The weight of a wait

Tidbits

While the weary sun quietly makes way for the blue cheek moon and while every single soul in the neighborhood takes to bed, I find myself wide awake. Amidst the murmuring darkness, beside my snoring spouse, I wait impatiently for the dawn to break. How do I express the emphatic and excruciating long wait for a mere game to begin. With just days to go, skipping heart beats and the brotherhood on social networks seem to be the order of the day. Everything else takes a back seat as I try to maintain my composure with a glass of wine! This wait makes so much sense and no sense at all.

I despise the game ever since there has been a flurry of sub-tournaments as they aptly say ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. Players, pitches, ICC rankings, format everything looked a distant dream until ‘World Cup’ came along. So much has changed of the game with power-play & UDRS (Umpire Decision Review System), I wonder. My husband's animated discussion on strategies every other day leaves me bewildered and thoroughly confused and yet today I find myself impatiently tapping my fingers and counting days. This wait makes so much sense and no sense at all.

My body tells me to do a little jig yet I refrain from such child-like attitude. My heart calls upon on the color ‘Blue’ and I refrain. My lips quips ‘I am coming home’.

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As Spring prepares to sing!

Love / Tidbits

As Spring waits patiently outside to burst in to my living room, I am reminded of the warm happy days gone-by. As the fleet of Geese swing across the moody sky, I am reminded of the days when I swung across the room in glory as I read the love notes. As the sparrows chirp across my deck, I am reminded of the days I would endlessly chirp away in to the digital desk. As the trees prepare to adorn new colors, I am reminded of the endless but colorful trials at the boutique shops - shimmering diamonds and the yellow metals made me go weak in the knees, they draped me red, yellow, purple, blue and every color in the gorgeous rainbow. It was spring without a doubt!

They say with money comes independence and independent I was. They also say independence brings the power to make decision of one’s own life and thus I did - ‘No time for marriage’, I had declared. Skipped a city if I was bored of it and hopped to another if she allured me enough. In other words, I lived a very carefree life which encircled work, travels and friends until ‘Life’ happened to me.

Entry of ‘Life’ into my otherwise spinning world happened at an unexpected juncture. It surprised me at one time and amused me in another - I pinched and punched just to be sure if he was real. Every time I pinched ‘Life’ I would squeak and as I would take on to punch him another time, I was embraced by his warm arms. One led to the other and thus began the most beautiful sonnet of my life.

“It is a learning that I procured, marriage cannot happen if it is forced upon. It happens when you want it to happen”.

Probably, I am the nth woman on this blooming globe declaring the same sentiment but strange are the laws of nature before we know, we find ourselves standing at the aisle with gleaming beady eyes and a flashing smile. Till then, we keep twisting and turning like a spool of wool.

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More than Words ;-)

Internet / Social Media

It took me some time to start liking the entire gamut of digital communication. I still remember the day when my best friend Lesley had sent me an email way back in the year 2000 - I was not particularly very happy with it. Initially I could neither comprehend her expressions nor her excitement. I thought I could not relate to my friend. I wanted to read a hand-written mail from her (which usually took weeks before it reached me).Often I miss the personal touch of an ordinary mail post - little errors, the handwriting, customized pictographs and times when we exchanged dry flower petals, glittering stickers among dozens of other things.

However, thousand plus emoticons (for many), smileys or pictographs (for others) across the globe each day is trying its best to add the missing personalization in the ever growing digital communication environment. Today there are perfect emoticons to express the accurate feeling of an individual at any point of time. The first person documented to have used the emoticons “:-)” and “:-(“, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University on the 19th of September 1982. Thus began the beautiful and colorful story of emoticons.

As a matter of fact, my chats with friends and family or e-mails to them are rarely completed without the use of emoticons and I feel they play an important role in the digital communication world. Communications in the world of social media (IM, FB, Twitter etc...) are more often very informal and precise since we are always on the run! Yet, it is true that we are still missing out on one important aspect of communication today and that is two people hardly see each other face while communicating in the e-world. Making it difficult sometimes to understand whether the person was ‘serious’, ‘joking’ or being ‘sarcastic’. At this juncture an emotional avatar or emoticons would save further explanation.

There are creative artist like Pat Byrnes who have pushed the envelope of emoticons a little further and have dug deep in to the subject to recreate emotions which are human-like called Smurks! Smurks are available for iPhone and ipads which an individual can use for email, twitter, Facebook among others. Facebook chats have become more interesting ever since I stumbled upon several emoticons signage recently apart from Emoinstaller a free application which integrates into Facebook automatically and allows a FB user to choose from dozens of emoticons while chatting. The only thing I did was click on the download option. Fantastic, I say ;-)

After Internet took away the pleasure of receiving frequent snail mails from me, I absolutely do not mind in indulging in emoticon enabled communication over FB chat, Gtalk, Messenger and emails which are getting more human-like with each passing day. They add that dash of color, force the lips to break into a smile and makes the fingers click away in glory.

*Few more FB emoticons for reference :-)


1 :) 2 :( 3 :p 4 :D 5 :o 6 ;) 7 8) 8 8| 9 >:( 10 :/
11:’( 12 O:) 13 :* 14 <3 15 ^_^ 16 -_- 17 o.O 18 >:O 19 :v 20 :3
21 :|] 22 (^^^) 23 :putnam: 24 <(") 25 :42:

Happy discovering the Social Media fabric.

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Strength of a 'WOMAN'

Tidbits

A strong woman works out every day to keep her body in shape ...
but a woman of strength kneels in prayer to keep her soul in shape...

To be a woman is the most difficult proposition probably tougher than being Obama or Hu Jintao. It has always been tough being a woman since the inception of human civilization. Women have always played a critical role in the development of a Kingdom/State/Country - may it be Mariam-uz-Zamani (also Known as Jodha Bai) who played an integral role in the political affairs of Emperor Akbar’s court or First Lady Michelle Obama whose social campaigns have added to Obama administrations positive approval ratings. As a matter of fact, a close friend of mine who is married to an army captain in a candid confession mentioned that senior army officers appraise their juniors based on feedback received from their wives about the better half of their juniors officers’.

We celebrate a hundred years of Women’s day this year and reports suggest that we have grown from strength to strength each year. A recent study by the Bureau of Labor statistics (2011) show that women are the backbone of the U.S economy. A staggering Sixty percent of women are working while Forty-six percent form the labor force today.She is indeed not just a pretty face!


Lets face the truth - ‘She has the power to make the world go round’ but most of us do not realize this strength and even if we do some of us use it to degrade the gender. It is a very common discussion among peers that women use her sexuality to progress up the corporate ladder and thus leading to a widely held view that some of the women who have made it to the top may have taken the aid of their femininity to get there. An acquaintance of mine regrets certain decisions in his life and recalls how his ex-girlfriend (with poor working and language skills) used him as a resource to get an admission to an American University - he burnt his mid-night oil to write essays on her behalf, wrote recommendations for her. Unfortunately it does not just end there, she would constantly get her projects completed by him, only to realize later that she was cheating on him. Yikes! Wish such women were an exception.Danielle Chiesi is a perfect example of the breed which created waves in the investment world who was charged as part of the Galleon insider-trading ring. She used her sexuality to get insider trading information and pass it onto Raj Rajaratnam (Sri-lankan born American who founded the Galleon group -a New York based hedge fund management firm). At this juncture I am reminded what Mae West said “There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out”.

Women are the foundation of every household,society and a nation. A society would develop manifolds if such women could learn to keep their soul in place. We have the strength to rise above all challenges, we are more t

han just a pretty thing. As women we should uphold the integrity of being a woman. As women, we have taught the world over centuries to have patience, derive strength from our weaknesses, to adhere by and exceed ethical standards of where we work, study or live.

I feel blessed to be born as a woman and sometimes wish that God had not trusted me so much. As they say with ‘Great powers come great responsibility’.

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Home is where the heart is ....

Family / Home Science / Love / Travel

I was born in a dynamic state called ‘Nagaland’ and it was my abode - my home. Home - where I would come to find my mother cook delicious delicacies, where I was surrounded by my friends, where I always ran away from our two gigantic German Shepard but spoke endlessly to my bunny friend and would spend hours wondering ‘Why doesn't my red nose parrot utter a word?’ also loved every time our dog hunted down our irritating neighbour’s chicken! Home sweet home :-) siggggghhh

As time progressed, I was sealed and parceled to a residential school in India at the age of seven where I went on to spend most of my ‘growing-up’ years amidst the Himalayan ranges, lush Tea gardens, friends and more friends. I never really missed home rather I would miss my hostel - I would miss the endless gossip, miss breaking rules, miss bunking classes. Little did I know that it had become a part of my life, a part so intrinsic only to realize it when it was time to say Adiós! Thereafter, I went on to live in several parts of India either for education or for work. Each destination is still close to me and they were home to me in their own right.

As famous as Mother Teresa who was born in Macedonia yet she adopted Calcutta as her home. As a matter of fact, she never went back to visit her family after she left them at the age of eighteen in the year 1928 or for that matter Body builder, Actor and Politician Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was born in Austria and spent a good twenty one years in Austria but later chose to move to USA and adopted America as his home so much so that he went on to serve as the Governor of California from 2003 - Jan 2011. His love is evident when he said “Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.”

I have a friend who grew up in Bombay and Calcutta (in equal parts) but just like millions and zillions of people around the globe, higher education took him to Germany and now for an assignment in America. While chatting with him the other day, he expressed that he is eagerly waiting to return Home - Germany.  He misses the place, the strong european culture, his friends and everything that spells and smells Germany without dismissing his old love Bombay & Calcutta in no particular order.

The Oxford dictionary explains ‘Home’ as ‘the place where one lives in permanently’ but the day and age that we live in today, I wonder can there ever be a place where we could continue to live permanently? A close acquaintance of ours probably in her sixties or seventies (she keeps me guessing her age all the time) have sold their home which has been her abode for years and will be moving to Minneapolis to be closer to her son and grandchildren and is absolutely thrilled to do so. History stands witness that there was never a thing that was permanent or ever will be and the term is only relative.

We hop cities, adopt countries/state as home because of Love. We are emotional social animals and we will do everything possible to be loved. Home does not signify which countries passport you might hold neither does it signify the concrete palace that you may have lived in or the cars parked outside. Home is about people with whom you may want to share your every Milli-second and never regret about any sacrifices that you may have made.

Home is where your heart is!

Amen.   

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Social Media or an Ocean??

Internet / Media / Social Media

Social Media is truly the next big thing....some years back my life on the world wide web was just Google, Gmail, Gtalk and slowly it advanced to Orkut then to Facebook...so much so I have learnt more from Faceboook than the Google search engine as a matter of fact I am continuously exchanging ideas discussing different hobbies, social activities more than ever...such is the development that I feel that each day we are shifting our life in to the digital world.
Twitter brought a new flutter in to my world...I follow dozens across the world (celebrities, new reporters, Tv channels, production houses etc) and there are dozens following me back....every bit of it is exciting...its as if I am the first to know...I know what the world is talking, who is the talk of the town and all the other jazz before it even hits the news channels or news paper. While blogging became a part of my everyday diary...new Google profiles promises me to keep me on top of its search optimization....Old professional friend Linkedin indeed helps me keep my networking going...evergreen Picassa always brings a smile to me and so does Flickr....Now I chanced upon Twitlonger - perfect platform for chatterbox like me!
The more I learn about Social Media and it only feels like a tiny droplet in the ocean.

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Rarest of all places...

Family / Travel

The world wide web is thriving with innumerable sites on travel, tourism, ‘must visit’ destination, honeymoon destination, family vacation spots among others. And it is certain, we are not bored of them and neither will we ever get bored of travel blogs or sites. It is a basic nature of every human being to keep exploring new places. Thus our fingers keeps clicking on the keyboard in quest to find a place that no one has ever heard of  or been to. Maybe the need to search and conquer new worlds has something to do with our ancestors from the prehistoric times who always moved on to fresher pastures to search for richer food sources. Though, I live in a time where every place on the face of this earth might have been discovered, every tiny curve measured, every mood of the sun captured and yet there is a tiny little hope that there is a place waiting to be discovered just by me.

Calcutta (as I have always known) is not a new place for me, it is my hometown. Friends, Coffee House, Nandan, Outram Ghat, Baul music, farmhouse picnics, endless adda (chats),cigarettes and tea in earthen pots are few of the adjectives that describes life as a single college student in Calcutta for me. A life free of all strings, completely vagabond*, rebellious, a wonderland, must have a political opinion, brash language were significant to my existence in Calcutta as a young twenty something. However, higher education pulled me out of my city of joy and for years I stayed away from her. And as I moved from city to city, I never really forgot her nor did I terribly miss her. Eventually, I returned as young engaged working woman but she looked different to me this time. The evenings looked dreamy, Flurys and Peter Cat flattered me, boat rides at the Outram Ghat spelt magic. There was definitely a spring in every step  and the sky was painted in a beautiful pink just like a marsh-mellow, in other words the rebellious nature of the city was replaced by romanticism. It felt like wine and I had no complains!

Interestingly, while it is true that we love traveling and that every individual yearns to travel around the globe, it is also a fact that more often than not we have been accompanied by someone or the other thus making the place of visit special. It is so intriguing to me that how a place can behave in a different mood each time we make a visit to that particular place. As if it was a woman sometime ago dressed in a gorgeous glittering gold dress blowing kisses in the air while on some other occasion  it was a man with rigid rules and regulations. Thus, the person accompanying becomes an important aspect while exploring new places or should I say that we will continue to discover the unknown in known as long as we have the people we love with us. Happy discovering :-)

Do share your experience about people and places with me.

* Vagabond

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