Memorable Quotes from "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel - 2

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always.


To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.


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Memorable Quotes from "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel - 1

I pause.What of Gods silence? I think it over.I add:
An intellect confounded yet a trysting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose.

People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawling feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build in one year will be torn down in one day by others.

Nil magnum nisi bonum - no greatness without goodness.

Look: Christ on the Cross died of suffocation, but His only complaint was of thirst. If thirst can be so taxing that even God Incarnate complains about it, imagine the effect on regular human.


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Memorable Quotes from the Great Indian Novel by Sashi Tharoor

It was as if the good Lord, having given the Indian peasent droughts, and floods, and floods after droughts, and heat, and dust, and low wages, and British rule, said to him, your cup of woe has runneth over, drink instead from the juice of Chausa, and it will make up for all your miseries I have inflicted upon you.


Indian Muslims themselves were not just Sunnis or Shias, but Moplahs and Bohras and Khojas, Ismailis and Qadianis and Ahmediyas and Kutchi Memons and Allah alone knew what else. These differences were simply a fact of Indian life, as incontestable and as innocuous as the different species of vegetation that sprout and flower our land.

So we Indians are open about our differences; we do not attempt to subsume overselves in a homogeneous mass, we do not resort to the identity disguising tricks of standardize names or uniform costumes or even of a common national language. We are all different; as the French, that most Indian of Europeon peoples, like to put it, albeit in another context, vive la difference !!! :))

No Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil serpent who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord.

Your lot were free to be themselves so long as this did not encroach on my lot's right to do the same.

Divide et impera - divide and rule in Roman.

If you want to know why democracy is held in such scant respect by our present elite, Ganapthi, you need only look at the way it was dispensed to us by those who claimed to be it's guardians.


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Memorable Quotes from the Great Indian Novel by Sashi Tharoor

one must vindicate the Truth not by infliction of sufferings on the opponent, but on one's self.

"vinasha kale, viparita buddhi," -whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

This is now the classic picture of India, is it not, and French cinematographers take time off from filming the unclad forms of their women in order to focus with loving pity on the unclad forms of our childrens.

Indulge an old man's rage, Ganapathi, and write this down: the British killed the Indian artisan, they created the Indian 'landless labourer', they exported our full employement and they invented our poverty.

There is something particularly soul-destroying about urban squalor: in a city-slum Nature provides no soothing contrast to offset the man-made horror. In those narrow airless alleys it is impossible to escape from the pervasive wrechtedness.

But Fate has a habit of intervening at just the right moment to resolve these crises, to drop an apple on a sleeping head, to turn an aimless drift into surging tide. Great discoveries, Ganapathi  are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.

Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one.( Her husband or son, of course never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking).

All we are left with is the drama without ths sacrifice - and isn't that a metaphor for Indian politics today.


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India's early exit from the Champions Trophy :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EngLjh927qo&feature=player_embedded

eid gift take 2 :) Apple MacBook pro :)

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new toy :) aka my eid gift :p

Chemical Engineering 101 - Esters

How to make Esters ? :)
Why do fruits have different smells ? :)

Basically this was the most fun part of my chemistry classes back in school. With all the dangers of Sulphuric Acid, fumes and pungent smelling ammonia, Esters provided some relief :)

They were good fruit-smelling hydrocarbons. They are basically present in every fruit you eat. Duh !!! that's why they are fruity smelling :)

Here is a small howto on how to make a Banana smelling ester :) :

http://www.umsl.edu/~orglab/experiments/Bananaoil.html

and here is some more information on different chemicals that makes certain fruits smell like their respective smells :) lol didn't know how to put it in words :) but WTH visit this site if u wud be interested in knowing something so interesting and helpful at the same time lol :)

http://faculty.mansfield.edu/bganong/biochemistry/esters.htm



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me and spilling ... made for each other :)

jeez I'm so tired of spilling everything I cook, heat, serve and eat :
(....with me spilling us by default ... at masjid I spill the food
while serving on my clothes ...so far I haven't spilled anything on
others clothes lol ...thank god ...atleast not in Chicago ..

but yeah I did that once in secunderabad :(... it wasn't my
mistake :) .. the gosht korma was placed on the edge of the thaal ..
so while turning .. the thaal swung .. and the plate of korma drifted
to the edge .. and the contents .. just a lil though .. spilled on ppl
sitting below :(...unfortunately it was a thaal of lil kids :(...kids
I adored and who used to scream at me all the time .. ofcourse in a
nice way .. they wud call me "HATIMmmmm UNCLE" lol ...

well so as soon as I dropped it on that kid :(..it was a mess
duh !!! .. worse the stuff was hot ...I took the kid away .. he was
brave .. I cud see tears in his eyes but he didn't show any real
emotions :(... so I ran helter-skelter ..found a clean towel .. u can
imagine how hard it is to find one at any masjid :).. and started
rubbing away the stains on his Kurti :(

so after the stains were wiped not entirely though .. and after he
felt a some soothing on his back .. I asked him to go back and eat ..
but he refused .. stating that it wud be shameful to go in the thaal
with a wet kurti .. aww he said .."sharam aata" lol in hyderabadi
accent :)..lol I was like .."Kya miyaa idhar ku koyee potti nahin,
sharam kaiko." lol I know my hyderabadi Urdu sucks !!! .. but that
cracked him up and he decided to go back ...

he was so concerned of his appearance due to his wet Kurti that he
walked siding the wall ..so that nobody wud notice it :)

well there are a lot many incidents :) ..

in the meantime .., one more instance of my spills is shown below ..
this is the third day in a row .. that I have spilled sheer-khurma
while heating it in the micro-wave :) .. this too at work .. where
I've to bother to clean it right away :$

Memorable Quotes 2 - "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai

Year by year, his life wasn't mounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air.

Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from it's determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

All the NRIs holding their green cards and passports, looked complacent and civilized. that's just how it was, wasn't it? Fortune piled on more good fortune.

And they couldn't wait for the shopping-"Shopping ke liye jaayengey, bhel puri khaenge... dollars mein kamaenge, pum pum pum. Only eight rupees to the tailor, only twenty-two cents!" they would say, triumphantly translating everything to American currency;and while the shopping was converted into dollars, tips to the servants would be calculated in local currency:"Fifteen hundred rupees, is he mad? Give him one hundred, even that's too much."

A Calcutta sister accompanying a Chicago sister "getting value for her daaller, getting value for her daaller," discovering the first germ of leprous, all-consuming hatred that would in time rot the families irreversibly from within.

He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug of conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous.

One true thing Jemubhai learned: a human heart can be transformed into anything. It was possible to forget if not essential to do so.

She felt grateful for the greatness of this landscape, walked on trying to recover the horizon-for it felt as if the space bequeathed her at the end of a romance that had promised a wide vista-well it was nonexistent. Sadness was claustrophobic.,

What could his father have known? This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to hav their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise?

The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.


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Memorable Quotes 1 - "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai

In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself.

Give this people a bit and one could find supporting the whole family forever after, a constantly multiplying family, no doubt, because they might have no food, the husbAnd might be blind with broken legs, and the woman might be anemic and bent, but they'd still pop out an infant every nine month.

If you let such people get an inch, they'd take everything you had- the families yoked together because of guilt on one side and an unending greed and capacity for dependence on the other-and if they knew you were susceptible, everyone handed their guilt along so as to augment yours: old guilt, new guilt, any passed-on guilt whatever.

What was India to these people? How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people's countries? Did their lives feel unreal to them as his own did to him?


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English 101 :)

ok so here is the difference between usage of 'which' and 'what' :

'which' - is used when u ask a question which has finite number of
options.
ex: which color shoes should I wear : black or blue?

'what' - is used when u ask a quesion with infinite options.
ex: what is your name?
it could be any name.

so yeah ppl get it right, next time :)

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This is how eid is celebrated :)

So this was our menu for Eid
day breakfast:

-Nihari
-egg omlette
-jam-butter
-Italian or French bread
-Sheer Khurma
-Orange juice
-and last but not the least - chai (tea)

Talk of replinishing your nutrients after fasting for the whole month
(30 days precise) during Ramadan :)

Funniest part is the fact that after consuming so many calories, our
people are still choosey when it comes to sugar or non-sugar tea :p

And even more there are few who would request half a cup of sugar tea
and half non-sugar. Now that's a real epicurian of tea :p

Oh well, it's all well if it ends well and so it did except for a few
surprises :). And surprises are exactly what you need to make a day
like Eid memorable. :)

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ice cream celebration :)

celebration to commomerate the success of my lil sis :) - ice cream
for Culvers - get culverised :p

View across Old Galena Rd, mossville, IL

Al Masjid-e-Saifee, Chicago

Dawoodi Bohra masjid in Chicago. The rising minaret mashallah :)

Al Masjid-e-Saifee, Chicago

Dawoodi Bohra masjid in Chicago, after the night of Lailatul Qadr
1430...so serene so holy... a living replica of the spirituality rich
night just passed.