2010- A recap

2010 was arguably one of the most fun years of my life. It was only the second in 5 years of married life that we spent in the same place.-Us being the migratory birds that we are.Minneapolis and 2010 gave us the peace,fun and friends that had been missing in our life for some time now.


January: 2010 started with a bang with us (ettan, me , amma and manu) leaving for grand marias to join our friends there. It was a very enjoyable 2 days of excitement and fun.After a lot of tension over a delayed EAD card and 2 job offers,January ended with us completing 5 years of married life.

February:My EAD card finally arrived and my dream of working in US was finally realized. The temperatures were absymally low ,but that did little to dampen my spirits as I started travelling by bus all by myself to and from my new job. Manu on the otherhand started his daycare and was not enjoying it one tiny bit.

March:March was a month of get togethers and brthdays.Our gang was now huge and each weekend was looked forward to eagery for the food and fun and frolic that it brought.


April:April came with vishu.We placed a vishukkani at home and manu got his first vishu kaineetam from his acha.The vishu potluck in traditional kerala style attire brought back memories of a distant homeland.


May:May was the month I had been looking forward to as my parents came to visit us.as we hadn't done much site seeing in minneapolis ourselves, we discovered minneapolis together visiting the cherry and spoon, mall of america and minnehaha falls.

June:June was a truly relaxing month with my parents .Ettan enjoyed excellent food cooked by my mom and manu had a great time playing with his grnd parents.Cricket season started for ettan and he was playing cricket on weekends.

July:July witnessed another great trip-this time to Las Vegas and Grand Canyon, Us , some of our friends and my parents.It was an amazing trip.July also brought me one of the best birthdays I had in a loong time.the traditional cake smashing and food and having soo many friends made my birthday memorable not for the number of candles I would have blown , but the number of people who were there with me when I did that.

August:August was a busy month , with thiruvathira practice , skit practice and lots and lots of cricket.all the practice paid off and it was a grand show at KCF onam celebrations at the end of the month.Altogether ,tt was an exhausting , but satisfying month.

September:A trip to LA marked the start of september and though it was only us , we had a relaxed and peaceful trip.We enjoyed seeing the whales at san diego and the amazing sights at universal.Back at MN , we were dissapointed that our trip to kerala got cancelled , but cricket and potluck were daily activities.

October:We celebrated manu's birthday twice, once with just the three of us at lake itasca and the second-a party with around a 100 people.Without the help of friends, such a huge party could never be realised.Halloween came and went , but as manurefused to wear his costume for even long enough to click a photo,it wasn't much fun.

Novemeber:Novemeber was a month of birthdays, every weekend having one or more birthday parties. It was also the month of birth of Devesh one of the most eagerly awaited babies in the gang.Thanksgiving saw us become proud owners a TV and a laptop.It was a real experience to see people queeing up in front of shops and putting up tents for me , where as for ettan it was first hand experience to stand in the cold negative temperatures to get the TV that he wanted.


December :December started with ettan getting the surpise of his life as we arranged a surprise party for his birtdhay.It also saw one of the most relaxed holidays that ettan and I had in a long time. We both had around 10 days of vactaion. We sent Manu to daycare and had the whole day for ourselves.For the first time in years, we sat down to enjoy good books,movies and even made a snow man.We also had 2 christmas parties with friends and went bowling.The year ended on a euphoric note with our trip to brinerd and a day of snow mobiling fun.

Old anecdote from college hostel

Ever since I started my blog at infy long ago, I had wanted to jot down small anecdotes of different people I had met in different stages of my life and one person who I always wanted to write about before she disappeared from my memory forever was our engineering college hostel and its warden (Nighty Thalla).

Hajira Bivi was one person who you couldn't forget easily. She was almost always dressed in a night gown with a shawl covering her part of her hair..and falling lazily around her rake thin shoulders, haunting the stairs and corridors of the hostel with a sour expression most of the time.The name was coined by would be romeos stalking the hostel who invariably got her at her angriest sour faced expressions.

In all the time that I studied for engineering , Cochin University never had hostels for BTech students , and we were all left to the mercy of private hostel owners who charged exorbitant rates for jam packed rooms and meager meals.But with its apartment converted structure and sweet talking owner, the suburban hostel had seemed like one of the better evils of the lot at first glance.

The initial honey moon period soon ran out and soon I began to find that vegetarian food just meant no non vegetarian (albeit the occasional bug in the food) and not necessarily any of nutritious stuff that we were supposed to get. Hajira warden who was super sweet initially started finding fault with us for no reason and soon , she would start stalking the staircases at night to catch people who were awake late night and report them to the hostel owner. Soon , we found that people who got along well with her seldom got reported while people who got her ire , got reported for minor matters like reaching 2 mins late after the 6:00 PM curfew. At 6:00 PM , she would wait at the hostel gates to see who were late and woe betide anyone who got caught.

During this time , somehow she started telling a few of us about herself, how this job was the only way she could support her family and this endeared her to us in-spite of all her faults. After all those were part of her job.But then some strange things began to happen. Things began to disappear. Small things like audio cassette tapes at first, but then things like watches , even money.These missing things were seldom heard of afterwards , until some one saw all of them in a bag in her room. Sometimes, long after something disappeared, she would return the things to its rightful owner citing that she found it somewhere. Many of the hostelites secretly thought that she might be a kleptomaniac who takes things and then returns them  after months.But she was sweet in many ways , and on one occasion , even let me and three of my friends in at 6:30 pm when we had a true emergency.

Soon afterwards, she was removed from her warden post supposedly for some misappropriation and we had a new dragon of a warden. We thought that was the last that we would hear about her , but that was not the case.During that time, yours truly and some of her friends decided to move into a rented house and almost paid the advance , but for some reason, the house owners backed off from giving us the apartment at the last minute. Later we found that a character assassination had been made and by none other than our Nighty Thalla..which prevented the house owners from renting it to us. She was very much there in the neighborhood and was hoping that we would join the new hostel that she had just started .

Then the story of the egg black magic or "Motta matnthravadam" happened. and it seemed to me at that time one of the funniest stories of the time. One evening , our new warden came running to our room and said , "You know , I 've known it all along. This place is jinxed". We thought she was being a bit too silly , but were eager to hear the story. "I went to the church priest and he confirmed ." She continued. It seemed that the from the day she joined for the new post , she was having a head ache and illnesses. When she finally had it checked by a priest, he told her that she had been a victim of ,hmm what else other than "motta manthravadam" by the old warden.. The idea of our Biwi casting a spell on the new warden was so funny that it was the topic of hostel dinners for weeks.But black magic or not , she could do nothing much to influence many people to join her hostel and soon I heard that she had left for her home town permanently.

Some times, I have wondered what became of her, and though we have cursed her a good many times while we were at the hostel, in my heart of hearts , I wish her well.

Snowy Dreams..

When I was a child, I had  always wanted to see snow. It was an elusive dream for me.White snow covered himalayan valleys and swiss alps were scenic views seen only in the hindi movie songs.When my cousins had gone to Shimla or darjeeling and recounted having taken snow in their hands, I could only look on with pure green envy. Once , my parents had planned a Shimla trip too in a december, but for some reason , it never materiaized and we went to calcutta instead, and that year, due to some climatic variations , we could not travel to darjeeling. Thus my snow hopes were dashed yet again.

Later , when I got married , my husband was working in Albany ,NY and I visited the place in october.This time , I was sure that I could experience 2 seasons that I had hitherto never seen in the tropical cities of kerala-Fall and Winter-colors and snow..The fall colors were superb that year , but alas , my husband's company snowstormed my snow dreams as they sent us back to bangalore 1 week before the first snow of the season.

Several different stints of onsite and offshore later , now, I find myself staring with utter displeasure out of an office in minneapolis into the snow covered pavements. I have to walk to the bus station in that snow(!!) and wait for my husband at a snow covered bus stop(!!). I would probably have jumped with joy at the prospect of going out last winter when I saw snow for the first time. But as they say , familiarity breeds contempt and not a  day now passes when we don't complain , how difficult it is to go out in the snow and how we wish we could have the tropical warmth of kerala for a day...

പൊന്നോമന

കരിമിഴിയില്‍ കൌതുകവും
കൈവിരലില്‍ കുസൃതികളും
കളമൊഴിയില്‍  കൊഞ്ചി വരും
കളിപ്പാവ  കുഞ്ഞു വാവ

പൂവിതളാം  നിന്‍  കവിളില്‍
ഇള  മഞ്ഞിന്‍  തുള്ളികളോ
ചിരി മാഞ്ഞൊരു  ചെന്ചോടിയില്‍
 അലിവോലും  ഗദ്ഗദമോ
 നീ  നിനയ്‌ക്കും  വിഭവങ്ങള്‍
നിനക്കുണ്ണാന്‍    സ്വാദ് ആയി      
ഉറങ്ങാനായി  താരാട്ടും
നിന്‍  പാവകുട്ടികളും   

എല്ലാം    ഞാന്‍  കൊണ്ട്  തരാം
നിന്‍  കൂടെ  കൂട്ടിരിക്കാം
മുഖ  പുഷ്പം  വിടരനായി
നെഞ്ജോരം  ഒമാനിക്കാം
കണ്ണാ നിന്‍  പുഞ്ചിരിയോ
 പൂക്കനിയെന്‍  ഇട  നെഞ്ചില്‍
എന്നും  നീ  ചിരി   ചൊരിയൂ
എന്‍  ഹൃദയത്തിന്‍  വിഷുക്കണിയായി    

എന്റെ ആദ്യത്തെ മലയാളം ബ്ലോഗ്‌

ട്രാന്‍സ്ലിററരെഷേന്‍ എങ്ങനെ വര്‍ക്ക്‌ ചെയ്യുമെന്ന് കാണാന്‍ നല്ല രസം ഉണ്ട് .മലയാളത്തില്‍ എഴുതാന്‍ ഇത്ര എളുപ്പമായിരിക്കും എന്ന്  ഒരിക്കലും കരുതിയില്ല  .ഇനി എന്റെ ജൌര്‍നലില്‍  മലയാളവും കാണാം.ഇപ്പൊ ടെക്കനിക്ക് പിടി കിട്ടി വരുന്നു. 

A free monday afternoon

After hours of fruitless searching for good deals on laptops and multitudes of attempts at writing prose blogs on a lazy november afternoon, I finally came to the conclusion that I am no good at writing the mundane daily details into blogs that some people so effortlessly seem to do.. and that too on a daily basis. Finally did what I like best , read a book. (Prisoner of birth by Jeffrey Archer). It was his usual hallmark style with twists and turns and if you have read more than  3 or 4 books of his, alas, very much predictable. But it is an enjoyable book nevertheless and the premise is interesting unlike Sons of Fortune which was akin to reading a bolly wood movie story of twins separated at birth.

Phoenix Song of Seasons

The Song of four seasons
Played from time imemmorial,
The story of life and birth
Of youth and death and rebirth

Those tender green leaves and grass
sprouting up in an earth so fresh
feasting on the first spring rains
Offspring from the white winter egg

How fast they grow , how fast they grow
into the splendour of summer youth
The aura of strength, the brightness of sun,
the fragrance of flowers, the music of birds.

Alas such beauty can never last
Such is the spell that nature casts
From the egg, the phoenix born,
There comes a time for its fire to burn

Down comes the Fall, the color of fire
Burning down trees in nature's ire
Blazing flames consumes the green
Soon Yellows and red are only seen

The fire dies down, the ashes remain
burnt phoneix feather,Charred and brown,
dead leaves let go from trees so bare
buried in the earth's coffin of snow.

But the phoneix song of seasons,
It will be played again
From the white winter egg
Life will sprout again.

Such is the tale of nature
Such is the circle of life
The phoenix of poetic dreams
Rising from ashes into a whole new life