Bliss called Swiss.

Open the window -

The world around is one big

Effortless, ubiquitous scenery.

Waterfalls entwine into mountains

Making love to the lush foliage

Punctuating every other view

That feasts the eye.

Lakes are friends with meadows

Hanging around together

And gurgling with glee.

Green is a different shade,

A brighter shade, a livelier shade!

Who says he is not partial??

Open the window

Look through it.

The world there is one big Canvas

Painted with loads of love,

Perfection unfolds

In every blade of grass,

In every bump of the land.

The air feels crispier, the wind swifter

Lulling the mind into an eternal bliss -

A vision so pretty

That Angels should dwell there -

Fairies should toil there

Sculpting every detail.

No human invention

Can ever recreate the magic

No human heart

Can ever forget the magnificence

Of God's own country -

If there is one, this should be it!

Giving, getting and every thing in between.

As a child, It felt like winning a bumper lottery when I received gifts from my family and friends. That's probably why I vividly remember the neon yellow snap clips my neighbor decorated in my oil doused braids when I went to give her candy for my Birthday. It was a tradition I looked forward to, distributing candy in school and in the neighborhood on my birthday and whenever someone gave me something, even it was as trivial as a pair of trinkets, It made my day. Getting gifts was a joy to the highest degree. My older cousin, who came and stayed with us for over a year to complete her teacher's training, used to get me little rhinestone studs, flip flops and nail polishes when she came back from her home town. Receiving them made me so happy that, a couple of decades after getting them, I still remember the joy my cousin brought me with those little stuff.

As a little girl, the gifts fascinated me - but as I grew up, the thought and the effort surrounding the event of buying and receiving gifts shifted to the front seat. This day, my daughter got some of the most expensive gifts whose value would be a thousand times more than all the gifts I'd gotten through my childhood and early adulthood. The sorry part is that she might not remember any of them this very day, let alone remembering how she felt receiving them.

Gifting is not about the expense involved - it is a very emotional experience sine it takes a lot of thought and effort to think of something for someone in a world paced at light speed. Unfortunately, many of us fail to understand this. That is perhaps why we see even grown ups throwing tantrums and complain about how something they'd received was cheap, easily available or downright crass. Since giving does not have anything to do with the value, it does not in the least mean that you could gift a pack of glue-on Hollywood pink plastic nails to a couple of grown up, autistic guys - no I did not imagine this, it was an actual happening in my aunt's friend circle a few years ago. A thoughtful relative of the guys went back to India from a visit to the US and lovingly brought them a pack of glue on nails, in Hollywood pink. I would not have believed this if I'd not seen them being handed over to my aunt's daughter by the guys' mother, along with the story of how she got her hands on them.

Thinking of gifting is like thinking of loving. I once sent some strands of fresh water pearls to a lady I know. When I sent them, I thought about the recipient with lots of love and wanted to send her something as a token of my thought. I later on learned that the person's daughter made fun of those pearls as the cheapest thing I could have sent them since pearls are available in abundance in their city. I was not angered listening to that - I was hurt. I did not have an occasion or a need to send it, I just had a reason - my love.

On an other occasion, I opened a gift for one of my nieces - a Hodge podge of things - used pencil cases, crayons, yes - used snack boxes - thrown into a careless pile, much like we throw things into a waste basket. This is not a person that cannot afford a few rupees to buy a box of crayons. She lived in a upscale neighborhood and was well off. And not being able to afford doesn't entitle us to gift used items when we are not at a charity drive. A simple card with an honest wish costs and means a lot more than the most expensive of gifts we can ever receive.

To be continued.

Dated

My blog address is way too cryptic and twentyish. I actually named it after how my hubby and I were called by two little toddlers in our group. Now the toddlers are young girls and Teteet and Uffu are past twenties. LOL. Last night in my insomnia, I thought of some alternates.

www.pronetogoodfortune.com

This has a history. I am better known as lucky in my cyber friend group. Urbandictonary.com has a lot of filthy meanings for that but the above phrase stuck as very cool to me.

www.randomwrites.com - since I don't seem to write about anything in particular.

www.wordcocoon.com - yeah, I said I am metamorphosizing in my blog. So this has to be a cocoon.

www.madcapmusings.com - Self derogatory - not trying to be overly modest or anything - but I sometimes get startled at my own audacity of actually writing crap and inviting people to read it:-))

www.hundredlittlehopes.com - I think of a hundred things to be - the latest one is wanting to be a teacher.

www.boredword.com - I see that I write a lot when I am bored.

www.doodlinletters.com - mindless drawing like blogs - kind of like doodling in alphabets instead of lines.

I think that teteet and Uffu (distorted forms of Sarat and bushu) need to retire - they are way too
cheesy, childish and dated!)

Fine Font

A conversation between me and my little girl in the isles of walmart.

She:" I want to get out of the shopping cart."

Me: "You can get down if you won't run here and there and not ask me to carry you."

She: "I won't run away and I will walk by myself."

I pull her out of the cart.

Not long afterward, she asks me to carry her on my hip.

Me: "You agreed to walk by yourself. I'll have to put you back in the cart."

She: With a panicked expression on her face, arguing in her most questioning voice "When did I agree? I did not agree. What does agree mean amma - is it something bad??"

Me: - No words.

Recent Read

I have a problem choosing books to read, like I have a problem choosing movies to watch. I have become a very non adventurous reader and movie goer of late as I don't want to spend time on what I might not like. Yeah, complicated! But once in a while when I stumble upon something and mindlessly pick it up, and enjoy it - it is a cue for me to go back to being adventurous with my book choices. Pieces of Happily Ever After is one such book that I picked up from the new arrivals section of the library. It is the first piece of fiction I'd read since late summer. A perfect, chick book, very down to earth without being Mills and Boon(ey)

I love the cover graphic as much as the book. And the title and the flow, and the believable protagonist. It is time I get back to my adventures in book reading.

Invasion

I am a vegetarian by choice - I emphasize the "choice" part all the time as my being raised as a vegetarian or being born into the brahmin community doesn't really play a part in my being a vegetarian. I had umpteen opportunities to bite into pieces of artistically marinated hens and lambs but they never enticed me enough and I wear my semi animal activist, herbivore badge quite pompously. I say "semi" since I am not yet in the league of Maneka Gandhi or Amala Akkineni. That reminds me of the time when I caught Ms. Akkineni being interviewed for her contribution towards blue cross, Hyderabad. I was at a friend's place and her dad immediately opined that organizations like blue cross make no sense in a place like India since we have a lot of people dying of hunger and Amala should focus on people and not low life animals - he didn't say low life but it was so strongly implied in the way he emphasized the word animals. His statement shocked me then, but as I grew older and wiser, I realized that in a place where the life of a person has no value - God save the animals. Anyway, I traveled across the oceans and came to a different world and started looking at animals through a different paradigm. Animals are living beings - not human beings - but they live, they experience pain and are limited by their bodily functions when compared to their human counterparts. Here animal right activists take their passion to a different extreme but hundreds of animals are still abused and left to die, or killed for sport. I condemn all kinds of killings, be it animals or humans or fetuses - but what about the pests? The insects? The ants, mosquitoes and the roaches and rodents?? Can they be killed? Is it not violence to spray insecticide on the robust little wormy things that camouflage so well onto my freshly sprouted rose stalks and distort my flowers? Should "all out" be banned? Okay, may be they cause and spread diseases the mosquitoes, so killing them might not necessarily be covered under animal/insect violence. How about Ants? The tiny black things that epitomize to humans the virtues of team work and hard work? How about hundreds of them in every nook and cranny of your pantry, invading every possible food container, penetrating magically into jars that allegedly keep even the air out?? How about ants on your kitchen towels - parading under the warmth and moisture of a wet kitchen towel? You get the idea - so these hundreds of ants marched into my pantry for the first time in years of living i n this house, and made me a non- animal activist. I still exercised 'options' such as the ones below.

1) Vacuum them and empty them into the trees.

2) Use a broom and a dust pan and sweep them out.

3) Transfer all food items into air tight jars - including the ones that come in storable cartons.

4) Re-caulk all hair line cracks in the shelving where colonies could be established.

I lost my battle with ANTS.

I did not have a choice. I had to empty each and every container in the pantry - that was all the three hundred and thirty three of them and spray some evil thing that claimed to smell like roses and kill ants on contact. I had to rip off my old contact paper on the shelves, re line the shelving, clean and disinfect the whole area and rearrange the groceries, condiments and spices the true legacy of an epicure. It took me 48 hours, two trips to Walmart, a day of allowing triple bonus TV time to my over manipulative toddler and arthritis like pain in my knees, ankles and knuckles to possibly win a battle over a mob of black ants.

I am still an animal activist - "semi" that is - which allows me the right to fight a laborious battle to drive away an invasion.

:-)

Steel Unicorn - part 2

One thing about the Unicorn awed to me to no end - he was the perfect contradiction to the whole entire family. Tatha was as cheerful as it gets and so was grandma. My own mom, Half a decade older to the Unicorn, wasn't bad either when it came to words like humor and cheerfulness. I sometimes wondered if Unicorn was found in some village fair, abandoned by an unwed mother? - The only thing that made me believe that he was indeed blood, was his nose - which looked every bit my nose's predecessor. The resemblance was so obvious that I'd noticed it the moment I could make sense of the things around me.

Tatha's house consisted of a cart load of characters - good, not so good and in between. Dammu (short form for Damayanthi) was a radiant young woman in her early twenties. She had the complexion that matched dad's extra strong filter coffee and eyes that bent ever so slightly upward, giving her the animated "bambi" look. Her braid was wholesome. It had the circumference of a grown up wrist. her waist tapered and peeked out of her Sari folds, showing off her perfectly chiseled midriff. Dammu was every bit a beauty, I could not help but wonder why she washed dishes and clothes in Tatha's house instead of taking the next train to tollywood - Dammu's fairy land. She used to tell me stories of the films she used to watch, which were too many to keep count. Sridevi was her favourite movie star. She often used to match her velvet bindi with her saree - kind of like a tribute to her matinee idol, she once told me. Dammu was liked by one and all looked thru by the Unicorn and loathed by a couple of people that frequented to tatha's house - Kamalamma the crooked smiled cook and Seethalu the retired maid in her late sixties for personal and professional reasons respectively.

Environmentalist.

I tread on the leaf laden side walk -

Feet tucked into my Birkenstocks.

Carrying a bag that proclaims

" I am not a plastic bag either!"

Toting locally produced

Organic greens.

As I tread along, I pass by

A pretty little thing, with spidery long legs,

Sherly Temple waves

And Victoria Secret bod.

I turn back and look askance

giving 'Going Green' a whole new meaning!

25/01 - What really matters??

So much for creative publicity - A recent publicity stint for a leading cosmetic brand previewed a seemingly thought provoking question. to rethink "What Really Matters?"

Many things crossed my mind. Friends, health, family, peace of mind, reaching out to others, giving our one hundred percent to things that we take up, sharing our fortune - the list went on.

I promptly logged into the link after a lot of soul searching.

here's what the questionnaire was about!

1) What do you think about public nudity?

2)What's your favorite body part?

3) Ever gone skinny dipping?

4)Make up or clothing?

5)Ever dreamed you were naked in public?

So what is the rethinking all about anyway?? Just a way of making much about nothing? ahem...wearing nothing???

For 24/01

Over heard by Moi

"It takes a lot of immaturity to fall in love. Once you are all grown and mature, you are looking at someone more in terms of how they fit you than how beautiful their eyes are!"

Thought of the day

the sincere devotee loves God deeply whether he is nonactive and silently meditating on God, or in the midst of a whirl of outer activities. He is awake in God during all hours and in all walks of life. He does not become so deeply engrossed in material duties as to be oblivious to the inner state of divine bliss.

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893 - 1952)

Source: God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita, Page: 318