very happy birthday’ just because facebook reminded us of it.

Let us all strive to be better human beings this year, to help a friend or even a complete stranger in some small way regularly just because we can,  to learn to respect each other’s opinions and thoughts without overburdening them with our own, to behave like the educated people that we are and not think-small in a big-world and on the flip-side continue to dole out justice to victims of inhumane and heinous crimes committed by the scumbags of the society.

Will blog again soon and hopefully be more regular at it.

I’ll conclude this post with a web-link that I love checking out from time to time- it proves that there still are kindhearted people in this world: 

http://www.boredpanda.com/random-acts-of-kindness/

P.S- Thanks Nisha for being a good sport and giving me the nudge I needed to blog again :)

Barfi - the movie

Off late, there have been very few things that have pushed me to open up MS Word and type out an opinion or a thought about something I want to share with the world.

I will admit, that my work (‘office ka kaam’) has slowly tightened its grasp over my mind and has engulfed me in its dullness with surprising strength.

Anyway, I am not here to talk about all that. I am here to tell you about something that I come across very rarely nowadays—a well made Bollywood movie.

Barfi: 'one of a kind' movie

Every few years, there comes along that one movie that has the power to pull you into it, to engulf you with its simplicity, a story so well-told that you are left thinking about it long after you have exited the movie theater.

Well, I must say this, that BARFI is one of those movies. A clever love story that slowly surrounds you like a fog in winter which would make you pull your woolen sweater over you and stay there in its warmth.  A story told beautifully and with performances that will be talked about for years to come by people who really value good quality and sensible cinema.

It’s a story about a deaf and dumb boy from Darjaleeng who falls in love twice, but with two people who have  completely different personalities. No it’s not your average love story because the persona portrayed by Priyanka Chopra is that of an autistic girl, which she has portrayed very convincingly. I’ll be honest, I was never a big fan of Miss. Chopra, except in the song ‘desi girl’ with that saree J. But this performance has earned her my full respect as an actor.

The story crawls into your heart as the movie goes on , but the writer and director had something else in mind, than just a cute love story. They slowly and very cleverly turn the love story into a suspense story. So cleverly have they done this, that around the last half an hour of the movie, you are left wondering to yourself “Wait, wasn’t this a love story?”, but that question is not the kind that will leave you shaking your head in disappointment. On that contrary, you will be left with nodding your head in approval.

The music (some really unique work by Pritam)  is charming and mixes smoothly with the 70’s era in Darjaleeng, the cinematography does not cease to please your senses and of course the acting is at par with some of the best out there. Every performance in the movie, be it Ileana (debut Bollywood movie) as the girl who chose comfort over love, Inspector Dutta as the cop who has spent a better part of his life chasing Barfi, or Barfi’s best friend with his genuinely Darjaleeng’ish accent: is equally convincing.

So, please, do yourself a favor and give yourself a break from the no-brainer movies that Bollywood has been churning out with will glory, and go watch this movie. Go experience of stories of  two kinds of people (mute and autistic) in a way that perhaps no other Bollywood movie has been able to capture. A movie that doesn’t generate pity at the disabilities of the people but rather shows how sweet their lives can be. Go marvel at the acting-talent that Ranbir Kapoor possesses which puts him in a whole different league than the current crop of ‘young talent’ without a doubt in my mind. Four generations of actors in the family truly shows in his performance .

Thank you Anurag Basu for giving me that push to start blogging again.

The Letter

It has been almost two months since my last post here. I had gotten a little busy with work and preferred movies and sleep on weekends to writing up something for the blog. I am guilty and I apologize. I finally found something to write about after a long time.

Let me first give you a background of what this blog is going to be about.

First off, it is a VERY LENGTHY blog. So readers are advised to step away from the computer, do a few stretching exercise and then come back to finish reading. 

My younger sister recently graduated from college, she today has a Bachelor of Technology in I.T, of which I am extremely proud of. She also bagged a job with TCS, the Indian IT service consulting behemoth, via her campus-recruitment program. She is set to join the company in three days time and as an older brother, I had some words of advice for her before she left to start this amazing new phase of her life. This blog is an open letter from an older brother.

The blog hasn't been proofread yet. So kindly ignore the grammatical errors...

our Angel :)

My dearest baby-sister,

They say that the human mind can retain a few memories from a person’s childhood with amazing clarity. For me, the day you were born is one of those memories. I still remember every single detail of the time when Shruti and I were first brought in to say hello to mom, after she was okayed to be visited by friends and family. We did not get to see you since you were too tiny and were kept away from everyone except the nurse. But, we were very well aware that we had a baby sister now, someone actually younger than us, who had just come into the world, and were as excited as a cat with a ball of yarn would be.

Two decades have gone by and today you have turned into this smart and fantastic young woman that I am super-duper-proud of. You graduated recently from college and are now ready to step out of our family’s wings into the big-bad-world out there.

Being your older brother, I am probably as scared as mom is today to be letting go of your hand. I’ve always seen you more than a sister. You are to me, like my own kid, if I ever had one. And I will always love you like one.

As you get ready to leave the house and start your own life, please take a few moments out of your life to read this letter where a brother wants to share some advice and caution you against what is out there. This might be really boring to you all who are so used to having super-short conversations via texting or tweeting (I know you don’t use twitter…but it was general mockery at your whole age-group) , but please do finish reading the whole letter. Remember, most of the things I will say here- I KNOW that you already do and safeguard yourself against. But I will write them down anyway.

So here goes,

-sweetheart, if you think you have seen your share of ups and downs in life so far, you are wrong. Life will continue to shoot arrows at you, maybe even bigger and sharper ones as you grow. You will have to deflect them, maybe even take a few hits, but heal from the wounds and move on. Life isn’t easy, it never was.

-Do not ever forget your family and friends. Respect everyone who have helped you out during your earlier problems. Stay in touch with them. Your family would be calling you every other day for the next month or so, to see how you are doing. The frequency of the calls might come down to one call per week. But we WILL keep calling. It might become a little irritating, but trust me when I say this, we will NEVER have heard enough from you. Also. Take time out of your life to actually make a phone-call to  good friends on their birthday to wish them. Sure, you can wish them on facebook, but a personal wish face-to-face or over the phone goes a long way in cementing a relationship.

-You will start earning now, for the first time in your life. It is a truly fantastic and euphoric feeling. This may sound clichéd but you will soon learn that ‘ With great power, comes great responsibilities’ which means, with the power of earning money, you will also have the added responsibility of managing your money and how to spend it. You will not be taught this in school or the college, but life will be the teacher for this. Spend carefully and save wisely my dear sis.

-You are moving to a new city where you will undoubtedly meet new people and make new friends. You will want to go out to party on some weekends when and if work pressure permits you. That is completely fine. Life after all needs some fun in it. If you happen to go to a pub, do NOT accept a drink from a stranger (Especially men). Actually, let me rephrase that: do not accept drinks from ANY MAN. Have your drink made on your own, or accept it only if it is ordered and made in front of you. You have no idea about the evil-creeps that lie out there waiting with their fangs open. Being an older brother, I will ALWAYS feel insecure about your safety. And I hope you don’t mind that.

-Trusting people will be an issue. Be very picky when it comes to choosing your friends and even more careful when it comes to choosing who to include in your ‘circle of trust’. It may even mean you will have a few lesser friends than the most popular girl in the group, but trust me: you will be much safer this way.

I think I will wrap up my letter with that point and another small paragraph about how much I love you.

I have and will always continue to cherish the times we spent growing up together. I will continue to regret all those times when I hit you because you were getting on my nerves as a pesky 7 year old. I will always love you more than any or all of your friends ever can or will ever do(all put together). I will continue to call you ‘beta’ every single time we speak on the phone. I will continue to invent quirky ways to greet you when we speak on video-chat. I will continue to look-forward to every single time I call you and you greet me with your chirpy ‘hi BHAI!’. I will continue to include your happiness  and safety as the first thing I ask of God everytime I pray.

You my dear lovely young sister, will NEVER EVER be a grown-up for me. You will always be my baby-sister. The day you bagged the job was one of the proudest days of my life. I will be proud of you no matter what you do, I am proud of you for just being my sister. Remember this Shillu, if a day  ever comes (May it never come), that the whole world has turned against you, you can be assured that there will be one person who will ALWAYS be on your side…and that will be this older brother of yours.

With all the love I have,

Bhai.

fraaandship!

So here I am, on yet another Sunday that seems to come and go like the trucks on the national highway in India. They just ride along and people along the highway hardly even notice them. Sundays are something like that too, hardly noticed nowadays.And as my good friend Nisha rightly predicted,  I end up getting up early morning and thinking what to do. I finally end up with a novel in the loo to help me pass time. Oh before you go all “eeeewww!!”, don’t think I don’t I know you’ve done that too. After all, having a long relaxing loo-trip is indeed a luxury for all working people. ‘Sheesh!’ you say? Well, I say “just wait till you start working pal…and then you’ll know what I am talking about!!”.

Another weekend, another AMC12 trip, another movie. Watched ‘The Grey’ yesterday. Liam Neeson packs in a power-packed performance as always. Intense movie but I would’ve wanted a better ending than the current one. The movie still manages to hold  your attention till the last moment and which is precisely why the ending could’ve been better.  Ok..so enough movie talk for this blog. I am sorry, it’s just that I’ve been watching so many new movies (one every weekend…compared to the 3 movies I watched in Rolla during my entire three-semester stay there! ) that I just had to share something about at least one of them.

I wanted to write a deeply-thought out blog this time but I guess I won’t be doing that. Don’t have the patience for that today. Maybe next time. So I’ll be pretty much just ranting about foolish, and small things that I’ve come across in the recent past. Kindly adjust. I would, at this point warn you that this particular blog is just going to waste your time..but then, which previous blog of mine hasn’t?! hehehehehe. *No I won’t use LOL for that, I am against using LOL. I prefer the much more realistic laughter*

kind of sums it up :)

The other day I was having a conversation with my best friend Mr.Lee (his real name is something else but I like calling him Mr.Lee on my blogs…and in case you are wondering, No, he’s not a chinki. He’s as Indian as you can ever get). So, it was our typical conversation with us tripping over each other at every available chance, taking dirty jabs at each other over and over again, to the point that neither of us have any more derogatory things to say for each other.

That’s when I realized that the foundation of our friendship was on these very highly idiotic conversations. These very brainless and insult-filled conversations that we shared is what makes us best friends. I really can’t have such conversations with any other human in the world, chiefly because I cannot insult people like the way I can with mr.Lee.

Friendship isn’t created. It just happens. A chance encounter with a fellow newbie in class can turn into one of the strongest and humbling relations you can have with  another human. For me, friendship is about bitching about my best friend to my best friend and then the next instant talking about how cool the latest movie was. It’s about being as spontaneous as that damn chicken that suddenly becomes possessed and tries to cross a road when you are driving down at top speed.

This one’s to all those people who know that no matter what they do, they’ll always have one person in the world who will take their side – their best friend!

Peace!

I Baked a Christmas

The Christmas tree at Harshita's place that I helped decorate

So, it’s Christmas and a non-white one at that. I will have to grudgingly agree that a white-Christmas would have been a welcome change from the cold-lazy-days that I have become accustomed to off late making me fall in love …with my bed.

Most of my peeps are out of town on vacation. While most of them are in some aunt or uncle’s place in NewYork, Philadelphia  , others have gone back to India for the winters. Those lucky buggers! So that leaves me alone in this town with hardly a soul to talk to. I won’t lie, It can get really lonely out here sometimes. So I have been trying to chalk up plans for Christmas day and trying to find something to do that really makes me feel …well..’Christmasy’. After a lot of pondering , and struggling with my head to keep myself away from facebook.com (for the half an hour that it took me to home-in on what to do on Christmas), I finally decided that I’d bake.

Oh yeah, you heard me..bake! I started baking last week and had already dished out some pies, oatmeal cookies (by Ritesh, my roommate) and the highlight of my baking-spree, the Banana-almond cupcakes and the banana-almond bread (my sister’s recipe). So this time, I decided that I’d bake simple white cup-cakes (you know, the ones available in every bakery in India, those light brown ones).

So I got up today morning, fresh after a long nine hour sleep (winters can do that to you allright!!), had some cereal for breakfast and set about arranging my ingredients in an orderly manner. I happen to be one of those people who like having their ingredients ready and in separate bowls (like them cookery-shows). I started around 1pm and after a few hits and misses, I was finally done with three batches of white-cup-cakes by 4pm. The first batch turned out impressively well but the latter batches were stubborn and did not follow on the same lines, unfortunately. (Bake tip: when using Baking ‘soda’ in your recipe, bake the ingredients immediately. Leaving the batter after mixing allows the acid to start fermenting or something and the cake can go the ‘what-the-hell-happened-there’ly way).

My main intention around baking three batches of cup-cakes was to give the cup-cakes to my good friends who are still here in town. I did just that and dutifully wished each one of them ‘Merry Christmas’ when handing the cup-cakes.  They were really thankful and that alone made my day and the 4 hours I spent in the kitchen, all worth the effort.

While making the awesomely-awesome cup-cakes (what?! I love boasting about those cup-cakes ok?), I realized that I really enjoyed cooking  / baking so much. Yes, cooking needs effort and time, and in most of the tasty-dishes, some painstaking preparation time too. But it’s one of those few things where hard-work can really visibly pay off and you can have a good time at the end of it, digging into that tasty dish you just whipped up.

lookin good fellas.. :)

Baking, now sits near the top of ‘my favorite things to do’, right up there with reading a good book, having an intense and thought provoking conversation with a good friend, and of course- sleeping. I don’t claim to be the best baker in town, or even the best in my friends-circle, but I sure can dish up a decent cup-cake. Here, check out the photos of the cup-cakes that I made today..

Merry Christmas everyone! J

Facebook'ing Tips

I doubt if there is any college student out there today who hasn’t heard of facebook. Almost everyone who has heard of it are also probably using this super-popular social networking website and helping Mr.Zuckerberg laugh his way to the billion dollar bank accounts.

I'll admit...I spend a lot of time on facebook. Being so far away from home, I rely on this website to keep in touch with a lot of my friends from back home.
However, I do keep bumpig into some really lame and annoying 'occurances' on facebook. I am pretty sure you too must have often come across some really really dumb instances on facebook. Things that people do and put up that's just a smelly load of bullcrap and makes you  want to roll up your eyes and say 'Weirdo!!' . So today, I’ll be offering some tips  to those few who actually read my articles every week, about how not to become a douchebag on facebook.
Note: I am not claiming to being a pro at facebook’ing and neither am I claiming that I am completely, utterly and compulsorily correct.

So here is the 'gyaan'  (Oh and it FREE by the way...  :

1. You update your facebook status message. I’m fine with that, completely fine. But you cannot and must not ever ‘like’ your own status message after updating it. The same applies to updating your relationship status or adding a photo and then liking it yourself first. Dude, that is just pure dumb. It only shows how obsessed you are with you own sad darn life.

2. This one’s related to relationship status as well. Please do not be so desperate for attention

and ‘facebook alerts’ (the tiny red comic bubble with that magic number in white inside it signifying

that there is, after all, someone who actually ‘cares’ about you and what you do) so as to update your relationship status to ‘engaged’ or ‘in a relationship’ and then changing it back to ‘it’s complicated’ .

Personally, there’s no such thing as  it's complicated in relationships. You are either ‘in’ or ‘out’, so man up and face the truth, buddy.

3. Never put up a status message that reads BRB . No one really cares man? There is probably no one in this universe who cares if you have gone for a washroom-break for a minute. You are not going to be missed. So please, BRB is a strict no-no as a status message.

4. Adding a profile picture that shows you clicking a picture of yourself in a mirror, with you staring at the cellphone screen in your hand is lame. Come on man, you have more than a hundred friends and that not one of them had five seconds to spare to click a decent picture of you? Really?

5. Keeping a continuous tab on the newly added ‘tickr’ sidebar and then claiming to have caught your friend ‘like’ing and then remove like (unlike) your status message (Yes, people actually do that) is not the right thing to do. Stalker!!

6. Becoming the first person to like the ‘new picture added’ by that hot girl in your class will definitely not put you on the speedboat to her heart my friend.

7. Do not ever leave a message that says "hey..have u chkd out dis hot chick xyz on ma friend list yet? " on your friend’s public wall. First of all, those braindead english spellings there, do NOT show that you are 'cool and hip and one of those sms people' . Next, the profiles are ‘public’ if you remember, so you typing all that horseshit on your friend's wall is visible to everyone on your friend's list man. If you however, DO intend to so that, then I have just one word for you - 'ShowOff!!'

8. Spamming your own photo with lots of comments on some silly issue that is not even slightly related to what is in the photo, in order to get into our walls in the ‘top new stories’ is not a good idea, please. If you have something to talk about, do it on your wall or as a private message conversation. We really do not care what your cat had for lunch written beneath a picture of you in the Bahamas with holding a pina-colada. That is the definition of ‘they don’t go together’.

So, all you facebooking folks out there, Pray keep these tips in mind to avoid being viewed as an obnoxious individual with an obesessive compulsive disorder to put up the most unwanted status messages on facebook earning the ‘facebook douchebag of the year’.

special thanks to my 'brethar' Murali Gumpeny for proofreading this blog for me.. cheers bro!
peace..
;-)