Birthday Fiesta

I turned 25 a few days back! And I have looked at the number both ways: the carefree age range of 20-23 is still not too far behind me, while the maturity that comes with 30 is not very far either. I've also thought of it as a quarter of a century old, well that’s a scary thought! Anyways, age is always just a number, and at heart, I still feel hardly 17!

To celebrate, I had a homely birthday party with just close friends and family the night before my birthday. My mom-in-law and I prepared some yummy Indian-Asian fusion dishes for the dinner; you can have a look at them below:

Vegetable Shaslik

The dinner table set with my favorite dinner plates

 I tried my hand at making Coffee Creme Caramel, and it turned out perfect, to my utter glee:

And the highlight of the party was this beautiful, super yummy chocolate-laden piece of heaven one of my best friends baked for me:

I got several lovely birthday presents too, and among all of those, my favorite was this:

This friend sure knows me to the core :)

So that's all for today....I'll be heading for a little getaway this weekend with my friends.  We'll be heading to my grandparents' place in the beautiful outskirts of a little town called Sylhet, filled with lush tea gardens all around. My grandparents' duplex apartment spanning the 9th and 10th floors has some of the most beautiful views in the country. Hope to get some good pics for you guys to see :)



What are your weekend plans, do tell?

My Love She throws me like a Rubber Ball

My old friend, or rather enemy, or maybe ‘Frenemy’ as a new term goes, is back. She’s back with renewed vigor and a suppressed vengeance, it seems. This time, she’s got me in a tight grip and the physical effects have started showing: the dark circles turning from light ash to a sinister grey, the puffy eyes in the morning taking much longer than normal to subside, the skin looking so tired and ‘un-fresh’ all the time. But these really aren’t my biggest worries. I’m more upset by the thoughts she puts into my head: the restless fretting, the unnecessary reflections on the days gone by, the worries of the future. All this while the chaos of yet another meaningless day rushes towards me and I’m left to fight its anarchy with diminishing energy and sagging eyelids.

This frenemy of mine has been with me for years now. She’s fickle, comes and goes as and when she wishes, no particular pattern or reason. When she announces her arrival, she gets me wondering to what I owe the pleasure (NOT!) of her presence. When she leaves, I’m left looking for clues to what it was that drove her away. Most of the times, she brings along some of her friends and they seem to have a ball in my head every night. Her friends have ominous names too: Anxiety, Restlessness and Exhaustion.  They are often joined by Blankness, which is even more irritating than its other acquaintances.

This time, I don’t know how long my old friend/enemy will be staying and when she will suddenly decide to let go of her grip on me. *big sigh* I just hope she tires soon this time.

Three

I’ve recently learnt (the hard way) that only when we are faced with turmoil in our life, we learn to appreciate the good times that we once passed by oh-so-nonchalantly. And similarly, the not-so-genuine friends we have around us teach us to appreciate the value of true warmth and friendship that we sometimes tend to take for granted.

One such ‘friend’ recently erased her name from my list of close friends. Let’s not get into the ‘why’ and ‘how’, what matters is the whole incident gave my brain a thorough shaking and made me sit up and take stock of my life around me. What I realized was not disheartening at all. The friends I still have around me (albeit, very few) genuinely love and care for me like I do for them. My two best friends from childhood are still there with me in every step of life, in spirit, if not physically. And there's another one, very special to me and very close to my heart for she's more like me than anyone else I've ever met was/is. She's like a soul sister, a confidante who relates to every word I say and makes me feel like my thoughts are not as insane as I reckon them to be. I'm very lucky to have these three very special ladies in my life, and I cherish them more now that I have realized such strong bonds are not to be taken for granted.

Three may not be a big number, but it’s more than enough for me. And just three will be enough to carry me through a lifetime.

With or Without You

 

As a child, I remember wondering how my mother could bear to stay away from her friends for such prolonged periods of time and only meet up with them on weekends or special occasions. To me, it seemed like something I would never, EVER be able to do. I just HAD to see my friends every day, or at least chat with them on the phone for at least an hour, if not more. During the teenage years, my two best friends meant the world to me, and the thought of not seeing them every day was unimaginable. We went to school together and went to tutors’ classes together, and as if staying together for something like 8-9 hours a day wasn’t enough, we’d come back home and chatter away on the phone till our mothers screamed their lungs out at us.

To think that the scenario today couldn’t be more ‘opposite’ is still shocking to me.The three of us hardly get to meet anymore. One of them lives in a different city while the other lives in the same city as I do, yet our worlds have drifted so far apart that we can hardly ever synchronize to catch up with a hangout. Funny thing, I don’t feel the sharp pangs of ‘missing’ I used to once upon a time. If anything, I rather like spending my weekends at my home, reading magazines or watching sitcoms or happily cooking in my kitchen. I like the distance and the space it allows me and the fact that I no longer feel the urge to share my inner turmoil or future plans with them on a regular basis like I did once upon a time. What was once unthinkable has been happily accepted as the norm now. Is this what adulthood does to everyone? I can’t figure out yet if it’s a good thing or a bad one.