Professional to unprofessional - all in a matter of 11 days!

The Webster's dictionary defines a courier as a messenger sent in haste or on a regular schedule with important or urgent messages. It means that people mostly use courier services to help send packages / parcels / documents / messages from one destination to the other when it is urgently important. I had something too. The for my PG Course fee. I needed it to reach Jamshedpur from Bangalore. I had sent the application form to the same destination about 2 months ago. Sitting in the luxury of the office A/C I had paid the office boy, given him the package and asked him to please give it to the courier collection center for sending it. In a period of 3 days it had been updated that the package was received and my application form reviewed. This time around after day 8 when I still did not receive acknowledgment I began to think there was cause for worry. Day 10 no news still. Day 11 I went to collection point to learn that there is nothing he can do to help me. He directed me to the customer care office and said I can track it from there. There were about 6 telephone numbers there - all non functional! After deciding that it was worthless for me, my mom and my brother to sit in front of the phone trying to reach someone, I left home to go to the customer care center which was at Koramangala.
The lady at the reception had a perfect answer to all my queries, "I don't know ma'am" And I just wanted to say one thing to her... "YOU!! Off my planet!!" Anyways I needed information from her and had to keep my cool. I asked to help me reach someone who would be able to assist me. I was then sent to the operation department and I am so thankful. God helped me understand the meaning of Rude. The security guy there was one of the rudest I have come across. After a lot of waiting around finally the manager says he will see me. I went to see him and he did not even bother to look up. When he did, he took my receipt and started on his attempt to track it. I started off on my story - right from how this seat was important to me, the DD has always reached within 3 days in the past etc. Like every good listener he was thinking about something else... God knows what! Finally after 10 mins he tells me, this is an unregistered courier and we do not have services to Jamshedpur. I was shocked! Anyways he returned my package to me and now Blue Dart ( The "dependable" international courier company) has promised me that I can trust them to get it delivered to the desired place on time and I hope I am in safer hands this time around.

Absent Mindedness - We All Do It....

I went to the bank this morning and wrongly picked up someone else's pass book by mistake. I went to another counter for some work and didn't even realize then that I am carrying someone else's book! Anyways as I was coming out of the bank there was this oldish kind of man standing there as if waiting for me. He kept looking at me from the time I left the counter right upto my walking till the door, which is about 45 seconds. He then came upto me and said "can you check if you have your own passbook?" There was no please in his sentence, his tone or his facial expression. I checked and I realized that I had erred. It was a mistake on my part and I apologised. I said I am really sorry uncle. He tells me, "You should have checked before you walked away from the counter and I am not accpeting your aplogy" !! I understand I should have checked and I made a mistake by walking away with his pass book. But was there a necessity for him to actually be so rude to me when I was sweet to him and said sorry. If everybody only needs to be rude I could have just dumped his passbook in his hand, plucked mine out of his hand made a grumpy face and walked out! Why is it that people are so rude to us even when we are trying to be nice to them?
But actually that is not the issue I am going to write about here. This is about my absent mindedness!! I sent my fees for a course that I had applied last week. It was supposed to be sent in the form of a DD. My brother had repeatedly tolds me to take a photocopy of it before sending it across. and of course I forgot! And then I had to go to the bank and to get the details of the DD! neither did I have to forget the photocopy nor did I need to see that grumpy old man's face early in the morning.
Some people say absent mindedness is mostly coupled with a genius mind. The genius is me was lost on the way to earlt I guess! and only the absent minded me landed here! The other half of me has been left wandering somewhere in between! Sad story.... let me start a search for that half and try and find that. Ah... would google be able to help me on this one??

Can't buy me love, love Can't buy me love sing the BEATLES....

Money seems to have an almost magical effect on us.Everyone says that money makes people behave strangely. I never believed it. Very few people I know personally would never behave in a weird manner with me because they have more money and I have lesser or vice-versa. I often ask myself how can money be factored into how much someone means to you. But as I learn about the ways of the world, I am slowly also learning that money is it can be! How is a question I am unable to answer. Money makes many brains influence them and their behavior towards you. What is about MONEY??!!
What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money. And what is the use of Money? It can't buy you happiness!! Are money and happiness so relative to each other. Happiness as I have known it is absolute. The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.
There are so many things money can't buy. Money can't buy happiness but it will bring you a better form of misery. Money can't buy friends but it will surely make more enemies for you. Money can't buy you peace of mind, but it surely knows how to take yours away from you.

Modus Operandi for Disaster... My Cooking Adventures

My brother wrote a comment on my previous blog that I should write one about my cooking escapades. I had been thinking the same thing and decided that this was a sign (Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho spoke so much about these signs that I am now hooked to them too! ) and that I should write about cooking.
I had never entered the kitchen till I was about 22 years old. (Oh! I am exaggerating, of course I had entered the kitchen...I obviously didn't grow to be 22 without drinking even a single drop of water that I got myself from the kitchen...OR all those snacks that I helped myself to) 22 to 24 passed in gaining expertise over cutting vegetables in the smallest of sizes. And then the craze for cooking began. The kitchen was soon to become my playground. And once in a while, along comes a dish that changes the name of the game.
My brother's friends asked him if he had health insurance. My friends pitied the people who had no choice but to push what was served to them down their throats and prayed that God help them. And when I told a friend that I am going to blog my cooking adventures he had these things to say... Do mention about the time when all those people got stomach aches after eating your cooking And also about the time when u added so much salt that the Dead Sea became a fresh water lake! He was being a meanie as usual. These things never happened (Or maybe my friends did fall ill but they never told me as they didn't want to hurt me. Nah! I would like to believe that isn't true!!)
But there was encouragement too... someone said Hey! I am sure one day you will be an excellent cook, invite me home for lunch on that day. Another said so what if your burfi this time turned into something that looks and tastes like halwa, you can tell everyone you made halwa!
My grand aunt who lives in the same building says the whole building will know which weekends Bhavana is cooking as she starts the day with multiple shopping trips. No No... I don't go shopping for clothes and accessories to motivate me so early in the morning... I have to make several trips to Namdhari's up the road to fulfill my cooking needs, considering I cook these exotic (Ya I love to use big words on my cooking there is actually nothing exotic about it) dishes, most of the time I will have to make these trips to fulfill the ingredient needs in the recipe. Actually the process starts from even before the shopping trips. I go online research multiple cooking websites try all sorts of combinations from these multiple sites and come up with the recipe. Who said cooking is easy! It involves a whole lot of R and D that goes into it. oh ya and then the documentation as well.. I have a recipe book where I am making a note of everything that I cook for future reference!
I have the most dedicated fan in my brother though. He will enter the kitchen when I have just kept something to simmer and every time there is a standard line. There is something cooking that smells nice! And the most ridiculous of tastes are enjoyed by him only because I cooked them. Thanks Little Brother! There have been times when I sit back in repentance wondering why I ever started cooking that particular dish. But that smile on his face makes me feel that it is worth it.
So here is hoping that some day people will realize that I am good culinarian. Well it's a long way off though... I need to convince myself of that first! I love to envision myself using a cooking range in a white apron and a white toque cooking something delicious on one of the flames, the OTG Oven baking some cookies below and the Microwave screeching to tell me that the vegetables that I put in it are ready for further treatment. Oh the screeching reminds me! This is a dream! Back to work Bhavana!!

Bright-eyed, Bushy-tailed.....

Jack(ass) of all trades…they say..Looks like they saw me when they were saying this…my dad admires the creative streak in me. The way I come up with innovative ways to exercise every few weeks is commendable according to him.

It all started by means of my morning walks with Asha a few months ago. We were religious the first one month. Get up early, get ready before she came down and gave me a missed call and all ready to go! Cotton tees, track pants, new sneakers and off we went! We also became friends with an uncle on our daily walking trips. We first met him when we were buying veggies at mini forest one Sunday. Looking back today, I remember thinking that it would have been better if he had two sons and they accompanied him on his walk. Soon the walks reduced to half their time (the rest of the time when we were still supposedly walking Asha was actually lying on my bed waiting for my mom to give her coffee) till they eventually died a natural death.

The next activity to catch my fancy was power yoga!

My sister discovered a place in some corner of BTM that taught power yoga 3 days a week. Not to mention the huge amount of money we both spent on the mat after just one class. Branded stuff frenzy! Urban yoga mats! We decided that we were more hygienic than the users of the common mats kept in the class and bought these similar mats (NO! Blooper!! They weren’t similar mats.. Our mats were Urban Yoga! Quite unlike the mats there)

It’s almost a legend that my body is as inflexible as they come. After a lot of (“happy pain”ful) pulls and cramps, my yoga teacher decides that I am supposed to push my body more!! It was exhausting and was yielding results! Wow! That is awesome! So what was the problem? The results were supposed to be the other way round! I was supposed to be gaining weight (my teacher’s oath to make me fat) and here I was.. I had lost 4 KGs in less than 4 weeks. My interest started waning (was there a doubt??) and that ended too.

My parents were confident that something else was bound to come up soon and it did! Back when I was in school the PT period was mostly taken up by badminton. And my evening play time was also the same story with the kids in my apartment block. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a friend of mine about how it would be nice for us to be able to play the game every morning. She said we could! She was also as excited as I was about and we decided to play every morning from 6 to 7. The place was the issue next. Where do we play? There was a field very close to my house which had a net and a drawn out court to play. But that place was already taken up by 2 groups of guys (one in the morning and one late evening) so that was ruled out too. (Maybe we would still consider playing there if the guys who played in the morning were good looking. I knew from my walks with Asha that all of them were just ordinary looking and we are clearly not interested in that species of guys!!) So as of now we are still playing the game in a spot between both our homes early morning whenever we can. (It’s quite often really! Almost daily in fact…) We both intend to make this work for the longest time possible.

But, in the meantime, just this morning, we were also discussing this possibility of joining karate classes. So if at all the badminton plan stops working out I already have plan B. In the alternate case of that not working out as well, my sister is planning swimming classes! We have both learnt how to swim but we are both quite unsure of how much we can succeed in beyond just managing to save our (own) lives only! So there is also already a plan C also in place. Looking forward to sticking to plan A for the near future and trying to work out plans D, E and F….