Happy Diwali & Weekly Menu Plan

 

Hope you all have a wonderful year filled 

with peace, happiness and prosperity.

Wish you all a very Happy Diwali ! 

Having soaked ourselves in lots of Diwali sweets, I decided on a light menu for this week. Here's what I have in mind....

This Week's Menu Plan
Sunday	Chicken Stew with  Bread, Toddler had stew with rice
Monday	Pasta with Mushroom and Spinach,
Tuesday	Rice, Dal, Fish,  and Steamed Beans for toddler Masoor Dal, Bengali Mixed Vegetable Side,  Rice.
Wednesday	Chickpea Curry, Briami with Roti and Radish Salad,  Rice, Dal, Fish  and Steamed vegetables for toddler
Thursday	Chicken and Noodles with Stir Fried Romaine Lettuce
Friday	Aloo Methi and Gatte ki Kadhi with Roti, Pasta with Spinach and Cheese Omelette and Boiled Carrots for toddler
Saturday	Leftovers

 Sharing this with Meal Plan Monday @ Organizing Junkie 

                                       and Meal Plan Monday at The Diary of a Real Housewife.

tiling the bits....

 our pre-Diwali late night sessions...collaged courtesy  Picasa 3

my sis-in-law Sweta left sometime back. after an extremely busy 3-day Diwali preparation, right now i am feeling rather laid back... yesterday evening was good. few friends came over. some helped us light the lamps and others helped with the last moment decoration touch-ups. smog from the crackers that had been burnt had filled the air outside.. so we decided to celebrate a peaceful Diwali with lamps, diyas, time-less melodies by R.D Burman-Salil Choudhury, sweets and samosas....

A very big thank you to all our friends who made the evening special for us..... 

Images, clockwise from the left:                                                     .            

1. aum Ganesha namah !. 

2. no décor can ever be complete without a touch of green

3. burning the midnight lamp preparing paper lamps, 4:00AM,4/11/10  

4. sweta working on the lamp shade at 1:30 AM, 5/11/10  

5. the golden embellishments .  

6. the first look.... 3:30 A.M, 5/11/10

[few more pictures of Diwali Preparation, 2010 are displayed in the side-bar-slide-show]

Happy Diwali !!

Have a wonderful year filled with peace, happiness and prosperity. 
Wish you all a very Happy Diwali !

postcard from my life...

After working on the lamps till 4 in the morning, we realised that we did not have a paper cutter. so last evening we had been to the City Centre Mall to get the necessary supplies... Now our lamps are almost done.. believe me the lamps look quite amazing. we are indeed pleased with our efforts and enthusiasm... will post the pictures tomorrow night. some preparations are still to be done. will take care of them in the morning...  good night and wish you all a very happy  Diwali !!

Diwali extravaganza... HRI.

Vidhya apartment, HRI, 2008, photograph by Shubhaditya

I do not have very explicit memory of how I spent  Diwali before 2003. yes, 2003 is the year I got admitted in HRI and eversince Diwali has meant much more to me than it had ever meant before... This is how the two hostels in HRI look on Diwali....

Hostel 1, HRI, Diwali, 2006

My husband, Nishi spent his first graduate year in this hostel. His room was the the fourth door on the ground-floor....

Hostel 2, HRI, Diwali, 2006. This is the hostel where I used to live from 2003 to 2005, till I got married to Nishi...

till date, every year with equal enthusiasm, the first year graduate students of HRI collect funds for Diwali,  hand a part of it to Mewalalji, - who very diligently gets the diyas in advance, soaks them in water over night and then helps the students to line them up in the hostel corridors and on the road sides... so that they can all be lit up by 6 pm on  Diwali .


this morning my sis-in-law Sweta has come. i told her about my plans of making the paper lamps. she said she had done it before and volunteered to help me out with some of the finer-time-taking-details of the project. we'll go out shopping this evening and later at night we have plans to plunge into our lamp-project. hopefully things will go well and tomorrow i'll have some nice pictures to post... how are your preparations coming up... i hope you all are having a great time this festive season !

Lamp Inspiration....

in my previous post i had mentioned that i'll be posting photographs of Diwali-celebrations in HRI through the rest of the week. so is a photograph of two lamps that Archana, Shrobona and Ipsita had made last year at HRI.

aren't they simply gorgeous ! I love the peacock.. its so intricate... so beautiful... one can easily see how much effort had been put into making that lovely lamp... yet all the effort and all the hard work did not budge them from making eight such beauties....  only the superwomen of HRI could do anything so elaborate just for an evening !!

lamps lighting the entrance of hostel 2, HRI. 

I had finished my Ph.d by then and was at home for Diwali... so i couldn't be a part of this Diwali extravaganza.... but had i known in advance about their plans, i would have certainly made an effort to be there..... i am contemplating making such a lamp for my apartment this year. 3 days to go... will i be able to make it... wish me luck... i'll really need it to match it up to anything as beautiful as the ones displayed above !