thaumaturgist

4.5 hours to go before we wake up to do a quick check of packed baggage and put in last minute items like toothbrush, make-up, etc. We got back from Zurich late Friday night, so things have been slightly hectic. Zurich was hot and not-so-exciting! I am on no. 4 in my Tiffany-spotting (inspired by breakfast at Tiffany's)also for the first time I saw Louis Vuitton bags carried by regular people, 3 on the same day. The city is a strange mix of German, French and Italian cultures. They are as curt as the Germans, as lavish as the French and as crooked as the Italians! They say 'guten tag' when you walk in, 'Merci' when you pay the bill and 'Ciao' when you leave! Now I shall decode these greetings to you- the first being 'whatever', second one is 'thanks for spending all that shit load of money on crap' and the third one means 'you're such a fool you don't even realize you have been ripped off' Looking at how expensive the city is ...

One day, a year and a half ago, I was sitting in my living room watching CNN. There was a feature about this book called Twilight written by some Stephanie Meyer on TV. They were just talking about the craze surrounding the book that is about a normal high school girl falling in love with a vampire and also that a movie is now being made based on this book. I didn't really care about it at the time, but the name stuck in my head. A few days later when I was scouring the 'fremdsprache'(foreign language) corner of the book store for some English books I came across Twilight. I thought to myself, "if it has become so famous it must be quite a thrilling book so why not pick it up"? I had no idea what I was getting myself into. To be very honest, it was a very poor piece of literature. The characters are unnatural, of course, how can vampires be natural? But there was something, something that makes you want to find out what happens at the end. It's like an old fas...

If the reader is one of my parents- stop right here!!! Wine rejuvenates the part of your brain that is involved in the artistic capabilities, in my case blogging, of course, if it can be considered artistic in any way. After two glasses of alcohol, usually, I can be quite embarrassing but the good thing is that the listeners never remind me of that fact, usually they are pretty drunk themselves as well. I am quite sure you have noticed the missing or too much of punctuations by now, I am usually quite cautious about not letting you know 'bout my spelling mistakes… backspace, type, backspace, type, backspace… aaargh!!! Most of the times, in one of these wine parties I am the sole woman in a group of 5 or 6 men, 1 being my husband, 1 a Russian, the others I am not too sure about… oh! I definitely fake French kiss one, oh you naughty minds---not that kind of French kiss but on both cheeks kind of French greeting kiss!!! By now you must be wondering what this...

I have to say I am quite frustrated with the grocery stores in Dresden. I have not found any green chillies and coriander leaves for 3 weeks now. Because of that I had to improvise on my simple fish curry and to my surprise it turned out really awesome. It's basically a cross between kalia and jeerer jhol . Here's what I did. I lightly dusted the fish pieces with turmeric and salt and kept aside for a while. Cut 2 medium potatoes , long and thick, then fried till lightly browned on all sides. Then I fried the fish pieces. In the same oil I put some kalo jeera/kalonji /onion seeds , after the tempering I added 1 medium onion finely chopped. I put two pinches of turmeric powder , 1 tsp chilli powder , 2 tsps cumin pwder and 1 tsp coriander powder after the onion was well browned. At this stage I added a fine paste made out of 1 large tomato and 4 dry red chillies/ shukhno lonka . Add salt. Fry it till you see little bits of oil oozing out unless, of course, you are not...

I am a big-city girl. I hail from Calcutta, it is the 3rd largest city in India with a population of 15 million. In spite of that Calcutta has a small town feel to it when I compare it with the national capital, New Delhi and the commercial capital Mumbai. In Calcutta, aunties stop you on the street to ask you what you were doing at the auto-stand at 7:30 p.m, in your uniform when you should be home and you meekly reply that you are just on your way home from the tuition and when a cyclist bangs on to you and knocks you down, the dadas, dadus and aunties rain down on him. But oh so big Delhi had me whimpering like a child, never mind I was 18. The devil may care attitude and I-don't-give-a-damn sort of people made me feel insignificant and lonely. The new born adult learns to hold her own fighting through all the injustices of being felt up, duped by the auto-wallahs and the lewd commenter... the young ones grow older, come of age, some become ruthless and unsympathetic towards pe...