My blogroll

Ah, Goawd! Sigh! Here it comes again. For the 26th time in my life. I so want to write a year-end/new year post about summing up and moving on and leaving behind and all such cliches. But the problem is, I am totally at a loss about picking and choosing. And I am not game enough for another harrowing literary ordeal at the wee hours of this wonderful year that had been. So I decided to play it safe and apply some strokes on a few of those amazing blogs that I have been following religiously this year. And I made a rather untidy attempt in trying to figure out what makes me keep going back to them.

I don’t like to expand too much and get lost in the mayhem, so I keep the list small and tight. A rather sad side-effect is that, many a noteworthy blog might have been (un)intentionally avoided.

**Being diplomatic **

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many amazing blogs out there which I might have missed .... Okai, uknow the rest.

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In alphabetical order -

Alyss
She keeps it short. As scant as they come. I still am not sure why I follow this one. Maybe I just like it.

AM
Here’s one crazy world for you! I am simply awed by the amount of places this fella has set his foot on. Too bad we don’t have too many continents and islands to discover. Otherwise he’d probably have found a place among the likes of Marco Polo, Columbus, Captain Cook etc.
Arvind
Ads, Ads, and more ads. Everyday, I get up, brush my teeth, go to the toilet, take bath and visit Arvind’s site.
Bandito
This is a friend. He writes seldom but it’s always worth a read. Write more, dude!

If I tell ya..

Another one of those hilarious female writer oddities found among the species.

Indu
So many colors here. One day its kickboxing, another its Carnatic music, then trekking, poetry…this is always a happening place.

Lost in Trance
Friend from college. Rediscovered a few months ago. ‘Redisovered’ in every sense of the word.

Nandana
It’s never been so easy to make a friend. I guess that feeling is shared by several of my blog-mates. Description of the blog is simple. Life.

Nomadic waves
Another girl who writes achingly pretty. She always takes such pains to find the right pictures for the posts and I admire her for just that. Does it so well that sometimes makes me think she does it the other way round. It’s a recent addition, but methinks it’ll stay.

Oxytoxic
When I feel like its time to exercise those parts of my brain which’ve been left idle for a little too long, I hop over here.

Poornima
You just have to read it to know it. One of the best prose I have come across in blogdom.

Potato
He plays games with the language and it’s such fun to read.

Sidin
Well, most of you know about this gentleman, what can I say! What happened to this guy BTW? Kidnapped by LeT?

Silverine
Hilarious to the core. Pictures, conversations, spice, salt, this one has got it all.

SnM
I read this and sometimes feel, well, that could have been written by me!

L'earn to live!

"Five thousand!!"

"Okay ten thousand!!!"

"Fifteen thousand????" Her eyes widened at the enormity of the figure. I was playing the guessing game with my sister when she asked me about the cost of my camera. Poor girl does not know a thing about the cost of digital cameras. Good for her. I somehow managed to change topic. The first thing everyone wanted to know was the cost. And when I tell them, most of them look like they wished they had never asked.

“What the …”
“Some guts you have…”
“Couldn’t you wait till the prices come down…err, will they come down?” These are just a few of the reactions I have received so far. Another person just stared me in the face for sometime, and walked off, without saying a word.

That set me thinking about the different perspectives we have about money. For ease of comparison, I pitted my latest investment against another most popular investment most of my peers seem to be making nowadays. Land. A cent of land can cost you anywhere between a fifty grant to an eye-popping, lunch-stopping, stomach turning 4-4.5 lakhs, depending on where you’ve decided to mark your bearings. I am only talking about the small city I live, for godssakes.

Suppose you buy 10 cents of land for Rs one lakh a cent. Ten cool butt-burnt lakhs! Okay, it was actually 10.5 cents. What’s the difference? You’re probably never going to use that half cents. So where’s the value of that fifty thousand? Nobody would seem to mind that, while there’s no living soul around me within 50 meters of me I am sure, who can digest the fact that I spent an equal amount for a camera!!! A camera! duh! And I am seated within a teeming melee of knowledge workers, mind you! “You can always sell it off and earn more money “ – some may argue. Okay, so that’s the entire point. You buy something, only to sell it off and earn more money. Then? Then you buy something else and then sell it off again! What a wonderful notion! The circle of life!

The only difference in this case is that, I am not selling off what I bought. And I am enjoying every single second,(err… actually one four thousandth of a second, to take it to the limits) that I am using it.

Two days in geektown - II

...12:55 PM, New Hyderabad Road
In my life, I must say I don’t have a previous experience of dealing with angry ewes. Forget it, I’ve had 25 whole years of experience in dealing with a bit closer species, which is - angry female human beings. But still don’t have a clue. I am not going down that road again, which numerous eminent men have before me, and failed miserably. I decided to pursue the safest option, which was backing off. Oh, I didn’t tell you, momma sheep was angry coz I was getting a little too close to her little one, which was dozing off so serenely, pic on the right. Couple of clicks more, bemused herdsmen, and we left!

1:30 PM, Nandi hills
“The view from the cliff is breath-taking… when u can see it” - I was informed by SnM. But today, the view was rather creepy. A sheer drop to nothingness. We had walked past a pond, minutes ago. Unless I was told, I would have been forced to believe that it was one of those never-ending gorges, the kind you have seen only in starwars movies. That was when we had stopped by to photograph some of these!

That was moss on a wall, by the way, and not tea-gardens in Munnar hill-valley. And u can make out the faint lines of the steps of the pond in the background

7:30 PM, Forum Mall
Each and every one of those thousands of faces looked familiar. I could read those faces, I knew those smiles; those hands that were held together. I could hear what they were chatting away in cell phones. I knew their deepest fears, I knew their wildest dreams. As we stood in front of a smiling mannequin wearing a sexy red dress, discussing plans for the night, I thought, this must be the most boring place on the planet. Yet everyone is here. Everyone wanted to be here, or, everyone wanted to be seen here!

Beer, vodka, rum, tequila and more tequila. Was joined by Bandito, and a lot others worth mentioning. That’s how the night ended.

One more day of shopping, visiting friends and dusty roads, and I returned.

(That must be about the driest endings for a write-up that you have ever seen, but that’s it, I guess)

Two days in geektown

6:30 AM, somewhere in Tamilnadu

I slowly turned my cramped neck to discover that it was raining. Without any second thought, clipped on the ipod and played Mark Knopfler. Knopfler started off by 'post cards fom Paraguay'. Lovely song. It cheered me up instantly. And I chose to ignore happy faces of folks along the road going through their daily rituals, this and that on public display.

Ch called in, "Where have you reached?" I put all my geographical, cartographical and anthropological skills to practice, did some quick scan of the surroundings and declared "40 minutes and I'll be there". That was when the first hole appeared.

10:15 AM, Madiwala bus stop

The hole was in fact, a pot-hole. And it was the first among the Thousand three hundred and twenty three more I was about to encounter that morning. Not your normal pot-hole that you see on the road every day…, each was just a bit short of being qualified to be called a well or a pond. Despite the great maneuvering abilities of the Volvo which put to shame some bikers who were also trying to avoid those holes, the bus took a good two hours more to cross the TN-Karnataka border. Ch came and picked me up, and I demanded his helmet the next instant. It was not the cold, but the dust that scared me. And I was on a diet of antibiotics and cough-drops for sinus infection, for the past 6 days.

12:15 PM, Indira Nagar.

Having treated myself to a sumptuous breakfast, I stepped out of Ch's house along with SnM, to find two familiar, smiling faces at the doorstep! Surprise, joy, smiles, and quick exchange of pleasantries with A and S, and we(me and SnM) were off, to Nandi hills in R’s blue Unicorn, which looked like it could use a good splash of water.

I was told Nandi hills was just about an ordinary hilly place. But, the climate made it look extraordinary that day!

12:55 PM, New Hyderabad Road

"Watchout, dude!" SnM called from behind. I turned around with a start and saw this lovely face, looking angrily at me!....

--to be concluded

Bookaholics ahoy!

NewYork Times' selection of 100 noteworthy books of the year, here! There's also a link to similar lists for all years back till 1997.