A return ...

Hello !

Well .... writing a blog after a long time .... wrote last almost 3 months back ! but today, I was reminded of blooging and its certain merits by a link sent by my friend Satyajit (aka Ali .... I wonder where he got that name from .... never asked him ..... ;-)) ....

Any way spent most of the of the day sleeping ..... awoke at 11 am and brunched and then listened to Hariprasad ..... he is just to good with that mere piece of cane ! Sometimes I feel if only I could do something wonderful like that ..... I am sure creating something like that takes you to a higher spiritual level, all with your feet still on the ground !! Such music is elevating ...

Well then I spent the next couple of hours from late afternoon 4 pm ?? till 6:30 ?? basically watching Hum Tum for may be the fifth time .... I kind of like the goofy / cheesy humor of Saif, the dialog is pretty cool too..... even tho' it is an adaptation from Hollywood's Harry met Sally .... but I would say an excellent adaptation to desi mentality and street talk ..... tho' missed some parts due to use of panjabi lingo ..... punjabi stuff seems to have gripped Bollywood movies this last few years ..... and this was a Yash Chopra production so I guess panjabiyana was bound to leak into it ! ..... tho' I didn't like it when it also seeped into Saif's Parineeta that I watched sometime back ..... I am more or less sure that you didn't have "horde" (chorus singing to be polite) singing at upper middle class Bengali pre-nuptials, I doubt whether you have it today also ..... and definitely not in the 60s which it is supposed to depict ..... (forget about the 20s ..... which the original novel was based on ..... but let's stick to the 60s ... that that's what the film makers say they wanted to bring forward into from the 20s ) .... guess this was just to give it an India-wide appeal .....

Well basically watched because my new roomie hasn't watched it before ..... but I fell asleep some 20 minutes to curtains I think ..... and as usual woke up 3 hours later ! God knows why I can't sleep less than that .....

Well some other time .... someone's calling on the cell ......

Chicken Pox

America is a strange place ..... here you have to have a car to go any where worth its salt ....
even the nearest shopping mall is 8 miles away .... and there is a limit to how much you can walk ...

I tried that when I first came here ..... its no joke walking that far to grab a cabbage !!
Even riding a bicycle is difficult, the so called freeways are so unfriendly to bike riders,
only on the backroads, which usually lead nowhere (nothing of a "civilizational" nature at least) sometimes end up as muddy ruts in woodland or turn back upon themselves, and just cater to a couple of houses along that road ....

What about "public transportation" you might ask ..... don't joke my friend is all I would say, except in the very big cities (NY, Chicago, Boston, LA, Frisco...)and their vicinity you don't have any worth while public transportation network .... everybody uses cars .... probably you would have to take a car ride to the nearest sulabh as well if it were India !! But yes, people can relieve themselves in the wooded patch off the road I guess, and in the US you do get to see people do that, India is not too bad man ..... the frequency is bound to be atleast ~10 times more ..... (three times the population, one third the area .... :-) ...)

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Last two weeks were a bit of a down-drift .... I contracted chicken pox from a friend who was returning from India, poor bloke had his rashes break out when he landed here, after enjoying 3 weeks of leisure at home !! .... atleast I had the worst period spending time at my apartment here !! The medicines they give you here are really powerful, back home in India, when we were young "pox" used to be a 2 week letdown .... here you are up and running in a week .... but I guess it is worse for children, because you cannot administer such high dose anti-virals .... Anyway it was nice seeing so many of my friends here getting concerned over me, and my apartment mates were so helpful by helping me out with some of my usual duties and by being considerate .... these little things makes one feel better so far away from home ....

Now I am feeling so much younger and energetic .... having "basically a childhood disease" at 26 makes one feel like this I guess ..... :-) ... however my fave is a motley patchwork of shades .... these will take some time to go I think .... (if at all they ever go) .... asked the doc the "medical" name ... and infection of "varicella zoster virus" .... quite a mouthful ....

Any way got to go .... there is a seminar to attend, let us see if I can find it interesting enough to listen to ... or may be 45 mins of napping or doodling .... !