Holy Cramp!

The thing about gymming is that you need to be in touch.... or you need to ease yourself into it. The best part is that I knew all the gyaan. In spite of that, I think the sheer excitement (:S) or the enthusiasm of joining a gym with world-class facility overcame my senses. And so on my second day overall... and first day at the centre close to home, in the process of 'discovering' all the equipment, I ended up working out close to 2 hours. And I ended in exhilaration (because of the high heart rate), took a quick shower and then came home in sweltering heat (where I thought I was going to die of a sun stroke) and while everything seemed on a high, I cramped!! Muscles which I didn't know existed announced their existence in the form of pain... :( And so, today was a rest day. Going by the pain I am (did I tear a ligament or something?), I think I am going to skip it tomorrow as well! Here's to working out and the mini-breaks it provides us in not-so-happening ways.

Thepla Central..

The theplas I made :D

Pappi Bhelwali

That's what my dad called me when he learned I'd made bhel puri for the husband... Here.. take a look.

The ingredients (including the teekha /meeta chutnies) -

The end product (phenomenally yummy - ask S if you want)

And... I made theplas for dinner today. Pictures later!

Gymmu-Gimmu

Its a Tamil habit, I think, to rhyme one word with another that makes no sense most of the time. The exceptions are aadu-maadu (goat-cow), veedu-kaadu (house-forest), etc. But usually its really senseless things like paalu-geelu (milk-senseless_word), kaapi-geepi (coffee-senseless_word), or dressu-gissu (Dress-senseless_word)... Ok you get my point. Actually I don't know why the senseless word usually is a rhyme of the original but with a 'g'.

Anyhoo, coming to the point of the post, I joined the gym finally today. And they have a lot of interesting things going on... There are dance aerobics, even salsa lessons and all over at the gym. This seems to be a great way to melt away time (and weight, I hope) over the vacations. And on other days. I've taken an annual membership. And my Patti asked me over the phone, "Gymmu-gimmu poitu vandhiya?" (Did you go the gym-gim?)

Hence the title of the post. :)

Citysnoozers awakens...

And finally, here is the long-awaited post on Bruges on Citystalkers. Lets hope that the Kumbakarna phase for that blog is finally over.. Fingers crossed.

Happy Friendships Day

For what it's worth, Happy Friendships Day to you all... Well yeah, I believe in Friendships but not Friendship Days... Not now at any rate. Yes, I was one of the naïve ones that jumped the bandwagon and bought dozens of colourful bands to adorn the wrists of my closest friends, pledging my friendship to them and in turn flaunted a wristfull of my own. The irony of everything is that this phase was most popular when we were back in our undergraduate days or school. When you actually tied bands on your friends that you spent the entire day with... and went home and made calls and spoke to for hours on the end. People who you had with you all the time, yet felt the need to 'make you own' by brandishing a band on them. How things have changed over the past 10 years. Now we are all miles apart, talk once in a few months at most and yet, we are secure in our bond of friendship. A few years after college, the gestures dwindled to emails at most and nowadays - nothing. Even still, the friendship burns strong, a warm glow that ignites you from the inside when you think of those people and the times spent with them. And now I see these 'days' and the rest of them (V-Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, blah blah) for what they are... business tactics to lure the insecure into buying tonnes of junk that gets discarded anyways. Isn't it more special when you do something out of the expected? Like buy someone something for no reason other than that you thought they might like it... make a call to those friends on random days, not because of birthdays or anniversaries or emergencies... It feels so much better that way and definitely means a lot more.

However, K, M, S, G, NK, SO, VR, PT - I miss you all. Happy Friendships Day.

Cinema Cinema

Disclaimer: There is no doubt about Kamal Hassan's genius... Fewer movies have made as much an impact on me as Michael Madana Kamarajan. But did he have to do these 10 roles?

So out of sheer boredom and fueled by the summer vacations, I ended up buying an account with one of the Tamil movie online sites. I chose Tamil thinking S and I could see a lot of dinner time favorites. I don't know about that but the first choice of the movie was also the most obvious, Dasavatharam. This Kamal Hassan movie has made headlines all over the world for a variety of reasons from budget to plot and obviously the most important being the fact the Kamal, the lead in the movie has played 10 different roles. Having heard terrifically rave reviews about the movie from tabloids to reliable friends, we were very excited to watch the movie.... for about 15 minutes. At the end of the movie, I was left gawking... and not in the good sense. It became very obvious that the script was tailored to somehow accomodate the 10 different roles that the lead man wanted to play and create history. And in that sense, he did. I don't think anyone is going to attempt anything like this for a long long time. But the worst part was that none of those getups were really required. He could've been content with just playing 2-3 of the main roles and hiring accomplished actors for the rest. Instead they spent a whole lot of cash, time and effort in creating 10 distinct personalities, 7 of whom were totally uncritical to the plot and a couple ended up resembling one another! Some of the get-ups actually looked like the human version of Shrek in Shrek II. And chaos theory as the central theme turned out to be too chaotic and the tsunami scene that people raved about was total disappointment. It was crazy. And Kamal Hassan taking up the screenplay as a 11th role was probably the big damper in the whole fiasco..

On a totally unrelated note, I acquired a DVD of Dhoom II and decided it was well worth a wasted afternoon to gawk at Hrithik. So subconsciously as I watched it, I counted him wear 8 different disguises - all of which looked convincing and looked great on him. While I reached no.8, my heart beat a little faster. What a humungous disappointment it would've been to Kamal Hassan had Hrithik equalled 10 in a totally unintended and unassuming manner. Lol!