This is so true.....

So I have been following this blog zenhabits and they write about some real cool stuff....stuff that we all can follow in our lives. the recent one is this . It talks about starting slowly and how productivity is over-rated. I can totally relate to it. Not because I am fiercely productive and want to slow down but I have realised the importance of starting a day slowly and it brings peace...real peace!!

You all there...read it and like it and follow it and be HAPPY!!

My lights were on first...

Well there is this girl who stays one block away and she is always studying. Whatever time of the day I see her, she is studying. How do I know she is studying?  Her room is visible from our balcony and the lights are always on so I get to know. Not a good habit to look into other people's house but what do I do, its bang opposite the place I sit in the balcony during our morning tea that I can't avoid her and then noticing her persistence, I once or twice looked for her in the night before going to sleep and guess what she is always studying. Whatever time I get up, whatever time I sleep those lights are always on and I see her face dug in the books. I do sound like a stalker isn't it. Don't worry, I am not. I am just observing.
So I made a game out of this experience that without making the extra effort to wake up at odd hours in the night to see those lights off, I will switch on the lights in our apartment before she is back to her study table and yeah it happened today.  I had to get up like real early in the morning and wohoooo her lights were off. I win!

P.S. She came back to her routine within hour an hour of my waking up and let me tell you its real early in the morning and she doesn't sleep early as well. I wish she gets whatever she is studying for.

Is the world going to end soon...

There have been talks that nature has taken lot of beating through the hands of mankind and its going to take revenge. We have been noticing so many natural disasters within short spans of time and the scale of damage is increasing with time. May be all these are signs of what's left and like dinosaurs we may also become extinct. The environmentalists have been raising concerns since years that mankind needs to mend its habits and be more kind to nature else the future generations will face the brunt. And now with the theories of global warming and consequent rise  in sea level strengthening and depletion of resources coming in, we are forced to think that we are the ones to blame. May be the world might not end but we may face a drastic change, may be a catastrophic event or end of the so important natural resources. The immediate question is how will we survive specially with no natural resources on which we are so dependent. Well I have different thoughts on the concerns.

• Natural resources may deplete but we will never run out of resources. We may not use Oil as the major source of energy in the future buts that would be because we would become more efficient and we would find better sources of energy. We came out of stone age not because we ran out of stone but because we found better ways to light a fire or make wheels out of. And same happened to say coal. At one point coal seemed to be a very important resource and worth preserving at any costs but see we have found alternatives to coal.
• The ozone layer is damaged and which is increasing the global warming and we are facing the consequences. My question is are we sure we are doing this? Who knows if that's the course of nature. The poor dinosaurs did not use chlorofluorocarbons and still had to die because a stupid meteor decided to hit the mother earth. Since we have the capacity to think, we assume that we can control nature - the very nature who created us. We readily form hypothesis with the very little facts available to us and try to control the circumstances. We forget that what we know is a fraction of what the universe knows. We can't even use more than a little fraction of our brain even after being aware of the capabilities it has and we make the mistake of predicting the future. So my point is that we should stop beating our heads on what will happen in future and how can we control it. We can not control anything. We can not even control things that actually are in our control. 

So lets just chill out and enjoy whatever we have. I am not saying go and burn plastic because the nature is anyway taking its course. The nature will still take its course but plastics smell bad when burned so avoid it!

My road is crumbling down in front of me and at the same time its getting build..

Hope never dies. And hope keeps us alive. Just imagine a single day without a ray of hope. We always have something to look up to and something to achieve which keeps us going. I love a new day and fresh beginnings everyday.

Life is good!

To be or not to be..

Well its not exactly that serious a question but still an important decision point. I recently gave an exam and though people are saying its a decent score, I am at the crossroads of retaking the exam or using the score I have with me. I have been breaking my head over this and have to decide in another 2-3 days.
frankly speaking, I would have been much happier if I had got the score I wanted in first go itself. Now if I decide to retake, it means one more month of studying and hell who wants that. I have other things in mind which  I want to do and may not be able to take out time for them. Other things like:

1. Join mandarin classes
2. Learn how to swim
3. Read more and write more

Well buts that's how it is. Got to make things move and if I do decide to retake, I am still not giving up on the small list above. I may start them late but I am doing them in any case.

Wish me luck guys!!

Blogging month..

Ok...so since I have not been able to pull myself out of the laziness and have not been writing at all, I am committing myself to this blog for full September - yes one full month of blogging with at least one post a day. I will write about anything that comes to my mind - my feelings, whats happening or whats not happening, what I am up to, the weather and its correlation to the sleeping habits - you know just anything.

Also, I am going to change the look of my blog. I want a MAKEOVER..I am excited about it. Lets see how it turns out.

Cheers,
SM

The Baking Disaster...well pseudo disaster!!!

When you are a housewife and you have just one interesting channel to watch on TV and that channel shows Masterchef (US, Australia, Junior) thrice a day, you have to get inspired to cook. And not just cook, cook the exotic stuff and feel good about it. After the Vietnamese Pho's disaster and Chicken Snitzel's "save my reputation" performance, I really got motivated to bake. Baking sounds so sophisticated and technique driven that the idea of baking made me feel chef like from inside and I thought of trying my hands on the chocolate chip cookies. The first question is why cookies- well because they sounded easy and quick. And why chocolate chip cookies, that's because almost everyone (including my husband) likes them. I got a decent recipe and the ingredients from our own mustafa. If anyone of you have seen Masterchef, they always talk about being absolutely right in measurements and technique. So before really starting to mix the ingredients, I did my research on:

• 1 cup measurement - its actually 16 tablespoons
• Tablespoon is different than teaspoon
• How to preheat an oven - yeah, it was my first time with oven as well and my oven doesn't have a pre-heat alarm
• Difference between whisking and beating
• Difference between baking soda and baking powder etc.

To cut it short, the preparation was fine and upto the expectations. But even after doing all the research on measurements, I got it wrong at the time of placing the rolls on baking sheet and the result was huge cookies. On second thoughts, I think they looked like pregnant cookies. You know the base was normal size but they bloated towards the top. And to add to the disaster, they got burned from the bottom - really burned (I wanted to say overcooked instead of burned but that would have been an understatement of the condition) - you will need a hammer to break that. But on the positive side, the taste was decent. That's why I am calling it a pseudo disaster :)
Anyhoo, when my husband saw my effort, he said, they look like boiled potatoes. Yeah right, he normally doesn't say nice things just to please me. He gives an honest feedback - so my cookies looked like pregnant boiled potatoes but they tasted good.

Moral of story is: We all should try new things, it gives new experiences and memories and more importantly a shuffle to our gray cells. I not only got the experience but also a post out of the baking saga.

I need a job!!!

I have not been working since 6 months now (wow..it has been SIX months) and this is the first time that I have been unemployed for this long. Like most of people I have gone through the phases of being unemployed such as enjoying the free time, thinking what all great things I can do with the time in hand, cooking, sleeping a lot, reading a bit etc. etc. And now is the phase when I need to start working again. Yeah you got it right, its not about the want to work but the need to work again. Staying at home sucks!!!

And I have reasons to get a job too:

1. To get back to normal life of having a routine and being productive.
2. To earn money and keep on earning it.
3. To meet lots of people and make new friends.
4. To shop for new formal clothes. Ladies dress amazingly here :)
5. To eat lunch with colleagues and bitch about the boss.
6. To be able to come back home and crib about how much work I have and how good it was when I was not working.
7. To be able to enjoy weekends.
   
8. To keep a track of time and marvel at how or slow it progresses (depending on what kind of day I am having).
9. To feel good about myself by managing home and work efficiently. Yeah, I have always wanted to excel at both the things together.
10. And last but not the least,to get calls on the phone and feeling a part of this world.

So all the people who tell me that, wow...you are not working..that's so great; is not so cool. I have my reasons to work and I am sure we all have. Tell me, what are yours??

Happy Working!
SM

Future Shock..

"Too much change in too short a period of time"
....that's how the legendary socialist and futurist Alvin Toffler had predicted in the 70s. And how true it is. The world is shrinking, time is flying faster than ever before (or its just me), innovations are happening at the speed of light and to add to our troubles; information has become way too accessible and technology has taken over our lives. All this availability of required and not-so-required things is making my span of attention and interest shorter and shorter by the day. I want more, I want something new to entertain myself.

• Online chatting (specially with strangers) - Bored!
• SMSing (looked like a necessity in college days) - Bored!
• Mobile phones (never thought that I will survive without it) - Bored!
• Social networking (first orkut was he king and then the throne was captured by facebook) - Bored!
• Online games (there was a time - not too long back- when I could spend entire day and night just playing games on the net) - Bored!

Now mind craves for something new...to learn and exploit it...and then forget about it. But amidst all this, all this obsession about NEW and exciting, the few things which never can be replaced are the things which are there since centuries, may be since the beginning of the mankind. These are the activities, things, experiences which still excite me or are still there with me. Things like:

• Going out and playing some real sports - Hit!
• Reading physical books (specially outside) - Hit!
• Doing calculations on paper (yeah I don't prefer excel sheet for simpler stuff) - Hit!
• Going out and meeting people (rather than spending life on second life) - Hit!
• Watering plants - Hit!
• Writing on paper instead of on computer - Hit!
  

Having said all this, I still crave for something new and better. I guess when Mr. Toffler did his predictions (which are turning out to be damn right), he would not have imagined how it is going to confuse us and complicate things for us. We are stuck between things we enjoy and things we should enjoy and the difference is minimizing with time. As the post progressed, I realized that span of attention is not the only issue here. The major issue is a confused and contradicting mind. The definition of pleasure is changing, its becoming more of what should be enjoyable according to certain set of definitions against what actually is. And I don't want that.

Mortality Attack

I am having a mortality attack right now. I am not sure if its a real thing and id it happens to people frequently, but it has happened to me couple to times before and its happening right now.

The symptoms of mortality attack are:

1. You realize that life is too short to do all the things you want to.
2. You think that ultimately you have to die and no body really knows what happens after you die. And then you start thinking that whatever you are doing - for yourself or for people around you - is that enough or is there even a need to do all that. Or we should just flow with the things and see how life takes its course or should you maximize this time. And even if you want to maximize the time - what exactly do you mean by maximizing.
   
3. You think that your loved ones are unhappy and then you start questioning/blaming yourself for it.
4. You think that there is so much unrest in the world such as abject poverty, unhappiness, hatred that you start thinking whether you deserve this life or you should give away everything for a better cause. Is leaving everything the better cause or being with the people who love you and whom you love and keeping them happy is the better cause. This feeling has come to me so many times that it sometimes becomes unbearable. Specially when I see poor people who are weak and helpless, I really can't justify the food I am eating.

Please note that these feelings are not to prove to people that I care etc., but these are very selfish emotions because I really want to look at myself and say that I deserve to be in this world. And these are very ambitious things, even more ambitious than getting back to back promotions to becoming the youngest CEO. Because this is a fight within me - a fight to decide a path. The fight to whether give in to mortality or to stand and spread love. To go all out to make this world a better place or to just stay in the surroundings and keep people around me happy. I should confess here that most of times I am very selfish and I want to buy the best clothes or to stay in nice homes. The materialistically selfish me takes over the other me.

I have had these or similar symptoms before. For the first time when I was a kid and there were floods all around and people were dying. The kid in me was happy because the school was closed for more than a month but the cynic in me wanted to join the armed forces who were distributing food so that I could just contribute even in the smallest way. I did not share my wish with anyone because the kids around me were happy to be away from school (like one part of me) that I thought I would look foolish if I say something like this and which kid wants to look foolish. And thus I gave in for the not so good and selfish me.

This has always been the conclusion of the mortality attack. I look at the variables and sometimes I get scared of the tough life I might face if I don't follow the obvious path. Since I am confused about the right thing to do and i really don't have the guts to go all in, I am thinking of taking a middle path and I promise to you all and to myself to do the following two things:

1. To be more giving in relationships. To be absolutely selfless and do all I can for the people I love and for those who love me. No hidden agenda.
2. To at least make efforts to do something for the world. To make difference in someones life - directly or indirectly.

The promises have been made and will keep you posted on the updates. I hope there are updates and they are worth mentioning. Please pray for me people.

Love,
SM

Its complicated..

What the hell..it was such a long break from the writing that I started thinking that I am just having a writer's block (the feeling is good though as only real writers with real stuff to write get writers block and however I am no close to the real writing stuff, it feels good to think that I may have a writer's block...and for all those who think it is not, I don't care. I would like to keep it this way :))
Before I really get on to writing what I came here for and which is precisely the title of this post, I think I should just mention where was I? and the answer is between my last post and now - I got married, moved countries and became a full fledged wife and honestly its not that complicated :)

So what it looks complicated, let me see if I can make it easier. You guessed it...I am going to give top 3 pointers on relationship:

1. KISS : Keep It Simple, Stupid. Its complicated because we can not simplify it. Keep it open, cool and honest. This is about relationship and not a job interview where you need to bluff (well don't you). Your partner is looking for the real you - good or bad, beautiful or ugly, smart or dumb - it really doesn't matter as long as its the real you.

2. You like it, I like it : This is original and super effective too. There is nothing sweeter than the art of giving and trust me the one who gives is the one who gets more. It might be the smallest of gestures but then the returns are exponential and the biggest fruit is that you feel happy from inside. Try it...if it doesn't work, come and tell me.

3. Unconditional love : One of my dear friend's father used to say that love is always unconditional. If its not unconditional, its not love and you might be in a wrong situation. This also translates to "don't have any hidden agenda for loving the person". Its like either you love a person or you don't. There are no reasons and no gray areas. Get it. Good.

4. Unique chemistry : Every couple's chemistry is unique, which also means that whatever gyan I am giving is of no use...but that's the irony of life too :).
What works for them might not work for you and never make situations bad by comparing. Look for what works for you and then stick to it.
I know you are wondering why the fourth point - its the bonus for reading the post till the end.

Happy loving!
SM