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 !!

Have a wonderful loving weekend !

i do not entertain email-forwards too much. but few days back i received one from my friend Rachna, which came with the added note.... "please dont miss it"  in bold ! since, a love stories are one of my favourite things i immediately started to read. It was an absolutely fascinating love story of  Narayan Murty, the founder-chairman of Infosys Technologies and his wife Sudha Murty.... how they met and set out on their journey together..... the mail was an excerpt from Sudha Murty's Autobiography.

Narayan Murty and Sudha Murty

i immediately knew that i had to share it on the blog. so ....heres a love story dedicated to all the lovely ladies who have unconditionally loved their men, stood by them through all odds and helped them live their dreams....

Have a wonderful weekend .. and..   please please please dont forget to read  this beautiful  fairy tale !!

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 !

Have a great weekend !

.... yet another week comes to an end... two more Fridays to go in-between and then i'll be home :D

on tenth december i am leaving chennai for good. the rounds of farewell parties and good-byes have begun and its time to start the shifting process... but i am not yet headed that way. my parents are coming here to help... so right now i am only procrastinating...

since this time i'll be moving to another country i am both excited and a-wee-bit nervous...

but we'll see... i am sure something wonderful is in store for me..

i am also excited about next weekend. for my dolly-darling Shruti baby will be here next Saturday to give chotoma a good-bye kissy....  O baby chotoma can't wait to see you again !

in india the festive season ends with Diwali... however with so many blog-posts on thanksgiving, i am still feeling a little festive at heart. so over the weekend i have decided to set my hands on a recipe or two from Kevin's Closet Cooking and also decorate my place a little with plants, flowers and lets see what else...
i might go site-seeing too... for the sun is shining bright after days of raining and is inviting me outdoors...

see you next week ... till then eat well, take care and have a great weekend !!

[photograph taken by Rajesh Gupta, HRI,2004]

after an years stay in Chennai...

I now understand that "a" attached to any English word qualifies for a question mark... and the letter "h" appearing in most Tamil names is silent...

I have learnt that too many women wearing yellow on Fridays is not a mere coincidence but a superstition.. and that women in cargos with strings of jasmine tucked into their hair is not odd fusion but an attempt at preserving age-old-customs....

I have learnt to accept and enjoy rains in November...

I have started to follow conversations in Tamil which include few English words...

I know the roads to and from the Silk stores in Thyagaraya Nagar (T.Nagar) and with confidence can haggle with the auto-drivers the rates... I can even give them directions when needed just to make sure that they know I am not a stranger to Chennai.

And these days I even appreciate the Tamil breakfasts of idli, dosa, pongal with sambhar and coconut-chutney and sometimes miss the coconut and spices when on holiday..... 

Yet in spite of my one years experience here, I haven't managed to master the proportions for a good cup of Tamil coffee. the not-so-sweet-not-so-bitter perfect brown coffee that they serve in the Tamil-households or cater at Hot-chips. So on days like this when its incessantly raining outside, I feel a little elated when i get my  sugar-milk-decoction proportions right !

[sip, sip...] hmm...thats what you call perfection ! a perfect start to the weekend....

I hope all of you also had a good start. Have a perfect weekend !

Happy Monday Morning !!!

Hope you had a fun-filled-relaxing weekend.... I had a wonder time... caught up with some old friends, did all the washing-cleaning-ironing and rearranging that I wanted to do and then froze my first lemon cheesecake... This was my guiding recipe for the cake. but i slightly modified the ingredients to suit my supplies.... and the result was a nice yummy, creamy cheesecake with a perfect crust... BLISS !!  [ well there is still a little bit of the perfection shelved in our refrigerator.  in case you are in town(i.e. Chennai) ... drop by.... you are invited.  and i promise you will not regret. :) ]

So that was the story of my weekend........ and right now i am finding it rather difficult to overcome the inertia of all the fun and settle down at my desk.... so i had been checking out stuff on Etsy and this is my find of the day....

 Breakfast Club Print  from  Dial M for Michele.


I love this print,  for at breakfast each morning my mind races back and forth through all the frames portrayed.... 
What about yours ? Doesn't it do the same ?

A Saturday morning in May...

i feel a little rusty

  a little dusty around the edges

i need to do a little cleaning

  a little polishing of the surfaces

a heap of soiled clothes are staring asking for a wash

a bunch of their crumbled kins are begging to be ironed

so this morning i committed myself
 to my wardrobe, my dishes and my room decor..

and only later today i wish to return to my tulips

to broaden their smile a bit more....

[image by weheartit]