Home Sweet Home :D

I'm just waiiiiiting to go home and see the familiar roads and buildings and taxis and autos!! Waiting to see Mummy and Baba and my baby sister Midu, who's grown up so much in the span of one year that I have been married!!! Waiting to meet Ma and Jit and darling little Billu, who we hear has become a really naughty little mutt!!! Waiting to see the new lean, mean fighting machine that Boo claims to have become!! Waiting to meet my friends and see how much they've changed. And see Durga's baby Sanjith, whom I met when he was just a day old. Waiting to even meet my maid servant who is excited with the news of me coming, the old watchman and the familiar autowallahs and the chaps sitting in Dhanvantri pharmacy. The familiar Hindi in Delhi, where we land (I swear if you were to hear my Hindi nowadays you would not believe I lived in Delhi 8 years!!! ) the charming Bangla in Kolkata, our next stop and of course the rustic brilliance of Tamil back home in Chennai. Can't wait to be home!!!!!

Recipes!!!!

Recently, a friend of mine from school, Ramya and her pal visited us here in NY. In accordance with any good host protocol I made sure the food was good :) And as it turned out, the food served was the most highlighted portion of the trip. Now all my friends are talking about the "Kashmiri Dum Aloo" I treated Ramya to. I love to cook but I don't have patience to work on highly elaborate recipes, so I search the internet to find easy-to-do recipes. Like the Kashmiri Dum Aloo, I've found several recipes that sound and taste exotic but are really simple to make. I've realised that with a little tweaking of your own, you can make any simple, internet recipe a really special hit with your friends ;) So people who hate cooking or think it's a really long, laborious process, give one of these interesting recipes a shot and see how it hits off with your buddies!!!

Mera Bharat Mahan

So this is our 59th Independence Day huh? 59 years of independence has brought us a long way I think... Maybe I didn't realise much when I was still living in the country but this distance has given me a perspective. Everywhere I read and every person I talk to is talking about the "Boom" in India. And the greatest proof of that, I think, is the fact that so many people I know are planning to transition back to India to ride the wave. Every American I meet knows enough about India to carry on an interesting enough conversation. They are charmed by our culture and the people and places. Almost every single one of them has said that India is high priority on their list of destinations (and being the globe-trotters that many of them are- it is heartening to hear!). And meeting different people who all love talking about India just makes my love for my country grow more. My India... my home!

Kabhi Alvida na Kehna....

So KANK was the upcoming Karan Johar fare that I was most looking forward to. From the time that I saw the promos in the theatre while watching, I think it was RDB (Rang De Basanti- for the uninitiated!!), I was counting days till its release. I am a complete sucker for all the candy-floss, larger-than-life, highly unrealistic, yet so completely fantastic Karan Johar cinema. I did, really did have very high hopes for KANK. Moreover it was shot entirely in NY and somehow made it closer to my heart. I somehow feel the need to start with my love for the KJ films as a preamble to my post, because I know once you're done reading with my review of the movie you are not going to believe that a KJ fan wrote it.

So we land up at the cinemas... which is a bit of a trudge away from home. I take a train and connecting bus upto to the theatre and Sougata manages to get to the theatre similarly from office. We hang around in the lobby, being an hour early, taking in the magnificent visuals of the oversized posters and gobbling down bhelpuri, samosa-chana and mango lassi. We manage to enter the theatre well ahead of time and secure good seats and thoroughly enjoy the Dhoom2 and DON promos before the start of movie.

Here we are waiting with bated breath and the story opens. The first couple of minutes are fine.. we are enjoying it so far as SRK and Rani meet on a park bench.. SRK waiting for his mum (the wedding planner/caterer- not sure!) and Rani getting cold feet before her marriage. And then they start fighting with each other, even just having met each other for the first time and pour their hearts out to each other (of course for the benefit of the viewers to know their inner most thoughts!) and then things get very weird. They finish their uncomfortable conversation and walk away from each other constantly looking back over their shoulder!!! I thought SRK was waiting for his mom? Where is he going? And what's there to look back every few seconds??? And he stands at the gated entrance of the villa or palace or mansion or whatever those structures that are convenient homes of all KJ characters and whammmm he gets hit by a car. I did NOT get that... and that was just the start!!!

So well things started going bad in spurts after that. We have all had enough of SRK's expressions and his "tch-tch-chup-chup" routine whether it is a happy scene or a sad scene or he's being romantic or angry.. it don't matter 'cause the dude knows only so many ways to contort his face. And it gets excruciating watching him over and over again every couple of minutes... and was it my imagination or did it really seem like Rani was reflecting his expressions after sometime??

The movie does have its moments and I will have to credit Abhishek and Amitabh Bachchan solely for that. Younger B was par excellence. He was real, believable and absolutely adorable. Every single scene that lent him an opportunity for KJ melodrama, he resisted and delivered such a wonderfully restrained and mature performance that it was a complete treat to watch! I think even the harshest critics of the movie have unequivocally lauded Li'l B's work in the movie.

Senior B was also so delightfully different. He was classy and completely in the skin of the character he played. He was naughty and incorrigible yet so warm and human. His character could easily have been a caricature had it been played by anyone else who didn't have his panache!

So getting back to the movie per se... I don't want to provide any spoilers for those still keen on watching the movie. There were huge gaps in the story. Rani's character was completely unjustified. Right from the start. I didn't get why she didn't love her husband, why she was sooo unhappy in her marriage, why she didn't get turned on by a hotttt husband like AB who was so doting on her and of course, how... oh how on earth did she find true love in SRK who was constantly complaining and scowling and making sarcastic, cynical remarks about every-******-thing in life!!! And it became more and more confusing when it seemed like everyone was making an effort to make their respective marriages work!

Well in any case... the absolute deal-breaker for me was the fact that in the end they justified the extramarital affair and said that THIS is their true love and you shouldn't be afraid to even step out of the boundaries or breach the loyalty of marriage to pursue your "true love"!! Well OK whatever dude!!!

For anyone who's interested, KANK is written by the same lady who wrote Fanaa and it is quite obvious why the story is the way it is!! I would say it's worth a watch for the sake of the two ABs.

For those who've seen it, let me know what you thought of the film :)

What a way to get to know me!!!!!

Thanks Moonmoon for enriching my blogging experience by tagging me even before I wrote my first blog. Well this is probably the most insightful first blog in the history of blogs... hehehe... Here goes:

So I am supposed to list 6 (not more, not less- SIX) "weird" habits I have... hmmm... let's see:

• I always start doing something that really needs to get done just before I am supposed to leave from home. For instance, say 10 mins before I need to leave I'll attend to the sink full of dishes that needed to get done in the morning!! My husband hates it that always when he's at the door, ready to leave, I head back inside to spray on some deodorant or something like that!
• I can be a people-pleaser alot of times and find it difficult to assert myself. But I hope I still come off being my individualistic self, who is also nice to people :)
• I am an impossible procrastinator... sometimes there's a voice inside me telling me "Come on- you need to do XYZ and you're not doing anything at all anyway... why not do it now?" and still I'd rather watch TV!!!
• But in direct contrast to the earlier point, I have to reply to mails as soon as I get them... because I know if I don't do it then, in all probability I will forget later.
• I lovvvve making lists. Hehe ask anyone at home I have a list for everything... for what I need to do in the day, what I need to remind someone about, what I need to pack for a trip etc etc. I guess you could say I have a "list-fetish".
• I still get unbelievably excited when my sweetheart calls unexpectedly from work or just lands up home without calling before he starts from the office!! He still gives me the rush like when we started going out 8 years back!!

Ok Ok so I'm weird... hrmmmphh!! but I guess, hehehe, so are a lot of people!!! Here's to us :)

(Image courtesy: Getty Images)