Strokes...

He was drunk...

it was evening. 7 pm. Dhaula kuana (Delhi) in that time when i was doing my masters, 2001 was not safe for girls. I had faced events of eveteasing and had held collars of bastards who would try to whisper things in your ears or would try to grope you. Police intervention was there but it was a scary place to be in the evenings.

I had come from work and was stranded in an area only which was only 5 mts (by auto) and 10-15 mts (by walk) away from my hostel. I had to report to hostel by 7:30 pm or else doors would be locked and warden would be updated of my late coming!

I was scared and tired. i tried stopping so many autos but none of them agreed to drop me to such a short distance. the road to the hostel was the scariest road. lonely and dark. people would stop cars or they would actually approach you if you were all alone. since where i was standing was flooded with students' PG it was a little safe. i did not want to take a chance with walking. so i tried and tried. but failed

then he approached me from the crowded, young, busy, unaware population there. he was drunk!!! he belonged to either brazil or some other country and was a student who was staying in that area. i was scared. people approach you for stupid things like "will you go out with me" on those roads.... 

he asked me what was wrong with me and i burst into tears... i was crying... i told him how i HAD to be in hostel before 7:30 pm ... and no auto was stopping ... i was stuck ..

he came near me and kept his hand on my head!!! he was unstable and i was scared... oh shit....

he said in his accented tone and broken english - "you my sister, i make sure you reach hostel.. i make sure.." i was shocked!!!

this drunk guy, who could not even walk properly crossed the road and waved frantically to autos threatening them to take me to hostel.. finally his friend also arrived and they managed to stop an auto...

he gave me his flat address .. then he told the auto wala bhaiya that i had to be dropped safely , that if he would mess  up he would thrash him up ... he asked me to let warden talk to him if she said anything to me... i was speechless...

he then told me to move on... .

i don't know where  he is... don't know who he was ... but unknown to him he has become part of my treasured memories...

whenever i am sad, lonely , disillusioned .. he crosses my mind.... i have no words to express what i feel for him....the immense respect cannot be put in words....i wish life granted him the bestest.. at least today  i send my blessings to him...

he was drunk... and he made me feel the safest that day .. .i dropped all my stereotypes on drinking after i met him...

This Blogging world of mine....

i did not know that when i joined this void i would end up having soul connections.. so much so that when anything positive happens in life my impulse is to come back to you all....

my god.. it is funny... i escaped into this to be devoid of any emotional connect which has the power to hurt you immensely and i ended up doing exactly that here...

i got a job!! it was a dream come true.. it is flexi-time contract for a year. I am working as an HR partner for this upcoming Financial KPO with a team size of 35+. The work is immensely satisfying since i am supposed to contribute only 10 hrs per week and be on floor as per my wish!! what i intended to do ten years down the line came to me in a straight shot!! it is a pure pleasure to be working on appraisal, induction, training ...HR policies... how much i missed it!!

the most satisfying aspect of this whole arrangement is that i am with my kid!!! i will not miss her important milestones!!  i am happy .. . and very very grateful to the divine force.. it took care of all my concerns at one go!

and guess what happened while i was running around to put the contract in place.... i was talking to Coreen, Honey, Jules, Mumbai girl (the doc in the making), positive thinker, Raja , Sandra, Masked Blogger, Julie...... funny..... how somebody becomes a part of you ... the feeling was a surprise for me too! here i was again attached to the virtual world!! i was so eager to come and talk to you all... i had this number 32 printed on my head!! i had to go back to the room where you all were sitting and waiting for me to come and break the news to you!!! some distant friends, some new where the connect is yet to form and some so integral to my soul world now....

thank you....thank you for being there when i had hit the lowest phase of my life.... i will make sure no work load takes me away from this little room full of beautiful people....

thank you....

GOA Again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it was Goa again for us!!! the main focus was on calangute and baga this time... had a wonderful time... there were some new developments though -

• for the first time i had somebody clicking my photographs.. i was not behind the camera always!! here it is for you all ...the real me!! it should also act as a disclaimer for people (only men) who thought i was BEAUTIFUL !!! ... do you see my tummy!! no i am not pregnant!! i am plain fat..... not so pretty after all when you go down, below face. People who seem to have fallen in love with me despite me telling them i am a mother of one child and not so young and pretty as i come across with make up on .... kindly have a look and know i was not being modest... i have passed that age of crush and love..... :)..i am a mother with a big fat tummy planning to have another baby...loads of grey hair on my head... not at all glamorous...
• i spent a lot on junk jewellery!!!! love them!! antiques drive me crazy and my husband was kind enough to let me loose..... i went like a mad woman from one shop to another admiring the beauty .... wow!! loved it ... Goa has an antique soul.... it inspires the age in you....
• bought some pure beach flavored clothes!!! they will last only for 6mths - 1 year....but i can't wait even that long... age is passing me by and i need to delve into everything silly before i gracefully give up my claim on youth and retire to peaceful and beautiful old segment
• we realised our daughter has grown up!!! we actually could leave her in our hotel room for 15 mts and have breakfast on our own in the nearby restaurant!!
• we went looking for alternatives to Angel's resort... the place we usually stay and realised it had no competition in the same budget!! it is a beauty and the staff members are very very very caring!! so we decided next time on, no experimentation - we hit Goa and we check into Angel's Resort straight on!

Dona Paula Beach- Evening

Break (fast) time!

posing in the campus of Angel's Resort!

Calangute Beach

Angel's Resrot...leaving for an evening shopping spree...

Fort Aguada...

Playing with shadows and charcoal..

 the shades are done by using the ashes of cig stubs!! had no charcoal stick per se... :)

i was trying to capture sun's beauty...but GOD had other plans... final product seems good !



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The dancing reflection on the window...

the brutal love...

i usually don't post videos..i assume nobody has the time and the patience to go thru it ... but i could not resist this one... found it on fb and thought of all the blogger friends... have a look at it .. i promise you will not regret it ..

i watched it at least 5 times..and i cried like a baby each time...

may the love of divine unmanifest envelop each of you ...

spread love around .....

Jules from Trying to get over the Rainbow came up with an awesome idea of spreading love. She offered this button to all her followers suggesting we send out this button to our blogger friends which in turn would spread the love around us...

so here it goes for you all... spread love ...

A confession...

i come back with a confession

i have told some of you individually, but today i go public with my social shyness problem with you all...

since childhood i have suffered from social shyness , any type of attention makes me feel very very very uncomfortable

i was a stage performer but i would come back hungry from parties because i was shy of eating in public, during my youth when i got attention from opposite gender i would want to hide in a cave, i refused promotion while working because i was underconfident of my skills as a manager, i refused to give presentation on assignments for which i had really worked hard (broken my neck!) because i could not muster courage to go public ... ... outwardly i have reacted as a rebel not caring to wear clothes or makeup (people around me thought i was bindas..) but the deep rooted issue was that i was scared of attention

nobody in the outside world except a few of them know that i can actually look the way i do on my blog... in fact not even the man i am married to knows that i have won lots of dance competitions...blogging was a medium of expression because i had so much inside me and i did not have the skills to share it with the world around me ....

i have been given awards by my blogger friends in the past, but due to this handicap i have felt very embarassed to display them on my blog...every time i see a new person on my blogger friend roll i get anxious..not happy ... anxious of failing them ...

when i got this one today i thought probably universe is forcing me to mend my ways....these blogging friends of mine have somehow managed to find my name everytime they wanted to share their happiness ....

i hereby display this award given to me by Samantha from  Life, Love and Living in France fame

Thanks Samantha, i am humbled to the core....

i would also like to thank all my friends who have in the past showed their affection for me by passing on the awards to me , i am sorry for not having enough courage to display them on my blog at that point in time....

Life is good, because today i have chosen to break this wall inside me... even if it is a virtual world... i am sure .. there is a plan which is coming in action .. thank you all for helping me surpass myself..and my limitations..

I would like to pass this to

http://juliemooreonlife.wordpress.com/
http://expressionsofamadwoman.blogspot.com/
http://mybigsecretblog.blogspot.com/
http://thinkerpositive.blogspot.com/
http://stuffcouldalwaysbeworse.blogspot.com/
http://velvetoversteel.blogspot.com/

you just need to write briefly about "life is good" and if you feel like do pass it on the award to your other friends...

the poor king ..

this is what i was doing all this while...
the painting is a reproduction of a shot of an old poor man taken by my younger sister Dolls during her trip to exotic Himachal Pradesh...

i have made him a king by giving a touch of gold acrylic on his cap and on his creases to represent the wealth of experience..

the standard of painting is far below anything decent - i have used students' oil colors and eyes could have been better ...creases also have not come out the way i had imagined it ...

Oh Sire...my Father!!! Your eagle is wounded......

you gave me your wings
your share of wind
and your share of sky
i flew high up in the sky
talking to winds and daring the sun...

oh sire...my father..
your eagle is wounded now
wings clipped
wind gone
the piece of sky all blurred and grey

you stand on the ground
watching your eagle fall
wounded, tired, lost, struggling to keep the dive...
lost in her own piece of sky
your eyes... all wet and sad...

i always told you
you were a bad investment banker
you invested in wrong stocks
your fixed deposit all gone
looted by the corrupt bank
you worked too hard with no result...
you chose a wrong eagle
the weak one
and though it flew for few hours
now it is ready
to dive to death

oh sire..my father...
please forgive me
i wasted your wing
your sky
your wind

this imperfect man.....

 My dear darling,

i write this mail to you to let you know a few things about life.our lives. i fear you will never come to know about them if i were not to relate them to you. since i am bad with talking i jot them down here. in this holy void of mine.

    this is about the man.. 
who fathered you  

i don't remember getting up at nights EVER to feed you EVEN once after i stopped my feed to you. he would feed you every night, every three /four hours. Till date, no matter how busy we are, no matter where we are , he is always alert about whether you are hungry or thirsty, and till date, if it is ever required..he is the one who gets up to get you milk..He knows exactly when your Complan needs to be refilled!

He is an amazing singer... and he sang beautiful numbers keeping you in his lap..putting you to peaceful sleep ... he does it even now if you are very cranky... he sings patiently to you ... lovely songs... i hope you will remember the beauty, warmth and rhythm of them when you are all grown up and ready to face the world on your own...

During your nappy period, he would  change your nappies absolutely on time and he always knew when we had to get a new packet!! He was more involved in your toilet training than me... he, in fact, toilet trained you .. very patiently ..

He never complained of not having enough sleep! we have a room free but he would never, ever, leave you and sleep in peace. This continues till date (remember last night how tired he was.. you played music and you had to share so many things... he did not leave you .. he waited till you allowed him to sleep....)

 He gets up each morning at 6 am to prepare you a hot water bath (on your school days) and lays your school dress, jacket with a perfectly pinned handkerchief on it, your socks, your cream, your bath-robe ..in a perfect order on bed. he wakes you up with loads of love and puts your shoes on once you are ready for school. he goes to drop you to the bus-stop and is home at sharp 6:30 pm to enjoy your company! All this when he is diabetic and he gets tired easily

His diabetes leaves him irritable at times, but, he is NEVER impatient with you. He sits with you and teaches you A,B,C as if it was a coding and data architecture topic... you cannot imagine the patience required for an adult to reduce to A B C when amidst studies you have so many stories to tell him ... he paints with you .. he admires your dance... he listens to your stories.. all this when i know his body is giving up and he really wants rest.....but i also know that you are the source of his energy and happiness .. so i don't interfere...except when it is dinner time!

He celebrates your birthday with balloons, cake and flowers because you claim it is your birthday! and this happens at any time of the year :)

 He takes you to places so that you emerge as a beautiful, well - read, well - learned, non-judgemental, respectful soul... that is his way of educating you

when you grow up and you have enough education .. like all over educated people you might have a tendency to see the imperfections in your father

but do not ever forget that.....

this imperfect man did everything to make your childhood a perfect one

the wandering soul.....

The topic of life after death has always been very close to my heart. I read, found books, borrowed from friends every time I glimpsed this word or thought that probability of finding something new about this contemplation point was higher in those pages – I don’t know if it was past-life memory that I carried within me but as a child when I could not express properly I would ask my father who made stars.. and who made the ONE who made stars? I was drawn to the nature in a more Para-scientific manner .. I used to and till date wonder how petals can be so specifically defined, colored and placed the way they are.. how is it possible that leaf and tree can nourish themselves..i wonder at nature’s arrangement of photosynthesis process and cross pollination leading to growth and maintenance of species, I wonder how perfect blue sky looks with green forest… how do smallest of beings survive.. how is the matrix of our existence so perfect … I have taught my daughter that HE is a perfect artist .. later I will teach her how perfect a SCIENTIST he is :)


I often wondered how could I dance when I actually had no control over my body … it was as if music seeped through my being and I moved… people said I danced well.. I won competitions, they came to see me perform .. .then one day I grew up .. and it died.. .did I lose my past life learning? When I was going through a depressive phase on how I have stopped dancing I stumbled upon Paulo Coehlo’s book whose protagonist found GOD through dance??!!! From thence I read at least 2 books of his, which talked of magic in succession! Why did i venture into magic realm.. very recently i watched movies on magic one after the other wihtout any planning , it just happened .. after the movies and few days ahead when i was casually scanning channels to find something interesting i stumbled upon "Decoding Magic" on AXN! needless to say .. i visited that program more than once because i was hooked...

My journey into the world beyond scientific explanation became more vigorous when I lost my cousin in an accident which should not have happened

I was drawn to Bhagwat Geeta , the mother of all philosophy books. I had heard from well read people that it contained THE truth, which when discovered, took you to another plane as a person/being.

Neale Donald Walsch’s book, Conversations with God, came to me at that point in time when I desperately needed an answer for something I was going through. It was a new experience and I was young. I had lost somebody I had shared my life with. She was close to me and despite our differences I loved her. What jolted my impressionable mind was the paradox – I could see her denims, her lipsticks, her stuff but not HER. Didn’t they say soul lasted forever and every earthly thing was transient! How was it possible when her denims existed and she did not? I was scared I would see her when I was alone and I felt tremendously guilty about the fact that I was scared of her spirit form. Didn’t we eat in the same plate the other day? Wasn’t she the one who gave extra rupees to the rickshaw bhaiya just because he was old! She was kind. She would never hurt me but I was scared! I tried my best to connect with her by focusing my energies on her thoughts. I thought, like movies, I would stumble upon her photograph in the book, or something from somewhere will fall near me and I would know it was her message to me. I kept repeating her voice in my head, the last time when she had called me, 10 days prior to the accident. The last time when I had seen her, I had left her sleeping on the bed, and she had lazily asked me if I was leaving for my hostel and I had said yes. Her face, the bed, my movement away from the bed, the room, the flat, kept coming back to my mind. What if I would have stayed back the day incident took place? What if I would have talked to her in detail on the phone the day she called me to wish me happy birthday – her last call, I had sensed the depression in her .. .what if I had tried and made it to the apartment that weekend instead of staying back in my room with my friends and preparing for my exams… what if.. what if.. what if…

She never appeared in my dreams, though she did in my sister’s – she was sad and silent and had walked into the forest

Since I had nobody to talk to, I started reading on what happens once we are not in this physical form. Dr. Brian Weiss happened to me then. They say when you seek an answer universe conspires to grant you the same. His book – Many lives, Many masters was kept in my hostel room. It belonged to my friend’s cousin. I asked her if it was ok for me to read the book. Each page from thereon was a revelation. I could not believe the coincidence of reading precisely what I was looking for.

Dr. Brian Weiss, from Miami, is into regression therapy. He is a psychiatrist who stumbled upon the wealth of past life by accident! Here is the verbatim introduction of his book – Many Masters, Many lives from the introduction page of his book ONLY LOVE IS REAL -

“Dr. Brian Weiss had been working with Catherine, a young patient, for 18 months. When his traditional methods of therapy failed, he turned to hypnosis. As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Weiss was skeptical and astonished when Catherine began to recall past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring problems”.

In his book, ONLY LOVE IS REAL, he has mentioned an incident where during his guided meditation amidst one of his group conferences a forensic psychiatrist experienced something rare. Mentally he perceived a shadowy presence of a young woman who asked him to announce to the group that “Natasha is well”. Given the fact that such names are rare in that part of the country he was little taken aback but he did the needful. In that crowd was a woman. Her daughter had died tragically in her twenties only 6months ago. Her daughter’s name was Ana Natalia. ONLY her mother called her NATASHA!

I have suffered from lot of anxieties and insecurities since childhood – car crash is one of them. Till date I am rarely able to enjoy car drives due to this fear. Losing my dear ones is a chronic anxiety I suffer from. Was I separated from them in one of my lifetimes? In my younger days I never could commit myself to a relationship for fear of abandonment, I had always seen a flash, a very blurred one, where I am standing in a room, a big one, all alone, it is a furniture-less house, as if WE have just moved into it, and there is a man who has just gone out.. Left me and gone… and I am going through this sense of hopelessness…I have had flashes of a kind face.. a gentle blue eyes… but it can be a deep influence of my liking for Jesus.. and his serenity

I have always , and firmly, believed that I was a French in one of my lifetimes. I somehow see a black cobalt lane – it can be an influence of watching too much of travel and living though :)

I have somehow loved my country so deeply that I feel it was a gift of choice to be born an Indian. No “third world” topic deters me from my pleasure of being an Indian. It is as if I still remember my soul state and everything about this country is ..so inspiring… it is as if I see it from outside and I feel blessed to have acquired body to spend time in this land of beautiful weather, color, happiness, dreams, relationships … it is as if .. i was an outsider and stayed back here because i fell in love with this country !

Why do abusive men happen to you? Why do things, you never anticipated will happen, actually happens to you? Why your fears appear as realities in-front of your eyes? are they premonitions? or you actually attract them to you ? are they past-life baggage and you need to clean up your act to start afresh ? questions and more questions ….

Such experiences have always pushed me to look for answers I cannot discuss scientifically.. it is like air.. it is there.. only the presence is felt… though you can prove its presence by passing bubbles through water but not its visibility… I don’t know how to express this further

Why do I jot this?

Because I am going through one of those phases where I go to my little library and dust the old books and pick up one of them… for I feel restless inside and I need answers.... this time I picked up Dr. Weiss and it stirred lot of thoughts I had not put in words for long…

Why was I propelled to read what I have been reading for past few days? Why is it a compulsive feeling to jot this down today? Is this a message to somebody ? I don’t know .. so I surrender my thoughts to this void, where lies all the questions and answers beyond our under-used minds…

madwoman: The Glassful of Water (dedicated to mother earth)

check out the rare take on water conservation - on loving mother earth
i could not talk about it in so many words so i have used my sister's old post....

madwoman: The Glassful of Water: "This is the story of a glass of water. There was just one glass of water. My great granny had got it from her mother. She’d handed it over..."

The Indian Woman that i am ! ... salsa with the camera...

today the Indian in me decided to experiment with my traditional looks... here is the result!