The Mini Kala Ghoda Festival

Last weekend saw a mini Kala Ghoda Fest as a preview to the annual one to be held in February 2010. And I landed there armed with my camera looking forward to some fun and disappointed I was not!

Though the mini fest did not have the abstract statues around it still invited one to mull over the wares that were displayed in the stalls on both sides of the street. Some stalls were the familiar while others offered a new browsing experience. To my surprise found around 3 stalls catering to different kinds of clocks! And they were all beautiful!! Some were made of brass, others of glass and some from Nagpur were made of wood in the shape of a t-shirt!!

The cultural shows were fun to watch too. Gary Lawyer entertained us with songs from Frank Sinatra to Queen and ended with one of his own. Following him there was a jugalbandi of music with Louis Banks’ son (forgotten his name!) on the drums, and accompanying him were members on the electric guitar, tabla, sitar and flute. The music enthralled each one of the spectators.

Sunday saw the same stalls and the crowd puller that day was Jagjit Singh live!! Yes, I stood and waited for him to come for 1 hour, not budging from my place less someone comes to displace me! Jagjit Singh was in a great mood and his ghazals kept everyone asking for more.

Wake up, Inglorious Surrogates!

Yes, I caught up with all these three movies over the weekend.

Started with Surrogates, and it was interesting (for want of a better word!) to see Bruce Willis with hair!! I have become so used to seeing him bald that the hair looked totally out of place!! The movie was interesting and if you enjoy sci-fi then you will enjoy it too. The movie made me wonder if I too would like a surrogate for myself – and yes I wouldn’t mind it most of the time but definitely not all the time! I mean I would love having it around to do all the daily mundane chores!!! Who wouldn’t?? ;) The movie was well made and Bruce Willis showed bits of his Die Hard character when he went around with his gun and a bloodied face and shirt.

On Saturday evening I went to see Wake Up Sid. Though I am not much of a Hindi movie buff I went to see why it was being spoken about. The movie was ok-ok. Loved Ranbir’s t-shirts though!! They all were really cool and cute all rolled up in one!! Hehe Konkana looked good as usual. The story was ok and the end could have been mmmmmmuuuuuccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhh better!!!! So go and watch it if you have nothing to do and you would like to waste 3 hours of your life! ;)

Inglorious Bastards – the name itself makes you inquisitive and curious to know more about the movie. The movie is over 2 hours long but never seemed it. One of Quentin Tarantino’s best movies ever! Though I am not a fan of Brad Pitt I must admit he acted well in the movie as the leader of the pack. Though more than him I thought that “The Jew Hunter” aka Standartenführer Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz was the cream of the movie! His acting was fantastic and you felt he was a real Nazi soldier! The compete band of the Inglorious Bastards were interesting including the baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter – “The Bear Jew”. The movie was made more realistic by the usage of local languages like French and German besides English, so you were forced to turn your eyes to the bottom of the screen to read the subtitles. It was gory in bits but then again what Quentin Tarantino’s movie doesn’t have blood and gore in it? All in all a wonderful movie – enjoyed it immensely!!

Voice your decision – Vote!!

Over the last few days the election committee has been trying to lure citizens towards the voting booths to cast their votes for the Assembly Elections. It has been interesting to see the way in which the various party candidates are trying to woo the voters.

Some have resorted to advertisements in the newspapers the major ones being by the Congress and the Shiv Sena – BJP alliance – and I must say that whoever is dong the print advertisement for the Shiv Sena - BJP alliance is good! To see what I mean, look on the last page of yesterday's Times of India newspaper!! Through these advertisements they seem to be reaching out to the educated masses instead of the uneducated ones. The Congress ads are a little stale now and look like they are used for all the possible elections that we have in our country.

In terms of innovative ways to advertise there have been the usual smses from the MNS and Congress parties – did not receive any from the Congress though... One that truly took me by surprise was when my mobile phone rang and on answering it, I heard a man’s voice (later recognized as Raj Thackeray) speaking in Marathi and convincing me to vote for the MNS. The commuters of BEST buses were not saved and even they had to look at MNS ads on the little tv screens in the bus.

I went to cast my vote yesterday and was pleasantly surprised by the number of youngsters around my area that had come out to vote too. Hope you have done the same!

I want to watch them all!!

I was surfing through YouTube a few days back and stumbled upon their Movie Trailers section and started browsing through them. I came across few movies whose trailers kept me wanting for more! Let me share them with you:

Alice in Wonderland – Johnny Depp never ceases to amaze me! From Edward Scissorhands to Pirates of the Caribbean, he is now the Mad Hatter!!

Inglorious Bastards – though I am not a huge fan of Brad Pitt (yeah!!) I kind of liked his acting in this trailer and am waiting this one to hit the big screen!!

Sherlock Holmes – the ever lovable mad detective, I have been reading his adventures right from my school days and have loved every one of them!! Even the TV serials based on his adventures have been followed by me religiously!! “It’s elementary, Dear Watson” being one of the most famous and recognizable phrases it will be fun to see the new Sherlock Holmes on the big screen! And I never knew that Sherlock wrestled!! :)

Surrogates – one of my all time favourites Bruce Willis comes in all sorts of roles!! Right from the angry cop in the Die Hard series to the ghost in Sixth Sense I have loved him in all his “hatke” roles!! And this is one more!!

The Princess and the Frog – on a lighter and funnier animated note this movie does not really follow the original story but looks like fun!!

My Web/Online Presence till today..

I visited some friends a couple of days ago and one very dear friend asked me if I was on Twitter. When I replied with an “Of Course!” he grinned and replied “Why am I not surprised!!” :)

While chatting with him I realised, Yes, I do have a presence on the World Wide Web!! And am proud of it too!! Today the whole world has congregated together on the Internet and is reaching out to people all over. As we progress, in time, each individual with access to a computer and an internet connection will be present online.

As I started getting introduced to the infiniteness of the internet, I decided to make my presence known to all around me and beyond.. :) I started off (years ago) with signing up for a yahoo mail id, a hotmail id and an Indiatimes id which then graduated to just having 2 mail ids – one on Yahoo and the other on Gmail. After this I got onto the social networking bandwagon and signed up onto Orkut. After getting bored with the site (yeah I know… u don’t understand that!!) I graduated to Facebook where I am more or less settled – for the time being at least ;) till something more fun comes up!!

On the professional networking side I signed up with the lesser known Ryze network years ago but I must confess that I didn’t find that very user friendly and now I am more active on LinkedIn!

Blogging caught my eye and the fun that I have had blogging has been awesome!!!! As you can see by this blog – have 75 posts and counting and have been around only 1.5 years – which may be less compared to those that write every day – but what the hell.. I enjoy writing and what I write!! Hehe Personal blogging aside I decided to get into blogging about my profession and started my HR Blog – it’s still only 3-4 posts old but I think I will get to 75 posts soon!!

I then wanted my own domain name and went out and bought that too which gets directed to my personal blog. I am in the midst of getting/setting up a website too wherein all the links to me will be present – cool nah?

Click! Click! Then I wanted to share my pics with my friends, so I signed up for the then popular Yahoo pictures – loved the interface and could uploading pictures was as simple as A-B-C!! After Yahoo shut down their service I went on the hunt for another online photo sharing site. Amidst all the ones out there, kind of liked Flickr but soon gave that up when I stumbled onto Picassa! This prompted me to start off my very own photo blog and I did! Though it is young too I don’t doubt that it will soon grow to be full of manyyyyyyyyyyy pictures taken from my camera and phone!

Twitter happened recently and it’s not too bad.. Have been getting the hang of it now and keep trying to tweet regularly! Spied one of my friend’s signature sporting his Google profile and now have one of my own too!

So I think for an HR person I am quite present on the Internet!! What do you think? ;)

My Best Friend’s Birthday Adventures

No, this is not like one of the Famous Five’s adventures!! This is about a night out with my best friend on her birthday last night. It all started out well, and we left her place for Juhu in her car.

With the windows rolled up, we waited for the air conditioning to kick in but to our disappointment it refused to do so and we had to roll the windows back down – not too bad as there was a cool breeze blowing. After filling up petrol we got on our way with the FM radio belting out the latest Hindi movie songs. We decided to take the Worli-Bandra Sealink and turned towards Worli seaface.

We suddenly heard a thump-thump noise and were wondering where it was coming from…. As we racked our heads to figure out the source of the noise we became aware of the car not performing the way it should. We pulled over on the side and discovered we had a flat!! Ok!! Two of us stuck on the side of the road with a flat tyre!! As we debated on how to get to the nearest petrol pump our eyes fell on couple of men changing a tyre on a car and we looked up to find that we had stopped right outside a small-time car alignment garage!! Luck was on our side!! We got the tyre changed and made our way towards the Sealink.

As we approached the Sealink the excitement grew and we were soon driving over the sea!! As we crossed the Sealink, I started taking pictures. The sights that greeted us were amazing and the journey was awesome!!

We made our way to the restaurant at Juhu without any further adventures and settled down to a yummy Italian dinner at Del Italia.

Grant us Independence today!

“Independence” a word that we take for granted at times but makes our hearts swell with pride as the tricolor flutters in the clear blue skies! As we all prepare to enjoy and celebrate our 62nd Independence Day from the British rule, I would like to ask for Independence from some other chains that bind us!

Grant us Independence from the terrorists who think it is their birthright to make our lives miserable by indulging in killing innocent people just so that they will go to heaven!! Don’t they realise there is nothing like that! Why are they getting away with all that they do?

Grant us Independence from the H1N1 virus that is making us suspicious of everyone we interact with, travelling with masks and handkerchiefs wrapped around our faces, and taking the lives of innocent children and elders.

Grant us Independence from the drought that we are facing in the country; send those rain laden clouds to us please! I recently saw the state of the fields on a TV channel and the dry, arid landscapes have been imprinted onto my mind… it is indeed a sad state of affairs…

As this year’s Independence Day passes I am thankful to be living in a free and independent nation. For whatever its quirks I love this country with all my heart!!

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO ONE AND ALL!!