What's The Good Word?

These days, I see everybody speaks in jargons and acronyms. “wfh” for working-from-home, “wfo” for working-from-office are two most often used letters these days. Ananth wished me “MHROTD” a week ago. As a small girl, when I used to receive greeting cards on my birthday, I used to look for two words – “Happy” and “Birthday”. Well, I get the message now but those two words that made me happy are missing.

It appears as though speaking in jargons and acronyms is a fashion and you are not “in” if you don’t. I am afraid words may soon wane out and we will eventually lose hold of any linguistic skill.

Of late, Chinmay and I spend Saturday afternoons playing a game of Scrabble. It is a simple word-game to form words from tiles you have and that fit on the board. It is fun and at the same time brushes up our vocabulary, gives us a chance to use new words that we have read somewhere. It is a great mind vitalizer.

Over Scrabble, we have also had many squabbles to check if the words were actually valid.
Did you know “qua” means “in the capacity of”? And the word “geek” has the following meanings:

1. A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy.


2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.


3. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.

But believe it or not, we are at times tied up for words to make from a bunch of consonants on our racks. It is easy to make acronyms like “ttyl” and “bfn” with those! Ha ha ….but we have never given up and always made some good word.

Physiology of Taste Buds

I haven’t found time, or should I say patience to write anything last week.
Last week was socially extremely active.  We celebrated two festivals.. Swarna Gowri and Ganesha habba. Both are major festivals here. Ganesha is celebrated until 5 days at our home. So we had an extended festival.  We had lots of relatives and friends coming home on all 5 days. I hadn’t seen many of my neighbours and even if I had seen them, I didn’t know their names. In our rushed lives, guess the time spent in “harate over the compound wall” has decreased and so also any bonding between neighbours. This week was a good time to make up for all that.

Festivals mean pooja and then lots of good food. Two days of non-stop sweets..obbattu., payasa,  modak,  kadubu, .. mmmm..  bajjis, bondas, poori.. wow. It was an amazingly non-stop feasting time! The last thing I wanted to think of is about any weight gained.
What is the rest of the year for .. burn it!!! Strangely, I always seem to think of weight gain when presented with good food.

Another interesting thought came to my mind after eating all those sweets. We seem to be able to eat the spicy bajjis and bondas one after the other.. and savour each of them.
Also, we can savour the modaks, obbattus and payasa well… but after eating one sweet, our taste buds seem to give up on sensing the taste of sweetness of another food. I am sure we all have seen that.. if we drink coffee right after eating a sweet, we seem to lose the taste of the coffee.

What happens with the sweet taste bud? Does it give up? Or is there a message in there?.. Don’t eat more than one!

Happy Gowri & Ganesha to all!

Do-It-Yourself

We have a small garden on our terrace and the idea of having the Sunday morning breakfast amidst the flowering pots was a sunny idea. Chinmay came up with this idea that he would like to make the breakfast table himself. The idea was exciting, but I was apprehensive we may end up buying other things other than the table like the tools. But still the idea held good.

I made lots of attempts to find a “Do-It-Yourself” kit for breakfast tables. I surfed the net for help, contacts…I could only find hits with names in the US. I scanned the Yellow Pages for suppliers of Garden Tools and Furniture.

A couple of them just didn’t understand what I wanted. They were like – why-should-you-want-to-do-it-yourself—what-am-I-here-for?

Another supplier of garden furniture said, “We can make the ‘do-it-yourself’ kit for you.. you tell the design you want, we will do it”. I said, “That means you would have done everything yourself”. “You can take it home and assemble yourself madam”, he replied.

Another person said, “Ah.. that is American style madam… only there you would want to do it yourself”.

I haven’t yet been successful in finding what we want. But the whole search got me thinking that why the Do-It-Yourself thing is an “American” style. Why is it that we always want to get things done? In fact, I have seen that we even take pride when we show around the house saying, “We got it done ourselves”.

In the movie Swades, Shahrukh Khan returns from the US and buys and installs the turbine, pipes, motors, everything to generate electricity.. basically does-it-himself (of course with the others’ help). If necessity is the mother of invention, why didn’t we do-it-ourselves?

Seems strange.. but something to ponder over the weekend.

Blogging through MS

Hey I added this new blogger plug-in to MS-Word. It is cool.. allows me to publish directly from a Word doc.    

anda kaalathil (in those days)

I used to maintain diaries long back when I was in Mysore. After some time, I lost interest in writing and eventually my diary updates largely comprised of accounting my daily expenses.

After reading quite a few blogs from Chinmay, Hari, Ananth, Sripathi and Girish, I am inspired to scribble something again.

I happened to lay my hands on my old diary last weekend when I stayed at my mother's place. I had written down very neatly all my expenses for the day - every day!
One typical day involved:
Petrol - Rs. 38.00
Xerox - Rs. 33.00
Juice - Rs. 21.00 (Suman + Niru + Me)

Mind you.. that was two litres of petrol for Rs. 38.00. I remember it used to last me a fortnight on my Luna Super.

Good old days!