Desi Fanatic!

I never think of myself as 'communal' but just going by the rooting for Anoop Desai on 'American Idol 7' just because he's brown and his surname is Desai and everyone knows I have Gujurati leanings ;-)!! The boy is cute, wear strange grandfather type clothes even for us Indians and can sing the socks off any ballad - however he cannot hold a candle to the creativity of Adam Lambert or the sheer personality of Allison Iraheta but still....my little brown Indian heart breaks when I think of his being voted off.

In Non Desi related news, I don't have a lot to write anymore since my heart and head are busy occupied with watching Robert Pattinson pull his hair back or drink cola or talk or sing or anything for that matter - Go! Youtube!

BBC book list

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dicken
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville-
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

English, anyone?

* Since I have already been pulled up [alternate word: chastised] for this post, I am going to state at the very beginning, this is my opinion and it is not a judgement and I am not being condescending either - I do not understand it, it does not make it wrong!

So I'm going to take a break from stalking Robert Pattinson on youtube and write about rather ask why do people speak funny? It all started with a friend of mine who described one of her friends as a 'RAKE' - I mean the poor boy is like 24 yrs old and he likes to play the field because he can due to his excessive cuteness but no, she made him sound like a 40 yr old preying on the emotions of women everywhere. Who uses terms like that anymore? apart from my mother, of course - she has a 'paraoxysm' of coughing instead of a 'fit' like other normal people in addition to not having the 'werewithal' to do something - I would just say the 'means'. I then heard the funniest story of a friend's boss who told him not to 'obfuscate' the issues but he was an old Bengali so he gets excused on those grounds. However, my young Tam Friend was telling us the story of how her brother was conned by her parents into wearing a dress and jewellery at the age of 12 and she has no idea of how he 'aquiesced' to that - wouldn't you rather say 'agree'??

Dilemma - Help needed!

***DECISION MADE*** going to Turtle bay.


Ok as I posted earlier, I was supposed to go to Turtlebay on the May 1st weekend. However this has become option 1:Let me note the approximate costs:
Tickets: Rs.6260
Ticket forfeited by Juggler: Rs.2050
Stay: Rs.5000
Food + Drink: Rs. 4000 minimum
Shopping: Optional but accounting for Rs.700 minimum
Total: Rs.18000
Benefits:

• New location
• Friends
• Beach
• Good food
• Sea + Ocean activities
• Loads of alcohol

Option II: The juggler is going to HKG on the 4th - my birthday is on the 8th.
Fly in on the 7th and come back on the 11th.
Ticket: Rs.25000
Stay: Free
Food + Drink: Free
Shopping: Optional but taking Rs.5000 just in case
Total: Rs.30000
Benefits:

• SAMARA
• the Juggler for the birthday and in Hong Kong at the same time
• Good food
• Excellent shopping

Help with the decision making!! please feel free to let me know what you would do!

Turtle Bay

So I had been to Goa in early March after a hiatus of 3.5 years and Boy! Was I grateful for the hiatus!! It was not at all the same as I remembered - I agree maybe it was the lack of company that also added to the disappointment but on the whole, the masses of people, the lack of change in some aspects of the 'Strip' in terms of the shopping and then the complete change in management of the restaurants etc - I mean every second restaurant advertised a 'Pure Veg' Gujarathi thali or 'No non Veg served here'. For crying out loud! this was supposed to God's Own Holiday Spot where a wide variety of meat is available not some pandering to the religious sentiments of the majority!

Now, I have a trip planned to Turtle Bay on the labour day with some friends - it's a new resort in Karnataka close to Mangalore that none of us have been to but it sounds/looks really good on the website. It also advertises it's varitey of sea food - thank God! It should be good just with reference to the time my parents and I had stopped in Mangalore on a driving holiday. The beach was desolate and the food to die for - we're talking soft shell crab and divinely grilled Lady fish! Looking forward to 4 days on a non crowded beach with the options of snorkelling and a massage sipping on margaritas and the like! That's the life!
Unfortunately, this trip seems to be dogged by problems - my company might schedule it's annual conference for the same weekend and since the conference is kind of a big deall and theon one time when the entire company is united, prescence is mandatory unless you are dying or getting married and even then they might expecty you to put in an apperarance. In addition, the juggler [previously known as the boy] had to cancel his tickets since he needs to be in HKG the day we leave Turtlebay for a conference for which he is also missing my birthday - guess I can expect a really big birthday present huh?

I am also going to take this opportunity to invite Robert Pattison to keep me company! anyone have an email id that I can send the invite on? Don't worry,Isis, I will send an invite to Hugh Dancy as well!

It's official - I'm in love with Edward Cullen - if anyone knows him - please send him a proposal on my behalf. He's british, a vampire and he sings! what more could a girl want?

P.S. Juggling is over ridden when singing is involved

Best Friends Forever

I realised yesterday that I have spent equal time apart practically from my best friend than we were together - we studied together from 1996 - 2002 [7 years] and she has lived across vast ocean from 2002 - 2009. In that time, she has visited India thrice, I've visted her once [6 days does count!] and we've been on holiday together once totally up to maybe 80 days tops, stretching it. She has gotten married, had a baby, I've moved away from home and back - life has carried on. The magic is that inspite of the distance and time, to put it in her words, 'there is noone else I can be totally honest with'! Thank you for the love!