Year: 2012

The three directional dilemma

Posted on by sudhagee

The Guest Post Series on “My Favourite Things” has contributions by those sharing my interests in travel, books, photography, music, and on issues that I am passionate about. Though the guest posts are not always by fellow bloggers, the guest authors are always those who have interesting experiences to share.

Today’s guest author is Raghav Modi, who writes four blogs —The Traveling Ticker,  Ticker Talks Film, Ticker Prints, and Ticker Talk. I admire the passion with which Raghav writes and his ability to juggle his many interests so effortlessly. I like all that he writes, but my favourite post has to be the one on a museum of pens in Birmingham. Raghav is also the founder of Movie Talk on Sunday (#MTOS), and The Sunday Book Club (#TSBC). In today’s guest post, Raghav’s three primary passions in Films, Travel and Photography converge to create unique serendipitous moments.

Ever get the feeling that you are being pulled in three different directions at the same time? I do. Every time I have a moment to spare, I feel like my interests/passions/hobbies all gang-up and pull me towards their individual selves. Films and Travel have always occupied the highest tier on my activities table. Photography was recently added to this knocking down books and food to the under-appreciated second tier. So now when the weekend rolls in I am never sure what to do, which eventually leads to me doing absolutely nothing.

But, just once in a while, something magnificent happens. Everything falls perfectly in place and I end up with a photograph, a memory, or in some cases my vivid imagination wherein all my interests amalgamate. Searching through countless photographs (thank you digital camera technology) I ended up with these few instances wherein my lust for cinema met with my passion for travel to collaborate into a unique photo.

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The House of Fear by Ibn-e-Safi

Posted on by sudhagee

The place: Allahabad. The year: 1948. Twenty-year old Abrar Narvi was a fairly well-known Urdu poet, a sometimes writer of short stories and satires, and with a wish to write in other genres as well. One day, someone told him that Urdu novels “would not sell without an element of sex in them”. When Narvi said that no one had ever tried, the same someone retorted that until this was tried no one would know, would they?

Narvi took this remark very seriously, changing the course of his life and that of a whole legion of his readers. In 1952, under the pseudonym of Ibn-e-Safi, he produced his first novel in Urdu without an element of sex and with an emphasis on originality and newness. This novel, in the crime fiction genre, was the first of a series that came to be known as “Jasoosi Duniya”. And in 1953, when Narvi migrated to Karachi in Pakistan, another series was created in the same genre that came to be known as the Imran Series.

Ibn-e-Safi was a prolific writer and wrote 3–4 novels a month at the peak of his productive period. When he passed away in 1980, he had written about 245 novels across both the series. Published simultaneously in India and Pakistan, his novels were hugely popular as they were the type that everyone in a family could read. In fact, Ibn-e-Safi’s publishers (on both sides of the border) claim that no writer of Urdu crime fiction has broken his sales record till date!

It is this popularity which prompted an attempt at translating Ibn-e-Safi’s novels into English to enable a larger number of readers to become acquainted with his works.

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Museum Treasure: The limestone door

Posted on by sudhagee

There is a room in the British Museum at London that, perhaps, receives more visitors than others. This room is a veritable treasure trove of Egyptian artifacts — there are busts of pharaohs, sculptures of Egyptian gods and goddesses, sarcophagi, giant scarabs, ships, and what not. A giant bust of Rameses II towers over the exhibits and it is quite difficult to notice the other exhibits under it’s rather overwhelming gaze.

Therefore, it was only on my third or fourth visit to the British Museum that I saw the “Limestone door of Ptahshepses” properly. I mean, I had noticed it before, but had not actually seen it, if you know what I mean.

The Limestone Door

That day, I spent quite some time searching for the mechanism that operated the beautiful and imposing door. I mean it was a door wasn’t it? Which meant that it would open and close. Right? Wrong. If only I knew how to read the hieroglyphics on the door or had read the information plaque carefully, I would have saved myself those minutes of growing frustration.

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The dessert box surprise

Posted on by sudhagee

I love desserts. I love looking at them, love the way they are made, love their vibrant colours, their varying textures, their enticing aromas, their eye-catching decorations… I love everything about them, except eating them.

You see, desserts and I have a rather difficult relationship. I’m allergic to chocolates and artificial food colouring. Sugar doesn’t give me a high; it gives me acidity. As for nuts and other things that make their way into desserts, let’s not even talk about them, shall we? To put it plainly, I need to keep an anti-allergen or an antacid (and sometimes both) handy, if I plan on eating desserts. 😦

Since, I hate taking medicines more than I love eating desserts, there has to be a very compelling reason for me to have both — the dessert and the anti-allergen /antacid, that is. And last month I was presented with one such compelling and intriguing reason — the Brown Paper Bag Dessert Box, which I first read about here.

The Brown Paper Bag (BPB) Dessert Box is a ‘surprise’ box that contains six different desserts, hand-delivered to you on a designated day of the month, usually in the last week. The surprise is in the contents of the dessert box — one doesn’t know what desserts it contains till it is opened. Each dessert box is priced at Rs.750/- and one has to sign up for a minimum of 3 months.

Now, I love surprises as much as the next person, especially one as intriguing as this. And when I shared this with Neena and AS, my colleagues, they were equally intrigued. We decided to share the cost of signing up for the minimum 3 month-period and for the dessert boxes to be delivered at work. Once the payment was made, all we had to do was to wait for the first box to be delivered. And on 24th September, I got a mail saying that the dessert box would be delivered on the 28th !

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Memorable travel memories

Posted on by sudhagee

If there is one thing that I find really difficult to resist, it is participating in travel writing contests—in the last 2 years I have participated in 3 of them. Though the possibility of winning is definitely a motivating factor, what really pushes me to participate is the challenge of writing a travel post based on a ‘prompt’ or a ‘structure’, quite unlike my usual travel rambles, er… posts.

So, when @raghavmodi asked me if I wanted to be part of a Blogger Relay Race, I immediately said yes. Organised by Lowcost Holidays on the theme of “Top 3 Travel Memories”, this competition involves members of 5 blogger teams (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow and Purple) writing blog posts on this theme. All members of a team do not post at the same time; instead one person writes a post on this theme and passes the “baton” to the next blogger on the team, who also writes a post on his/her top 3 travel memories, before passing the baton on to someone else in the team to continue with the Blogger Relay Race.

I am member of #TeamPurple and yesterday, I picked the baton from Ashley of Fun As We Go. As I sat down to race, er… write about my top 3 travel memories, I realised how difficult it was to narrow down my top 3 travel memories since all my travels have been special and memorable in one way or the other. But since this called for just the top 3 memories, I decided to go with the first 3 memories that popped up in my mind.

And they are… 🙂

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One evening @ the service centre

Posted on by sudhagee

One doesn’t always have to go seeking entertainment, you know. Sometimes, entertainment comes to you or it just happens around you.

This story begins on the day my loyal cell phone of 5 years finally decided to give up on me.

I was quite heart-broken for we had been through a lot, my cell phone and me. I had clung on to it in spite of its many eccentricities, but that day it just stopped working. And I knew that it could not be repaired.

So off I went and got myself a new one, and that too a smartphone. This also meant that I could not use my old SIM card and would have to visit the nearest outlet of my cell phone service provider to get a micro SIM card.

So there I was waiting for my turn to be served and trying to read. But the snatches of conversations that I overheard was too interesting and after about 10 minutes, I switched off my Kindle and listened unabashedly to the exchanges happening around me.

Like this one.

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