Creeps after dark

Delhi is rife with creepy people crawling the city after dark, from passing lewd comments to doing condemnable acts, they are everywhere.As a girl in Delhi, walking alone at night can be a horrendous task, here is a list of creepy crawlers you might encounter and you should beware of.

1. Zara zara touch me: This category covers people who have a propensity to touch women for no rhyme or reason. So as you walk on a road minding your business or stand in a bus, a cold hand will suddenly brush against you or maybe when you are at a shop and paying the shopkeeper, he might think your hand is also a part of the payment.

2.Horn OK please: Many a bikers fall under this category, especially when its starts to get dark and you cannot see the shameless "man" on the bike, he would honk at you or play a lewd song just as he passes by you. The more creepy ones might want to follow you your circle around you for sometime.

3.The singer: The singer is the one you really want to slap hard. He will stand in a desolate location or maybe hide somewhere and start singing lewd songs when you are nearby. Once again, the creepier ones might just follow you and sing even more. You can hear songs from "choli ke peeche kya hain" to "Why this kolaveri Di?" all with double meanings and lewd connotations.

4.The Smartass: The smartass thinks he is very smart and clever with words. He is the one who will pass comments on your dress or your walk and team it up with some special sound effects that sound like he is in an orgasm of sorts.

5.One Direction: The braver ones of the creepy lot might try to strike conversation with you by asking you for directions and then, seeing that you were stupid enough in the first place to stand at night and talk to a stranger, offer you a lift or ask for your company to some place.

There are many more disgusting people on the road at night and as a lone girl on the road, it is always better to have some company or be home before dark. Ideally they should be publicly flogged, these creeps who have brains only in their pants, but as a smart woman it is always advisable to keep a pepper spray with you or better still, avoid situations where you might end up all alone in a dark road.

Pineapple and chocolate mousse Duet

This is a sweet dish made up of tangy pineapple and dark chocolate.

The ingredients are:

Del Monte Pineapple slices: 2
Del Monte Peaches halves: 4
Dark Cooking Chocolate: 9 tbsps
Coffee: 1 tbsp
Butter: 2 tbsps
Whipped heavy cream: 2 cups
Eggs: 7
Castor Sugar: 4 tbsps (or according to taste)

Pineapple mousse:

1.Take the pineapple slices and add a bit of sugar on it and keep on a low flame till it turns into a sort of gooey curd. Strain the curd and refrigerate for as long as you want. It lasts for a day or two.
2. Separate four egg white and whip them into stiff peaks with a tbsp of sugar and refrigerate.
3.Whip a cup of cream to soft peaks and refrigerate.
4. Take out the pineapple curd, strain it and add the remaining egg yolks to it.Mix well.
5. To the mixture, fold, a third of the whipped cream.
6. Now fold a half of the egg whites to the mixture and fold the remaining whipped cream.
7. Refrigerate the mixture.

The chocolate mousse has to be a bit bitter to counter the sweetness of the pineapple.

Chocolate mousse:

1. Whip a cup of cream to soft peaks and refrigerate.
2. Take the chocolate, butter and coffee and melt over boiling water till the mixture is smooth.
3. Separate the 3 eggs and whip the egg whites with a tbsp of sugar till soft peaks.
4. Once the chocolate mixture is cool yet warm to touch, add the 3 egg yolks to it.
5. Fold in a third of whipped cream and then half the egg whites and then the remaining whipped cream.
6. Refrigerate the mousse.

Serving:

Layer the pineapple mousse and chocolate mousse over each other and then top it off with peaches or whipped cream.

(PS: Check out http://www.facebook.com/worldfoody for the food adventurer!)

Awaiting Barfi! or not.

Barfi! starring Ranbir Kapoor is set for release on September 14.It is a story of a deaf and mute man and looking at the trailers, the acting seems commendable as the Kapoor stalwart does what every newcomer does to show that he can act, take on a role of an "abnormal" man.

But a personal take on this, I don't really think I am too comfortable watching films with such a subject matter.Somehow the Hindi film industry fails to hit the target like some other films like Rainman manage to do with a sensitive issue. I cannot pick point but there is a certain anomaly in our films with mentally challenged people. Be it My name is Khan or Black, the tone of the film, the settings and the music all adds a depressing "Oh you poor thing" feel to the movie that just diverts away from the whole story. In trying to show that the abnormal is normal, these films make the abnormal more abnormal and makes then stand apart.

So as SRK stood on a busy highway with a board reading, "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist" or Amitabh Bachhan pirouetted around Viday Balan in Paa, you don't fall in love with the character but just feel sorry for them, a feeling the filmmaker were not trying to achieve (I hope).

Maybe the technicalities of the film are a bit botched or the someone is hitting the wrong spot. Another thing that I have noticed is the extensive use of depressing colours in the films. So if there is a blue setting, the film will have a sad bluish tinge or an orangish yellow casting an air of gloom all around. The music always seems like a funeral march and I don't understand if filmmakers can give over the top senseless sets to films like Cocktail and get amazingly Bollywood type music to that film, why can't the same be done in such films? Why do we have songs which are not even catchy but really umm for a lack of a better word, abnormal?

Science and Spirituality: Who can dissect the soul?

 “This discussion will start World War 3.” My best friend said as we sat discussing the concept of souls. She is a spiritual person and believes in the whole idea of souls and reincarnation while I, being a believer in science don’t really accept the ideas.

Many Masters Many Lives by Brian Weiss, a psychologist takes the concept of past life and deals with it scientifically, almost. It is not proven whether the doctor was right or was he just fibbing. He is a past life regression therapist now and talks about our “spirits” for the want of a better term travelling from one plane to another. In all there are seven planes but we, as humans have still been travelling in just two, the spiritual and the physical. He says he has seen proof of the human subconscious shifting between these, of people being born again and again in this physical world of them remembering their lives and of groups of spirits being born together again and again.

Spirituality has always believed in the human soul, of an unknown entity that guides us, that is the mind in our brain, that is the human in our lifeless machine and that believes in miracles and makes them happen. To a spiritual person, reincarnation is not a bleak possibility, but the truth of life, Hinduism, Buddhism and even Christianity talks of re-births and unfinished businesses.

Psychologist, Carl Jung talks of the human subconscious as something so powerful that holds the entire history of the human race in it and that hasn’t been tapped into yet. This does make sense, our brain is a powerful organ and we have hardly understood its function. We know of the chemical and neurobiological processes and yet we fail to explain how things work more importantly, how the human brain works. It is not a set of equations that can be broken down and studied or some hypothesis that can be easily developed with time.

Conspiracy theories are abound about past life regression that say it is all a fib, maybe that is possible but sometimes, there are things which we cannot explain, we have no answer to them. A man on his deathbed, a clinically dead man walks again, a person seems so familiar to you that you think there is a connection, things of which you dreamt one night suddenly seem to happen to you and you cannot understand it. Why do Psychics still flourish in this world of cold calculations? Why do we still get our horoscopes checked and believe in miracles when everything fails? And why is it that despite everything we are taught to have a strong will power and determination when there is no scientific proof that what we think affects the actual physical working of our brain.

Or does it?

Our thoughts so powerful, that they can alter the physical and chemical composition of everything that is happening in our body? How do we explain this process? What exactly is happening inside our body that makes it undergo such changes?

Dan Brown wrote in Angels and Demons that science is too young to explain everything and for the things we don’t understand, we should just keep faith.

Human beings are machines where each part functions in coordination with the other, a well oiled well meshed machine that is so complicated that even now we don’t know what is it that makes us “us”. Maybe the answer lies in our brain. We don’t understand it and hence concoct many reasons and theories to explain the inexplicable. It is a mass of unexplored territory, for the scientist and the spiritualist. It needs answers and in the absence of which it looks for alternative theories and accepts them because believing in something beyond our control, a power greater than us keeps us humble and helps evades so many questions. A time will surely come when we will have all the answers, about our soul, past life and many such questions that have created a heated debate in the world. Maybe Science will unravel it or maybe something else would, it is our brain that needs to be answered and it is our brain that will give the answer. It is only a matter of time.

Throwing away old clothes

Emptying your wardrobe after years of piling up clothes and assorted fabrics is always a difficult task. All sort of memories seem to claw at you as you throw open one old cloth after another. The jeans you wore during your graduation, your prom dress, your favourite T-shirt when you were a teen, everything just gnaws at you and opens up a stream of memories.

It has always been difficult for lazy me to sort my wardrobe, arrange anything in order and for years it has become a home to homeless junk. So, one can find my old extra large purple T shirt from the days when everything I wore resembled a tent to my skirts and shorts when I had toned thighs. Old caps from the days when I used to dress up like a guy to clothes I had bought to not clash with my faux red hair. Dresses that are out of fashion but still amazing, traditional clothes from my various cousins’ weddings and weird clothes that make me go what the hell was I thinking!?

Taking each item and sorting through it, rejecting it and making the decision to finally throw something away is so tough. I have been avoiding this for years, carting the contents of my wardrobe from Delhi to Pune to Mumbai to Delhi and adding on to the mess. Sometimes it comes in use when you want to go all out and wear old clothes and mix them with something else, a la hippie look. And sometimes it becomes a battle in futility trying to fit in everything in the cupboard. Mostly it is a bone of contention with my family which complains that I have the biggest wardrobe with the littlest space. I cannot throw away my clothes. It’s a disease.

Some clothes have history, like my Harry Potter coloured ones, the red and yellows, the colour of Gryffindor, my wizard robe look-alike clothes, some are my artsy hippie clothes for the days when I feel like a vagabond artist and some are my inspiration to lose weight, the sexy itsy bitsy ones in which I have to fit in.

Maybe you are not meant to throw away old clothes, maybe you just need to keep them safe in your cupboard as memory aids and maybe you can convince your family that you do need a another larger wardrobe after all.

Things Harry Potter has taught me.

People often talk about the Harry Potter fandom and don't understand why we love the series as much as we do. Here is a list of things HP has taught us and siriusly this is more than just some random kids novel.!

1. Love makes the world go round: As Dumbledore said each time, you can love and yes you can. The books taught us how love between friends, between siblings and kids of your friends, professors, neighbours, people who just know your name, house elves, half giants and dragons mean so much more than all the wealth you can accumulate in life and all the power you can get.And this makes you the strongest person you can ever be.The power to love.

2.The gray in between: Sirius said that the world is not divided into death eaters and good people.We all exist in between.Snape showed that a Slytherin can be brave and can love.And no one is pure evil or pure good. We are all humans after all.

3.No one is beneath us: What would the world be without those creature we cite beneath us? The house elves, the goblins(though they are mean), dragons, giants, pixies, unicorns, thestrals and centaurs all play such an important role. A lesson in life, no one is beneath us and they are all very very important.

4.No good comes of forced love: Merope bewitched Tom to marry her and yet he could never love her. Never force the love of a person, no good ever comes out of it.

5.Loyalty above all: People are so important to us that staying loyal to the ones we love makes us stringer than we are. And as the death eaters bundled together, we had everyone beckoned at the call of the DA.And the ones who were the most loyal, Luna, Ginny and Neville. The ones who never left and were always there to fall back on.

6.The bad are good too: A repeat of the gray area point but sometimes even the ones who wish us bad do us good for their own weird reasons.And Narscissa saved Harry...

7.And even if its all in the head why can't it be real? Why cant we dream and believe in what we want to? Whats in our head might as well be real. Dreams are very powerful.

A change in Life

Destiny, they say plays an important part in a person’s life. Firm believers harp on about its magic and the ones who don’t believe in it talk about being practical and real.

But sometimes we are confronted with such situations in our life where we have lost all control over the proceedings of the case. We cannot control what another person thinks or how the dynamics of a particular group and setting affect us and it is at that time we bow to the unknown.

For many, the unknown is God and for others it is fate or destiny, personally, I believe in a balance of things, karma or the yin yang two concepts that govern many things in my life. The Sanskrit Vedas talk about karma, like how many things we do, good or bad get an equal due, whether in this life or in the other. Obviously, I don’t believe in the next life concept, but the idea of getting just deserts is enticing. The yin yang is an oriental concept, martial artists use it, religious monks use it and philosophers talk about it. A circle with an equal balance of black and white with opposite colored circle on it, symbolizing the balance of things in life, man-woman, black-white, good-evil it is all there.

It can sound philosophical but science too has this concept. Science is what I believe in, what makes perfect sense and bears stark resemblance to life. You have the electrons and the protons, opposing charges in an atom, there is the north pole and the south pole of the magnet and the earth, acid and a base in chemistry, infra-red and ultra violet radiations for everything there is an opposite balancing force. Physicists are talking about the anti matter, the opposite of matter basically it is all about a balance in life, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

But does this apply to human behavior? Does destiny or balance in things play out there as well? The human mind is an electrical process, thoughts and actions are all about converting chemical energy to electrical, mechanical to chemical, reactions and sparks flying everywhere in the human body and how they interact with other reactions sprouting through people and what it all creates, its chemistry, physics or something inexplicable.

When I talk about something that should change, I think about this balance. I am still not sure if it plays out in real life. If every deed you do goes out. Something bad you did meet an end and something good you did get a reward. Sometimes it plays out so well, when you see things getting their due, karma they call it, balance it is. But then again, sometimes it plays out so unfavorably. There are people who have been dealt with a cruel blow in their life, have nothing in life, are sad and helpless and are suddenly crushed to death under a rich man’s car who pays a hefty sum and is out. How does that play out? What do we make of things then?

Or on a larger scale, Idi Amin, the notorious dictator who supposedly drank his enemy’s blood in their skull killed millions and then spent the rest of his life in a political asylum in Middle East amidst riches. Is there really a balance here? Closer home, on a personal front, there is a person who doesn’t like you, they will say something that suddenly affects everything round you and one small miscalculation on your part or ignorance and you have the most important thing snatched away from you. Is it fair? We ask ourselves again and again.

Books have been written on it and sermons been delivered on a maniacal basis almost. People talk about getting out of the self pity mode or they say that what happened to you is all your doing but we need to be realistic as well and this is something I would like to change. If maybe we can control the electrical or chemical or some sort of dynamics of human behavior or human interaction, the wheel of life, it has to be the balance of things.

Optimists will talk about justice, it can be delayed but will always be there but this faith is wavering and it should not, the evil doers should be scared of it and the good-doers proud of it. The third law of motion talks about equal and opposite reaction and that is what I want in this world. A balance of things just so you know how things are working out and how you are doing and a balance of things to not let someone feel out of sorts not let someone feel like they have the bad end of everything and to encourage people to strive harder, work even harder to get what they want and if there is balance, if there is destiny, fate or god, they will get it.

Make the world a happier place.

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