Hawaii ho!

When we came back from India, the last thing S and me had in mind was budging out of the house for the next few weeks unless absolutely necessary. Both of us were looking forward to the Christmas vacation just so that we could sleep, sleep and then sleep some more.

But then, a week-end came in between, before Christmas. Both of us totally chilled out and slept to our heart's content. That Sunday night, I announced - "Let's go somewhere during Christmas." S enthusiastically agreed as well.

And lo! Within the next 24 hours, the tickets and the hotel were booked. Yaay - we were going to Oahu, Hawaii! One of my childhood dream vacation destinations!

This was the first time in as long as I can remember that I have gone on such an unplanned vacation. Anyone who knows me can tell you that my vacations usually involve plenty of research about the destination and a wish-list of places I want to see along with the tentative dates on which to visit them*. Plus I carry along a horde of printouts having maps, restaurant directions and what not.

This time round, there just wasn't any time to plan. So, S and I simply packed our bags and drove to SFO to catch our flight. And boy, did we have an adventure.

We wound up doing a ton of things - a submarine ride, shopping in the International Market Place, going to the North Shore, visiting Pearl Harbor, going to Waikiki beach, hiking up the Diamond Head crater, going on a sunset cruise... I only wish we had more than 4 days to spend there!






Turns out that even unplanned vacations are super-duper fun!

Just to make this post a wee bit useful, if you are heading to Oahu any time, do drink coffee at the Island Vintage Coffee cafe located in the Royal Hawaiian Shopping center in Waikiki. I kid you not - they ground coffee from the beans to make my yummylicious cup of Lava Mocha. BTW, they served the best coffee I have ever tasted. Aloha!

* note, all this happens only if another a fellow-vacationer has not entirely taken up the planning mantle.

2010 is here ...

Wishing you a wonderful year ahead filled with all possible joy, happiness and prosperity!

*clink*

Pic courtesy here.

Another vacation, another wedding and am back

Did I say that the vacation to India for my wedding was my busiest holiday ever? Now I realize that I said that because I had not yet taken a vacation to attend my sister's wedding!

Sis got married on Dec 11th to Deepak (congrats again :-)). S and me landed up in des during thanksgiving weekend (just in time for the engagement) and are back after a hectic whirlwind two-and-a-half week vacation. Wedding was ton of fun and we had a blast at all the the pre and post wedding events. Only, I re-realized that Indian weddings involve an insane of amount of getting up eaaaaaaarly. So much so both S and me actually slept quite a bit on the plane back to the US (that is definitely a record for cannot-sleep-in-a-seated-position me). Now I need a vacation for my vacation.

Being in India made me realize all over again just how wonderful it is to be around close family and how much fun it is to participate in family activities. I also figured that after living all these years in the US, India is still the only place which feels like home to me. Super good thing, if you ask me!

I am going to be spending the next few weeks dreaming of des. And also spend the next few weekends and long weekends sleeping.

Unnai pol oruvan - the review.

Since my movie reviews usually only dis movies, I thought I should write about a movie I liked for a change. Even seeing two Tamil movies in the recent past and getting mega bulbs in the bargain could not stop S and me from heading out to watch the latest Kamal Haasan movie, Unnai Pol Oruvan. Both of us are Kamal fans after all!

I learnt that this movie was a remake of A Wednesday! which was released sometime last year. This was a further plus for Unnai Pol Oruvan since I had heard many positive reviews for A Wednesday!

We reached the theatre and bought tickets. S rushed ahead to get good seats. Right. The theatre had an audience of two viz. S and yours truly. Mercifully some more people showed up as movie starting time approached thus dispelling our fears that the entire show would be canceled thanks to lack of an audience!

The movie started on time. From the beginning, a fast pace was set for the movie with every scene bringing anticipation of what next. No unnecessary scenes or songs. The movie's locations fluctuated between a total of less than half a dozen places but still managed to hold attention.

After intermission, the pace picked up further till the climax. I liked it, especially the speech at the end. I am specifically holding back details - I really think you ought to watch it yourself!

When the ending credits rolled, it was only slightly past the 2-hour mark. What a crisp and neatly made movie! Each frame of the movie contributed in someway towards moving it forward. The acting overall was quite good (though Kamal's accented English jarred a bit at times).

Thoughts provoked by the movie's ending speech were under discussion between S and me all the way back home. Its been quite a while since a Tamil movie did that.

Final verdict: go watch.

Benefits of blogging - updated again

Did you know there is a country by the name of Saint Kitts And Nevis? I did not but now I do and what's more, my blog had a visitor from there today!

Ever since one of my posts got linked here (before you jump to conclusions, a long while back Blogger had a link where we could submit posts from our blog which narrated some experience we had with blogger or something like that - I told you it was long ago, right? Anyways, I had no idea on what basis they picked posts but mine got picked somehow), I have been receiving one-post-stand visitors from all over the world.

So, now here is yet another benefit of blogging: you get to brush up your Geography :-).

Kandaswamy - the Review

Sridhar (henceforth known as S in this blog) and I decided to see the tamil movie Kandaswamy today. Since we had already seen one Tamil movie based on a positive recommendation (false, as it turned out to be) and gotten a mega-watt bulb, I was kind of wary about going to see this movie in the theatre especially since S said that the movie had gotten not so great reviews. But S wanted to be a true-blue Tam and see the movie in the theatre anyways.

We went for the 3.30pm, late noon show. As events later showed, that was probably the best decision with regards to the movie we made today. The movie started. After a series of events in the movie, a police officer steals money from a poor woman and is resting in his room at night. All of a sudden, this character wearing billowy black colored harem pants, a black full-hand shirt with big metallic buttons, gigantic bat-like wings with colorful markings, reddish-orange feathers on head and a red eye-mask (no, am not making any of this up - I don't have such a fertile imagination) descends from the roof and starts clucking like a hen while bobbing his head up and down to look like one too.

At this point, I assumed that this was the new-age punishment for wrong-doers - make them die of laughter. Instead the police officer on screen actually gets intimidated and scared. To be fair to the director, the red-masked character does deliver a few bodily punches between clucking. Still I could not wrap my head around the "hen laying an egg" act performed by the red-masked character. Who, by the way, was the hero - Vikram.

By now, my poor self was sadly drooping at the thought of sitting through the entire movie. Which was when I suddenly perked up. I excitedly turned to S and said "Hey, I got my idea for a blog post - this movie's review". With this happy thought in mind, I resumed watching the movie in a slightly happier frame of mind.

So, where was I? Ah yes, the hen act. Anyways, apparently the latest fad in the Superman, Batman, Spiderman series is Henman. Seriously, I wonder what Vikram was smoking when he agreed to appear on the big screen in that role.

Then the heroine, Shriya, appears. She studies in this college which looks like a harem-themed casino in Vegas. Correspondingly she participates in a college-dance show which looks like a Victoria's Secret model lingerie parade. I know masala movies require suspension of belief but this one required us to not only suspend belief but also expel it.

Anyways, the story is something along the lines of Henman robbing the rich and giving to the poor. In between, Henman performs this series of matrix stunts while bobbing his head up and down. What about Shriya you ask.

Well, when normal people need entertainment they watch a movie, go for a play or some such. When Henman needs entertainment, he goes to visit Shriya whereupon they immediately break into song and dance (I kid you not, every time they met, there was a song and nothing else).

The movie was proceeding along these lines when I realized that it had run for quite a while and there was still no sign of an interval. I anxiously asked S why the interval had not arrived yet. He consolingly said that since this was the US, there was no interval. I doubtfully nodded my head - Indian movies did have an interval even in the US.

Then around the 2 hour mark, the interval sign popped up. WTH!?! To revive our flagging spirits, we bought popcorn (easily the best part of the entire experience) and returned to the theatre. From that point, the movie dragged on and on. Obviously the director (who is also the screenplay, story and dialog writer) was so much in love with his masterpiece that he couldn't bear to conclude it.

By this time, S and I were having our own far more interesting parallel commentary for the movie. We could no longer follow what was going on in the movie and frankly, we couldn't care less. Finally, at long last, the end flashed. At 7.15pm. For a movie which began at 3.30pm. We were out of the theatre like a shot (only the fact that wehad paid $15 a head made us stay for that long). As we passed the crowd waiting to see the 7.30pm show, we giggled conspiratorially. The poor sods!

On the plus side, the look and feel of the movie was top notch. On the minus side, um, everything else.

Verdict: Recommend this movie to people you don't like. You yourself stay away from it like the plague. Even renting out the DVD is a bit much.

p.s.1. Just to clarify, Vikram's character's name in this movie is Kandaswamy, not Henman.

p.s.2. Good thing we went for the noon show. Like S said, we would have been far more irritated had we lost sleep due to going for a later show.

p.s.3. Vikram, dude, you are established enough to pick the movies you want to act in. Just thought I should remind you.

p.s.4. This movie is hitting Bollywood soon as 'Bhagwaan Kand'.

Anybody there?

Hola folks! After a long-ish break, perhaps the longest one on this blog thus far, I am back. And this time round I have a water-tight excuse as to why I could not blog: I was too busy. Okay, okay, stop rolling eyes! I was too busy because I was in India. That's better, no? But wait, it gets even better. While I was there *drum rolls*... I got married :-D!

Yup, Sridhar and I got hitched on the 24th of June, 2009 in Chennai. The weeks preceding and succeeding it were a huge blur of activity - I don't think I have ever been more busy in my life. But I we had a great time.

This is the first week that I am back in normal operation since our return (though, sadly enough, my work-brain has been forced to be on full alert for quite a while now).

Now, if all this isn't a good enough excuse, I would like to know what is :-D! But fear not gentle readers, I will certainly be more regular from now on.

Lost

The other day we were supposed to go to a conference in San Francisco from work. As I have said before, I *hate* driving in San Francisco and invariably take the Caltrain followed by SF Muni buses/trams whenever I want to visit SF. However, after lot of discussion, my colleague and I discovered that taking the Caltrain involved getting up at some unearthly hour if we had to make it to the conference on time. So, driving it was - sigh :-(! My colleague said she would get her GPS but I said, "Hmm - okay! I will also get printouts of the directions."

Now in this world where using GPS is the fast becoming the de facto standard and paper maps are slowly becoming extinct, I am still stoutly refusing to buy a GPS and am clinging to paper maps with a vengeance.

This is not because I hate trees and using paper maps is my insidious way of trying to destroy them. Just that, since the time I started driving and using maps to find my way around, my sense of direction has improved. A lot. This might not seem like a big deal to most of you, but not so at all to me!

I was a directionally challenged child. I would have to visit any place at least half a dozen times before the way to get there would get impressed upon my brain (and note here, I am not even talking about long distances, I am talking about stuff like "how to get to the library from my classroom"). Not surprisingly, I grew up to be a directionally challenged teenager and a directionally challenged young adult too.

Some of you may be thinking, "Ah, but everyone loses their way from time to time...."

Okay, beat this:

- When we moved to a small town near Trichy, we moved into a colony which had exactly two streets. On the way back from school the first day, I promptly turned into the street in which my house was *not* located. A neighbor (who knew that new folks had arrived in the colony - it was a small town, didn't I say?) kindly directed me down the right street.

- In the first week of grad school I trailed like a lost puppy behind two other new grad students who were temporarily put up in the same apartment complex as me because I could not figure out how to get back home from school. Don't get me started on the different kinds of grad orientation programs I was utterly uninterested in and yet had to attend because I did not know how to go home by myself!

- Within a span of five days in the same grad school mentioned above I asked for directions to the administrative building when standing right in front of it, behind it and beside it. Yup, with campus map in hand too.

- When I visited my parents for the first time in their new home, the first morning, I made the wrong turn while trying to get to the kitchen (before you get ideas about palatial mansions, this is a normal apartment)

So anyways, the point here is, if there was any way to get lost getting somewhere, you could count on me to get lost. Hence anytime I had to visit an unknown place, I asked for several landmarks/street-names etc to make getting there idiot-proof. I had more or less resolved myself to spending a lifetime of memorizing copious directions.

Then I started driving. Initially I had nightmares about getting lost along with a car. Then I noticed a strange thing. As if by magic, my sense of direction started improving. Not by leaps and bounds but certainly very much in the forwardly direction. Perhaps it was because, for the first time in my life, I was consciously noticing where I was going.

First I started recognizing which streets were parallel/perpendicular to each other. Then when getting back from an unknown place, I could pull out the reverse directions from memory. Then I could tell which freeways intersected with each other and whether to go north or south (east or west) to get to that intersection.

The pinnacle of progress (for me) was reached when I managed to guide my friends to spots around San Diego with only a normal AAA map to help me. A stellar achievement when you consider that just a couple of years earlier, my superior navigational powers made my friend drive about 15 miles in the direction opposite to Disneyland in LA.

All this is not to say that now I can get around the world with only a compass in my hand. I can't. For that matter I doubt I will be able to get around my city with only a compass in hand. But if I make a wrong turn now I can mostly figure out how to get back to the starting point and start afresh. I can also make intelligent guesses about where something is located. Which is not quite so grand in the big scale of things - but which nevertheless gives me a cheap thrill when I am right.

Ah - so where was I? GPS. Ya - the reason why I don't want a GPS is, I don't want it to dumb me down all over again and undo all my progress in recent years. I want to use my brain to do the work. Agreed that printing directions off Yahoo maps and driving to a place is not exactly a Mensa challenge but it still requires more work and direction sense than having a random female intone "Turn left in 0.3 miles".

So yup, I am not going to hop onto the GPS wagon as long as I can stand it out.
--

Image from here.

Retribution

So you know how nowadays many weddings offer free on-site mehendi drawing to guests in one of the many the pre-wedding functions. Last year, I spotted one such mehendi artist at my cousin's wedding and promptly went and showed my hand. I got a minimalistic but cute design done across the back of my palm. I was hardly done crowing over its prettiness when a friend promptly managed to smudge it. Giving him a glare which could have melted the Himalayas, I got it corrected by the mehendi artist. Then the clarion call sounded for dinner.

Of course nothing stands between Archana and her food and I was well at the front of the line for the sumptuous buffet spread. I was making my way through getting servings of the yummy dishes, safeguarding my mehendi decorated hand, when a young guy appeared out of nowhere and rudely pushed his way in ahead of me without so much as a muttered 'Excuse me'.

I was startled and annoyed but there was nothing I could do and I proceeded down the line after him. A bit later, when I glanced at my hand to re-admire the mehendi design, I got a shock when I realized that pretty much all of it had been rubbed away. Darn - that rude person had spoilt my mehendi - grrrrr!

I was ready to get all upset and direct my angry gaze upon rude guy when I spotted him and realized that most of the mehendi on my hand had transferred itself to the sleeve of his shirt. Which, till a few minutes earlier, had been a nice milky white.

FOr a moment I was filled with guilt but glee took over almost immediately. Retribution - ha! Since I spread word to my cousins I had plenty of spies to report exactly when rude guy realized that his shirt sleeve now had new designer patterns on it and was also able to note his expression. That would teach you to not cut lines, dude!

It is so true, that old jungle saying: "Never mess with the mehendi on a woman's hands or you will be sorry."

***

Image courtesy here.

Fact for the day - 2

Celery eaten as Cream of Celery soup with (important!) a side of toasted sourdough bread is actually quite palatable. Even though each serving has quite a generous quantity of celery in it. I still am not a celery fan though and will think twice before stocking up my fridge with celery again.

Soup made by yours truly. Not so the bread.