Adieu!

This blog has been dead for a while now, despite my multiple attempts to resurrect it. So today, I decided to call the dead spade a dead spade and move on.

Why now? Well, every now and then, I stumble on a cool blog while searching for one thing or the other and I binge-read their blog only to find that one fine day the blogger simply stopped posting, or worse, completely vanished. I never thought (or realized) I was doing the same to my blog. No, not the cool blog part, just someone on the internet you relate to suddenly vanishing and making you feel just a little lonely. You know, like when you search for an obscure computer issue and there is that one guy on Stack overflow who had the exact same issue as you, but nobody responded, and you so want to talk to the guy and say "Hey I hit the same issue too. And what happened to you? Did you ever resolve it?" but obviously that guy is long gone and you are screaming into internet nothingness.

If anyone ever stumbles on my blog, I don't want them to feel shut off. Hence, the proper Goodbye.

When I was actively blogging, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the discussions with my readers and the often surprising responses (um, compliments) I got from my readers in real life. Thank you for your support! :)

I haven't written much in a while, for various reasons that I have only recently begun to explore. So I do not know if I will even return to writing regularly (I hope I do). If I do so, I will add a link on this page to wherever I move. I tried Medium but something about it (the platform? the UI? the existence of so many trashy Medium articles?) prevents me from writing well on the platform. So I will have to find some other location. I also prefer customizable backgrounds and so forth, so that will be a factor, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

For now, I will be making comments moderated on this blog (assuming Blogger still lets me do that). This should allow people to leave comments but filter spam , given that spammers and bots have been the only ones commenting lately, and I will leave the blog on life support for as long as Google hosts the platform.

So, without further ado...
Adieu!

(Get it? Get it? I am proud of that one =D )

You might very well think that....

After a long wait, D-Day has arrived. HoC Season 4 is on!! (Unfortunately, this isn't a review. A related topic, rather.... )

You see, I am not much of a TV watcher. I can watch mindless comedies while doing chores, but I am sort of a TV commitmentphobe- cannot be loyal to any series, watch it everyday, etc. However, occasionally, circumstances collude and I end up watching one. Two years ago, I started watching House of Cards.

At first, I was thoroughly impressed by Spacey and his lines. Spacey is, no doubt, brilliant. Robin is great too. She is sexy and power-hungry and magnetic all at once. I was not a big fan of Kate Mara or Russo or the Dunbar lady, but then Jackie and the Russian President guy were spot-on. I liked the Season 2 Mrs.President too, too lazy to look up her name now.
Of course, the focus is not the characters. It is the lines. When Spacey delivers his words, even in an act of unpardonable evil, you agree with him "Yes, yes, a matador. Never a doormat!". 

Yes, yes, the Netflix House of Cards is awesome. But..

Wedding Diaries- Part 4

You know how some wise person said all that people care about a wedding are the pictures.. (And the getting married. But that comes second really!)
The hassle about picking the right location, theme or not theme, if theme then choose decoration.. (oh wait, my writing sounds like code now. That is definitely not a good sign. Should. write. more. often), from picking the right saree/outfit to choosing the matching mojari (aka sherwani sandals) - every step of the process is simply a coin dropped into the bucket of "the pictures should be good" and what will my Instagram 
followers think".

Knowing this on some level, I figured that what really mattered in the long run was finding the right photographer and finding the right clothes.


First the clothes.
I had about 2 weeks to shop. I wanted to be there for the shopping, and one might say I brought it upon myself.... but the two sarees I let someone else pick were such utter disasters that if I didn't want to look like a cross between Godzilla and Christmas lights, I better pick my clothes myself! The downside to that was walking up and down the streets of T.Nagar trying to find good sarees.

Apparently, the minute you breathe the words "wedding" or "bride" people see you  like this:

Plus, saree shopping required a bunch of tricky constraints to be met. You want a good silk material and potentially some sequin work or whatever, but not so much that it would be unwearable in the Tamil Nadu heat. But then again, it should meet the grandeur scale expectations, which in many people's minds translates to social status - so if you wore something a tad simpler they would think you were begging in the streets of Dharavi or something. With my natural instincts primed to pick sarees that would go well in board rooms of conservative East Coast banks, it was more than an ordeal for me narrowing the right one. And what with inadvertently mentioning the word "wedding" in the stores, the store guy would insist I try on each saree I even vaguely considered. But that's not it.

I don't know which bride had the brilliant idea of color-coordinating clothes with the groom. (Of course, it was the bride's idea, however much the nerd-looking-sarcasm-spewing-feminist-inside-me complains!) But that has spawned off a whole other set of shopping difficulties. Love a purple saree? No, can't do- a purple sherwani would look like the groom came straight from Bombay circus. Found a beautiful bottle green? But that doesn't go with the rest of the theme. And then there were the traditional no-nos of white or black, apparently Indians like the gray areas a lot more (trying so hard not to make an India-bashing joke here).
So finally after spending endless hours in endless stores and clogging practically all of the T-mobile international data bandwidth with saree pictures, I had a good mind to call it all off and walk in with a T-shirt and good ole denims. Ha, I wish...

With all that effort going in, one would think I would have escaped the Bridezilla fate and come out stunning on D-Day. I say it again "Ha, I wish".

(To be contd.)

From a crow's egg to inside a kid's head

I watched two incredible movies the last weekend. So I am going to break the wedding diary series and put this piece in. Both movies were amazing- both were about children and both were funny and intelligent and wonderfully entertaining. In fact, it is only as I type that I realize they are in completely different languages, with drastically different budgets, and depicting almost different ends of the economic spectrum. The first movie was "Kaaka muttai" (Crow egg) and the second was "Inside out". (Interesting/funny-moments non-plot spoilers ahead!)

"Kaaka muttai" is a movie about two kids living in a Chennai slum. When a new pizza store opens in the neighborhood, they want one and decide to save up  (300Rs=~6$) for it. The story revolves around the little schemes they do to get the pizza and whether money was all they needed to get it.
"Inside out" is a Pixar creation and about what goes on in a girl's head when she moves to SF from Minnesota- the typical struggles of a regular kid who moves to a new place and faces change. of course, the main brainwave (no pun intended) was in showing her emotions as quirky characters in her brain who are trying to control her actions- and how they interplay as she eases in.

The Wedding Diaries- Part 3

Ya I know  it's been a millenium since my last post. You see, right now I am part of a scientific experiment at my job where they keep loading me with more work and every two hours they check if they have managed to kill me yet. And every time, I go "Surpriiiise, I am still alive!!"
So in order to keep my sanity, I thought I should go back to blogging. So, here goes....

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.)
 
Long story short, at some point everyone involved agreed that the wedding was going to happen. (I will get to the whole reason-arrange-marriage thing at the end.) By this time, I thought the "difficult" part was mostly over. Everyone was on board, after all. If this were a cartoon , this is the point where the devil would be lurking in the corner saying "You wish" and grinning evilly.

Yes. Wedding prep.

I knew that entire wars have been fought over wedding details and the carcasses were enough to send Asoka to Buddhism, so I thought I shouldn't be too involved. In fact, I started out with the naive idea that I didn't care too much about this stuff and I would not worry about making the choices. (After all, I got to make the biggest choice aka the groom) And things would have gone on fine......

But once I saw a sample invitation that came in dirty violet with golden tassles and yellow-green text, I realized I did care about this stuff on some level. I did want the pretty invitations and beautiful text- an invitation that was elegant, minimalistic and somehow had a tinge of wedding-grandness at the same time. To quote Meryl Streep....

Turned out I was.

After a few whatsapp and gmail threads with loads of pictures, I realized one thing- the perfect ones were either too expensive or just too high maintenance. The ones that appeared to be in my league were either "good-but-not-my-type", "meh" or "really terrible, I cannot believe I am even considering this. I must be getting desperate". In the end, I just realized you have gotta pick one anyway and hope that it would work out in the long run.
Yes, yes. I am still talking about the invitations. Not. The. Groom.

Anyway, after that fire was put out came the invitation text. I am sure I drove the printing guy crazy with my grammar nazi-ness by having 4 reprints of the prototype. In my defense, I could obviously not have my name spelled "suchira"  (with the 's' in lowercase') or Irvine spelled "Inwine". Seriously!

Then came the menus. As a food lover, I thought I should have a say in this even though everyone insisted I wouldn't be getting to eat much of it.
So I was trying really hard to include items that different sections of guests would appreciate (or at least to serve the principle that nobody should go home hungry!) But then our original caterer bailed out because our mandap wala said "No buffet" (I know, what is up with THAT!?! That too in a place with a characteristically Western name - Salem.) So we had to settle for a South Indian caterer who promised to make Naans and some paneer thing (I forget what), but from the minute I saw his menu written in Tamil, I knew he was one of the types to spell Gobhi as Gopi and my expectations spiralled down. 
I still had to ensure there was at least a mix of dishes in the menu and that the chef  didn't put anything that was technically correct but practically incriminating like fake meat. Not that that helped. On D-Day most of his dishes reminded me of hostel food anyway. 
Of course I had to repeat the charade again for 2 more receptions- and also ensure that they didn't all look the same. If someone is thinking I should have written a script for generating menus - I agree. I don't know why it didn't occur to me then.

You know just writing this out is tiring. And that's not even midway. We still had the theme and decorations, clothes and all that other stuff to go..

(To be contd.)

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Oh, the reason for not liking arranged marriage. I am thinking I will make it one of those things like the face of this lady:

We'll keep mentioning it, but probably never reveal it.. :D
So, for now, That's all folks!