Having been something of an introvert all through school, till my class 10, I had only two or three close friends at school and I didn’t talk much with any of the others in class. Even as my friends circle slowly expanded in the years to follow, I would call 2007-2010 as the peak period in my life when I had many good acquaintances and more than a dozen close friends – friends with whom I felt comfortable being myself, friends with whom I could share anything and everything that I wanted to – with whom I was in constant touch.

For no particular reason whatsoever, today am not in regular touch or am completely out of touch with most of them.

It was in 2010/11 that a whole lot of change happened – many of them went onsite or on sabbatical or quit the company or busy with work and even friends outside work got busy with other things. And there were some who simply stopped being in touch suddenly! After the initial phase of regular mails and calls, slowly the number of calls/mails reduced. Even the occasional online chats didn’t go beyond a few minutes.
It has been such a long time since I even mailed/pinged some of them & vice versa, that even when I rarely see them online now, I wonder if I should even start a conversation. Maybe they are thinking the same too?

I do know that many go through this phase and thus is life, but still felt like writing about this today.

I had totally forgotten all about this song and suddenly remembered it yesterday when listening to Sanjay’s Bhageshri RTP.  

Aaromale – Bhageshri, Shreya Ghoshal’s voice, the soothing instrumental background – takes my memories back in time. Back when it offered solace in times of gloom. Back when it simply pulled me into it totally that in those moments when I was listening to this song, it was just music and me and everything else was forgotten. Back when I discovered yet another facet of the raaga Bhageshri. Back when this was the only song that I kept listening to for hours together. Back when there were less confusions in life. Back when every moment of Bhageshri, Shreya’s voice and the soft instruments vying with each other to create an aura so beautiful seemed to effuse an eternal musical bliss and calmness.

Today when I listen to it after several months or maybe even a year, this beautiful Bhageshri piece sounds only more beautiful. More soulful. More soothing. Its effect on me still remains the same, though I am happy to say that there is no gloom around me now.

I wonder how I had even forgotten it all these days!

Thanks Google Reader for being a great companion for hours together on several days all these years. I have always liked the neat interface. I am yet to start using another feed reader. Miss you, Google Reader!

This is my entry for the contest by Kitchens of India and Indiblogger. I came to know about the contest from Bhushavali’s blog.

When you have a husband who is a big fan of the ready-to-eat foods available in the market, it is inevitable that you end up tasting the food offered by most of the brands since your kitchen is bound to be full of them. We both liked the Vegetable Biriyani masala by ‘Kitchens of India’ the most and it was reserved for those weekend leisurely meals. My husband and I, both novices as far as cooking is concerned, took quite a bit of time to perfect the chapatthi after several attempts with different brands of atta and different proportions of atta and water. Finally it was rotis from Aashirvaad’s atta which satisfied our taste buds. The husband went on to make tasty phulkas too with it!

So, being fans of ITC’s products, the moment I read about ITC’s contest, I got all excited and told my husband, ‘Hey, see! A contest is being organized by our favourite brand. Why don’t we plan for a party for real since you will anyway want to use at least one of ITC’s products if we were to host a party?’ ‘Why don’t we have a get-together with some cousins of ours at our home?’ was the reply. We discussed and came up with a guest list comprising of a good mix of adults and kids.
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What a boring song with lines like kanji aari pochu which, by the way, sounds as though it is being recited and not sung and what is it with that sad, melancholic feel oozing out of this song making you too to feel dull? That was the feeling that remained even after a few days of listening to this song.

And then it finally happened today – suddenly the words sung as though in a soft whisper with full of longing and the soft, caressing, minimal music in the background seemed to seamlessly blend together to create a magic, a soothing, melancholic magic sans the feeling of gloominess. And not to forget that interlude with that lovely humming which suddenly has words and humming and chords coming together with the humming and the chords forming a nice backdrop for that non-dramatic-climatic high-pitched enga pona raasa which undergoes beautiful transitions to come back to the initial slow enga pona raasa.

I am now so fully drawn into this song that I just can’t stop listening to it!

The only thing that I hated the most during the time in Singapore.

In the HDB (Housing Development Board) apartments in Singapore, the method of disposing the garbage from your house was to open a door beneath the sink in the kitchen and throw the bag of waste into it. There is a vertical passage that runs through all the floors and every house will have a door to that passage. The garbage from all the houses gets collected in that area and the ground floor has a door to it. The waste is then collected from it by the workers from SembCorp (remember our good old Onyx?).
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The catchy tune appealed to me right in the first listening and it was the only song from Kadal that I was initially listening to. One fine day, it so happened that I listened to it in the presence of Sahana and guess what she did, she started dancing to the tune! From then on, there were several days when you would find the mother and the daughter happily listening to this song on a loop with one, all smiles seeing her daughter enjoying herself and secretly harbouring the hope that she too might become a Rahmaniac 😉 and the other, happily smiling and dancing away, innocence and beauty personified.

And how! Feels really, really good to be posting something here. Looks like writing about my love for Madras unleashed the blogger in me once again.

Yes I really do! I have to somehow sacrifice that ‘2-minutes’ of blissful sleep post switching off the alarm in the mornings and try to squeeze in a bit of cooking into my otherwise mundane routine involving just taking bath, having my breakfast and leaving for office.

Back in Singapore, the recent routine was to wake up by 7, see the clock and mutter to self that I should have woken up at least 10 minutes earlier and hurriedly start cutting the vegetables to cook lunch for the husband all the while praying that Sahana shouldn’t wake up in between. But, alas, the always-right Murphy’s law comes into play and exactly on days when I am already way behind schedule, Sahana will wake up crying and my husband will start saying he is already getting late and I, in a state of craziness trying to calm a crying baby and finish off the cooking, will somehow finish the cooking, pack it on time (8 am) or a few minutes behind time and what’s more, even accompany the husband till the end of the road since Sahana’s crying would resume again on seeing her dad leave her and go. That one hour in the morning would be a crazy time. The feeling would be similar to having the deadline of having to catch the bus to office. Oh I miss that feeling too nowadays since I come by car.

Coming back to the topic, I thought I should tell you about my cooking skills, or the lack of it. Before the Singapore stint, I would have hardly cooked for a maximum of 10 days in my entire life! So having to suddenly do full-fledged cooking on my own meant having to eat food that didn’t taste good! But, as the days passed, my cooking slowly improved and I had finally graduated to becoming a decent cook with some dishes even turning out to be really tasty.

But now that I am back in Madras, it has already been two months since I cooked! I don’t know the state in which my cooking skills are now.