Random Thought...

Sashimi - Sushi Me!

Don't you have days when you go thinking of food? Not food in general, but in super specific : I wish I could eat ________ from ______ (fill in appropriate food from relevant food joint). Well, I'd been feeling like eating sushi all weekend. Lots of sushi. :) The weekend came and went and sushi didn't happen. Sigh.

Now, sushi has not been a favourite food always, do not mistake me.Like every mallu, mad or otherwise, I love my seafood. But yet another quirk that Serenity and I share is that we hate fishy fish. Yes, I know fish is supposed to taste like fish and not chocolate, but its the fishy fish that we don't like, the fish that smells fishy. And raw fish? eeeugh. Calamity has always been wary of sushi because of the ickiness of eating raw fish... (yeah, getting over that was a jump) until, she went to a Japanese food joint here with a sushi enthusiast ! Before I ramble again, small foot note : I LOVE wasabi, I love pungent mustard that explodes in my sinuses! And Wasabi is what made me put my first mouthful of (raw fish!!) sushi in my mouth, with a warning beforehand that I would spit it out if i didnt like it....

I bit...I chewed..my mouth exploded with flavour and I was hooked!

Fishy? Not AT ALL ! Tasty? Most Definitely! And that, is how I swallowed my pride, along with the sushi(raw fish!).

So now that I've gone and rambled all over the countryside about how wonderful that was, I'll tell the rest of the story really short.

- I, Calamity craved sushi

- Calamity didnt get to eat sushi over the weekend.

- Calamity went on an insanely long shoot on Monday (6 hours - for the recording of a 20 minute shoot!) and called Serenity and told him how sad she was and how badly she neeeded sushi by this point.

- Calamity and Serenity got to the restaurant before it closed orders! YAY!!(Yeah, last order is at 9:30)

- Calamity and Serenity had a platter each of sushi.

- Calamity smiled all the way home and then smiled some more. So much happiness happened that she woke up smiling the next day!

And that, is how much satisfaction there is to be had in fulfilling a food craving!!

Just a random thought....

Calamity and Honesty......

Thankyou Primitive Lyric for my first EVER online badge. I'm rather kicked about it.
So then I get this comment saying I've been tagged, and having no earthly clue what that meant, I tracked back to her blog to see what "being tagged" entailed. And therefore, here are 10 things about me, honestly.....

1. If I like you and consider you my friend, I will trust you implicitly... and nothing saddens me more than when that trust is broken. The journey from friend to non-entity happens in one step.
2. I cannot tolerate stupidity, it irritates me.
3. I am easily irritated.
4. I expect too much out of poor Serenity... intuition, understanding etc etc. (much more than one can logically expect from a man !!)
5. I love and hate horror movies in equal measure.
6. I cannot draw to save my life ! (yes, and THAT is why I use a computer to render 3d spaces! My perspective drawing is Escher-esque in a most disturbing way!)
7. Being language impaired PISSES ME OFF.
8. I have a dirty mind. If there are two meanings to something, I will invariably get the dirty one first. :D heheheeh.
9. I grin and giggle when my flight takes off and lands.... I love flying !
10. I can eat chocolate all day.... Give me chocolate and water and I'll be a happy person. (high on sugar and obscenely obese, but happy!!)

And I tag:

Egg

An Excerpt from Desiderata

Desiderata: (Latin for "desired things", plural of desideratum) is an inspirational prose poem by Max Ehrmann about attaining happiness in life....

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.......

.....And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul......

This is one piece of writing that I first came across in junior college.... it has comforted me, made me see a lot of things and meant different things to me at different times... Today, these particular paragraphs make sense to me as I try to make sense of the death of an old friend..... Of someone snatched away before her life even began...

Through everything we're all going through, the only things that came to mind when I heard that she was gone was

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,

and remember what peace there may be in silence......."

And so I looked up the rest of it again to read to myself... and found meaning in it again.

Its an incredibly beautiful piece and if you haven't ever come across it, here it is for you.

I hope it gives to you all that it has given me.

Life is Short....

... and never have I been made more aware of this fact as when I received a call late few nights ago saying she's in a coma. I wrote this post when I heard she was brain dead, but somehow held back on posting it because I still hoped with all my heart that some miracle would work and she'd step back from the brink. She didn't. She's gone.

Death never seems final until it strikes someone close to you. Suddenly she goes from being a person to a collection of memories. I know now that I'll never see her again, not even by accident. She's been more a good friend's friend than my own... part of the same circle, we've shared tiffins and friends.. She and my friend, they shared a name.. I think that made them closer than any one could imagine. By the time we passed out of school, they were practically one entity. We always spoken of them in the same sentence. And I spoke to my friend today and she sounded bereft... "There's only one of us now, ya.... Nobody needs to call us by our initials any more.... There's only one of us left..."

She danced her way through life.. she danced her way into our lives in the seventh grade... and though we drifted apart over the years, our paths met, crossed and parted again...She'll dance again... I know she will.. Somebody who loved the idea of love, she was to marry in a few months time... I called her crazy when her Michael Jackson obsession made her scratch his initials on her arm...laughed at her, laughed with her and shook my head sometimes when they played hooky... I remember shooting rubber bands at her in class, and her uncanny way of popping into photographs... I remember her covering for me (who could only serve really good) in a crucial volleyball match.. I remember the exaggerated "Bambaiyya" accent she used a la 'Rangeela'. Today, I'm not remembering the reason why we grew apart.

I'm aching today for my friend. For the one who's here and the one who's not here anymore. For dreams left undreamt and a life left incomplete. For the ones who have to pick up the pieces and move on. For the void she's left in the lives of those she belonged in. I'm aching for a boy left heartbroken and a family left grieving for their little girl. For people like me who're only left wondering why we never mended those cracks when they first appeared. I'm wondering whether she saw us all, all over, praying for a miracle for her, and now trying to believe the reality that we're trying to grapple with - a reality that doesn't have her in it any more.

Dear friend, be at peace where ever you are.

A Series of Unfortunate Events.

I saw this on someone's blog today and remembered an article (true story, yes!) that I had written based on my flatmate's and my experiences with domestic help in the city-that-never-sleeps. It has languished in my drafts folder forever....

My mother often says that she'd like to write a book on her experiences with different maids over the years. From the one that bit my sister to the one who chased me around the house trying to break my skull with a butter-churn, to the one who had the bigamous husband (who was married to her sister, no less!!), they're all worth a lot of page space.

Having moved out with a fellow designer from the dry state and having polished off the better part of a bottle of very pricey scotch that a friend had gifted me, I was rather alarmed to see the remaining alcohol's level dip rapidly in the bottle. Does Scotch evaporate?, I wondered. I checked and rechecked that the bottle was closed tightly, but lo and behold! the next time I checked on it, the level had dipped alarmingly AGAIN!

Having come to the conclusion that flatmate had been having a night-cap to relieve work-pressure, I did not spare it a second thought, though I had assumed upto this point that she was strictly a wine drinker, while she assumed that I had been imbibing copious amounts of scotch!

It turns out that we were subjected to a rather one-of-a-kind specimen of the house help category. Let's call her Urvashi. Let it be known that Urvashi was a silent shadow upto this point, who came, did her bit and disappeared, with little conversation exchanged with either of us. And then one evening, came a phone-call that rattled us both!

It was our house-broker, who happened to be in the area while we were both at work, to register a tremendous ruckus ensuing from our humble abode. Initial suspicion that it was the TV was quickly dispelled when he, and a LOT of other people came upon Urvashi, who was not just a wee bit tipsy, but completely SMASHED!

So much so, that she could barely stand, and so was sitting there wailing her head off!

But wait, it gets better!!

Not content with the level of inebriation she was at, Urvashi had evidently intended to continue the party, because a search of her possessions revealed not one, but TWO bottles of country liquor that she presumably brought along to supplement my (now meagre!) quantity of hooch!

The little to-do involved her screeching, building people assembling, many tries to bring her to her senses (including water being flung at her through the balcony grill - we were on the ground floor), and finally ended in our broker taking away her keys, getting the woman into an auto and in both of us receiving calls from him, informing us of the exciting activities of the evening!! Since our building society mainly comprises of senior citizens, we were a little apprehensive and wondering when the eviction notice would come! But methinks, that this being SUCH an unusual situation, they figured it was really not something we could have predicted.

So now, we're looking for house help again... and this time the main question in the

interview is "Have you or any member of your family been prone to bingeing on alcohol?

If yes, then how many drinks can you take before getting completely wasted?"