..yours randomly!

(Blogging about some of my interesting experiences during my India trip this year...) 1. Gharonda: The Nest In India, poverty is so ubiquitous that it becomes invisible. What catches the eye is the new wealth: the dazzling malls, the exclusive brands and the middle class Indian’s ability to spend more money than their parents could ever dream of. A recurring encounter with poverty comes in the form of street children who descend like locusts at each traffic signal. With their skeletal bodies dressed in rags they beg and beg with hollow eyes for money or sell flowers and magazines. After a few initial encounters, they too become a part of the unseen. One of the most impressive people I met in India was a rosy cheeked, smiling young woman in my hometown Lucknow! We found out that we’d even gone to the same school, Loreto Lucknow, though she was a couple of years behind me. A young mother herself, Shachi runs an NGO called Ehsaas, which rehabilitates such street children.

The age of social networking via the internet has created deep social dilemmas. Till now, whenever you disliked a person, all you had to do was to pretend they didn't exist / avoid talking if thrown together / or in the worst case scenario exchange vague pleasantries and depart with an insincere "lovely-meeting-you". You congratulated yourself on passing the litmus test from your mom's manner book combined with a pleasant feeling of relief at not having to meet for another decade or four. The other party was oblivious that you'd been slinking into dark corners and jumping off bridges rather than meet them (or so you thought) ...and all was well with the world. But now there is Facebook and anybody can send you a friend request! And the thought of having them on your friend list getting minute to minute details of your fascinating life--(meha...is eating chips while listening to U2) the quizzes you take ('what kind of vegetable are you?') and your pr

I got my SO a pup for Valentine day. And now my life has become a misery. I have to point out that I was honest from the start. I told SO that I love dogs but am grossed out by poop picking. So the deal was that he will do the poop picking while i do the grooming, cuddling, loving, food-giving aunt bit. Though SO has pitched in to do the poop picking it's me who has been driven nuts. In the 5 days since she's been with us --she has bitten, scratched, chewed and peed inside. (though never pooped inside..coz of course that would make life difficult for SO whose job it is). She wails and barks when put inside her crate; eats and pees when put out of the crate; and has dug a hole in the neighbour's compost pile when I take her outside to play. My vocabulary has become limited to "No Bessie!" and my neighbours see me day in and day out as a wild eyed harridan with hair sticking out (she loves to chew my hair), dressed in a mangy coat and chewed up slippers (she lo

Twit: - Slang- A foolishly annoying person. (Definition free online dictionary) For months I ignored the hype around Twitter. But I'm a sucker for enticing looking boxy spaces which ask me confidential questions. So when the box at the Twitter website cooed like a particularly pleasant dove and invited me to confide in 140 characters: "what are you doing?"... I gave in. And wrote my first tweet: - "Should twitter users be called twits?" "101"--replied the box. (FYI -"101 means the number of characters left.) I thought my first tweet with its clever pun on the word 'twit’ was great but the rest of the Twitterati decided otherwise. It ignored me. Now if it had been FB or OS I'd have posted a dictionary definition of the word 'twit' as slang (as I have above :) but really there are not many definitions you can write in 140 characters. I thought of writing another tweet explaining the definition of 'twit' and the pun on '