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..
;-)

Barber bhaiiya...

I've always been fond of short hair on my head. But like most other Indian youngsters who have been through college, I've had my share of 'trying-to-grow-long hair' days and attempts of masquerading the hair so that I looked less like Abdul Kalam and more like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2.

The last time I had tried growing my hair long, a fellow and one of my prettiest classmate had commented rather rudely that I needed a haircut and that I looked like one of those villian's sidekicks from south-Indian movies. That was that, I never attempted to grow my hair long again (at least not intentionally).

I have been kinda infamous amongst my family (immediate family and the extended one too.....far far extended) for visiting a saloon or 'Barber shop' as it's more commonly known in middle-class India-  to get a haircut at least twice a month...that's once every fortnight. Of course, I would confidently defend myself by saying that I had a thick mane of hair and that my hair grew faster than other mortals (I still think it's true btw). My mom and siblings made it a point to humiliate my publicly by saying that I didn't even look like I had had a haircut (this was right after I got home from a saloon...freshly trimmed hair  et al. ) thus hereby questioning my decision to get a haircut and 'waste' Rs.20 (Rs.10 before soft and proud hair started sprouting above my upper lip).

The funny thing is that I have almost never been satisfied with a haircut that I had get. There have hardly been four or five occasions where I remember getting that perfect haircut ....the one that I had envisioned. Our desi-barbers seem to have a mind of their own when cutting our hair and not to mention the scissor in his had has a mind of its own. No matter how many times and in how ever many languages you tell them how you need the hair to look after he's done cutting it, he would nod vigorously and set about cutting the hair just the way HE liked and not how you'd have liked, all the while listening intently to the discussion on the radio about how houseflies can be tamed or whatever. And you end up looking like you’re taming a porcupine on your head or sometimes are left squinting at your reflection to see if there’s actually hair up there or is it a layer of charcoal dust the the ‘naai’ peppered when you weren’t looking. The barber though with so much pride in his eyes that you begin to doubt if the government has awarded him the Padma Bhushan or something. The sad thing about haircuts is once it’s messed up, you’re as screwed as that harry potter guy minus his wand in front of Voldermort. There's no going back-- only wait for the jeers you'd get from your friends at school the next day, from family members who think you are ridiculously wasting 80% of their income on haircuts, and from your neighborhood stray cum pet dog who would growl at you as you walk past it on your way back from the saloon showing its distaste of your new haircut. You suddenly go from being ‘that crazy fellow from the last bench’ to ‘that guy with the funniest haircut…haa haa haa’…..God I so used to hate it when that happened.  

Now, after having moved to USA, I found to my utter disbelief, like most other Indians there, that each haircut costs more than 20 times than what I paid for in India (after we convert the USD to INR). Wow! I will have to get used to haircuts only once every few months. It's going to be more difficult than getting over drugs at a rehab center, but I think I will live through it. God will give me the strength to live through this... sniff. I am almost used to it now btw.

Reality-bites ..

As soon as the clock strikes 8pm, most of the TV channels in India switch from their pallu-clad-saas-bahu-serials to the 'reality shows' every day.

They've had reality shows for singing and dancing since quite some time now (I do consider TVS  sa-re-ga-ma on Zee tv a reality show hmpf! ) but channels and their overpaid-overintelligent-overcreative staff off late have started rolling out a buffet (quite literally) of reality shows ranging from talent shows (anyone can do anything....Am actually planning to go and show my talent of counting from 1-20 in one single breath!! ) , cooking, dare-devil stunts on bikes and helicopters,stand-up- comedy and even marriage.

So the general public in apna-Bharat-mahaan now churns out 'reality-show-stars' faster than that mouse in your attic churns out tiny hairless 'mouselings'. People can dance their way to semi-stardom, cook their way into your friendly-neighborhood-dhaba, marry their way into some bizarre household that has the mother-in-law decked in more make-up than Simi Garewal or even jump into a pitiful of shit as a daredevil stunt and find themselves starring in Slumdog millionaire part 2.

The other thing I find quite disturbing about these shows are their judges or a.k.a- guru, master, dancemaster, chef-master, chaddi-master, fartmeister etc. etc. They seem to be graduates of Subhash Ghai's Whispering willows or whatever acting school and have hence mastered the art of giving out appalled expressions performance after performance (I bet they can give apni Amisha Patel a good run for her money on a one on one keep-repeating-the-same-expression-over-n-over-again-contest). These judges can give out a barrage of the same feedback in so many different ways that it would put Shakespere and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to shame.  The pure dumbness of their comments just for the sake of increasing TRP', which includes having a verbal-tussle or two with the fellow            judge every now and then, can be edited and telecasted separately as 'Indian Judgment show' that I am sure will attain even greater TRP ratings than the WWE (formerly known to all Indian kids as WWF) itself.   Wonder how the judge of the 'Comedy Circus' - Archana Puran Singh keeps laughing over and over again at some of the world's saddest jokes. Me thinks, she secretly inhales laughing gas every now and then when the camera isn't focusing on her wide jaw. 

With that being said and done...I urge the TV channels to show some more sensible programs that involve more than just people cooking tuar-dal, singing 'munni badnaam hui' without even the decency of showing the video when the participant is singing this song, or jumping into a bed of scorpions and later sobbing about how one of the scorpions almost ate her up, and the judges gawking with the most artificial acting in the universe.

Gotta go now....going to watch 'megastructures' on Discovery channel (Now THAT is a show!)

peace!

COMICS-NOSTALGIA

My grandma has been wanting to throw away some stuff from the store-room in order to accommodate the ever-swelling 'junk' that each household magically keeps producing at a steady and unstoppable pace. I was given the duty to clear away some old boxes that apparently contained things from my childhood.
Upon opening one of the boxes, I found a bundle of comic magazines. Comics are how I had been introduced to the world of 'Reading' and I have always been fond of them.
I very fondly remember the times when I used to devour these comics at a rate faster than than I used to gulp down food.

FLASHBACK: imagine the following in a crackling black and white movie frame:
I am all set to journey to my grandparent's place in Bhopal, from Coimbatore (a 20 hour journey). My excitement of visiting my beloved grandparents is peaks with the fact that I will get to read comics on the train. Now, in 'those' days, I was allowed to afford the luxury of a comic if and only if we were travelling by train (my parents later confessed that the comics kept me from jumping out of the train at every station that the train stopped).
So there I was, entering the railway station...one hand being held firmly in the confident but relaxed grip of my dad and the other swaying happily by my side like a dog's wagging tail. I knew the exact location of the book-store in the railway station and prided myself at being able to get to it even blindfolded. I knew that the train would arrive only half an hour after we had stepped into the station (which I thought the train did on purpose by the way). So I started looking in the direction of the book-stand. My dad sensing my desperation to hold a comic in my hands, smiled down at me and took me straight to the book-stall.
I happily bought myself a Tinkle 'digest' and two Chacha Chowdhary comics.
Ah! I was feeling like a king now, clinging on to the comics like they were worth more than my life. The rest of the journey I do not remember too well....it's all hazy with me buried into the comics and noticing almost nothing else.

OK...Now you can come back to the present day...full-color picture in HD ...

Chacha Chowdhary and Tinkle. :) who doesn't remember them? They've been one of the most important memories  of every child who grew up in the 90's. Quite honestly, these comics were some of my most treasured posessions till a very long time. They were almost like my best friends. The Chacha Chowdhary comic's  trademark one liners 'A volcano erupts in Jupiter when Sabu gets angry', or 'Chacha Chowdhary's brain works faster than a computer'  were their unique-selling-points. Every child loved these characters and even sometimes wished to be as intelligent as the Chacha himself. Then there was Tinkle with its 'Tantri the Mantri'  with his ever-failing plots to assassinate or get rid of his king (which rhymes really well btw) and 'Suppandi'  the simple village-lad with his never-ending goof-ups. The jokes at that age seemed so funny but now seem to be pretty lame and I chuckle to myself thinking 'how did I find these jokes even funny?' Then there were numerous other comics from the 'Diamond comics' (which were quite a rage in the 90's) stable like  Billoo, Captain Vyom,  Chotu Lambu which were also quite popular.

Anyway, the fact remains that these comics definitively occupy a vast part of my childhood memories and I will always be fond of comics no matter how old I grow. Only now, the comics have shifted to the more radical and 'cooler' super-hero genre. :D Everytime I see a Chacha Chowdhary comic or a Tinkle Digest somewhere, It unknowingly triggers a wave of nostalgia as I find myself back on a railway station as a 11 year old waiting for my dad to buy me my 'treasures'
:)

Wedding planners..

So, my sister’s wedding was successful and went smoothly without any major glitches or hiccups. I must say, all the forewarnings by my brothers (those with prior experience of helping with their sister’s marriage) did live up to their hype as my sister’s wedding kept me super-hyper-ultra-busy the last three weeks.

Taking care of the transport logistics alone cost me most of my time as I had to deal with the six hired vehicles and two of our own (totaling upto nine vehicles).

Here are some of the tips and things that a guy who has the responsibility of his sister’s wedding should know or be aware of….also some point from the following are my own observations and realizations from the entire event.

The e-invitation that I personally designed and created for my sister's wedding===========>>

1-      Learn MS Excel and become proficient in its use including the keyboard shortcuts. It makes life a lot easier when you will be needed to keep tab on a ton of things during the marriage.

2-      If you are a US returned brother/son—then you are expected to magically appear upto three* tones fairer than even your rich-A/C-house-dwelling-uncle and his family.

*conditions apply  

3-      Always keep a notepad handy with you along with a pen who will most likely become your best friend in the weeks leading upto the wedding.

4-      Be prepared to become the bargaining leader of your family (getting trained under the current-bargain-champion-naani would be a good idea to get started).

5-      you can kiss all the lip-smacking hot food being served on the marriage day goodbye as you will become one of the last persons at the wedding to eat that day after having taken care of all the proceedings.

6-      Maintaining a good relationship with the drivers of the vehicles, the security guard, the pan-wala, the banquet manager at the hotel where the wedding is going to be and the caterer will really help smoothen things out (thank you Abhishek Chowdhary for that valuable tip)

7-      Never walk beside a stranger on the road who has either a cough problem or a tobacco-chewing habit.

8-      You will appear in only 2% of the photos clicked on the night of the wedding.

9-  Get ready to be absent from Facebook and twitter for at least a week (yeah...it's tough...but you gotta do what you gotta do :-)
10- Have a backup pair of footwear hidden in a back-pack and keep them close to you...you never know when your current footwear might become a victim of 'mistaken identity' or when they might become the 'object of desire' for your friendly neighborhood stray dog.

Well, I guess that’s all about it …I did have a good time working exceptionally hard to make the wedding a grand success….and nothing pleases you more when at the end of it all- your efforts are heartfully appreciated. 

Peace always..

flight home: PART 2

So, after much hassle and headaches, I managed to board my flight to Visakhapatnam (after having missed it the previous day). Like I said in the part1 of this blog, that I was one of the last persons to board the aircraft.
I had to sit right at the front of the plane, the very first seat, staring at the wall with a strange drawing of a puma with two tails (which apparently was the cabin interior manufacturing company’s logo). I was pretty comfy on my seat and was enjoying the final phase of my journey back home. The captain (an American in an Air India flight… the irony.) announced in his usual authoritative yet friendly manner, that we would be landing in about 15minutes. I looked out of the window in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the always-beautiful vizag coast line. Unfortunately, all I could see were thick dense clouds. In face I could not even see the wings of the flight, so dense were the clouds. Usually, this would trigger a panic attack thinking whether the flight will be able to land or not. But since the captain had already announced that the flight will be landing shortly, I sat reassured and home-sweet-home isn’t too far now.
A few seconds later, the flight started experiencing quite a lot of turbulence. It almost felt as if we were riding a bullock-cart on one of our good ol’ muddy-kachcha roads in India. Now, those who have traveled frequently by air know that turbulences are common in airplanes and they die out pretty soon, often within seconds. My co-passenger (sitting beside me) though was surely not a frequent flier as was evident with the look of terror on his face and suffocatingly-tight grip on the arm-rest that had turned his knuckles white. He was ready to pray one last time and even gave me one of those ‘now-would-be-a-good-time-for-you-to-pray-too’ look.
About a minute filled with turbulence and tightly gripped arm-rests plus and my neighbor’s terror-filled expressions --the radio crackled to life and the captain announced with some slight jitter in his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, due to the unexpectedly rough weather over vizag airport, we will not be able to land there today and we are now enroute to Chennai, where we shall decide the next course of action”. That’s it, I almost felt God smiling up at me and ticking away a point on his list of ‘Smaran’s patience test’. My smile faded away at the bat of an eyelid to match the weather outside (read: dark and gloomy). Agony and anger filled up inside me as other passengers too started their trend of long exhales, shrugs and sighs.
The flight landed 45 minutes later at the Chennai airport. We all waited patiently inside the plane as we were not allowed to disembark and walk into the airport. Although some passengers (including me) did get out in the pretext of feeling ‘suffocated’ inside …I even took a small stroll around our rather small aircraft which ended with the chief-cabin-crew lady glaring at me with her huge bindi on her forehead that made her look like a Hindu-demon-Goddess. The pilot and the passengers were hoping that the storm in Vizag would die down and we would be on our way back without further delay. Sadly, this did not happen. The weather over Vizag airport was only getting worse. We eventually were allowed to switch our cell-phone back on. This was when the plane erupted in a cacophony of calls, with each passenger calling up their near and dear ones to inform them about the situation. I could distinctly figure out the same sentence (plane could not land in vizag…we are in Chennai now) being repeated in 5 different languages. It was actually pretty cool :)
About an hour and another round of refreshments later, we were finally told that we would be accommodated in a hotel (courtesy Air India) in Chennai and that we would be flown out to Vizag on the same flight the next day.
We were taken into the Chennai air terminal and were asked to collect our bags from the claiming area. Another shock/ patience-test waited for me here as I discovered to my mounting sadness, that my main bag (check-in) had not traveled in the flight as it should have. At this point, my patience level had overshot the boiling point. I was at peace with myself…..basically because there was absolutely NOTHING I could do about it. After having lodged an official complaint for missing baggage, I was whisked away to a ‘three star’ hotel which from the outside looked like my school. It was painted in a weird bright yellow, that is pretty reminiscent in the buildings of Chennai. All meals, I was told were courtesy of Air India. This, my friends was the best piece of news I had received in the past three days. I immediately and shamelessly gave a big grin to the front desk guy as soon as he said the food was free. Hehe.
The rooms, thankfully were really nice and had all the basic amenities including those tiny complimentary shampoo bottles that I so love to use. I have this habit of using the shampoo and based on the smell, I would guess from which shampoo bottle was this so called ‘sample’ taken.
Over the next 19 hours, I did not venture out into the city of Chennai (which I would have loved to), I slept and got over my jet lag, gleefully devoured the paid-for-mutton-biryani and chicken chettinad (reminding me of my roommate Vivekananda Reddy’s own recipe) for lunch and dinner and almost finished my novel that I had started reading in Frankfurt Airport.
My co-passengers, who I kept bumping into in the resturaunt, looked somehow thrilled at the fact that they were in a new town and did not have to pay a penny for it. And none of them, had ventured out of the hotel. Ha!
We finally were taken to the airport the next day at around 8am in an old, rickety mini-bus that was noisier than the airplane’s turbines itself.
I finally made it to my destination around noon, minus my main baggage, and almost leapt into mom’s arms with such force that she almost tumbled over.
And so, I came to the end of a missed-flight, Delhi’s-cheap-hotel-staying, turbulence-experiencing, free-food-gorging, noisy-airconditionless-bus-riding journey that led me to my home two whole days behind schedule.
It was an experience of a lifetime and I will pray that none of my friends ever run into such a situation.

Special thanks to:
The New Delhi Air India staff for their utter chaotic handling of their passengers.
The new Terminal 3 at New Delhi airport for their malfunctioning screens
The AirIndia staff (NewDelhi again) Mr.Harpal who made sure I got a ride to the nearest hotel for a ridiculously high taxi tariff.
My NewDelhi-Vizag flight captain, for having ‘tried my best’ to land at Visakhapatnam
And the ever-efficient and alert AirIndia Baggage staff for failing to load all but my suitcase into the flight.

Scores:
God’s patience-testing game: 0
Smaran                               : 1

HA!