Exam papers are the only places where you should ask the 'why' questions...
... that is the only place where they have actual answers.

My Bundle of joy!

Yey! Its party time! Tai delivered a baby boy last Monday! It has been a wonderful feeling to be a Mavshi. I just can't wait to meet my kiddo :) Lotsa baby shopping this month!

Fall Colors'07

Finally! Finally,this year I got to see fall colours. I have always been excited about fall colours since I have been in India. Its been 3 years since I have been to Buffalo,NY and still I had not even seen the Fall foliage in Letchworth State Park.
This year me, Karthik and Manas decided that we will go for a fall colour weekend to New Hampshire. New Hampshire boasts one of the best foliages around in New England area. 5th Oct,Friday we set out to NH. Saturday morning, after enjoying a sumptuous breakfast of eggs and sausages, we started our Fall colors drive.
We had decided to do Kancamagus Highway drive which goes around the White Mountains. On the way, we could see the hint of the fall colours... Greenery on both the sides of the interstate was interspersed with red orange and yellow colour. While appreciating that spotted foliage, I had no idea of the explosion of colours that was awaiting us! The whole drive was literally straight out of the dreams! I had never seen such an unbelievably beautiful blend of colours. The whole range of 'White' mountains was covered with blazing orange, ravishing red and shimmering yellow colour. Few of the trees were still maintaining their fresh green colour and contrasting all the other colours,making them look prettier. We clicked lot of pictures at locations that seemed straight out of the movies. Lots of foliage, colours ,brooks, gorges were later accompanied by a nice drizzle. We ended the day with a fitting dinner of clam chowder and lot of seafood (I had swordfish :D).
On Sunday, the weather was sunny. We decided to go up the coast of Maine, famous for its lighthouses.We visited 3 lighthouses in all. ( Whale back at Kittery,Cape Neddick and Portland Lighthouse) On the pier of Portland, we enjoyed more seafood! I finally got to eat Lobster. Manas had a mouth watering crab roll and I had a Lobster roll. Karthik did not venture beyond popcorn shrimps.
The whole weekend seemed to be an out of the world experience. I am falling short of words to describe the dream-like, romantic colors of New Hampshire, the sunny skies and blue oceans of Maine and the fun I had in the short weekend trip!
Now I have already made plans for September end for all the forthcoming years!

Collage...

I am tired of analyzing people. I wonder , why couldn't the God make everyone the same? Less work for him and less work for us humans too! Now since they are all different in nature, at least He should have had made them with a 'contents' label. Contents: Hazardous material. 80% khadoos, 10 % bitchy,1% humourous, ... something like that :P
I feel all the people that you come in contact with, are part of a big collage. You are the starting piece. You keep on meeting people and try fitting them in your collage. Some fit as if they were just meant to fit in with you. Some fit, but there is a little gap left in between. Some come with shapes that would never fit. You just throw away some of these 'unfit' pieces. But, you just can't let go of some of these. At times you compromise other pieces for these ones. The collage keeps on changing as time goes on. Pieces get replaced by new pieces. Few closer pieces go little away because of addition of new pieces.
And thats where the analysis comes in picture. Analyze each piece and fit it in. Addition to that, the pieces change their shapes! Bah! I am just tired of analyzing....

33B, Apt#6

Shifted to the new place!Us 4 decided to split and stay separate for convenience. Apoorva stays close to Manjari and Laveena's place. So they kinda of stay and cook together.
My new room mate Dipti will be moving in on 1st Aug, so for the for the first month, I would be staying alone. My neighbours are Karthik and Manas.
Currently I am in the middle of unpacking my stuff and setting up the house. My room and kitchen is alread set. The living room still seems a bit 'not perfect'.
The new house has a patio too :) I will get few small plants and flowers for the patio. Me and Dipti took real interest in buying matching stuff for the restroom(!) . Everything should be perfect by the end of this week :)

Crappy Chicken :(

After cooking a really good chicken curry about 2-3 days ago, I tried making it again today and I sucked bigtime! Its been long since I have cooked something crappy.
It took me ages(2.5 hrs) to make it(damn it, it was just a curry!) The amount of ginger was a tad bit too much and the curry was diluted. Far from the perfect curry that I used to make in the past. Nothing irritates me more than a bad cooking session!
I feel that my cooking has gone down a bit over the time. I literally felt like 'officially' giving up cooking. It was cute of everyone that no one criticized it.
I think I am cribbing a lot as usual....

Lazy Weekend

I think this was one of the very few long weekends that I spent in Buffalo. My NJ plans were thwarted by fever and I ended up in Buffalo.
The whole Saturday was spent in the bed while reading stuff and watching crappy movies. When you randomly choose movies,I wonder why u always end up choosing a boring one.
Movies,books and Niagara falls is what I would sum up the weekend was. Parag had come to Buffalo with his VT gang. I played 'The Guide' again and had fun with them. At times, its real fun to hang out with random people.
Monday was the shopping day. Did a lot of random shopping...splurged a lot.
It was nice to sing at the top of the voice. It was nice to dance at the random songs.All in all... it was nice doing nothing...

And the time flies by....

Jeff: Sharvari, do you feel that time flies real fast?
Me: Of course!
Jeff: Hmm... I thought only I have reached that age.

And the dialog continued to end the lazy day. We talked about how we have changed over the time. There was a time when 'Ice Ice baby..' seemed to be coolest song around and now you can't believe that you liked such a dumb song (or rather according to Eric, 'you were such an asshole') once upon a time!

I wonder how much I have changed over the period of time. I still surprise myself by behaving in a completely different way.Then I realize that I have changed in that particular aspect. When you look back, you can see the collage of your personality.Your core personality, your outlook and your interaction with the important people in your life changes. At every point that you make this review, you feel that personally, socially , mentally you are at the best. About all your (n-x) images, at least you try hard to convince yourself that you were the best then for that time period.
At times you wonder how much you are going to change afterwards. After 10 years, would you even be close to what you are now?Would you still find the same songs to be 'cool'? and lastly, Would you find your decisions to be foolish and regret those? Would find out shortly,coz time flies by....

Ferrari? Or smthing else...

Today I fly
in a different car
Is it a Ferrari?
Hmm...Can't be.. it has a slow start.
But now the fuel pumps in.
The roads are bad,
but smooth it runs.
It must be a Ferrari.
Oh the speed..
guess you cant see outside the window
Should be a Ferrari.
We just reached back home
Ah yea, I was in a Ferrari!

PS: LOL!!! everyone knowswhat I am talking about!!!!!

Castles in the bubbles

They say its ephemeral
full of bubbles.
But bubbles don't make it pretty
but imply the reality.
So, you gotta build castles
inside each bubble.

So many of those burst,
some drift away
But you are still left with few
They can start you anew
In there you have to build the castles
and paint them in pastels.

rand( );

That is what future was gonna be ... rand( );
H1-B quota got flooded the first day itself! My lawyer had warned me in the first meeting itself. He was sure tht its gonna be filled up on the first day itself.
On 2nd April afternoon, we got to know that USCIS has receiverd 150000 apps! The lottery system and the 1:3 chances of getting the H1 scared the shit outta the ppl.
USCIS later let it out that tht masters quota is not yet filled and so thankfully rand ( ); no longer features in lives of the masters quota students. But the general quota people are going to suffer.
These things were bound to happen as big companies in India like Infy , wipro ,TCS hog down a major chunk of the H1-B quota. Most of the time these companies jst file for an employee's H1-B but dont send them onsite. I personally feel that even the applicants who hv done their bachelors frm the USA shld have a comparatively easy way of getting the H1. May be they can keep a separate quota for onsite H1s or they can divide the quota according to different sectors.
Many people might have to return back home only because the lost the opportunity to someone who would hold an H1 but still work in India all along!
The US congress passed a bill to legalize large number of illegal immigrants. They would be categorized as non-skilled labour. Acc. to them, this step is valid because there is a business demand for the non-skilled. But looking at the number of apps for H1, doesn't it show that there is business demand for skilled labour too?
I am safe now but still worrying about few of my frnds. I hope things would work out for them.

Food! :D

I was scrolling through the index of the posts of my blog. Suddenly I realized ," Oh my God!! There is not a single post on food as yet!!!!!" How can MY blog be without one on food! I think thats why my blog sucks :P
Looking back, I wonder how come names on the lines of 'Pompfret Tales' or 'Tandoori Express' or something crappy like that never crossed my mind as I was naming my blog!

Thinking about 'Hinduism'....

Disclaimer: Just my naive thoughts....

Chatting with Karthik. Ended up talking about 'Hinduism' and drifted away thinking about it.
I prefer calling it as Hinduism and not Hindu dharma or religion. It was always defined as 'the way of life' and not in today's twisted way. But anyway, I am not writing about that.
I have talked to him about this 3-4 times and every time I realize that I barely know about Hinduism. The main point is that I have not yet read anything about it. Not even Bhagvadgeeta! I had read few 'adhyay' from Gita but I was a kid at that time and was not at all philosophically inclined.
I wish to read up more about it. To think of it, all the shrutis, smrutis and samhitas like the four Vedas and Upanishads , AaraNyaks etc. must be rich of knowledge. Knowledge which is somewhere necessary for a person's philosophical evolution. While reading such things , you suddenly come across to the answers to the questions that you never realized you had. A conscience building experience, I would say.
Moreover, I think that reading these things is like reading and knowing your philosophical history as history is not only the kings and queens and their kingdoms, but even the thought process that existed in that era. All the this literature is damn old and it would be really nice to know what Hinduism actually was. It might be really broad minded, but I think people start following it without understanding it properly which makes them orthodox and gives it a bad name and a twisted nature.
I feel that its a rich heritage of which I know nothing. When I wrote the words AaraNyaks n Upanishads n stuff, I know that those are just the names stuck in my brain since school, just like the other random bits and pieces of unindexed information. I am curious about it. I know that I wont be having patience to read a lot of stuff but some thing is better than nothing! Starting to read the BhagvadGeeta now.

What do u do....

Its a weekend morning. You step into the shower to wash your hair. The water streams down on u.
What do you do when you feel like getting dissolved bit by bit in every droplet? What do you do when you feel that the hot shower is the best thing in the world? What do you do when you wanna swim endlessly in the water? What do you do when you start comparing the waterdrops with pearles? What do you do when you know that these soothing but irrelevent thoughts have no meaning.... What do you do when you know that its just the ususal shower that you are finding so heavenly!....then what you do is simple....
You store that stupid content feeling in the corner of ur heart. You feel happy that ur wet hair tickeling your neck bring a twinkle in your eye and you feel grateful to the hot water for starting your day so perfect! :)

4.22 pm

..........and the time doesn't seem to pass. Waiting for 5.00 pm so that I can break free n eat Maggi :D
In the morning, I didn't feel like I have woken up. Had a shot of coffee which had its required effect. I have been working since then. Now, not a single line of the code seems to work. Now my stressed out mind( and hands too!) is crawling around the web reading crappy things like 'How to remove coffee stains' etc. Not a single person worth talking(note that!) is online. I have always noted that whenever you are busy working, every single person on all your messengers would ping you. But they just seem to disappear when time doesn't seem to pass. Not even a spam mail is hitting my inbox.
20 more minutes of such agony...and then..Maggi!

Coldddddddddddddddd!!!!

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......................
Finally the winter is here and its here with a bang! After a balmy January, I had given up all my hopes for beautiful sights of snow covered Buffalo. But no-no....the winter started with the new month. It has been the coldest one since I came here in the US of A.
It snowed a lot on Friday. Saturday was nothing different. We had to cancel our clubbing plans because of the snowfall.
The temperature has been around -25C to -30C . Today its warmer as the temp is -17C(1F) ;)
Waiting for the sun now....

Hmmmm.....

Excerpt from my personal diary....dated sometime in early July'06...

"...I hate 53 Springville. Living alone is not very bad but 'living alone' when you still have people around you is horrible. Your 'own' people. That sucks...
I don't think I would tag it as anybody's fault. I never thought a month long absence of a person changes things so much. So, I better learn that than wishing that times would be back to normal...
I think, hoping that people will be there in your hard times, itself is wrong... But then should I be there for them during their hard ones? Should I be caring towards them like before? Would I be able to flush away this venomous feeling? I guess, yes.. I hope to pass this as a phase. A phase when I needed people, but they were not there. May be they never understood that I need them. I guess, the batsman always gets a benefit of doubt!
Told Kanchan the following over the phone,
" People change coz situations change , and they stop caring for you, coz they no longer need you."
I still might be wrong........"

And I am happy that I was wrong...A good discussion always helps..as always!

A completely impulsive, but highly edited post. Somehow these memories clouded my head right now and I felt an urge to make my thoughts public, knowing that not many read my blog ;)

Life in an Ice Cube...

Got up early in the morning. Looked outta the window to chk if I there has been any snow. Thank god.. there wasn't any. Just a light rain.
Got ready and opened the door and whoa! I almost slipped! The steps were covered with ice. I could see the transparent ice every where. Then I remembered that Yahoo! Weather had told me to watch out for the 'Wintry Mix' since yesterday night.
My car was sparkling as it was fully covered in ice. I broke the icicles on the handle and got in. Rolled the windows down. Oh!dint I just roll the windows down? then how come they r still up? Then I realized that it was the ice on the car windows! had to clean my car with a scraper as the ice was really hard.
Throughout the day,it was all icy.....beautifully icy....every branch of every tree was covered with uniform transparent ice casing. Every road sign had sparkling icicles. Whole day it was drizzling. The whole city seemed to be made up of ice. In the evening, the bare trees looked like huge chandeliers as the street lights shown on them.
So it was a nice day, reminded me of the Snow Queen's Castle in the Hans Anderson's fairy tale.... :)