postcard from me

just yesterday i had been planning a tea-party for our friends here and cursing our moody oven for betraying us in such prime time. and the next thing you know is that there's a knock at the door.... and the maintenance guy walks in with a replacement of the oven. yay !! now i can make puffed pancakes for Sunday breakfast and delicious moist brownies and cupcakes for our friends.

and for now i'll leave you with some photographs of the kids on our blocks. all of these were taken on Saturday at a friend's place were we gathered for a potluck farewell dinner for Paromita-di !!

p.s. Pradyot is now 8 months old. and with his new antics he is pretty much the centre of the universe for Nishi, me and my parents.

pps: in the first party-photograph Kabeer and Pradyot are dressed in kurta and dhoti/pajama, an ethnic indian custom that my parents sent from India.

Belly Shots !!

 Sporting my almost 35 week pregnant belly...... heeheehee

Of late i am getting a little tired of sitting at home the whole day... so we have tons planned out for this long weekend... of which i am most excited about our visit to the Carnegie museum, hopefully i do not feel too tired and dampen all our plans !!  what are you plans for the weekend ? hope you have a great time !!

Dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse.......

eversince our little-one's homecoming news was delivered to us i have been avoiding eating out as much as possible... the thing is that i am not quite accustomed with american food and it scares me ... lest i should eat something that is not agreeable with my little man.... 

but after the long hot week last night i just didn't feel like cooking yet another meal... so i readily agreed when husband proposed that we go out for dinner... 

having developed a taste for steaks over the last one and a half years he suggested the LongHorn Steakhouse... and the online-menu seemed to have a lot of options without indulging into soft cheese or herbs of any kind...

   so LongHorn Steakhouse it was........

while husband ordered a beer and a big burger .... i was happy with my citrus grilled chicken and side of seasonal veggies..... so much so that i completely forgot my intention of taking photographs of the food we ate........

however we did remember to take a snap of the dessert ... the sight of which made me exceedingly happy...though the photograph doesn't say so .... { guess sometimes photographs can't say it all... ;)}

so you see...... sunday-night just happened to be a delicious date-night for this extremely-cautious-mom-to-be..... :):)

Hello Monday !!

the berries looked more reddened

the breeze felt just right

didn't pinch the face

or numb the finger-tops

blew softly    -nouncing

           spring surrounds.....

Saturday morning we planned for The Illusionist. you see magic delights me and the reviews also looked nice. so..  Illusionist it was.
but we were late. missed our bus and reached the theatre a definite fifteen minutes late. but what luck !
we were just in time for The King's Speech. and yes it was a great watch !! loved the movie, loved the actors, the set and did not quite realise how the two hours just flew away..... 

how was your weekend ? hope you had a lovely time...

[photograph by google search]

Though the life holds its treasures out ....

              To be enjoyed by everyone........

                   It is the lifted face that feels the shining of the sun..

nothing but the clatter of cups and spoons and the hissing of the cooker
mark my mornings.... yet i am bent on lending each day a character.
so without scorning the normality of the regular, i go ahead
and complete my chores,- one after another. - till all is done.
set the bed, fluff the pillows, lay the meals on the table-set. 

clean the surfaces bearing marks of yesterday, then read and write by the afternoons.
later with hair neatly set apart and in a dress ironed to the hem
i wait for husband to return and share his story of the day......
each day follows a routine just like the other.... 
yet the reading, writing and the cooking sets it apart.... 
besides... every night when i resign to bed
i rest myself with the realisation that i have grown a day wiser

and have come a day closer to you-  my love ...

[the title quoted from here]

A birdie at Liberty Island.....

Hi there !! Hope you all had a lovely weekend and are still enjoying yourself. we had a lovely time at NJ with my uncle aunt and sister.... we left pitt friday evening and returned  this afternoon. it was a short trip.... nevertheless was wonderful for meeting family and picnicking with them is always delightful !!

[picniced the original photograph for these days i am in love with the Holga-ish effect :))]

Happy New Year !!

Image: my favourite corner of our place at Pittsburgh. 
  potted plant from Ikea,  owl paper weights from Mamallapuram and my new recipe diary from Barnes and Noble.... 

Hi there ! how have you been. how was your weekend ? Mine just rushed past....

I kept returning to Ma Niche several times yesterday... I wanted to write about happy things...

but with Friday approaching so fast and the sky pouring its heart out it felt rather gloomy and i found it  difficult think of  anything nice.... ( might have mentioned earlier that i am leaving chennai for good this Friday. )

i am happy to join my husband soon and resume back the life that i had left behind in Pittsburgh last Feb...
yet i feel sad.. perhaps because i have already started missing my late-night-coffee--theatre--weekend-outing companions ....  my companions who have now become my habit ...... so inspite of my thirteen years of nomadic life i am feeling a little upset as i begin packing my things this time....

see you soon... hopefully in a better mood !

[image from here]

The Puppeteer....

Though I have been meaning to write about my niece Shruti and our Dakshinachitra-picnic.... with so much work waiting to be attended to i can't seem to squeeze in enough time to touch up the photographs and write about everything we saw at the Heritage Cottage by the East Coast Road .... i am excited to share all about it with you and will do that as soon as i have enough time in hand .... till then feast your eyes on yet another glimpse of our day...

a scene from a puppet show that Shruti enjoyed.... and a photograph of the little puppeteer with his robust muscular puppet of Vanar Raj.....

a scene from a shadow puppet show we saw at Dakshinachitra....

the puppeteer with his puppet....

P.S: excuse the picture quality for  the mobile-camera found it extremely difficult to yield anything better with the puppets moving so fast...

Hello Monday !!

Hey all !! so how was your weekend ? mine was good.... my baby Shruti was here with her parents and aunt to say her goodbyes. together we went shop-hopping and also for a little picnic at Dakshinachitra on Sunday...

It is amazing to see how much the little lady is growing everyday... but more on her and Dakshinachitra later today... perhaps tomorrow... for now just two photographs from our trip yesterday .......

see you soon....  enjoy !!

Vanakkam Mamallapuram !

60km south of chennai is situated the ancient coastal town of mahabalipuram, earlier known as mamallapuram. the town is famous for its historical monuments... the Shore temple, Varaha caves, Arjuna's Penance and the Pancha Rathas and is one of the most popular tourist places near chennai.

few years back i had seen in a friends album photographs of the massive sculpture of Arjuna's Penance and had been fascinated by them. eversince i have been longing to visit the place.  however until last Sunday my plans always got dampened by something or the other that would come on the way.... so on Sunday, before day-break, when my friend Rakesh and me finally left for mahabalipuram, i was all excited ! we had wanted to hit the shores by sunrise. but somehow that did not happen. we were a little behind our schedule and reached there only half an hour after sunrise... the rest of the trip however went as planned. in fact it turned out to be much more delightful than i had imagined... 

With Lonely Planet as our guide we knew that all the historical monuments in mahabalipuram are spread over an area of 1.5 sq. km. so after the air-bus dropped us at a spot in mahabalipuram we decided to tour the place on foot... this allowed us to explore every nook and corner of the town and appreciate the sculptures that lay all over the place... this sculpture of the saint was the first one we came across.... i am not certain, but i think it was placed at one of the gates of Hotel Pallava Dynasty located on E. Raja Street..  

tourists usually go for the Shore temple first... however since we had already missed the sunrise so we deviated from the usual tourist route and walked 300 meters west of E. Raja St to find these beautiful extensive sculptures of Arjuana's Penance. In my mind mahabalipuram and this elaborate elephant sculpture had always been synonymous....it was this photograph that had fascinated me at the first place... so having reached my destination at the very beginning i felt pretty satiated......

Arjuna's Penance

we spent the next two hours walking up and down the slopes seeing and photographing the monoliths and rock-cut-outs, sometimes climbing flights of tall steps, marvelling about the height of the people olden days, marvelling at their motivation to keep at the work and create such beauties as the Ganesh Ratha, Krishna's butter-ball, Trimurti cave, Varaha cave, Rayar-Gopuram, Mahisasurmardini Mandapam, Krishna Mandapam.... we did this till we were tired and hungry... 

Ganesh Ratha

Varaha Cave

Rayar-Gopuram

Sculpture at Mahisasurmardini Mandapam

the caretakers at Krishna Mandapam

....and felt desperate for a sumptuous south-indian-breakfast.  the place where we finally seated ourselves was a smallish street-side shop... while i can't vouch for the food we had there.. i can certainly say that the food they served wasn't too bad....

next we walked down Beach Road to see the Shore temple. at the site of the temple, there are two shrines  namely the Kshatriya Simheswara and Rajasimhesvara which are collectively known as the Shore temple. from the plaque displayed at the entrance we gathered that this historical monument was built by the Pallava King  Narasimhavarman-II around 700 AD and it marks the culmination of the architectural efforts that began with the cave temples and the Pancha Rathas....

the shore temple...

built on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, the shrines of the temple are continuously being affected by the rough sea and salt laden winds. though the archaeological survey of India has lately undertaken efforts to check the effect...  a closer look at the structure reveals even to the naked eye that what stands at the site of the shore temple today is but a weather-beaten-remain-of-what-used-to-be-a-magnificent-structure-once....

by the time we came out of the shrine complex it was 11 am. with the sun shining overhead we did not feel upto it to walk to the Pancha Rathas yet.... so the next few hours we indulged ourselves in shops, beach, food and more shops.... we spent quite sometime at Elangovan's shop no 6. he was a pleasant man and showed us a lot of stone carvings which we hadn't seen before... i was particularly impressed by the pieces cut out of the onyx stones... they looked lovely and i surely had a hard time trying to resist my temptation to own one of them...

Elangovan, shop no 6.

the shore temple as seen from the beach..

one of the many curio shops at Othavadai St, Mamallapuram

our next stop was the Pancha Rathas. these stand at some distance from the Othavadai Road where we had stopped for food and window shopping. being exhausted from all the walking we finally took a auto-rickshaw to the site of the Pancha Rathas....Though the name suggests, from the plaque displayed at the site we gathered that these temples have nothing to do with the Panchapandavas of Mahabharata.... the Pancha Rathas are a group of five temples resembling wooden chariots cut out from a single huge rock sloping from north to south.... this project was initiated by the Pallava King Narasimvarman-I (AD 630-688)  and the five temples were executed as models of south Indian temples and not consecrated ....

by the time we left the premises of the Pancha Ratha it was around 6:00. it was time for us to take our ride back to Chennai... so we took an auto-rickshaw to the nearest bus-stand and while the sun set along the western horizons we took our ride back towards home........

[all the photographs displayed have been taken by my friend Rakesh and me...]

Hello Monday !

the seashells.... mamallapuram

Hi there ! so how was your weekend ! mine was great.... by far the most delightful weekend i have spent during my one years stay in chennai... we, me and a friend, went for a days trip to Mamallapuram. there is a lot about the trip that i want to share... but that i shall do after office today..

since i could not contain my excitement any more i thought i'll drop in and post a picture from yesterday. Hope you all had a wonderful start to the week and are back at your desk refreshed and rejuvenated ! Happy Monday and have a great day !