Mumbai Diaries - 20 days of sheer experience.

1. If in Visual Entertainment Media, the day starts by afternoon and ends by next day morning. 
2. 4 out of 10 ppl you meet is Gujarati, and issh you end up talking to all in Gujarati and rephrase later in Hindi. :D
3. If a localite say " paas mein hai, you can go by walk" Do not trust.. Walked for an hour to reach the place. Phew.
4. You may have zillion relatives in Mumbai; try staying in a sharing Apt. Experience.
5. Take away food has its own charm here.
6. Walk, Walk n Walk until you sweat hard. It’s a cool trend here, you walk and talk.
7. Roadside Sandwich, Dabeli, Wada pau are anytime reliable to any restaurant.

8. People with celeb attitude are none other than RICKSHAWALAS.  How do you feel when 10 such rejects you daily?
9. House parties are most preferred and enjoyed than to travel to town for partying.
10. Your booze is just a call away. Home Delivery – boon.
11. Our knight in shining armour --- JUST DIAL.  Especially when its 10 pm and you girls are locked out of your flat, with keys inside.
12. Railway punching vouchers are time savers. Punch and board.
13. Local train goof ups : Boarding at wee hours towards Virar ( quiet sticky experience) , sat in a handicap coach (Discovered after  10 mins of boarding), boarded  1st class in 2nd  ticket. 

14. Save huge money on cab, use local. Eventually you get used to it.
15. You are married to your roommate. Be nice.
16. Be smart with Auto walas, or they will beat around the bush.
17. With street shopping, do street bargaining. It works.

18. You see many good faces. Smile, talk. Go bird watch.
19. Visit “THE JANTA BAR” – Palli Naka, coolest bar I have been to. Its Decent—Come on in.
20. Sit long hours on Bandstand, Carter road, Marine drive, Juhu with friends. Dub over the sleazy hanky panky scenes around.

21. Deserts at Candies. Period.

22. Long horny traffics. Metro to blame.
23. Carry a direction meter, any sane would confuse. West or East?
24. No scratch accident is abusive national issue here.
25. Visit Malls, drool over international brands, bump into bollywood celeb, have Ice cream, come back home.

Myth = Mithya - A Book Review

Mythology is the imaginary world that we have created by fascinating grandma ma stories, or those long awaited sunday mythological epic serials on television. Hindu Mythology for me is the most exciting and intriguing subject. 

The concept of 330 million Hindu gods is still unbelievable to many. This forced me to pick up, Myth = Mithya - A handbook of Hindu Mythology by Dr. Devdutt Pattnaik from the book shelf. A brilliant handbook on Hindu Mythology which is divided into three sub parts, Brahma and Saraswati, Vishnu and Laxmi, Shiva and Shakti. The three supreme Gods. The book has short stories associated to these gods/ goddesses from Vedas, Puranas, and folklore. God creates world as Brahma, sustains it as Vishnu and destroys it as Shiva. The life is a circle and every beginning has an end to it. "If myth is an idea, mythology is the vehicle of that idea" well defined by the author.

This book glued me till the last page. Each and every character in Hindu Mythology is known or has heard before. But the story behind each character is unveiled dramatically in this book. Few stories and instances described by the author is so trivial and connects the dots with the Gods and gods. Mind here, Gods/ Goddesses with capital G is the supreme power and creator, while the gods/goddesses are the infinite creation of the Gods. Like Shiva is a God, while Indra is god.
 

The stories of gods in this book are retold so beautifully that the reader is forced to nudge the person around and insist them to read this book or force them to hear the interesting story you just read. I couldn’t resist myself though. Few of the short god stories really shocked me.

 Like why there is full moon day and why the moon waxes? Chandra's favorite wife is Rohini, he waxes as he move towards her, and wanes as he moves away from her. 

Spending one day with Lord Brahma is equal to a thousand years on earth. (Again Mithya)

In the beginning was the self = the Purusha. He split himself and created the Prackriti. Purusha is "man" and prackriti is “nature". Purusha is conscious being, observer and inner reality while prakriti is ever changing, outer reality. All living organisms possess seed that helps procreate. Plants, animals and women (read prakriti) shed their seed involuntarily during pollination. The human male (Purusha) has the freedom to shed the seed. So white, the colour is Purusha the man, inner soul. Reason for the differentiation between men and women.

The Shiva ling that people worship, is one of the "Shiva roops" caught in midst of making love to Parvati.

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik is a popular mythologist, who writes this book with such an ease and simplicity which grips the reader. On a personal level, mythology has always engrossed me, so did this book do. One of my best reads. Now I have many mythological stories in my inbuilt hard drive to take these stories my grand children to bed.

A Photostory - Wine making

                                                                       

Pic -1:The location chosen to plant wine grapes is perhaps the most important decision a wine maker considering Climate, weather, topography, and soil composition.

 Pic-2:February to March is when grapes ripe in India.

 Pic-3:It’s important for grapes to be picked carefully so they’re not bruised or split.

Pic-4:White wine grapes are crushed and their juice is separated from their skins. Red wines skins will remain with their juice to impart their colour, tannins, and flavour to the wine.

 Pic-5: It is during fermentation that the grape's sugars are converted to alcohol (specifically ethyl alcohol) and carbon dioxide.

Pic-6: Aging process - Older the Wine, it taste better.

 

   

   Pic-7: The final step is bottling and labelling.

Countdown to Mayan Doomsday

Apparently, the world is going to end on December 21st, 2012. The countdown has begun. In some way or the other the Earth will cease to exist. The Mayan Calendar story is talk of the town. Earth has survived many doomsdays, how serious is this end.

                                                        Pic : Wooden Mayan Calendar.

The Mayan calendar stops at the end of the year 2012. The calendar was constructed by an advanced civilization called the Mayans around 250-900 AD. Presently, southern cities of Mexico. The people living in Mayan society exhibited very advanced written skills and had an amazing ability when constructing cities and urban planning. The Mayans are probably most famous for their pyramids and grand buildings. They used many different calendars and viewed time for spiritual cycles. While the calendars had practical uses, such as social, agricultural, commercial and administrative tasks, there was a very heavy religious element.  It was determined "day 1" as August 11th, 3114 BC. And it was also easy to calculate the date at which the calendar would end -- December 21st, 2012.

We’ve sailed by several hundreds of dooms day predictions. Here’s a list of some dates that have passed us by.

 1537: According to French astrologer Pierre Turrel’s calculations the world was to end this year. He also provided three alternative options: 1544, 1801 and 1814.

1794: Charles Wesley, a founder of the Methodist Church predicted the end of the world this year; his brother John, a fellow co-founder later said the beginning of the end would begin in 1836.

1910: The May 18, 1910 passing of Halley’s Comet was to be accompanied by death due to gassing – the comet’s tail was said to be giving of poisonous gases. This is perhaps the first doomsday theory based on scientific fact.

March 10, 1982: This end of the world theory is something Hollywood would have been proud of. According to the book ‘The Jupiter Effect’, published in 1974, certain planetary alignments would create a gravitational pull that would create solar flares, sun spots and/or earthquake. The most that happened that day was that the tide rose .44mm higher than normal.

March 8, 1998: An Indian doomsday cult, based out of Karnataka, proclaimed the world would end with a series of earthquakes; that the Indian subcontinent would sink into the ocean a la Atlantis and that Lord Vishnu would put in an appearance. Weird weather would signal the end.

2008: A British religious group, The Lord's Witnesses, predicted the end of the world, the result of a catastrophic (there can’t be any other kind!) world war. The prediction was made on the basis of ‘codes’ embedded in the Bible.

Hollywood released a film in 2009 based on Mayan Calendar phenomenon, “2012”. “Nothing will happen. Many hopes and dreams are yet to finish.” says Keyur Patel, being optimist when asked about the D day coming soon. Sneha Shah, on the other side says, “Some or the other way nature has started giving signs. World will come to an end someday. The date is a myth”. While few scholars deny disaster, few are waiting for the doomsday to pass by us.Personally i have lot many things in my, "TO DO LIST BEFORE TO GO" to complete before i welcome Doomsday.

i Steve Jobs: A Life to Live.

                                 

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." And so he created passion for mankind. From Macintosh to iMac, from iPod to iPhones. When people ask and debate on what does i stand for in all Apple products? I have my own form of it, It stands for Intelligent. Intelligent technology that Steve jobs as a creator gifted to mankind. 

Every successful human being has a life story to say, so has Steve Jobs. Born to an unwed American graduate student, and was unwanted and put up for adoption to only those who are college graduates. But later the biological mother discovered that adopted parents were not college graduates, and she refused to sign final adoption papers. When promised that Steve would go to college, they were finally declared as Steve jobs legal parents. Later in the life, when Steve Jobs joined college spending his parent’s entire life’s hard earned money. He realised no value out of it, so he decided to drop out and work towards what interests him. Dropping out after 6 months of college, sleeping on the floors in friend’s room and struggling with financial crunch. He joined Calligraphy classes, which he knew had no practical use in his life, still continued because he loved what he did. This helped him in the designing of Mac, with beautiful typography, which we still enjoy in our computers.  Steve Jobs was 20, when he and his friend Steve wozniak started “Apple” in his father’s garage.  It was just a start. Apple continued to expand and from 2 there were 4000 employees in Apple which turned out to be 2 billion dollar company. With new experienced personnel appointed as CEO of Apple, at a point of time, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple Macintosh division. And it was a beginning of new era. Steve jobs started his own company NeXT & Pixar. Later in 5 years, Pixar became one of the initial world’s first computers to make animated feature film. Toy story was the first animated film from Pixar. As it is said, chase the excellence and success would follow, with Steve jobs success, eventually Apple bought Next and Pixar. Steve Jobs was again in his own created company,” Apple”. 
 

Steve jobs always had inclination towards spiritual part of life. Be it going to Hare Krishna temple in his early ages or turning as Buddhist from India. So he had this positive energy in him, when he discovered cancer in his pancreas, which doctors said was incurable.  During the treatment, doctors were amazed to see the rare tumour which was curable from a surgery. And thankfully he is healthy now. With such a splendid graph of life, Steve Jobs is ranked at 17, World’s Most Powerful people. With Apple’s latest product launch iCloud, I say world has already iSteve Jobs.  

Staring!

Men are from Mars, and females are from Venus. And on earth we get proof of this phenomenon. Its from the childhood we Indian girls are taught men are little superior then girls. No there are no such lessons or subjects on these, but the day to day experience teaches you this lessons.

Girl is dressed to look beautiful, and if boys look at you, oodles, and drools is the sign that you are successful in getting that look. Oh i see, that’s why few girls live with such a chin-up and walk away phenomena against men. Unlike always, I’d like to blame it all to the men. Don’t get that STARING as full time job. Universe knows, no extra force is to be given in this lovable job.I mean, how really amazed can one be looking at a girl? And the span of amazement is like never ending. The girl with decently dressed tip to toes,oh so it’s the girls beauty that is aww strucking. But does really anyone care, that the beauty you are enjoying is not comfortable with that appreciation? The scan from your hair to your shoes.

Mumbai Local train travels have their own charm. But yes, its said, everything that has its benefits has its own drawbacks. It was weekend trip to Mumbai, sideseeing, shopping and feeling the Mumbai air, we took local train,and  the co travelers takes a full scan look as I aboard. And you can see where the eyes are. And what they get? Is the universal question.

But I am okay with the whole Staring thing. It has now the value of “ay” in OKAY. I say thanks for making me feel, what I am “WOMAN”.

Fool yourself.

The art of acceptance, the art of absorbing new things in life, inhaling the foreign air and making it your own is the new definition of Adaptable. How difficult is to adapt something in life? Ok, this question comes with various expected and unexpected answers. Adapting something that you already wanted is easily digested or I say happily lived and accepted. Adapting something which you are already alarmed of, comes with the future acceptance nature. Adapting something you have never ever thought of in your conscious world, comes as a shock.. That means, unexpected adaptation is equals to shock. Lets not get into that math. But yes, adaptation is a task, a huge one!

I was in a foreign land. Everything was brand new. A new start. All that you have done till date looks blur. New place, new people, different culture, different thoughts, all together a different way of living. The life that was lived, the basics that was absorbed, the living that was sensed, felt , lived and now the sense of adoption made me feel, as i am reincarnated . How difficult is to start from zero? Leaving everything far behind. Oh yes, it’s a nature of life. Learn new things. One should be open for it. But learning those things in a different manner or style is called Adaptability. Change is the spice of life. But when everything around is changed its more spicier and indigestible.  

Subconscious in you plays the game. It forces you not to adopt few things in life, because they are against law of nature, or the basics that you have learnt. But yes, there are few tactics that life teaches you to handle it. Ignore, Divert, Love adapting. Fool yourself with the present system.And adapting is easier then you thought. This is what my fool mind says.

Again, it’s a tough fight to adapt.