3 Idiots - my initial reaction!!! WOW!!!!

WOW!!! Loved it. Such a nice entertainer.... As usual excellent performance by Aamir Khan... Ofcourse the rest of the crew as well. Was transported back to my college days.... The essence of the care free life of college captured very well.

Ofcourse there were a few thoughts to ponder as well... Like:

1. Study for knowledge sake and now for marks or work.
2. The focus and pressure of the educational system.
3. The lack of practical application and simple explanations for complex words/mechanisms!!

You can add on any more if you like... But yes that is the crux of the movie. Must see...........

Surprised!!!

Somehow with the changing priorities in life, I never got to blog about anything for a long long time now. With a daughter (toddler) at home, freelancing job, chat with hubby, visit friends, handwork, and the flare to read books, I never felt the need to sit down to blog. That became my last option in my list of priorities. Especially now that I am no more sitting in front of the laptop for a continuous 8 hours a day where I feel the need to take a break from the current job that I do, I really do not feel the urge to write.

But today, while I was browsing networking sites searching for my friends and trying to reconnect, I noticed that most of my friends, whom I have lost touch with, have started blogging and guess what they blog about!!!!????!!!! COOKING... They post recipes on their blog on a periodic basis. Some of them do it daily while some do it weekly and so on. So many of them who I never thought would get so domesticated ended up posting blogs with cooking recipes... But that is pleasantly surprising as well as it strengthens my thought that cooking is an art.

I do love and enjoy cooking. It allows you play around with the ingredients and create surprisingly fabulous dishes. But there is a risk that you will end up with a charred dish as well. But what is life without a little risk!!!

International Chef in the making...

A child coming into your life turns it into an overdrive, that you hardly tend to find time for yourself. So I have been off the blog for quite a while now. My toddler is still a handful, but 2 years of being a parent has given me enough experience to juggle around my various roles and still find time to keep in touch. But yes, my social life has taken a back seat and I do not keep in touch with people as I used to. We are back in the US again, in the East Coast in a laid-back seashore town named Groton in Connecticut state.

Now that I am a full-time home maker and have more time to kill than I would have had if I were working, I decided to try something different atleast as far as the food goes and was pretty impressed with its outcome.

There is a saying that the best way to a man's heart is through his stomach.... But as I had already won my man's heart and only then married him, there was never a need for me to go in the way suggested by the saying. Still there is nothing wrong in surprising him once in a while with my culnery skills. I tried out 4 new dishes last week:


Broiled Tomato Parmasean

Tomato Pasta

Vegetable Manchurian

Baby Corn Manchurian

Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the first two dishes... But I did take a picture of the Manchurian dishes, that we had with Egg Fried Rice prepared by my husband.

The first dish was courtsey Food Network (one of the TV channels in USA) while the remaining three were from a website called Indobase. I enjoyed cooking all these dishes and my family equally enjoyed eating them.

We plan to try out more dishes in the coming months... Will keep you posted.

Cherry Blossoms in Washington D.C.

We are back after a long break in our blogging.... In the last year and more, there has been lots of changes in our life. Now we are proud parents of a beautiful 1 yr old girl, who keeps us on our toes at home in Alexandria, VA.



The natural beauty we enjoyed at the "National Cherry Blossom festival" in Washington D.C. prompted us to write a post. The sight was an amazing visual treat to our eyes, stretching beside the Potomac river. Such wonderful colors and beautiful flowers!!!! This festival is usually celebrated for 2 weeks - from March 29 to April 13, 2008.


For those who do not know what the festival is about, here is an excerpt from About.com "Washington, DC welcomes the arrival of spring with the National Cherry Blossom Festival, a tradition that showcases the beautiful gift of 3,000 cherry trees that the city of Tokyo gave to our nation’s capital. The National Cherry Blossom Festival is an annual two-week, city-wide event featuring more than 200 international cultural performances and over 90 other special events. From arts and exhibits to cuisine and sports, there is something for everyone to enjoy! The blossoming cherry trees symbolize the arrival of spring and brighten the area surrounding the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin with their vibrant pale pink and white flowers.


The National Cherry Blossom Festival kicks off the busy tourist season in Washington, DC and includes many special events near the monuments and the museums on the National Mall." (Source: http://dc.about.com/cs/familyactivities/a/CherryBlossom.htm)




Like the above excerpt says, the city is flooded with people coming from all over the place to see the blooms and participate in the various cultural programs. We tried our best to capture the beauty through our camera lenses... Hope you enjoy these pictures as much as we enjoyed the sight in person....

For more pictures and information, you can also look at:
http://www.nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/
http://dc.about.com/od/hoildaysseasonalevents/ss/CherryBlossoms.htm
http://dc.about.com/library/maps/blmapTidalBasin.htm

Blogging and Active Life

I read somewhere that the more activity filled your life becomes you tend to blog lesser and lesser. I do not know if this is for a fact... But in my case, I can see this happening. With my family life getting busier and active day-by-day, I tend to find lesser time to blog.

Probably some of you might think I am just reasoning out to justify my lack of blogging... But believe me, though there are lots of things that I would like to blog about, I have not yet found the time to accumulate them, converge them into a topic and put them in words.

Now coming back to the current topic, I do see that some of my friends who used to blog regularly and some other blogs that I used to frequent have also become less active. I was just wondering if their lives were also getting too active that they found lesser time to visit their blogs and update them....