Word for the day

Hey Everyone! I don't know if I can keep up to what it says on the post title, that is come up with a whacky word for the day, but I just saw this online and had to post it. And these words do not have to be confined to the English language. They could be from any language.

The word I found today aptly describes me as I am today. And it is a Japanese word. It is :

TSUNDOKU

I think the picture explains it all. What do you think? How many of you are doing this right now? Letting your TBR list pile up?

This gives me the kick in the pants I need to finish reading these books before I buy any more.

My Birthday Haul This Year

I have great friends. They know that the best gifts that I could ever get are books. I want to thank all of them.

These are the books that they have given me.

This was gifted to me by my colleagues. They know my love of books but did not know that I have not read the first part of this series or have the books. But it has turned out to be a good thing as it gives me an excuse to get the rest of the books.

I have already read this book but I didn't have a physical copy. For this I thank Vikrant.

My father is as avid a reader as I am. He has a huge collection of Books & Comics. One of them is the Calvin & Hobbes collection. My friend Ankur was lucky to have xhosen the 2 that we didn't have back home :)

I love the LOTR series and connected books. I tend to read LOTR at least once a year (if not more). I already have the 3 books along with The Hobbit and Silmarillion. The person who got this should have known that. But he still got this for me because this is the 75th Anniversary special of The Hobbit. So he has made a proper LOTR Geek out of me with a copy to read and another to Keep on the shelf :P Thank You Aashith.

I recently discovered the works of Brandon Sanderson. I really loved the Final Empire, and have said so in an entry on this blog. I also went on to read The Emperor's Soul and Legion. I like the worlds he has created. So this is a great gift from my sister Babbi. I get to read it in a book form and not online.

I discovered Manga quite accidentally. But I have been reading a lot of it in recent times. And Akira is one of my favorite Mangas. I gifted myself the 1st volume. The rest were given to be by Ashish and and my best friend Chaitra. Because of them I now have the whole Akira collection. I now plan on acquiring another Manga collection. Probably Monster.

This years birthday was the best in terms of my gifts. I want to thank all my friends for the love they have shown.

Food

This post here is dedicated to all those people who stay in hostels or away from home. Especially to a very dear friend of mine. I had always taken the food my mom cooked for granted. I used to complain even if there was a pinch of salt too less in the food, I used to whine when she used to make things I didn't like( this used to happen a lot as I used to be in a joint family), and i absolutely hated( still hate) brinjal.

Then the day came when I had to go live in a hostel. I realized the value of my mom's home-cooked meals the very first day. I missed her cooking more than I missed her in the beginning. Most of the vegetables were undercooked, the food was either too salty or spicy,mostly it was bland. But after about a month of that food my palate actually got used to it. The only thing I could not get used to was the burnt rice.

The only way I could survive this ordeal was because of my friends. They used to get food for me from home every time. And they introduced me to a lot of restaurants. I was from a small town and we didn't really go out to eat much. But once I got to Hyderabad it was tradition to go out at least once a month. We started going out for birthdays at first. Those were one of the best times in my life. I made great friends over food. I introduced my friends to food from my hometown and they introduced me to lasagna, pasta,etc.
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This past summer my mother tried(emphasis on the tried) to teach me to cook. I learnt how to make rice, dal and bhindi and aloo fry. It brought me much closer to her. This was the same summer we finally got a microwave oven. This brought out all the  cookery books dealing with microwave cooking my mom had bought over the years. We experimented with a lot of things. We baked a cake, I made pasta( which came out really well even if I say so myself) and my mom baked biscuits. The funny thing was the first batch of biscuits were perfect but the second batch were burnt. My father and i could not contain our laughter. But my mom had the last laugh as we had to eat the burnt biscuits.

This is the second hostel I have been in in my life. And I have to say the food is great, especially in comparison with my former hostel. Maybe this is because the menu is decided by a committee of students. And having a friend on the Mess committee doesn't hurt does it. At SDM we have Wednesdays' as a mess off ( dinner). So we go out to have dinner in the beginning of the month and stay back and have Maggi at the end of the month when we're strapped for cash( or atleast we plan on it. We've only stayed in twice maybe). In just a span of three months i have gone to more places to eat than I did in the three years I was in Hyderabad and I've had loads of fun. We've revealed to each other the kooky side of our personalities over dinner. Then we come back and probably play a game of charades.

What I am trying to say with this diatribe is that food is a necessity, not just for nutrition or to survive, but it brings people closer together, makes you open to new ideas and it's just plain fun. I have come to appreciate food a lot more now thanks to my stay in hostels and a lot more recently thanks to my friend Chaitra. It has helped me make friends and also helped me to enjoy life.

Hostel life : Part 2

In my previous post Hostel life : Part 1 i recounted my experience in a hostel for the 4 out of 6years i've stayed in a hostel. Those years were during my graduation and the year i took off from college to study for my MBA entrance exam. After which i joined a residential MBA college. And for the first time in my life i had a room of my own. Granted it was small, but it was mine and it was adequate. I went about making this place my own by promptly keeping it in a state of marginal untidiness and put up a few pictures and posters. The hostel had clusters of rooms, with ten in each and a communal bathroom. All of us in the cluster, unfortunately woke up around the same time and stood in line to make use of the facilities. this happened mostly in the first month or so. We later fell into a routine.

Each cluster was a separate world on its own. We had little get togethers, parties and we stuck by each other. In the first year we had our seniors as our neighbors. which was great for us as we could ask them advice on what subjects were great, which professor to look out for an which ones were a pushover. Most importantly which professors would mark us absent if we entered the class 5 min late or the classes in which we could easily obtain proxies.

This experience was better for me because everyone in the hostel was going to the same college and the same classes (atleast for the first year) and we all lived together. We were going through all this together. So it gave me a sense of camaraderie. The campus was great too. It was at the foothills of Chamundi hills(mysore) and the weather was always pleasant. The boys and girls hostels were in the same compound as the classrooms. So this time around i also made great guy friends ( i was in an all girls college for my undergraduation).

I've noticed that guys are more resourceful when it comes to food in the hostel.Us girls used to usually depend on the guys to provide us with something to eat whenever we were really hungry, which was usually around midnight. We usually used to go get something to eat from outside but there were guys who would actually cook in their rooms. Some of them had induction cookers in their rooms. I had a friend who used to make us sandwiches and burgers and another who used to make Maggi for us whenever we were hungry. They were life savers.

The mess used to have a night off on Wednesdays, so we had to fend for ourselves on that day for dinner. I had a great group of fiends with whom i went to a lot of eateries. One of my favorite places to go to was Jalpaan. Me and my best friend loved the Spaghetti there. With extra olives... Yum. Ok i am digressing. What i am trying to say is we were one big family. I had a huge group of friends for the first time who were as crazy as i was (if not more). We had a celebration almost every month. The best part for me was our MBA fest called Naissance. This was a 3 day fest and i was in the team taking care of one of the major events called Best Manager where we would basically put the participants thorugh the grinder and see who survives to be named the Best Manager. I had alot of fun devising the rounds for this event which was as long as the fest. As we were staying in the hostel we could devote almost all of our time to it. i barely slept for a few hours in those 3 days.

We had a pretty big campus so we would go out for walks at odd hours of the night when we couldn't sleep. We would hang out infront of our campus store and talk about, discuss or debate on almost everything under the sun. Sometimes the topic would be something really trivial and sometimes very serious. but we almost always talked about it as if the fate of the universe hung in the balance on whatever we concluded. I miss these discussions. its not the same over the phone.

In the 2nd year we were given the choice of choosing our own rooms. I chose to stay in my room but my close friends were now my neighbors. That is one of the reasons my 2nd year was such a blast. I used to spend a lot of time with the girl whom i consider my best friend and talk the night away. Whenever we had a party coming up all the girls would start getting ready about 3 hours prior and hog the mirror. we would each critique the other persons clothes and if we were the same body type lend each other our clothes. I have a lot of fond memories in that place. or maybe i should say i have a lot of fond memories because of the people i met there.

I am a better person now because of the time i spent in that hostel. I learnt to share, love, negotiate, compromise, stand up for myself. I learnt that i had friends who would stay by my side no matter what. I found a friend who is my 'Soul sister", a brother (who is a little nuts), someone i can fight with (i fondly call him the Jerk), and someone i can turn to with my problems (though he will make fun of me in the process). For that i thank Chaitra, Ankur, Aashith, Ashish, Carl, Rashmi, Shafeeq, Kanchan, Dee, Payal and all my friends from College. I love you all and i miss our days of goofing around.

Hostel Life : Part 1

I started staying in a hostel a little later in life than people usually do. I joined a hostel during my graduation when I turned 17 and not while I was in school. For those not in India, Hostel means dorms and it doesn't necessarily have to be on campus or even owned by the college or university. I have stayed in two hostels in my life. one during my graduation and the other time when I was doing my MBA. In total I've lived in hostels for 6 yrs of my life, the last 2 of which were all in all the best years of my life. So far.

My first hostel was an OK place, though my sister would say it was the worst place EVER to live in. It was a small room with two bunk beds, so we were 4 to a room. I didn't have a problem sharing my room with my roommates as I never really had a room of my room to begin with. The food was terrible I admit but there were good eateries nearby. I also had great friends who were Day-scholars ( students who go to college from home) whose mothers were great cooks. They used to get a little something extra for me almost everyday. So I enjoyed that.

My parents were a little worried that i might not fare very well in a hostel environment but to their surprise (and mine) I managed pretty well. they were worried for me as they thought I might get pushed around a lot seeing as I wasn't very assertive at home, and i depended on them to get a lot of things done. But once I got to the hostel I fares fairly well. My reasoning was that when i was at home i knew that my parents would take care of things, but once I was out from under their wing I learnt to handle things on my own.

Me being in the hostel was also one of the reasons that made me come out of my shell. I made friend on my own and actually made best friends for the first time. Not just one though but THREE. We had a lot of fun. I was such a good child that i used to play hooky from classes with the consent of my parents. This was a testament to the trust they had in me to not do anything stupid. I am lucky to have the parents that I have as they were alright with me going out with my friends. Within limits of course. My grades were not to be effected. And they weren't. I guess having smart friends was advantageous.

The advantages of being away from home was not taken used by me but my friends. You see in our quartet I was the only one who was single. And 2 out of the 3 friends who were in a relationship took full advantage of me. How you ask? they would tell their parents they were going out to meet me seeing as I was the lonely kid away from home, and go out and meet their boyfriends. Another plus was that my hostel was in the middle of the city. It was fairly near to all the places one would go to date. What was in it for me you ask? I got their undying gratitude and entertainment.

I also made a lot of friends in the hostel itself. we were a mix of students and working women. Whenever college was out for holidays and I couldn't go home all of us at the hostel used to go out to shop, eat and just hang out. Our daily ritual was to go out for ice cream every night at half past nine. We used to rush to the convenience stores nearby. This was a ritual which was upheld come rain or shine. there were three shopping complexes in walking distance from our hostel. So whenever we were bored we would go to these complexes and window shop. We would try on clothes and take pictures in them but not buy a single thing.

For me it was like an extended sleepover. We stayed up late in to the night talking and giving each other beauty treatments ( I mostly refrained from this), watched movies on the lone laptop, gossiped and there was a lot of drama.I did have my share of problems. the food was terrible. I often starved myself for a day before I had anything. I actually had a severe case of anemia by the time I left the hostel. But all in all this is an experience I would never trade in for anything.