Life is full of moments....some good, some not-so-good, some filled with happiness, some others heartbreaking. But this well-connected moments and their accumulation make this journey more beautiful, enriching...and worth living for.
Some incidents occur and the memories and the associated feelings, the impressions....remain etched in our minds. Other occurrences fade away by the passage of time...much as the sea-waters wash away the foot-prints we leave while walking across the shores.....
Our lives are thus a rendition of remembering and forgetting.......of holding on to some, and letting go of the others...!!!




Image from: ininweb.uprm.edu

Thanksgiving..

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about the festivals celebrated widely in the United States. Thanksgiving Day is one of them. Celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, it is originally a harvest festival, where people of the region pay thanks to Almighty for a bountiful harvest and in a larger sense it marks the thanksgiving for everything that matters in our lives, for all the beautiful relationships and for all that we are blessed with in our lives. In USA, the day is awaited throughout the year with pleasant anticipation and is celebrated with joy along with friends and family. The one important aspect of this celebration is the family re-union over dinner and the menu (another important parameter) famously consists of a turkey delicacy. I have observed while living here that the Thanksgiving Day is the only day where most of the offices and businesses remain closed and the later reopens in the wee hours of Friday morning with wonderful and huge deals to the shoppers' delight. Thus the whole weekend starting from the Thursday until the Sunday remains in true festive spirit nation-wide.
I am now revealing the true intent of my story...that this year, after merely observing the pomp of the day for the past two years, we decided to celebrate the day in our own way. One of the two major aspects of the festival was missing (as we are thousand of miles away from our family...so family get together was painfully out of question)....but turkey was not.....!!!! So we decided to have a turkey dinner...:) Observing that a whole turkey would be too much for just the two of us, we bought a Turkey wing and I cooked it in true Indian style ( much in the same way as I would have made chicken tandoori )....!!! and I must say, we loved it....it tasted even better than chicken...( as were said by many of my friends here...) 
For the two of us, (the husband and I), experimenting with food doesn't happen very often....we prefer to stick to our good old Indian foods and delicacies, but we tried this and much to our delight, it came out very good.....We most definitely will always be very much Indian, in every way possible, and..even more especially when it's about the palate....but Thanksgiving with turkey will remain memorable......:)

p.s. For my friends here, I share a photograph of the Turkey I cooked....:)

Sau Gram Zindagi......

Yesterday, we went to watch Sanjay Leela Bhansali's latest movie 'Guzaarish'.....Bhansali is known for his larger-than-life portrayal of stories, scenes and the characters. His films transcends the viewers to a different world, to a space which is somewhere beyond reality but falls short of absolute fantasy.....thus leaving a lone cinematic possibility of being and the incidents happening.
'Guzaarish' dishes out the same intrigue and uniqueness and to top that, the film is shot by cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee with an excellence which seems less of a lens-work and more like an artiste's stroke on canvas....only it is celluloid...!!!
The story is plain....it just is about a well-known magician (played by Hrithik Roshan) , who, 14 years ago, met with a near fatal accident which leaves him quadriplegic. Being paralyzed physically, his health gradually deteriorates and after living, loving and suffering through his condition, he finally appeals unsuccessfully for Euthanasia (mercy killing). 
The story, as plain and with some constraints in the weaving of its details, acquires a certain level of drama with the maneuvering of the characters, their passion and demeanor, and the associated sequences. The gaps in writing has been somewhat covered by the camera and the director's expertise in the portrayal. The performances by the lead and character artiste's deserves mention. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's (playing the nurse to the ailing magician) mettle has been redefined, giving an impression that only Bhansali can understand, work out and make her come up with the best. Hrithik Roshan reasserts himself with respect to the acting skills as well as his drop-dead charisma, in this piece of cinema. The film expresses itself and flashes back into the incidents happened earlier in a very different and stylish manner ( I won't come out with the details here for keeping the magic intact for those who have not yet watched the movie), the scenes and colors are equally distinctive and used with defined sensibility. The costume and music, because of its unlikeness, went well with the narration.
For me, it was an experience worth having, except for a tad bit of melodrama in bits and pieces throughout and especially in the closing shot. Moreover much of the narration leaves many a things to the perception of the viewers, the expressions not as detailed as in his earlier films.......and this perspective of the movie may do either good or pose as a disadvantage for the movie  depending on the audiences' demand for clarity. 
'Guzaarish' is about the celebration of life and its moments.....the love we feel, but the movie does not blurt out the message, loud and clear..it flows underneath along the length of the film. 
I would have loved it rather more if it ended giving out a brighter sense of optimism as it intended to do, it seemed....but fell short for whatever reasons......
          "Thodi si teekhi hai, thodi meethi hai....
                 sau gram zindagi..........samhaal ke kharchi hai"

Today, November 22, is the birthday of a very dear friend of mine....but I don't write about the birthdays of all my friends in my blog. But she is special. Special because she is one of my friends since the time I came to know what is known by the term 'friend' (literally, I mean.....the greater meaning is still left to be fully understood), because we are friends since we were in class I, because I have neither seen her since 2001, nor spoken to her. But I still say we are friends and she knows that too. We just passed out of high school and she decided to take a certain step in her life which I thought (and still think the same) to be a serious lapse in judgement on her part. I suffered but severed all ties with her because I thought that she deserved much better and I was not ready to hear to her inconveniences (which often elevated to sufferings as well, as I correctly thought it would be like that )....I think I love her too much to bear those circumstantial constraints in such young age. I hear from my parents and common friends sometimes that she is all right, has settled in her life in a good way, got over all the problems but I, till date, choose not to be a part of her life. 

But I think of her often, remember her on her every birthday, and I knew somewhere inside that she knows this fact and she understands. She tried to contact me a few times, the friends who knew both of us thinks that I over reacted....but it's perhaps a confession that I, knowing the fact that each person is destined to live with certain respective terms and conditions in life, still cannot get over the feeling that she deserved much more than she went through. May God bless her with immense happiness, peace and love in her life.....and I want her to understand ( I know she does) that I consider her as one whom I'll always regard as my friend and will always love her.....only I choose not to be a part of her present....

The most enriching read of this year..

Reading is my passion. It is said about me by my near and dear ones that I cannot spent a day without spending sometime with a printed material before my eyes. I happily agree to that notion. It's true that I love to read, be it anything like a newspaper article, writings of fellow bloggers, magazine bits and pieces, novels and non-fiction or even (if nothing's available) the community newsletter and everything with religious interest and attention....!!! 
Last year I read a novel that I loved and will always remember.... 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini. It's the story of two friends in Afghanistan. This year, incidentally, another book on Afghanistan stood out of all my readings. This is not a novel though, but a work of non-fiction, named 'Good Morning Afghanistan. 

Waseem Mahmood, and award-winning broadcaster and an ex-BBC producer, writes this brilliant book about the radio programme (named, Good Morning Afghanistan) he, with his team, started in the nation ravaged by the unruly Taliban for over half a decade. After the fall of Taliban at the end of 2001, the radio programme voiced the concerns and the incidents that were taking place in the battered nation, helping the people in a way to get over the nightmare of years of war and irrational policing.

The book starts with the description of one of the heinous acts of terror in modern world, the 9/11 and how it shook the lives of a string of people mentioned in the book along with the thousands who bore the brunt of this destruction first-hand. Written with the lucidity of fiction and details of a document, Good Morning Afghanistan is a compilation of true incidents that happened in the course of one and a half year, beginning from September, 2001 to January, 2003. It reveals what Afghanistan went through during the course of the Taliban regime and what it takes for the people to recover from such huge material and emotional damage. It takes courage and persistence to bear the unnecessary and meaningless acts of cruelty and terror for so many years.

The book is a documentation of a nation starting afresh, after having lost almost every hope of getting back their usual way of life, with the radio programme giving them the first glimpse of hope.

I must say that I will remember this book as well with a heart full of compassion and respect for the brave people of Afghanistan.