Random. Structured. Haphazard. All Me.

A Tangled Yarn of Thoughts Being Unravelled…

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  • 2014: A Retrospective of Movies

    2014: A Retrospective of Movies

    Compared to other years, I’ve actually gone out and watched quite a few movies in 2014. My quite a few might be still a pitiful number but I was averaging one movie a year after MLM was born so anything that takes me beyond that number is just dandy!

    I downloaded (ahem ahem) quite a few recent movies as well in the past year and rather enjoyed some of them while others were  in the watch’em-delete’em category.

    Some of the stuff that stayed with me from 2014 were:

    I wasn’t too impressed with How To Train Your Dragon-2 barring the new dragons they introduced. I didn’t see why Stoick had to be killed off. But Toothless as the alpha was a bit over the top for me. Still…dragons, fire, flying..what’s not to enjoy?

    Incidentally I watched about 5-6 movies in the theaters this time around so half the fun was that. Plus the nachos and the popcorn…leave it. Am a hog.

    The stuff that was a strictly one-time watch were:

    • 22 Jump Street (did not understand how this got good reviews).
    • Guardians of the Galaxy (the retro soundtrack made me nostalgic)
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past (enough already with the franchise!)
    • The Other Woman (not very funny…not really funny at all)
    • Frozen (somehow the hype made it less interesting for me but gotta love ‘Let It Go!)
    • Sex Tape (watched it halfway before the brat woke up but didn’t find it engaging enough to come back and watch it till the end)
    • Annabelle (boring!)

    I still have atleast another 10-12 more to go and we’re round it off by watching Paddington today at the theater (first movie out in 2015…yay!).

    Be as all this may, I think 2014 is one of those years where they have made extremely diverse movies and some truly excellent ones at that. Hollywood doesn’t let the grass grow under its feet but the amazing range of 2014 has been one its best so far.

    Do you agree?

    Happy Viewing all :)

  • The Blasphemy of Terror

    I’m partial to Websters so I’ll stick with their definition of blasphemy. It goes,”great disrespect shown to God or to something holy

    :something said or done that is disrespectful to God or to something holy”.

    Now caricature has had its enemies since the first time man realized that satirizing something or someone was in its own way, an insult. It didn’t always have the sting of a slap or a harsh word but it dared to mock something that was of gravity to others if not outright revered.

    But a caricature also had at its heart the notion that it was, is and will be ok to take a less than obsessive, somber look at things in the world around us and see its fallacies, foibles and it’s essence as it were. When you make a caricature of an individual who has been in the news or someone who has caught your eye for whatever reasons, it is your humor, sense of cynicism (at times) and your own attempt at making sense of that person and what they stand for. Prominent features are focused on and at times if the person is known for specific things a la Dan Quayle for his spellings or GW for his statements or Manmohan Singh for his silence then certain things in the image are magnified or shrunk to paint the picture the artist or satirist wants to convey. It is their way of not spelling everything out; not crossing all the “t”s and dotting the “i”s. It is simply an expression. It *can* be used to hurt. But then there are those who choose to look only at their point of view and prefer to focus on the negative rather than try to understand that it’s a statement at its core.

    And when caricature is deemed as blasphemy, that’s when all hell eventually breaks loose. People worship many Gods. Some visible. Some not. Some tangible. Others ephemeral. But they have their beliefs. And it is MY belief that when believes are pretty much all what people have, then any sort of object which has the ability to inflict even the smallest of dents or nicks in their believes; will face a tremendous backlash.

    I don’t doubt that the cartoonists at Charlie Hedbo wanted to and were making a statement they believed in. Why wouldn’t they? They knew they were living under a scanner of those who bitterly opposed what they were saying. They knew the potential and extent of damage that those antagonists could cause but they believed nonetheless. Maybe foolishly but they believed in what they were doing. God only knows few people have had massive successes financially by drawing cartoons. So I guess we’re back to their beliefs. Which ultimately got them killed.

    But there are blasphemies of other kinds. Not just against God. There is the blasphemy that’s perpetrated everyday against human life. The blasphemy of rape, of sexual abuse, or deviant behavior towards children.

    A charge of religious blasphemy towards a group of individuals who were making statements through their work during a time charged with religious intolerance, political ineptitude and a blatant disregard of human life, seems a very WRONG reason to condemn them to death. Surely the preservers of religious faith ought to believe that their God has a sense of humor at the end of the day?

     

  • Zero. Dark. 2:37 AM

    I wanted my first post in the new year to be witty, funny, tongue-in-cheek but I guess I’ll be falling back on my old form of ranting about my kid. My forte in life et al.

    This morning my darling ray of sunshine switched on all the lights in my room at 2:37 am and tapped me on my face till I woke up; to tell me he could feel the germs in his stomach moving around. Yikes.

    I thought it was time for a visit to the loo and suggested as much, while scrambling from the bed and trying not to fall over the Batman figurine that mysteriously ended up underfoot or getting tangled in the bed sheets. But no. Apparently it wasn’t about going to the loo at all. My brat couldn’t sleep and had been thinking about the rumblings in his tummy and decided that a middle of the night bout of calisthenics would ease his mind and body.

    So there I was, puffy eyed and puffier-faced with a severe case of bed hair, trying to focus myopic eyes on a 5-year old who was exercising in front of me and who wanted to discuss his tummy germs at length.

    After pondering about tossing him out of the window and eventually nixing the idea, I managed to get him back into bed so we could discuss the way ahead. It seems he knew the course of treatment- no doctors but quite a bit of medicine, the yummy kind. And of course, no school. NATURALLY.

    Kids are funny creatures. Their minds work in mysterious ways. They process information, look at things in a manner which is unique to their ages and bent of mind. Those were the things I was trying to tell myself as the hands of the clock crept closer to 3:00 am and the verbosity of my kid kept increasing.

    Finally, I did the only thing that made any sense. The only thing that was a viable and legal resolution to the entire situation- I woke up his father, passed the buck and went off to sleep in another room.

    I think that’s what I’ll try to do in 2015 more and more- react less. Not fight against the inevitable or the inexplicable. I’ll figure out how to tackle things and if I don’t succeed I’ll pull in an unsuspecting person and pull an escape routine on them :)

    But seriously. Happy New Year blosgosphere peeps. Have an excellent year. May your thoughts and words never fail you and may you end up on more and more people’s’ reading lists as time goes by.

    Salut!

  • 2014 in review Or Why I Love WordPress

    The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 27 trips to carry that many people.

    Click here to see the complete report.

  • VaCaTiOn!

    I thought I might blog each day of the vacation but that hasn’t happened. No biggies. It’s a vacation after all. Nearly free from rules except the 20-minute rule for getting into the pool post a hogging session.

    The beach is clean, seem to have no riff-raff (none that I’ve spotted so far) and is pretty shallow so MLM and we have been able to venture pretty far in without worrying too much about turning turtle once a big wave hits.

    The resort by itself is nothing over the top. It’s cozy, looks like a resort, feels like a resort, acts like a resort as it were but it’s not your run-of-the-mill filled to the brim during holiday season either.

    We get enough pool time and don’t have to jostle for a good spot on the beach either.

    One of the things we wanted for the vacation was an overall sense of being relaxed. We haven’t yet opted for too many activities (that’ll come with the second part of the holiday) and neither did we want to have our fill of things to feel that we’re getting our money’s worth. We wanted to relax, have some laughs, take a few pictures and have a good holiday.

    Barring a smallish (well..not that small) with the luggage arriving once we landed in our destination it’s all been just dandy.

    We’ve tasted the local cuisine, gone to a party, made half-assed sand castles, caught a wee mudskipper, chased crabs on the beach and seen a mangrove and it’s denizen amongst the whole of things we “haven’t” done.

    MLM has been pretty social too….going up to people on the beach and in the pool, saying hello. Sometimes choosing people to interact with purely on the basis of their attire viz the boy who wore the alligator swim trunks or the lady who was just lazily floating in the pool till the little monkey swam up beside her and decided he wanted to do what “aunty” was doing :)

    We’ve had to resort to the television only once or twice till now. The digital media is a companion during meals but we’re working on that.

    All in all it’s a good way to round off a year that’s seen lots of hours in the office, lots of scoldings over handwriting and homework and plenty of time agonizing over the ironing, maids and choosing schools for the offspring.

    So here we are….vegetating.

    How sweet it is!

    Treasures of the beach aka results of our scavenging
    Treasures of the beach aka results of our scavenging
    This says it all...happiness personified.
    This says it all…happiness personified.

  • Vacation Diaries- Day 1

    We’ve set off on what promises to be an annual vacation of sorts.

    We’re in Goa with a whole bunch of other people who also are in Goa doing the same thing we are-lazing in a resort which caters to their kids’ ideas of fun viz the beach and the pool and also to their eating habits viz daal-chaawal-rotis with french fries thrown into the mix.

    Sounds prosaic? Banal even. It’s not. So far. It’s a safe thing to do. Guaranteed successes and whatnot plus it’s that change from the everyday that we all long for.

    That’s why am hitting the sack before 10 pm and why I’ll have to keep coming up with reasons why my kid can’t take the sheep and horse figurines from the Nativity scene on display here. Image some kid walking off with Christ’s flocks or just pinching off Baby Jesus.
    Now that’d be a vacation blog worth writing.

    Our trip was relatively painless. After the offspring discovered that cup noodles weren’t served on short distance flights (awww) and I discovered I saved 200 bucks because of it (yay) we settled down to some angry bird action. Just when it was going good we landed and promptly spend an extra half hour at the luggage carousel waiting for what turned out to be a bag with a busted lock (double awww).

    Getting to the resort was fun. I slept. Red and offspring counted Christmas stars on the houses along the way. And on reaching here I found out that it was full of people I’d left behind aka a home away from home. So what’s not to like?

    Day 2 will see the dawn of the SLR on the trip along with a walk (read run, after my kid) on the beach and some sorpotel down the gullet. Burrrp.

    G’nite.

    Watch this space for more trite, hackneyed and utterly predictable observations.

  • Reblogged:Playing With The Hand You’re Dealt…

    Isn’t that what it all boils down to in life?
    It isn’t always celebrating the things that go well or in accordance with our plans or even making our peace with the things that don’t. It’s finally just existing with what IS.
    Sometimes we are able to do it gracefully and other times it takes a lot of plodding and prodding to get through each day.

    There’s a saying by Oscar Wilde that people often smugly quote- ” There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

    I’ve found that while tragedy might be too strong a word for it, it does seem difficult to comprehend and accept ,what you sought out, opted for even isn’t all that it’s cut out to be or even worse…it’s not what you want. Is inadequate.

    So you shuffle the deck a few times and hope the next hand is better than the one that has you staring in bafflement.

    Or you chuck the cards up in the air and don’t care if they scatter all over; since it’s mimicking life in doing so.

    And some of us painstakingly make a house of cards. Trying to balance each card over the other and anxiously watching whether they stay up or come tumbling down.
    In the end you either end up with a steady house you used up all your cards in making and are proud of or you decide to call it quits after you reach a plateau and are still left holding a few cards for later.

    It’s all about playing with the hand you were dealt.

  • Reblogged: Marking Territory

    Everywhere I look, I sit the offspring’s presence prevails.

    The jar of Gummybears are usually within hand’s reach although with the child-proof caps it’s still a bit in our control when we want to hand the bears over.

    There are clothes clips on the futon, tigers and lions (figures) under the sofa cushions and Play Doh and khakhra crumbs all along the path he’s taken through the house. Very Hansel and Gretel and one can guess who the witch in this story is too :)

    Point is- kids take over your life in toto! And when they sleep you reclaim it and the house which has their artwork all over the walls instead of the nice designs you and your husband picked out as newlyweds.

    But then again they surprise you in the MOST UNEXPECTED manner. After a terribly taxing day when you’ve restrained yourself from leaving them on some unsuspecting person’s doorstep they turn to you and execute a deep bow and say Thank You Very Much Ayu in the cutest manner ever and all’s forgiven till the next transgression.

    Damn! Check and mate to the offspring. Mommy’s still figuring out her opening gambit!

  • Reblogged: Like A Phoenix

    A lot of blogs turn out to be a plunge into some deep chasm of thought. It’s not. I suddenly get a notion in my head. It often cries for a platform. Some days I can give it one and other days it’s shunted onto my list of things-to-do-but-not-now-maybe-later.

    After a long time I napped in the afternoon. It was my own fault. Sunday comes every week but I don’t indulge in heavy meals that make one languorous. Today I did and as a result I stretched out next to my mom (another factor in inducing sleep) and conked off the moment the head and pillow connected.

    That Red kicked me out of the room and took charge of MLM was probably the biggest reason for being able to sleep for 2 hours.

    When the mind is relaxed it seems into sink into itself. Not like a balloon with air going out of it but almost like it heaves a small sigh of relief that you aren’t stretching it to all ridiculous lengths and just starts emitting little blurbs of thoughts like a person lazily blowing bubbles. Or as in my case, a contented person emitting little burps.

    So the mind burped this thought- everything that grows brings with it something that had to break.
    It wasn’t a “Whoa horsey” kind of thought either. It was reflective.

    An empty land becomes an apartment complex. It’s dug into and practically eviscerated but it’s growth. And breakage. The homes are built and we “break” the space which earlier existed and coop ourselves up into an affordable number of square feet and call it home.

    Relationships grow and break your notions of what is and what should be. Things are seldom tweaked. It’s usually a structural kind of change that happens and the mind fits itself around the new thought, the new idea and tries it on. Sometimes it fits and other times you’re left with something that is chokingly tight or so loose that you just can’t work yourself into it and it just hangs uncomfortably around you and your life.

    It was a very A-Ha experience as Red calls it. Another realization. One that you might have already had but didn’t allow yourself to dwell on for long.

    And every time the phoenix that is the mind, rises above and tries to make sense of things, of relationships, of movements in life of the ground that is now a tall building that you have to call home, the people who are moving on, playing different roles, the child that is growing up…

    Yup…Sunday afternoon naps are quite potent.

    Am glad the next one will take another few months to come about :)

  • Reblogged: What You Say Vs What They Hear

    I keep wondering what is it that makes my kid do the opposite of what I ask (read threaten/yell) him to do.

    These are the very regular occurrences in our house:
    • Stand still gets interpreted as be anything but still.
    • Be quiet or HUSH= keep chattering incessantly.
    • Just a minute/second= I want it NOW!
    • Give me a minute to catch my breath= peppered by demands.
    • No iPad/TV = GIVE iPad/TV NOW!
    • Let’s eat dinner= I want JAMP (jam).
    • Let’s each lunch= I want chips!
    • Let’s brush your teeth= eating the toothpaste.
    • Rinse your mouth properly= water trickling out of the corners of the mouth with zero rinsing having taken place.
    • Enough ketchup= squeezing out another massive glob of it.
    • Eat properly with the spoon= eating with both hands in one go and looking absolutely simian in the process.
    • DON’T=DO
    • ENOUGH= NEVER ENOUGH
    • I’M ANGRY WITH YOU= thousands of kisses rained on my face as a bribe.
    • GO STAND IN THE CORNER= slowly inching away from the corner and smiling like an evil monkey.
    • Let’s not put the Play Doh on the sofa= rubbing it even more into the fabric.
    • Don’t write on the walls= put handprints with paint instead.
    • GO TO SLEEP= STAY UP AN EXTRA HOUR JUST TO SPITE ME.
    See what I mean!
    Clearly I live in the Land of Opposite and MLM is King!