**My 4 year old nephew almost cried himself hoarse one day screaming ‘V-A-N-I Vani Vani’
**Sitting on a huge see-saw made me feel like I was in the sky
**I laughed so much sitting high up on the see-saw I was sure I would die laughing
**I went on the giant wheel for the first time in my life – and enjoyed it too!
**Nearly died laughing looking at the videos of all the antics 4 grown-ups had done in a children’s park (umm, yeah, grown-up includes me too! :) )
**Visited four temples in two days ;)

**We went to a quaint, unknown village after receiving directions from very eager-to-help people.
**I met some of the most beautiful children in the village – where one girl refused to stop staring shyly at me and my sister
**We smiled heartily at three kids who were proud that they took a ride in the car we’d come in and rolled out of it joyously, grinning away to glory
**I caught a sad cold which surprisingly, got cured soon! :)
**After the trip, finally got something I had wanted for long, but was slightly scared of: getting a second hole pierced in my ear! ;) It pains now, but who cares?

Couldn’t have asked for a better ending for a wonderful year….Happy New Year, everybody! May we all have a beautiful year ahead, filled with happiness, health and laughter!

Yayyy! A check up for my eyes after almost 18 months of glasses revealed that my power hasn’t gone up. I’m delighted! I’ve been such a good girl, considered the complaints I made for wearing glasses.

Blessed with the comfort of having an ophthalmologist way too near, it took almost the end of my vacation to get my eyes checked. Busy gal, you see.
Boy, this doctor is all sophisticated (well, she is the only person who’s checked my eyes, but nevertheless). Random machines doing things I don’t know (of course!) and some tests which nearly made me cry out in pain for all the light that was glaring at one eye, the testing took 45 minutes. Good girl that I was, I read all the letters on the board correctly with my glasses :)

The doctor recommended to my mother that I can get a laser surgery done the next time I come home so that I wouldn’t have to wear glasses (lazy me, I don’t have the patience to wear contact lenses!)

One small disappointment, though. I was secretly hoping that I could change my glasses’ frame if the power changed, though I had told my mom that I would wear the current one for two years. No power rise, no new frame. :(

Doesn’t matter, the happiness overrides the disappointment. I’m all smiles. :D

“Rakshasa!” is how even my mom calls me now. This ‘nickname’ was given and popularised by my elder brother 10 years back, when I was a brat who refused to learn to swim.

It all began one fateful day when dad decided swimming was one essential thing left out in the plethora of extra-curricular activities that I was in: tennis, modern dance, carnatic music, painting and sculpting. My brother Vipul, well-established (so he claimed!) swimmer (all because the guy who crossed the English channel was his senior in school; I know, the connection’s really weak, but I didn’t know this much then!) was given the charge of taking me to the pool and leaving me with the instructor. And so began trouble.

Swimming is no dangerous stuff; but I freaked out and wailed the moment water entered my ears. Our instructor, Thangadurai sir, though, was convinced that this was natural, and made sure my ears were well covered before I even stepped into the water. He began with teaching me to float.

Floating did go quite well, as water really didn’t enter my ears nor did I have to breathe with difficulty. But the moment sir decided I was ready to go the next stage, he had it. The first day I cried so much that he actually got terrified and asked my brother to take me home and console me.
After fake promises from my parents that I would no longer be taken to the pool, I slept that night, reassured.

But my parents had their own plan; “Vishal has to know to swim,” said dad. So my brother did take me to that fateful pool the next day despite my wailing all the way to the pool and even one attempt to jump off his cycle and run back home (like I knew the way! But that time I’d do anything to avoid the pool.). That day, sir was more considerate than usual and put me under ‘special’ training - I was to wait till all others in my ‘class’ finished and then I was taught by sir – special attention was given to me. That day went fine as not much water entered my ears though at the end of it I was shaking and thanking the Lord for making me come out of the pool alive.

Sir was encouraged by the lesser amount of fussing I had made that day. But he took the wrong step the next day – he made me go deeper into the water.
I was shocked. And outraged.
I screamed my head off, claiming sir was attempting to kill me. Sir tried telling me that he was teaching me how to save my life in case I was drowning, etc., but none of it worked. He became stubborn too. He refused to give in to all my tantrums and held on. When I realised he wasn’t going to let me out, I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed him by his hair and pulled at it ferociously, threatening him to let me out. After three minutes of struggle, I won. He pulled me out of the pool and told my brother it was impossible to teach me. And the moment he said that, my tear-stained face smiled. And my brother was enraged. He picked me up, scolding me all the way, and ultimately concluded that I was a rakshasa, a demon.
And the name has stuck because I still refuse to learn.

P.S.: Sigh, I don’t know how to swim, too. And I have never tried to learn, too. My class mates in university are surprised that I don’t know swimming though I come from ‘ a city on the coast’, but how’ll they know that swimming is the last thing my parents want me to do in the beach! But I guess I have to give it a thought now that water-related disasters are occuring often in Chennai!

God, I’ve hardly posted with this frequency in the recent past. Still ‘velai irundhum vetti’!

After playing minesweeper for hours losing every minute, I decided to give up. Luck wasn’t favouring me at all (well, only in the case of Minesweeper, Lady Luck!) and every guess I made was going wrong. I was getting bored and thought of going to the kitchen to see what my mom was doing. One look convinced me not to near the area: she was making ‘pori urundai’ for the Karthigai festival this evening. I had done my part of the work: I’d peeled and powdered tens of cardamom seeds. That done, I have silently refused to do any further work by retreating into my room and ‘working’ on the computer.

Then mom wanted me to find the dhobi guy in our apartment. I went down and found him sleeping. Then I went past him into our lil’-park. I went and sat on the swing when two old women gave me weird looks. Concluding that they definitely thought I was too old for the swing (sigh…I’m not that old!!) I got down, depressed that I was getting old for many things I wanted to do. Then I realised that I would feel young in one place: the gym. I went to the apartment gym and found it locked. I peered through the curtains and was delighted at all the things inside. I decided that I had to be fit when at home especially, since I was doing nothing but eating, sleeping and watching movies. Then somebody said the gym wasn’t working properly.

Dash it! I returned home. Found some random self-improvement books: 25 ways to motivate people, 52 ways to live successfully, and finally Improve your English. I decided I didn’t need any of those and went back to my huge Shantaram book.

Damn…can’t even read that now. I have so much to do (what, I don’t know, but that’s what my mom says), but I don’t feel like doing anything. Probably watch a movie. But that’s a bad chance to take since going anywhere near the television would mean a good shelling from mom (and chances of work: cleaning the lamps!). Right now I’ve spent some ten minutes wandering around the apartment searching for people and another ten minutes writing this. Another 8 hours 25 minutes left before everyone thinks it’s high time I slept.

-- Velai irundhum slight-a vetti.

Before I go to the things which went awry, some nice things:
My blog’s worth $22,181.68!!!!! (Ok, maybe a digit in the end is wrong…)
Yippppeeee…ma blog’s gonna be makin’ me rich!!
THE SUN’S SHINING!!! :)

Gosh, am I thankful for the last one! After what seemed to be eons of rain, Chennai is back to its warm and cosy self.
I undertook a spiteful trip to the terrible-as-ever Ranganathan street to get some craft work stuff for my cousin, two days back. Thank god, I came out alive!

The road was horrid. We took some shortcut when entering and avoided a lot of the slush around in the road. But a slight error while returning made us skip the ‘shortcut’ and we ended up in the street. Milling crowds, all too anxious to get out of the street safely, made sure I didn’t have to walk. They kept pushing me here and there, and I knew that another 5 minutes in the street and I would burst into tears. Thankfully again, it took lesser time to get out because of the crowd, which in its eagerness to get out, pushed me out too.

I know it’s too much to feel this in a crowded hell like R. St, but I didn’t want anyone to stamp my shoe, especially in all that slush. And I didn’t want to step into any of the waters, too. As I tried my best to avoid these things, hoards of women grabbed on to my arm for support, upsetting my delicate balance of oh-the-marsh-in-the-right-and-the-feet-in-the-left-so-center’s-the-only-safe-place support many a time. And as one woman threatened to knock me down, I gave her a glare she shouldn’t forget in the near future. :)

It’s been real long since I went to that godforsaken place, and the rains added to the misery, and I’ve vowed not to go in there again before I leave again.

Things are really going awry. Rains, which we wanted so badly that I was sending prayers to God every time it rained in Singapore for it to rain in Chennai, have just exceeded their limits. But now maybe I should just be thankful that I wasn’t there when the real heavy rains poured down in beginning of November!

Ah..work coming up now. My grandma is giving me a choice between setting the table and folding the dry clothes. Sorry, grand, neither. Wish I could just escape doing any of these things :P, but it’s so difficult adjusting to some things back home when I’ve complete independence in my hostel. But again, I can’t grumble: home is where mom’s good food is! And it’s just more than food: it’s all the pampering!! Mom says don’t whistle after 6 in the evening when I’m happily whistling a whole song from Ah Aah, while grandma wishes I would whistle carnatic songs instead. Mom then wonders how the Creator made a mistake by making me a girl, because according to them I’m the total opposite of any gracefulness expected in a woman! (God forbid!) After a while, maybe she decides that more than being boyish, I’m being feminist. Hmm…well, feminism is maybe too strong, I would rather say I have a teeny-weeny bit of chauvinism, female chauvinism. (If such a term even exists!) Just reminds me of a silly guy in a Singapore bloggers’ meet who thought my blog URL was chennaigirlrights!! WTH!

Ok, totally unconnected stuff. Technically this post must be titled ‘Random Scribbling-4’, but sequels can get too monotonous at times.

"Vidu, can you come here?" yelled mom from the kitchen.
It was 8 in the morning. I was sitting on the floor in my room, newspaper spread out, sipping warm Milo. The MetroPlus section had something about Madhavan and I wanted to read it at the earliest.
I got up and went to the room where she was.

"I have to get that carton down. The dolls are in the carton," she said.
"Hmm.." I nodded. The day after was the Navarathri festival. My mind was busy thinking of all the work that I would have to do for the festival: dusting the dolls, fixing the broken ones, and worst of all, make the field for the 'cricketers' to play. Those 'cricketers' dolls were actually pretty awful looking. They didn't look like they were wearing pants: "Veshti kattindu vilayadranga paaru," Dad often used to joke.

I got a chair and pulled the carton out of the loft. Dad had got the other ones out. As I put it down with great difficulty, I saw another familiar, old, purple bag. Wondering what it was, thinking where I had seen it before, I pulled it out.
"Ayyo, Vidu, don't take that out now! It'll be difficult putting it back in..." groaned amma.
"I have to see what it is, ma..." I said, pulling it out.
Mom took the carton and left the room. I took the purple bag and went to my room.
It had accumulated a lot of dust. After dusting for two minutes and a sneezing fit lasting for ten minutes, I opened the bag. I gasped.

It had my entire Barbie set: two Barbies, a Ken (Barbie's ex-boyfriend!), a Skipper (Barbie's sister) and two babies (don't really know how they are related to Barbie!), and a whole dismantled doll house.
I quickly assembled it, forgetting the tough code I was working on for my work the next day. I was getting as excited as I had been when I had first got a Barbie. The kitchen was looking cute as ever. I remembered how I had always wanted to build a kitchen like this in my home. And looking at it now, I realized that I had, after all, built the kitchen in my home now, somewhat similarly.
I soon started placing 'dishes' in the microwave oven and tried to make 'pancakes' in the stove, all the while smiling to myself.

After making my dolls eat, I ran up to the kitchen and gave my mom a plate of 'food'.
Mom was shell shocked seeing what I was doing.
"Vidu, unakku enna di aachu?" she asked in a very concerned tone.
"Ma, I'm playing with my dolls!" I answered and pranced about the kitchen singing a Barbie song.
Mom was almost convinced I was mad.

I ran back to my room. It was then that the computer screen caught my eye. The debugger was showing a shocking 300 errors for a few hundred lines of code.
I quickly pulled a chair and got down to checking the code again. Four hours later, I was tired to every muscle, trying to rectify the horrible code. I stretched and looked around the room.

My eyes fell on the playhouse I had assembled. I smiled, thinking of the 25 minutes of joy those dolls had given me. I made some space on my work table and put the dolls there, and took the 'dish' out of the microwave.
In another five minutes, I was all set to look through my code again.