Blame it on the Kindle..

Whoa! 2 weeks and then some have passed since I last blogged! To be honest I am shocked! But then I do have 2 very plausible excuses - some thing that are very apparent to attribute the decline to. So here goes nothing -

1. PhD is time-consuming - Who knew?? But apparently being in the final year can have its toll on personal effects like the blog and such. I vow to bounce back soon!
2. Kindle! - Not so shockingly, every spare moment I have in commute or in transit is spent poring over the contents of some book or the other of over 100 of my favourite books all queued in - give or take a few new ones bought from the Kindle store. So I walk Kindle, I hop and jump Kindle, even. Admittedly its not smart to cross roads engrossed in reading. But stopping short of that, every spare moment is gone in rekindling my passion for non-stop reading! And the delight, oh delight of e-ink cannot so much be stated as experienced!

So enough excuses. I am here to bid adieu to clearly the best month of the year - November!

Lets hope this blog ends this year not with a whimper, but with a bang. Stay tune in December! Happy Holiday season everyone!

Traveling solo..

Doing a PhD often entails solo travel, be it for meetings, conferences or workshops. Worse, sometimes you're left to tour exotic locations all by yourself (especially if your husband can't make it with you). Even otherwise, I have come across a lot of people who aren't squeamish about traveling alone. But here's a common issue. When you travel alone, do you end up with more pictures of the place than of you with some of the sights/sounds out there? This question is along the lines of another discussion we had over a year ago on MindBlogging - if you could ever go to movie/restaurant alone.

To answer the question raised above, I am guessing...YES for a vast majority of people. Either that.. or awkwardly positioned self-shot pictures which end up having your face 3D upfront with vestiges of the monument you wanted to capture in the background. Even while traveling in groups, I've noticed that most people are not comfortable requesting a stranger to take a picture of the entire group. And thats often a combination of one of two reasons - they are afraid that they'd mind in that we're disturbing them or that the picture they end up taking is going to be sub-par. However I believe somethings better than nothing and you could always ask someone else to take a shot if you aren't entirely satisfied by it. Or you could travel alone, use a tripod and not be shy to smile wide at a camera positioned 10 feet away with the timer blinking for 10 seconds with the possibility that some jerk is going to run away with your equipment any second. Ok the last bit is a possibility, even if unlikely. 

So what is the solution? I know some people just don't mind not having enough pictures of them in a location and it matters to them only what they absorbed visually and felt while being there. But then again, I don't belong to the "some people" category. I love having my pictures taken in all the new places I visit with whatever needs to be captured in the picture. And so, I approach random touristy-looking strangers and make exchange offers with them. Their picture for mine? A never-fail barter system. Even if only a handful of shots are up to your own quality-control, at least you have them. And even if a bunch of people turn you down, you don't know them and are probably never going to run into them ever again. And for every person that refuses to take your picture (I am yet to find one), there are 10 or more that will. So the bottom line? Don't blame shyness or your own loneliness for the fact that you didn't get enough pictures to a place you visited (unless you really really didn't mind) and instead, get out there, speak the word or play the charades (if you are language-stricken) and get what you want - a picture of you.

PS: When you give a camera to someone to take your picture, please please let it be a point 'n' shoot. If it's a fancy SLR, unless the person you are giving it has had some experience, you have a guaranteed blur!

The justifiable hiatus?

First up my sincere apologies to all my readers for the perpetual vanishing act that I seemed to have mastered on this blog, what with the lack of updates. But at least for the last month I have a valid excuse. The whirlwind activity-packed trip to India of course! Of course there were a few sparse updates on MindBlogging that must've clued you in on that. But none further. However we just got back to Paris and I successfully snuck in an unwanted visitor back with me - Mr Flu!

With the flu having a hold on me it's been a disastrous 10-12 days of nose blowing, vapour inhalations, endless tablets, multivitamins, hot teas, samahans, kashayams, coughing, phlegm and all the gross components of the package. And the best part? There's no relief yet. I am indeed posting this blog smelling of a potent mix of Amrutanjan and Axe (potent to me but evidently not to the cold itself). BTW who knew that blowing your nose every few seconds could drain you of so much energy?

Be that as it may, there's so much to do back here in Paris! The PhD isn't going to finish itself, nor are the endless lines of abstracts, reports and experiments. Add to that cooking for yourself after a month's break of eating all the yummies in the world, it's like be transported back to mini-hell. On the other hand, it is Pillayar Chathurthi today! So lets ban all the negativities, look out to the brighter side of the grass, wish for good things and hope for the best for all!

Happy Birthday Ganesha!

The Ganesh pooja post-completion. 

 Ganesha up-close.

Blog drop

I just went back to MindBlogging and was shocked that after a third of July having passed, there was just one blog post and that too a pictorial one. Well I guess that goes to show how busy the days have been. Indeed with the cleanroom closing for summer and the days melding into evenings melding into football nights, there's hardly been any time to pause and breathe, to chill or seethe on the blog. With the impending conference trip and more work deadlines, I am going to guess that July is going to be pretty sparse out here.

However I do have some unfinished drafts from before and I'll make an effort to finish and post them at the very least. Other than that, Paris has gone the far end of summer and we're all gasping for water amid the humid days and the tortorous rides in crowded trains and disturbed transport. Hail Summer!

On a different note, I am super sad that the month of football worldcup is drawing to a close and leading to an all unexpected finalé today... Go Oranje! (Oh and what's the deal with the Oracle octopus anyways and why is it almost always picking the winner from my list of losers?) More to follow soonish.. watch this space and thanks for visiting so far!

The fine line...

This is about the fine line between sharing details and sharing too much details on social networks like Facebook and stuff. Recently I've marveled how some people have absolutely no qualms in posting stuff about themselves that may potentially harm anything from their professional opportunities to their personal relationships. On that note, here's a poll on where I stand in your opinion...

Brushing the results aside for a moment, I think most people are a little lost on what can be shared what's too much information. And I gave it a little thought and came up with just 1 question that they need to answer -

Would they be comfortable with their boss and their mom reading whatever's been posted?

Well that sounds fairly simple. But sometimes some people neither have their moms nor their bosses on their lists and hence have no boundaries either. On the other hand, its not just about the inappropriate content either, not just about posting pictures of one completely zoned out after a night of partying or the likes of it. It's more about sharing too much. Like breaking up over Facebook or publicizing one's fights and misgivings, rants and fantasies about other people (not celebrities) which are very real. I haven't understood that. For instance if someone broke up with someone else, why would they want to actually scream all over Facebook about it? I have the same question about a million other scenarios. And it's like people's personal boundaries have eroded into ambiguity with the popularity of social networking. Now getting "likes" or unwarranted advice/comfort from relative strangers is more welcome than actually sorting things out with one close confidante.

A while back, I read on Dear Prudence that someone found out that her best friend was getting married only through FB. That's just ridiculous. On the other hand posting information about the really big events might be ok (not like an invitation, but like an information). Like buying a house or moving to a new city- surely things everyone would like to know and find out eventually anyways. But then there's another thing I realized even as I write this post. Each person will have different boundaries. For instance what might be my too much might just be normal for someone else. Which makes the whole post moot, I guess? But then there's still something to ponder about. How much is too much? Comments appreciated.

The upsurge

Maybe most of you haven't had time to react to the proposal of change or the change itself on the blog. But it did work for me "hit-wise". 239 unique visitors yesterday! Yoo hoo.. Thanks and keep them coming!

Unveiled...

Here goes nothing. Love it? Hate it? Indifferent? Give it sometime and let it grow on you. Thanks for the votes but I realized this was one of those things I wanted to do than consider it a burden.

Here's hoping the template has nothing to do with why you visit MindBlogging. Keep coming!

Should MindBlogging be remodelled?

Hello hello,

Having reaped the benefits of renovating this blog layout after some hard work for over a year, I've decided it needs to change. And this time I am going to go very plain jane and probably very ordinary. But before I make the massive switch, I'd like to poll you all.



And of course based on your responses, I am going to act on it and may take a hiatus from blogging accordingly. Thanks for voting!

MindBlogging goes global..

I check the visitor map for MindBlogging periodically just to see where the word has spread. Today I had a nice surprise in store. Here, see for yourself!

Thank you all for visiting even in this time of sporadic posting! I promise I have 3-4 posts sitting as drafts just waiting for completion. And I am getting to it. Meanwhile, as always, keep visiting and keep commenting. Xoxo.

Behind the veil of anonymity..

What would you do if you could do something and you could get away with it? Something like an invisibility cloak where you could glide along doing good/bad undetected? Unfortunately such powers mostly always invoke that tiny part in us that wants to do something "bad" and get away with it. They don't say for nothing that with "great power comes great responsibility". However with the invisibility cloak being a not-too-distant reality, what I am really talking about is the whole wide world of web anonymity. Where it's all too easy to create fake email IDs, fake logins to most things, where there is no real verification, where it's so easy to word your thoughts in someone else's lingo and pass it off for the real thing... where hate mail is sort of second nature and what not. I will be honest and say that I did create a fake email ID but to my credit, I haven't sent any emails to anyone from that. I sort of use it on movie websites or other random newsletter subscriptions which require email verification and where I don't want spam on my primary ID. But I would assume that almost everyone has multiple IDs which they use for work/fun or whatever else. I am unaware of anyone who has used a fake ID to actually get some message across to someone they knew but who wouldn't have a clue of who they were from the ID. That would be fun though and potentially gossip-generating in this dried out era of time, but dishonest, nonetheless. This is sort of one of those things I am on the fence on. While expressing your thoughts as your own is probably best, anonymity sure helps when you want to avoid any long-drawn repercussions. Of course the whole "hurt" factor is killed as well... which explains why even on MindBlogging when people want to leave comments that are not concurrent with my thoughts, they are usually anonymous while they take the effort to sign in when it's all praise. What do you guys think? This time, anonymous comments are welcome. There is some comfort behind the veil after all...

The inner paradox

Sometimes I am amazed by what I want to do and what I really want to do and how much they differ. And this paradox is usually a result of fulfilling other's expectations of me, projecting a more flattering image of myself or something similarly irrelevant. Atleast that's understandable when it's something stupid. Like not eating the last bit of the shared chocolate-something-delicious at a restaurant for the want of not appearing gluttonous even though you'd really just like to have it. I am actually talking more about things that you'd normally think are more serious and hence the course of action, pretty straight-forward. Like reactions in my case. I consider myself a true Scorpion in every sense of the word (though not believing all that much these days in all that Linda Goodman astrological mess - ok, there's another paradox for you). You would then think that negative reactions like spite should come easily to me. But yet again, I am caught in the middle of being truly vengeful and just plain nice and mostly the good trumps the evil. And the part of me that believes that I am capable of true spite is truly saddened. See the paradox? Even being good can sometimes make you feel bad. As always I am going to extrapolate a simple thought to something a bit more complex. Some people for instance just deserve to be at the receiving end of spite sometimes and the “bad” that you’re feeling is being unable to mete out what you think is the right treatment to them. The really funny part is where only the bad things stand out in our heads immediately whilst obliterating everything good that might’ve been in the past. One bad experience can wipe out a multitude of good ones in a second while it takes more than just one good experience to overcome just the one bad experience. Isn’t that weird? Go on, give it a thought. Think of that restaurant you stopped going to because their service sucked one time even though they’ve given umpteen good ones before that... or that brand of milk you stopped buying because once it was bad. Ever noticed it’s similar with people too? One act of distrust for example is going to take a long time to wipe away from memory while all those good things before were not given enough credit as they were. Scientifically it means just one thing - Good and bad are neither white and black respectively nor weigh the same on any scale. Why all these inequalties? It’s just in human nature, I guess.

On that philosophical note, this post marks the 600th for MindBlogging overall and the 200th this year. Pretty momentous, I'd say... Thank you readers for keeping me motivated. Keep MindReading!

Much ado about nothing

Ah well, this is one of those posts again where I discuss nothing's going on and shockingly it's twice this month! All around me, in most blog addresses I know of, there's hardly any update. Of course for you American soil junta, it means that Thanksgiving is on and that means holidays! So Happy Thanksgiving!! But for the rest of us and apparently a lot of us, either nothing's been going on or we've not found enough things to blog about. Kind of makes me miss those days when I saw blogs in every situation. But that seems to be the problem... apparently most situations that recur have been accounted for at some point or the other on this blog... And that makes November, the hit month of last year, this year's lowest in post count. Hmph. Anyhoo, on a completely unrelated note, S n I got totally hooked to The Big Bang Theory, all by chance. I had downloaded one season having heard of it from someone and turns out, it was one of the easiest serials to get hooked to since Friends. And before we knew it, we downloaded all the episodes that there are and were seeing them at shocking rates of 20 episodes a day. Consequently, we ran out through the weekend. That apart, it's been busy work days, busier evenings with new found sports activity and gaming on the PS3. All that equates to irregular blogger. My apologies. Let's hope the year ends a bang in December, and not like this whimper. Thanks for visiting MindBlogging regularly, y'all n Happy Holidays again!

Wakeup MindBlogging!

Holy crap! This has been my slackiest period ever as far as MindBlogging is concerned (except for the lull after the first post ever). But it's unimagineable that I haven't blogged in weeks nor checked updates on anyone else's blog. Of course this could mean one of two things - I've been terribly busy or that I've lost interest in blogging. Mercifully, it's the first one. Either ways, it seems inexcuseable at the moment. So what've I been upto ever since I last blogged?

We've been to Parc Asterix for Halloween
We've been to many restaurants in Paris celebrating everything from birthdays to Wednesdays....
We've met all our friends here more regularly than ever before...
I've become terribly serious about my PhD. It's not a joke anymore.
The weather in Paris has deteriorated as quickly as the light has faded from our days..
I've fallen back on tried and tested recipes. Time to break the mould again.
We've had more people at the new house than ever before at the old one..
And last but not least, we went to the beautiful wine region of Chablis here in France. The white wine from here is world famous. And from everything I saw and tasted, it well deserves the reputation. I leave you with a taste of Chablis right here...


Here's welcoming my month of the year! And where are my loyal commentors? I miss you guys!

Comments anyone?

Well well... here's where we get to the heart of the blogger's world. Comments. Without the comments, it seems almost unacknowledged that your blog gets read at all, but for the Statcounter that sits there proclaiming that 150 people have visited your blog in a single day. That sounds great... but with no comments, it's hard to tell if people enjoyed or cussed your blog for it's contents. Well, the bigger person may say that they don't care and that they use it as an outlet for their emotions, blah.. but we know that in every bigger person, there hides a tiny little part that wishes that people would just comment! And it's not a big ask, considering that we're the ones who sit n dole out every aspect of our lives for dissection while the rest of you only have to put in some words of encouragement, support, acknowledgement or in pertinent cases, make relevant contributions to the discussions in question.

Of course I realize that not everyone will enjoy everything you write about. But does that authorize them to leave anonymous one-liners that neither relate to the content of the post nor do justice to the rest of the stuff you've written about? I don't think so. Like my friend Gandalf pointed out in the comments section of the previous post, if you have nothing good to say, you should probably say nothing at all. And this is strictly in relevance to unrelated comments that contribute nothing to the content of the post. On the other hand, a healthy debate about some discussion is more than welcome and we've seen it happen in quite a few topics in the past. So does it make me vain if I delete these anonymous comments that are plain derogatory? Probably. But it's in keeping with the fact that these comments are left anonymous for a reason. Does that sound reasonable? No anonymous comments on this one please.

Being Jaya

I saw this movie called Julie and Julia yesterday. To make short of the story, it's about how one woman makes a life out of challenging herself into trying all the recipes written by a famous chef within 1 year and keeping it up by creating a blog. It charts her triumphs, her meltdowns and how she thinks that she is the center of the universe and how she is more worried about disappointing her readers than herself. It set me thinking. It is so true of almost everyone who blogs, I guess. Not always for the disappointment factor, but also for the treading-the-fine-line factor, especially on sensitive issues.

The weird thing about having a personal blog is that it's not really a personal space. But it is something I've chosen to share with everyone, not something I've been forced to. Over the course of MindBlogging, I realize that I have expressed my views over a variety of things/incidents/experiences, blah. And of course there are 2 sides to every coin. While some people agree with my view point, others don't. And that's perfectly alright. There's a reason this is my blog. It's about my thoughts (sorry about center-of-the-universe vibe). And unless you're me, we can agree to disagree.

The ripple effect

Loose definition: Sorta like a Mexican wave that spreads around from the place it started.

Ah, have you noticed something? Many bloggers aren't writing all of a sudden. Confused? Scroll down to the 'I spy' section on MindBlogging (find it on the column on the right) and look under each blog to see when it was last updated. These are the blogs I "follow". Apart from a couple of updates (after more than a few weeks), the rest of the bloggers and inadvertantly the blogs, have reached stagnation. Now scroll up to the part of MindBlogging's archives. See the dwindling number of blogs from hale n hearty June to now? It's begun crawling.. And I assure you that apart from me actually having been busy and out of the country and on vacation and stuff, a part of it is certainly attributed to the ripple effect. Everyone else has given up writing and my own motivation to keep the wheels moving is winding down. Earlier I used to find bloggables on all sorts of situations... now I am having to hunt.

Come on fellow bloggers... let's rise again!

For the people who came here hoping to read something fabulously interesting, I am sorry. But here's a peace offering. I promise you won't regret reading this one - 20 weirdest craigslist ads of all time. Enjoy!

Je suis bizee

Dear Readers,

I sincerely apologize for not having been able to update this space for about a week now. Sounds less to you? Feels like eternity to me!! Having been pretty regular with MindBlogging, I find it oddly unsettling that my thought-flow has been arrested enroute to making it on the blog due to unforeseen busy-ness. With the vacation fast approaching and work remaining to be completed and S's parents here, there's just enough time to breathe and exist. Once the vacations start, you can be assured that I will be back in full swing.
Until then, please hang in there.
Cheers!
J

Great expectations

Ah.. seeing as it’s Mother’s Day today (Happy Mother’s Day btw), I couldn’t have chosen a more opportune moment to write about this topic – that first child. This is a topic on which I’ve had various discussions with my friends. It’s no shocker that these days, unlike the past, people aren’t popping kids the tenth month after their marriage (for the international readers, having kids out of wedlock in India is considered illegitimate and is highly frowned upon). Instead they choose to get to know their spouses in new light even if they knew them from before. They discover living together, make plans for the future, including financial stability amongst other things in preparation of bringing new life onto the Earth. But that’s typical of this generation, I would imagine. Of course, I understand that there are different reasons for children being born as well - “accidental” babies and all those not-so-flattering instances when kids are conceived for a variety of reasons other than truly wanting them – to repair a marriage, caving to parental pressure, to become the center of attention,  to spice up the marriage by adding a new dimension, to name a few. Sounds bizarre? Believe me, I’ve heard about it happen, outside of the soaps on TV. And as much as it sounds like 10 months conception time is a decent period of time to prepare for the new arrival, unless you are mentally ready, you’re probably not. These pearls of wisdom have been given to me by the newer generation. The older generation steadfastly believes in the “sooner the better” strategy. And for them, reproduction formed the core of family life. In our day and age, we seem to have added a lot more dimensions to our personal happiness and satisfaction and I know while everyone would love to have a child eventually, no one wants them right away. For one, it’s too much of added responsibility to the already being married thing. And in the past, for us Indians at least, it seemed easier said and easier done because of the large joint families and the plenty of childcare experience that ran with it. The women were largely homemakers and had plenty of guidance from the mothers and the MILs alike and in fact had hands-on assistance from other relatives and maids alike. Raising a child was a family responsibility as far as it went. And consequently the dads just had to entertain the kids when they were in good humor while the mommies got stuck with the diapers (previously just loin cloths I assume) and 3 hour feeding sessions. These days it’s an even deal and the Daddy had better pitch in for almost every responsibility to make it easier on the typically working Mommy, considering that the families lived away from homes and with visa restrictions and stuff, it wasn’t possible to have help on hand more than a couple of months at a stretch.

Everyone can agree that this is one change that is truly life-altering. It is so important to respect the fact that you are bringing in a new life to this world that is totally helpless and dependent on you for everything. While in short thinking it might seem as an excellent camouflage to get that attention from the husband/family or to stop those incessant fights amongst couples or to even stop having those unpleasant conversations with the grand old ladies who tell you they won’t live to cradle their great grandchild in their arms, it’s the most important thing to realize that the child needs to be born(e) because you want him/her, not because of anything else. Listen only to yourself.

On a different note, Happy mothering to all my expectant friends. :)

This post marks the 500th for MindBlogging! Cheers, MindBlogging!

Much ado about nothing

Yesterday, I was generally publicizing my blog to my newly web-savvy aunt. She asked me what my blog was about. The most simplistic of questions, yet the most complex when it came to answering it. The answer "nothing" sprang to my lips immediately (figuratively speaking, of course) for in reality it would rather have to be my fingers as we were GChatting. But my answer didn't sound good.

What's the blog about? It's not about anything. What sort of publicity line was that? And why or how would it ever sell? On the other hand, MindBlogging is about everything. Everything I am concerned with in any case... be it day-to-day or thought-to-thought. And then it struck me that it definitely wasn't easy to find the fine line between not sharing anything too personal while being entertaining and ultimately just talking about my own life or thoughts with the exception of now-common food blogs sprayed through the other posts. That's the thing about personal blogs I suppose. While food blogs, movie blogs, investment blogs and the whole world of other generic blogs out there probably have a steady stream of regulars, it's harder to retain interest in a personal blog.

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my regular readers. I hope it's half as entertaining for you to read as it is for me to write it. Keep visiting!

MindBlogging revamped...

So if you've been wondering where I've been these past 3 days without posting or anything, by now, you must've gotten your answer. Templates are a pain (atleast for me) to change... but yet on some level I enjoy doing it too. And the need arose when I saw a sudden escalation of the number of blogs out there touting the same template as I had been for the past few months... sure, they didn't have my fancy header.. but of course the similarities were very obvious. And so I decided it was time for a change. And voilà... Do drop me a line if you think this change is for the better or for the worse. I appreciate all the feedback from all of you... and I must thank Priya for her role in my HTML lessons.

And I promise to post other stuff soon... Au revoir!