Random. Structured. Haphazard. All Me.

A Tangled Yarn of Thoughts Being Unravelled…

Recent Posts

  • Channeling Animals

    Today I walked on all fours. In an extremely ungainly manner. Bum in the air, hands flat on the ground doesn’t do it for me. And also makes me appreciate the load my feet carry.

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    My trainer occasionally gets his peeps to do various animal-walks. Red’s come back all winded doing a duck walk and apparently there’s no end to the variety of animals that can and will be channeled in the fight towards a fitter body. Here are a few that trainers love to inflict on us poor heavyweights.

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    A crab walk
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    A bear walk/crawl
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    A crocodile walk
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    The snake crawl

    All of these are designed to impact the body positively; in theory. But doing them is another ball game altogether. Especially when all the body wants to do is curl up and sleep. Image result for hibernating like a bear

     

     

  • Boy Scout Motto Redux

    As a parent and especially a mother you need to be prepared for ANYTHING. Over the last 8 years I’ve got used to stepping on dinos, finding action figures under my butt and the occasion plastic snake in the bath bucket.

    Each animal does tend to stay in its own “ecosystem” though. For example the snake I found in the bucket was a sea snake. The dolphins and sharks that crop up on the cistern or in the bath enclosure are technically near water.

    Today I saw TO had found a new way to mark his territory- he left a perfectly formed clay ‘S’ in the bathroom. Say hello to graffiti circa 2019!

    I thought about the Boy Scout motto-‘Be Prepared’ and believe (now more firmly than ever) that it applies far more to the mother of boys, scouts notwithstanding, than the boys themselves.

    Atleast somethings I can still count on remaining the same…

  • Harsh Truths

    TO learnt a rather tough lesson today- about life, death and how you can’t save everyone.

    A pigeon had laid her eggs behind the AC unit on one of our window parapets. It was sheltered from other birds, the strong winds and still gave enough access to the warmth of the sun. 

    In due time the eggs appeared and eventually a chick. We’ve been keeping an eye on le chick and seeing the day to day changes in him/her. But the chick was in the infancy stage still and not strong enough to fly.

    Today TO came running to me to show me something “very bad” that was happening. A male pigeon was trying to attract the attention of mother pigeon and in the process, with all the flapping of the wings and the clawing that went on, the baby bird got shoved out of the nest and is now slowly dying.

    It moved feebly in a rather pathetic creeping manner, trying to get away from the danger and managed to get itself further away from the nest. 

    The mother flew away in the entire commotion and now we have a tiny life ebbing out on our window. It’s sad. And what’s worse is that due to the grills on our window we couldn’t access the bird and get it back to the nest and keep it warm somehow.

    TO kept hitting the glass to shoo away the bigger birds but they kept at it and in time the baby bird was well and truly done for. And such is the unavoidable aspect of life- bad stuff happens, you don’t get to save everything and everyone you want to and yet there’ll be another nest here again soon. Maybe by the same mother bird. 

    Resilience, circle of life or animal instinct, it’s all the same thing at the end of the day…you got to keep soldiering on. Or as Dory said, “Just keep swimming!”

  • You Are What You Read…

    Red reads “interesting” things. He reads fiction, non-fiction and plenty of things that ‘thinking’ people seek out.  Am far more pedestrian and I think I know the answer to that as well…let me just pull up my virtual couch as I hark back to my childhood for the insight.

    When I was in 5th grade, our class teacher was very passionate and stringent about our reading habits. And with the baggage that came from being from part of a race that’s been persecuted and vilified throughout history; she exposed us to books which left a lasting reluctance in me seeking out thinks which were a “heavy” read. And I don’t mean tomes necessarily. I mean books which made a 11-year old year child in a foreign country sad, restless and not quite content.

    Books, in my family, are a gift for all occasions. Toys will come and go but books will sustain. The kind of books I was given ranged from folk tales, mythologies and even things which helped me do school projects (thank you Barnes&Nobles for your books on the Roman civilization). And for the most part they all had a common thread running through them; they were fun to read or they entertained at some level.

    When I read Friedrich, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Number on my Grandfather’s Arm or Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry I had too much to process for my pre-adolescent brain. Books that were fun to read aka Pippi Longstockings, Anne of Green Gables series, Judy Blume’s works or Harriet the Spy et al were still good to dive into but the somber tone struck by the Holocaust and the stories of racism especially during the Great Depression has made me wary of anything that seems even remotely “serious”. For the same reason I seldom seek out the dramas in movies either. Red runs towards drama and I veer towards stuff that’s the White Chicks ilk.

    I am a semi-closeted romance book reader, the HEA notwithstanding. I like reading Regency stuff; having been introduced to Georgette Heyer and her peers by my godmother. The thing with the lighter kind of reading material is you can pick it up, put it down and not go off into raptures or trip into a long, winded thought process and still enjoy it. I need to feel entertained at the end of it all. Not necessarily feel like I came away with more stuff to chew on.

    My favorite authors for the past few years have been Jonathan Kellerman, Jana DeLeon, John Sandford, P.J Tracy, Rick Riordan. Their works aren’t creampuff by any stretch of the imagination but they are all aces in the entertainment segment.

    So that’s me then…a Regency-romance, police-procedural, mythology-geek, serial-killer book loving mom who is currently giggling through The Adventures of Captain Underpants and groaning through the Geronimo Stilton series. And it’s true now as it was 30 years ago..if I have a chance, I’ll pick up a book or the Kindle over most things and just lose myself in it.

    To sum up in the words of the great Stephen King, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” 

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  • Ta 2018!

    I’ve been lazing in bed all day. A semi-cold grounded me. But as always, laziness plays a far more potent role than I ever give credit to.

    2018 was a year of massive highs and lows. Saying goodbye for good isn’t ever easy. It’s harder still when it’s out of the blue and leaves you reeling. But thankfully there were the same old comforting things like reptiles and dinos and superhero movies to look forward to, while bingeing on nachos and setting up reading challenges.

    I traveled a fair bit and I hope to continue that into 2019 as well. Caught up with the dearly beloved and some others out of a sense of familial responsibility but came away with realizations each time around which have been and will be enlightening in the long run.

    We took some tough decisions as a family and girded ourselves up for potential big hitting changes but things haven’t rocked the boat yet. That we are prepared, helps me sleep better at night.

    I started on my book. It took me forever to see what was staring at me all along; I needed to talk a bit less and write stuff out a whole lot more. It may never end up on a bookshelf barring my own, but it will get done and soon.

    As a family we achieved big milestones of forbearance, discovery and made new memories. We had major laughs, hit our heads against some walls (me more than Red) and in the end decided to suck it up and be grown ups!

    More than anything else, this year has been one for generating massive amounts of food for thought. What kind of child to I want to be? What kind of a parent, friend or spouse? And most importantly…how do I want my day-to-day to play out. Am getting to the answers despite the lure of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

    Here’s to a fabulous 2019 from me and mine along with a retrospective of the year that was.

    Salut! 

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  • 418th

    It’s not your usual, run-of-the-mill number is it? 418? But it’s been 418 blog posts since that fateful day back in October 2013 when I sat down to test drive WordPress for my work-related blogs and found that it was actually quite fun and easy to blog here.

    Since then it’s seen some periods of intense blogging followed by equally lethargic periods of lull and stagnation. blogs are like plants; you can water them, keep them in the sun, but they’ll bloom when and how lusciously they’d like. I like to think that there are times when there’s an abundance of growth and then there is some drought.

    This is how it’s been since the first blog post published:

    • 2013: 364 visitors spread across 16 countries.
    • 2014: 1048 visitors from 38 countries.
    • 2015: 2201 visitors from 83 countries (best year yet mainly because OT started full day school!!)
    • 2016: 916 visitors from 50 countries.
    • 2017: 1012 visitors from 50 countries.
    • 2018: 1538 visitors (till date) from 43 countries.

    It’s very liberating to be able to put one’s words out there. More so for a gabby person like myself. But it’s more than knowing that someone may have liked something I expressed, it’s the feeling of having reached someone sitting in say, Moldova (true story) through this medium.

    So what’s next in 2019? Well I’d like to focus more on photobloglets and test drive bits of my other big project- THE BOOK on Wattpad and here.

    Thank you for reading. Thank you for stopping to leave a comment. Critiques help more than praises at times. And every bit has been heard, chewed and digested towards creating better and more engaging content. I’ve realized at long last that as long as I can write and have enough inspiration to keep doing so, I’ll be content.

     

    Salut!

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  • A Quick Trip To Uppada

    In the district of East Godavari, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, lies the smallish village of Uppada. Know for its hand looms, the place was on our itinerary recently as we took in a bit of sight-seeing while exploring the wetlands of Kakinada.

    Our kids, mine and a friend’s, are pure city slickers. Mine cries out for room service like Princess Vespa from the Spaceballs movie.

    But all that apart, our target was to get the kids to see how different people make a living and possibly see a bit of village life and how something as beautiful as a silk saree gets made.

    Here’s what we found…

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    A partially woven silk Uppada saree

     

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    The weaving extraordinaire…notice the pedals below the floor level
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    The weaver’s grandsons showing us how a bobbin looks.
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    A lovely, vibrant and lightweight Uppada silk.

    The artistry of Indian weavers is eons old and while in many places it’s a dying craft because of mechanization, it’s still quite inspiring to see a few colorful threads spinning around merrily and transforming themselves into a lush fabric.

    Here’s to more visits to the hinterlands and discovering more of indigenous art forms and their practitioners.

  • Of Mice And Men

    TO’s school puts together a pretty good show for their annual day. The stage, the lighting, the whole shebang is something I look forward to each year. And it’s actually rather superlative given that they have to co-ordinate with kids ranging from kindergartners to 5th graders.

    This  year’s extravaganza was their rendition of the Pied Piper of Hamelyn. Between the harlequin-like piper and rats (of which my flesh and blood was one), it was quite enjoyable. I seldom need a reason to start tapping my toes and seeing TO’s practice session at home, I knew it’d be fun all through.

    They usually end with a peppy number and get the entire jingbang on the stage to take a bow.

    Here’s how it went…

  • Creature Movie Bloglet

    As a reward for a decent first term report card TO was given the permission to watch The Meg. It’s a PG-13 movie for what reason I know not, but ostensibly to ward off screams from kids. That the screams maybe of joy seems to have escaped the censors.

    Anyhoo, the brat turned into a proper prophet of doom with his sepulchral pronouncements of ,”They’re gonna die”, “The shark’s going to eat them all”.

     He added a chomp-chomp to emphasize the eating bit when the Meg took a while to appear on the screen.

    This cheering section is totally for the shark!

  • Movie Review: Aquaman

    Movie Review: Aquaman

    Aquaman is totally worth the money because for the price of one movie, you can view a whole bunch of movies because there’s hardly anything that Aquaman hasn’t borrowed from.

    Let’s start with Jason Momoa shall we? The fresh faced young man from Baywatch Hawaii

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    morphed into Khal Drogo

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    and then Arthur Curry/Aquaman and made having uncombed, tangled hair and a heavily tatted bod a USP.

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    He doesn’t act all that convincingly but then again, beefcakes don’t need to be method actors either. They flex their pecs and go through the gamut of expressions between a frown and a smile.

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    Amber Heard- someone was channeling the Little Mermaid when they got Mera to be such a blatant redhead. I mean the RED is totally out there. Barring that, Amber is just Amber. She meanders from scene to scene and tends to be vacuous pretty much all the time. 

    Nicole Kidman- Looks good for her age. Fills out a body suit pretty well and that’s the extent of it.

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    Patrick Wilson- the James Wan favorite isn’t chasing specters this time around. He’s the overambitious blonde haired claimant of the undersea kingdom. Possibly the only guy who seems to make sense in this whole movie. 

    Willem Defoe- some men weren’t meant for manbuns.

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    He is one of them. Hard to believe where he’s landed up since the days of Mississippi Burning. On the flip side, he was such a good bad guy in Spiderman that whenever he smiles, all I see is the Green Goblin! 

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    Aquaman is a mishmash of the Predator, The Sword In The Stone (no excusing the pun that the lead male character is also called Arthur), Transformers, LOTR (the huge machines which show up in the Return Of The King) and every movie cliche there ever was. Momoa even channels SRK at one time with his signature move.

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    With next to no chemistry between the male and female leads and the underwater scenes not being anything superlative; this movie is purely for those who want to gawk at Momoa or is an individual below 10 years of age.

    As far as the DCverse goes: this one comes up short. It’ll make money because most of us have kids we have to cater to. Bring back Superman, Aquaman is all washed up!