Gold and Beautiful

I went to play paintball on Sunday and it was great fun.... It reminded me of when I was a kid and we used to play Holi in Dombivli......Used to be fun, throwing balloons and colored water at other people from our terrace and painting everyone's faces with color.....After doing all this for half a day, the rest half of the day would be spent in the bathroom trying to get rid of all the color, especially from your hair......Well, paintball is not really the same, what with all the protective gear you wear (check out the pic...the one in red sleeves is me). It was hard for me to pick up the gun (boy, was it heavy!!!), duck and run and then on top of that aim and shoot...I did not excel at the game, but I managed to have fun, shot a couple of people, got shot and also successfully stole the horse..........yeeeee!!!

Is it possible to forgive and forget??? Ideally that's what you are supposed to do, especially if you love your own peace of mind.....but is it as easy to do as it is to preach??? I once read this quote in the Chemistry dept at Tulane. It said "People will forget what you said to them, they will forget what you did to them but they will never forget how you made them feel" I totally agree. I can very easily forgive, but does not mean I am going to forget it....Depending on the gravity of the wrong doing I might not really be able to forget, meaning I will never ever repeat my mistake.... Once bitten, twice shy!!!!!

These are my favorite (man!!! I still spell favorite with a "u") socks that I bought from Sock Market in San Francisco.....First of all San Francisco is a very beautiful city....It's my favorite place in the US. I am a city person and I basically like cities.....I like NYC because it reminds me so much of my days in Mumbai....and then I like LA, that's another nice city with great weather...but SFO is the most beautiful. It definitely tops my list and places like the Sock Market just add to the number of reasons i like SFO.....Did you ever imagine that anyone can actually get excited about their socks???? I did not! But this place is really pretty kool. Its a small store on Pier 39 and has some really funky designs, colors (there comes my "u" again) and textured socks. Check out the store (and my kool sneaker socks) here .

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving...good food, lots of shopping and hopefully a wonderful 2007 to be thankful for....Suma aunty sent me an email wishing "Happy Thanksgiving" and I replied back wishing her the same, etc... and said I did not do nething spl except for dinner with frnds...and then she replies back saying "that's great, you have frnds with whom you can spend Thanksgiving!!!!" And I thought very true...reminded me of the Thanksgiving episode from "Friends"...neways, Xin and Annie were nice to invite us for dinner where we had some traditional Chinese food "Hot Pot" (Doesn't it look yummy even in the pic??? The last one is Indian though, "Gulab Jamun") The healthiest Thanksgiving dinner ever. I have never ever had so many steamed veggies that tasted so good!! And then Suma aunty's email got me thinking about all the things I need to be thankful for this year....Let's see....Great frnds (in beloved NOLA) ...

Thanx to a nice friend I was able to get scholarship when I left India for my higher studies. That scholarship paid for my one way ticket to the USA and although I was not in a situation that if I hadn't got that money I wouldn't have made it, but it did help me a lot, or rather it helped my self esteem a bit....Not having to ask my parents for the money, definitely made me feel better, what with all the middle class background and 22 year old girl going alone (instead of getting married!!!!) emotional pressures from outsiders (Thank God for my parents!!!). Anyways, long story short the scholarship was good....and eventually I was able to obtain an updated list of all such trusts in Mumbai that give scholarships to students going abroad for higher education. I am providing that list here for everyone who wants to use it. Remember one thing, most of these are Parsi trusts and their goal is to fund as many students as possible. So if you get funded from one trust, you won't g...

I was just reading an article in TOI about Madhur Jaffrey and she mentioned sipping sugarcane juice at Taj.....Sugarcane Juice !!!!!!!! I was crazy about it for so long, at least as long as we lived in Dombivli....It's been such a long time since I had sugarcane juice. My grandfather passed away when I was still in school. But when I was a kid we used to visit him and my granny every summer (thanx to my maasi, who did not mind taking care of all the cousins during the summer break!!!)....And there were only so many things you could do in that village. Once a week, get up really early and go to the weekly bazaar...Then in the evenings go to one temple everyday. There was one ice-cream shop in the village, so one trip to that place (mango, pista and one more flavor ...I forget....mango was my fav!!!). Then there was a sugarcane juice shed/stall...So one trip there and loads of mangoes at home!!!! Those were wonderful days. Once in that entire trip, would be some spl puja day and all ...

Everyday on CNN and other news channel I hear them talk about the rising gas prices. Every morning on the news I hear them talk about traffic problems and everyday on different channels and in different commercials I hear them talk about the green revolution.....If everybody is worrying about traffic problems, environment pollution and increasing gas prices, I am wondering why are they not doing anything????Haven't you heard about public transportation???Look at other nations, even a developing nation like India has better public transportation. And this country somehow does not want to go that way. Instead they prefer to buy bigger SUVs and Hummers with no gas mileage whatsoever........You complain about oil problems but you don't want to do anything about it. Obviously the politicians don't want to address that issue, because their personal financial gains lie in oil.....I just saw this yesterday somewhere, the blind (oops!!! the visually impaired) people are complaining ...

Another WWII movie.....I don't know why I am obsessed with these movies, gotta blame Arun for it (actually gotta blame him for all of the gud things :-)). Anyways, really nice movie and along with all the usual thoughts that run in my mind after watching such movies, another thought crossed my mind was how would a Bollywood director make the same movie? It would be impossible for them to make the same movie or even a remotely similar movie....Can you imagine a Hindi movie about a great Pianist caught in a war and survives merely by hiding and getting help from other people. Even when there are small Jewish revolutionary groups trying to attack the Nazi soldiers (somehow the word soldiers does not go with Nazi....just feels wrong!!!) he is hiding in his flat and watching all these people get killed .....I mean cmon.....our Bollywood hero would never ever tolerate that. Sunny Paaji would bend the bars in the window and jump out of that sky scraper's window, land on one of the Ger...

Everything looks so beautiful in Fall.....The trees in my apartment complex are all yellow, pink, red....Every time I get out of the house I remember that I should have my camera next time and take some pictures. I never really did that, but fortunately last weekend I had an opportunity to go hiking once again. This time we went to Green Mountain with a bunch of people we had never seen before (aahhhhh the wonders of Internet!!!!). The hike was really good, only 6 miles, the weather could not have been better, the tress were all beautiful colors and the people were great....Unfortunately when we reached the lake, for the first time I realized the extent of drought in this area. I had been hearing about it for quite some time now on the news, but when I walked in the middle of the lake (look at the pic), I realized why people were so worried.....Hope we can survive this season and have more rainfall next year....keeping my fingers crossed