Found this on the big world wide web and haven't stopped smiling since then :)


Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Won't you just disappear?
or atleast fade away into distant fog.
Should be easy,
you were always misty.

I never have problems sleeping. I fall asleep the moment I hit the pillow. Mom and sis are forever envious - something like neighbours' envy, owner's pride.Today is not one of those days!
Inspired by my flatmate's 'early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy , wealthy and wise' philosophy I had decided no late night calls, gtalk chats, books. And it didn't work for me. I was tossing on the bed disturbed by the people shouting on the street, music from some night party, police cars whizzing by and my flatmate blissfully sleeping away to glory thoughout all of this! Even more disturbing were the random clicks from the past that I kept seeing - inspired by the 'Christmas Carols' that I read yesterday?
When I couldn't take the torture any more, I decided to go back to my usual ways - armed with steamed veggies and pitted dates to satiate a rumbling tummy, I turned to the laptop and internet to wear me out to exhaustion and sleep.
I once said to B that 'Life is like a decision tree with a lot many possibilities and only one certainity after which all the probabilities stop mattering' after a very stressful Business Stats class. Charles gave me a 'D' in the subject. Once we have chosen a path, we can't usually undo it and go back. And sometimes we may not want to. But why is it that inspite of what we choose and why, we have agonizing moments (hours and days) thinking about what could have been and what may be. Is having a choice really a good thing?
Another thing to ponder - this whole 'Am I really right' rigmarole only seems to get worse as we get older.
Why can't it be alright to be wrong once in a while. And not have to pay for it! And now that we are at it, why does life have to be a one way street? Why can't we flit between the parallel universes?

Once you know what you don't want, its easier to make other decisions. :)

Sooper Dooper Happy!

If you were at Reject ( a discount store in Melbourne) on the Bourke Street on the 12th evening and saw two seemingly normal girls giggling away to glory, it was me and the new flatmate.

Joke: Does a guy getting a Valentine's Day Card from Reject get automatically rejected?

Owgay, that seemed so funny back then!

And Happy Wednesday! Because I don't need one official day in the year to tell people how I feel. :)

The much awaited "the" mail did come. But it was nothing like the Eat Pray Love moment that I had been waiting for!

I had a strange dream last night. I dreamt that a Dinosaur somehow materialised outside my house and followed me. I mean from outside, while I went about shutting one window after another. The dinosaur looked pretty adorable actually, but I was scared. Maybe the Dino was lost, maybe he was alone and the only one remaining from his species and he wanted to make friends. He sure looked friendly, however my basal instinct was to shut him out.

There are some dreams you remember very little about, but this one wasn't one of those. I remembered everything, every feeling when I got up in the morning.

Any Freuds and Jungs amongst those reading this, would love to hear your take on my dream.

Haven't been able to stop myself from checking mail!

Okay. I don’t need to tell you how much of a bad year last year has been. I am not even going there now. Well at least trying not to. Note to self – whenever you think you are going through a bad phase, remind yourself about 2010. That should make you feel better!

I put up with a lot of things from a lot of people that I didn’t have to – I don’t know why again. Note to self – Stop being so vulnerable. Everybody has an agenda. And making you happy is not on it. And stop listening to people who don’t make you feel good about yourself. You owe it to yourself. And yes, relationships will sour. People will stop being what they were or what you thought they were. You cannot hold yourself to something that probably was only a delusion and hope for the best. Sometimes, its perfectly normal not to see something good in everybody and every situation. And when you do, don’t make excuses for them just to make yourself better. Things are bad and they can only turn better if you accept that they are bad in the first place. And if something makes you uncomfortable, throw a fit! You are a princess and you deserve to be treated like one!

Quite a big note, aint it? How ever cynical all of this sounds, I think I needed this seemingly harsh reality check to bring me out of my “I-look-at-my-perfect-world-with-rosy-glasses” delusion. And I think my readers (if I have managed not to chase them all away with such a gloomy blog!) deserve to know this – no nursing of the broken heart or sort of deal. Just that sometimes a move to a foreign country with bad weather, no friends, really bad flat-mates, unpleasant acquaintances, indifferent colleagues, no support system makes your life less pleasant and more dreary. But now that it is summer, it is all well. And it is also helped from the fact that I have changed residence and put all of this behind me.

Wish me luck guys, I still hope to publish that book. And travel around the world. And buy my beach house. And meet my Prince Charming. (Though not necessarily in that order, not if my mom would have it :) ).

And while life looks all sugary, I am going to take it with a pinch of salt.

Can I please get a billion dollars? :)

Way too busy, having fun! :)

You left without as much as an Adieu,
No goodbyes,
With tears that were only mine….

A stolen day, A muted me,
Numbed by pain,
A feeling of loss,
I don’t know what.
Jarring Music to shut off the world around,
A matching stride to fool myself.
Too many things to do,
So many sights to see,
Life is a joy,
Then why does it feel like a staged performance?

A long long time back a friend messaged me saying, Time has a way of changing things but not the joy in wishing a friend like you... And this message stayed on - in my memory and on phone as well. I must have changed my sim card atleast half a dozen times and deleted a zillion messages to make room for new ones, but this one stayed on for some obscure reason.
And as of a few months back this said person and me are no more friends. Time really has a way of changing things.

P.S.: Are few things fated to occur? Does life leave us hidden clues that only time can unravel for us? Are we reading in between lines where there is no need to? Are there really para-devthas who say thathaasthu at random and god forbid you have an unpleasant wish/thought right then?

Just back home after watching Endiran. A movie of too many firsts for me - the first Tamil/Indian movie I watched in Melbourne in a theatre being just one of the firsts. It was also the first Rajnikanth movie I saw in a theatre! Yea..Shame on me and my ten years in Chennai. For once, I don't really have anything to say in my defence. Except that I tried to do something about it and saw the First Day First Show of Endiran in Melbourne.

The plan was to do it on Saturday and we even had tickets for the Saturday show. But when you have people like me and R, the best laid plans fizzle out and plans are made on the go. We planned to watch Bose engira Bhaskaran movie on CD which we had just bought at the Indian store and we were making our way back to my apartment when
a chap asked us directions to the Greater Union. Neither of us knew that Endiran was all set to release today in Australia and when we knew, we had to make this trip to the theatre and try to get tickets for today. Thanks R for not saying Yes when I wanted to go home. We somehow managed to get tickets and decent seats and watched
the movie too. And got back home to FB. I didn't want to say much about the movie initially,tut then when have I ever gone with my first thought? And more ever,like my cousin says.. Who wants to go to a theatre to see an Old Man?
So rubbing it on your face it is - I saw Endiran before you! This might be the only joy to be had from seeing the movie.

About the movie - no Rajani punch lines;many many stunts;action sequences inspired from Matrix, Godzilla,Mummy Series.
Dialog- no good. Music doesn't really amaze you the first time around but not outright bad either.I thought the movie was going to be like Bicentinal Man, but that didn't happen either.The movie had like two/three high points. Aishwarya Rai didn't do much, please don't ask when did she ever.She is P and T, no Y :) Casting was okay though - I did expect some laughs from the two side kicks in the lab,but they didn't have much of a role either.
Ice as a doc student romancing a Dr. Rajni, who by the way has been working on a 'Tin-head' for ten years is way too much! Neither of them looks any young! The tin-head was not cute, atleast not the way Ice gushes over him until he crossed over to the other camp. After that he looked like one of those things from the DD serial called Chandrakantha - the one that goes about saying 'Yakkooooooo' every now and then.

Like one of the guys said on the way out - Idukku, veetla beer aduchu thalaya saachurkalaam. Illa Dabaang paathirkalaam. Pst Pst.. More laughs in that one I hear...Overall Okay.
Its one of those movies you definitely must watch - everybody's gonna be watching it and if you care to be in and contribute to the conversations that are going to follow, you know what to do!

Btb, we have two tickets for the Sat evening show. And we sure do not want to watch it again.. Any takers?
Err... Is this why you asked me to say something nice about the movie, R?

An update on the afternoon where-in I decide to soak up on some sun-shine.
Thanks to Melbourne’s ever changing totally unpredictable weather and my own internal clock that is always on a lag-mode, I stepped out of the apartment at 4:30 only to find it no more sunny! In fact, my on-loan-from-flatmate sweat shirt was keeping me warm even though I only had the hide-the-fat intentions while donning it. I had only thirty minutes to head to the City Library, return my books and find something decent enough to read. I am not really particular about what I read, the philosophy of everything and anything goes ruling both my taste buds and my taste in books. But for quite some time now, I have been doing my best to find refuge in a known author – not up for much experimentation there right now. True, I read and loved Wuthering Heights a couple of weeks back, which I have been meaning to read for the last fourteen-fifteen years and its not even a difficult book to get your hands upon for that matter. But WH affected me like no other book, its truly gothic! It took me a couple of days to finish it, I couldn’t find it in me to do it in one sitting and it was way too exhausting. The last couple of reads have been light on the mind. So I wanted enough time at the library to borrow something like that. I managed to find something I liked in less than five minutes and in a rare one of those moments sorta thing decided to borrow a couple of Learn French DVDs. Wish me luck on that one. I do hope I have the discipline to use them.
And then I went on the weekly piligrimage to the Indian Store. Back in India, grocery shopping was just another thing that had to be done. I don’t think I ever gave so much thought to what I was buying as long as I had something stacked up at home. But now, I know I cannot make this trip for another week and I need to do a bit of planning about what I want to and might want to eat during the week.
It was my trip back home that was interesting. I saw my boss walking at the other side of the street, going the opposite way. He didn’t notice me, the street was way too wide for me to be able to catch his eye and neither did I have to, like it sometimes is. Like sometimes, I just have to do certain things. He was on a call and was waiting to cross an intersection. And as he was just about to cross, he had the same clueless look like that I have sometimes. Gosh, what do you know! It doesn’t matter how old you get to be. You can still be clueless and it is totally okay for you to be so. I know – its taken me so many years to learn this one!
The next intersection I saw this Chinese kid trying to cross the street. He had this suitcase he was trying to lug around and maybe it was too heavy for him. He lost his footing, came in-front of a car, managed to get one of his slip-ons off. Way too embarrassing – one slipper on the foot, the other on the road and our guy trying to get his act together. The driver thankfully didn’t do the “Saavu Kraaki” routine or maybe there is no proper English equivalent for that term. And this guy managed to cross the door and later put on his other slipper. And he smiled. To himself. I am not going to come out with some random interpretation on how this made me feel ‘cos I have none. It was just weirdly cute!
I walked up the street, smiling to myself – one expedition that went well. I can still entertain myself and that is just a nice feeling. When you do not always need people around or the voices in your head to keep you amused. And I saw this restaurant on the Paris End of the Collins where they let you sit outside under those huge umbrellas. Something caught my eye and it wasn’t until I looked again that it struck me what it was. Everyone eating in that restaurant or at least everyone who had chosen to eat outside was a well-dressed-above-forty woman. Maybe everyone out there was having a girl’s day out, with a sister/friend. Mani, V and A – you were in my thoughts today. Another picture on my mind was the Old Woman dressed in her bridal dress from ‘The Great Expectations’ - I need to hunt up that book now. Another random thought!
An hour of soaking in on the bath tub, reading a not-so-bad book made the day better. Think will make some pasta for dinner now and call it a day. A peaceful end to what had started off as a chaotic-muddled-up day.

I was talking to a friend's brother, someone I had come to know towards the end of my days in Bangalore. His cousin is A, b-school friend and one of my closest friends. So close that I think she now tries to avoid talking my ever sounding low calls. Hic Hic...
Now A's brother is amazing. He has this pretty neat uncomplicated way of looking at things that I am so jealous of. He is all plain speak and that is again a trait I have searched for in people I meet, in vain. All in all, he is like the brother I never had - always teasing me, making me see things in a different perspective, making me cry a couple of times and giving me loads of sensible advice. And for somebody much younger than me, he is pretty stable, again something I am envious of.

So we were just chatting up and he asks me how I have been and if I have been busy. Its a rebuke, for not having stayed in touch like I said I would while moving out of Bangalore.So I tell him, it aint that, just that lots of things have been happening.. So many things to deal with. And he asks me out of the blue - How is that possible, you and problems don't stay anywhere close. That brought a smile on my lips... Its a nice sunny day outside.. Think will go get some Vitamin D :)

Just when I decided to blog frequently and take up writing a little seriously, stuff happened. Me moving to Melbourne is one. I also had to learn a much needed lesson in a bad way – You need to be very cautious while choosing whom to call your friend. I am over the mopping phase now (touch wood, hopefully it lasts!).
Just when you think your life has become way too complicated for you to handle, you realise there is a simple reason why it is so!
And hopefully, I will blog. write. smile. be myself :)

Hello Guys,

Been quite a while since I posted here. Quite a couple of things on my mind that writing something that would make sense to a sane head was completely out of scope!
Now what was on my mind is something that you are not about to hear, not now not ever! You learn is all that I can say. Now over with that. :)

For those who did not know earlier, I am in Melbourne. Aparna knows and since she seems to be the only one reading my blog,everybody knows :) If there is someone else, the silent reader types - welcome and do leave a comment behind. Oh yea, thats me - the one with the hope against hope hopen kinda hope! I could do with some cheering right now.

Its been two weeks here. I wont do the like it/ dislike it part. It is way too soon. Its cold here, the weather is good on my skin and I like that part. My hair though is quite another story. Hopefully Parachute from the Indian Stores does its magik. Getting used to the 'scene' on street is a different thing altogether. I am so used to doing the turn to your left, then right, then left routine while trying to cross the road. Here, you just need to see the traffic signals. That huge leap of faith is something I haven't yet managed to find in myself. Also, I do not loose my way any more, fingers crossed. Wouldn't wanna jinx it.

It is not a big city, like an aquaintance once said 6 streets horizontal, 6 streets vertical. You can practically walk yourself across the street. Its easy to get/feel lost however. Small towns are easier that way I reasoned with myself while waiting for a friend on the street. Small place, friendly people, easy life... And then, I saw a common house sparrow. And another. And for reason that cannot be explained here,I felt a strong sense of belonging.Maybe it was the DDLJ ka "yahaan ka kaboothar kabhi India ho aayaa tha" logic or maybe there was just "something" about seeing something like a sparrow at a time when I was feeling lost and vulnerable. I know it sounds poetic, but then thats how I felt. :)

Or Maybe I am filmi!!And the rest of the evening only made things better - the stroll across Victoria Market, speaking in Telugu with the guy at the Indian store, longish conversations with another poor lost soul here, late night chai... It feels like home.

And on that note, Good Night to you guys....