Hasta La Vista
I have decided to stop writing here.
I will be continuing on a fresh slate somewhere else. I have made the decision to not write the address down here..
In case you know me, please email me and I will send in the address if possible.
It was a pleasure writing here, but this is a burden I have decided to download and not look back.
Thanks for being here..
Margazhi Thingal!
Today starts the month of margazhi! This month is considered to be the time to be austere and spend time in focusing on God and hence not favourable for any other activities.
For me, this month is associated with the 30 days Thirupavai viradham, when I read the thirupavai and go to temple and pray first thing in morning at 5:30 am. Then have the hot pongal prasadam and be back by 6:30 am. (Can’t believe that I am the person who did all that, now waking up at 5:30 am is a dream by itself)
Missing that tradition here.. With gymming added I cannot take bath go to temple, then get to gym sweat it out and then bath again, with the cold weather being what it is!
So I will have to do a late morning prayer..
One of my favorite stanzas
செய்யும் கிரிசைகள் கேளீரோ, பாற்கடலுள்
பையத் துயின்ற பரமனடி பாடி
நெய்யுண்ணோம் பாலுண்ணோம் நாட்கள் நீராடி
மையிட்டு எழுதோம் மலரிட்டு நாம் முடியாம்
செய்யாதன செய்யோம் தீக்குறளை சென்று ஓதோம்
ஐய்யமும் பிச்சையும் ஆந்தனையும் கைகாட்டி
உய்யுமாறு எண்ணி உகந்து ஏல் ஓர் எம்பாவாய்.
Random Notes
Hitting Gym this week on.. 3 full days of success so far! My calves beg to differ on the success part..
Lesson of the Week – No outing is better than mismanaged outing (Note from a bad Tuesday)
What makes some types of food desirable is the fact that it is forbidden (Fall out of Gym restrictions). My dietician suggests I cut on sugar, oil, coffee and outside food. Misery aptly describes the feeling I felt at that moment
Badly cooked food, Rain time pakoras, hot oil baths, Festivals and rituals related to it are all reminders of home for me. But nothing like a good head cold and sinus infection to make me miss Mom. I miss that magic concoction that is terrible to drink but gives “Instant Relief”, those vicks with steam inhalation sessions and the spoon of Sukku ( dry ginger) burning away your head while working on your sinuses. Nothing like mom’s care!! 
Not even the best efforts by your spouse can equal that.
That’s all for now..
The book Meme
I lifted this Book meme off Felicity .
The rules are – Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt. These are the BBC top 100 Books to read . As opposed to most people who read only 6, I am slightly better, but then what have I been reading?
Some of the books I have been intending to read but just gave a miss somehow.. Anyhow, I have a mission now.. 
I will update you guys when am done with 50% of the list. May be this is my target for 2011..
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 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
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 The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’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 series – 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 – A.A. 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 Meaney – 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 The 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 – E.B. 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
8 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
9 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Get Idea ad- Bad Idea?
I was watching the latest Idea ad-
They talk about good signal/customer service/reasonable phone bills and say if you want this switch to Idea without changing number. “Mobile Number Portability” coming soon.
Think I am someone frustrated with Airtel/DoCoMo/Vodafone. I want to change my connection provider. I see this ad. Would I switch today? No. I should rather wait till portability comes in, so that I dont have the headache of informing the new number.
Will I change once the portability is implemented? Probably yes, probably no.
Why?
a)Customer service of my current connection provider may improve to retain customers
b) I might not feel the problem is as huge as I feel it is now
c) I might find a better provider than Idea.
Just my line of thought. Wonder why Idea didn’t get the idea…
