Day 3 - Pasta Primavera with Red Sauce

Has been a lovely day so far. It's actually my rest day as far as abs workout is concerned. All the abdominal muscles are doing fine. They are known as the laziest muscles of the body, because in our normal life we hardly ever stretch them backward or contract them.

As I have been experimenting a lot with food these days, here's another Yummilicious dish I prepared. It's amazing how simple it is to cook. I wonder why I didn't learn to do it earlier. In fact, that has been the case with everything in life.

Learning to cook and having the freedom to cook in your home is definitely an advantage that I enjoy in an otherwise mom-dominated kitchen. Now, my whole family joins me in gobbling up my dinner-time experiments. I must say, they have infinite patience.

I happened to come across a brilliant blog about two absolutely adorable dolls called Srikar and Sarveshwar.

Yummilicious - Thus begins a new practice! Day - 2

The last 10 days have been very crazy. Have gone through storms of emotions; the ones that women usually get as part of their PMS. Have realized that I too have such cycles though I never wanted to accept it for fear of being ridiculed by my near and dear ones.

Had severe bouts of sleeplessness and as a result, woke up late and screwed up the rest of the day. Eating spicy North Indian food regularly definitely helps in aggravating the already high-on-pitta body of mine.

One night, as I was reading a book, I felt terribly uneasy about my own body. I felt disgusted at the amount of earth that I had accumulated because of my reckless culinary habits and lifestyle. I had to do something about it. And when it's weight and inches around the waist that one wants to lose, one has to go to Yoga.

I started my intensive workout for weight-loss coupled with a very strict diet. Often, the word 'diet' tends to make us believe that one is depriving oneself of the pleasure of life. But I quite enjoy my special 'diet' because I've found wonderful new ways to keep my extra-sensitive little tongue more than satisfied with my own recipes.

Just yesterday, I made the most delicious dish I've ever eaten in my life. It was simbly Yummilicious!

A thumb rule that I follow is that Good food has to look, feel, sound, smell and taste good.

Day 1 and Day 2 have been a little tough on me. I'm sure with days to come, it'll get much easier and the benefits will more than compensate for the lack of indulgence into one of the oldest impressions in man - food.

I plan to break this diet on New Years Day with a an equally sumptuous meal cooked by me, for which I invite each one of you.

Jai Gurudev!

Radhe Shaam!

It's very rare that things touch my heart so tenderly as reading 'Krishnavatara - The Magic Flute' did.

The author, K M Munshi, took me through a beautiful journey, traversing the times of Krishna, in a mesmerizing way. When I read the book, I felt like I was actually there, seeing it happen in front of my eyes.

The way he has portrayed the love that the Gopas and Gopis had for Krishna; the love of Mother Yashodha; the love of the cows, mountains and rivers, made me yearn to be that character; so totally, madly in love.

Radha. Just uttering that name makes me long for His presence. She was an embodiment of longing, and longing for the infinite. That's what 'Radhe Shaam' means.

Though I've read about Krishna and have heard numerous stories about His superhuman feats, heroic battles and how He came successful out of them all, the author has stupendously managed to maintain suspense, thrill and drama throughout the book.

I would rank this definitely in the list of top 10 books that I've read in my life.

A must read!

Now, go get yourself a copy from here.

Ah! That was quite an overwhelming response to my post on this blog after more than a year. I feel soooo encouraged to regularly post here knowing that there are actually people who read my blog (person , to be specific). It gives me all the more freedom to write/say what I want to (not that my freedom of speech/pen/keyboard has been snatched).

Have been dabbling with the keyboard (musical one) off late these days. Must admit that I was very skeptical about the idea of having to use both my hands to play musical notes simultaneously. Just the sight of 2 sets of staff lines glaring at me was scary enough to keep my hopes from being normal, let alone high.

I'm currently learning to play scales on the keyboard. If you're wondering what scales are, they're the skin of fish or they could be the instrument used to measure distance or they could be the factor by which the distance has to be multiplied by to get the actual distance. But that's not what I'm talking about here. Scale is a set of musical notes that are arranged according to some logic. Now, that some logic could be any logic so long as it conforms to certain rules of some other logic. This 'other logic' again could be any logic so long as it does not exceed the boundaries of a certain 'some other, other logic' and so on....

I'm guessing that if you've come this far in this post already, you possess immense amount of patience. You must pat yourself on your back. Seriously. Just do it.

It's amazing how the mind can think of a certain thing and the eyes and fingers can completely disobey the mind and perform an action that is quite contrary to what the mind is thinking. As a matter of fact, I do it whenever I lie. The mind knows the 'truth'. But the mouth utters something else. Something very similar happens while I play the keyboard. My right hand plays 'Sa ri ga ma pa dha ni sa' and my left hand plays 'Sa ni dha pa ma ga ri sa'. But, in my mind, I sing 'Sa ri ga ma pa dha ni sa' and my eyes are looking at 'Sa ni dha pa ma ga ri sa' because it knows where those notes lie on the keyboard. My attempts at rationalizing this phenomenon have been futile. All I can do now is just marvel at this multi-tasking behemoth called the neural network that runs in me.

Jai Neural Network! ;)

This and that!

I've for long been wanting to post on this blog. Most times, it's only been a desire to post and let the whole world know,

"Hey! Even I can have a blog and post regularly on it!"

And it doesn't matter what I say. It's a form of catharsis, just like the bursting of crackers in Deepavali. But the standard of perfection that I set for myself, sometimes just causes a lot of trouble. Like the previous sentence I typed, I prolly used the 'backspace' key more than I used all the other keys put together. I've decided now that I won't be using the backspace key for the rest of the post. Though i said that, I actually used it once. Maybe this will meke myself less harshon myself and therefore onot be expecting much from others either. As u might hive noticed, there were a lot of unintended mistakes and everytime, my mind keeps sayng , "Arun: ! WhYou have gone crazy" Doing something new , with awareness , has its own charm. Mistakes, when done with aware4ness, cease to be mistakes. Or atleast prevent them from happeneing in future. The biggest fear I had in the past was "What would others thing about me if i made a fool of myself bny making a mistake." I happened to come across Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's talk where he asaid, :" My dear! Poeple have no time to think about your mistakes. They have many more problems to bother about. When you make a mistake, say sorry and move on. It's a win - win situation. When you make a mistake, you learn and others laugh." I thought it was brilliant. Since then, I've in every chance that I have received, not been afraid of makign a fool of myself. It's really stress-relieving. It's better than not taking the chance to learn and late r regretting for not having done it. So I hope you all would forvige me for all th e mistakes in this post and hope that' you'll for get it soon. I can't wait to see the expression on your faces upon reading this blog. It's kinda laoads of fun for me:)