365 days of Awesomeness

It was back in July 2009 when a good friend of mine came about the idea of Blogging a photo a day - a 365 Picture blog; A blog which would capture all the funny, lovely, witty, classy, touchy and unforgettable moments all through the year. It’s been a year now since that idea, and little did I know that I would actually successfully capture 365 beautiful days in my blog!

Today my 365 blog celebrates a year and I have absolutely no words to express how happy and satisfied i feel! This blog had promised the world that it will live for a year and live to the fullest! And it has kept the promise! :)

On this emotional moment (nautanki sak!), I would like to take up few lines on this post to thank all the lovely people, animals and objects who made an appearance in my life and my blog! If not for all of you, my 365 days would have been just another year passing by.

Thank you dear friends, colleagues, family members, acquaintances for the sweetest smile and patience to pose for the snaps: Vasumathi, Subash, Jathin, Rashi, Mohit, Mummy, Daddy, Vishnu, Amma, Appa, Teeks, Ramya, Arun R, Deepa, Abirami, Naag, Senthil, Mariya, Kalyan bro, Ramya (ex-colleague), Preethi, Bajji and Shyama, Aji, Pavi, Mani, Arun (from Amazon.com), Ankit, Krish, Ravi Shankar, Mani, Gajendra, Shoaib, Yunus Uncle, Razia Aunty, Kindle QA Team, Digital QA team, Belin Giles, Gayathri, Rekha, Sudha, Karthiga, Praveen, Amitesh, Pranav (kid), Kiruthika, Anuj, Lata Aunty, Anirudha, Chandana, Nagaraj, Deepa and Pradeep, Bakul and Poorni, Vishnu's College Friends, Hyundai Sales Person, Shwetha Ramesh, Sunita

Thank you to all the non-living objects, the materialistic stuff which appeared on my blog:

- The selective cars: Vicky's car, Hyundai i20 (and all the scratches), Honda Civic, Subash's Car, Praveen's car.

- The "in" gadgets and the "Smart" phones in town: Benq HD Monitor, Kindle, my iPhone, my Blackberry.

- The yummy food and beverages served by the loved ones: Basundi, Pepsi, Sprite, Chocolates and their wrappers, HSB tea, Brownies, Choco bar, Mango Pudding, Pickles, Kulfi, Mysore Paak, Gulab Jamun, Pasta,

- The awesome India discovery: Kabini, Darjeeling, Sikkim, Pondicherry, Bangalore

- The movies from Bollywood, Kollywood and Hollywood which kept me entertained: Jab we met, 3 Idiots, P.S I love you, Chance Pe Dance, Paa, Karthik Calling Karthik, Ek Vivah Aisa bhi, Harry Potter, Love Aaj Kal, How to Lose a guy in 10 days, VTV, Ice Age 3, Monsters vs. Aliens, Wake up Sid, There's Something about Mary, Rajneeti, Raavanan.

- The various "hang outs" which I visited numerous times and spent some great time: CCD, McD, KFC, Fruit shop @ Greams road, Mocha, Don Pepe, Parfait 3, Gangotree, Pizza Hut, Little Italy, Donuts inc, Bela Ciao.

 Last but not the least - To myself - for appearing in the most number of posts on the blog: D

 P.S - The blog is still alive and kicking, but just catching up on age ;)

Hair cut - Again!?!

It was back in November when suddenly I got my almost-waist-long hair cut into a "Bob". To me, this drastic change is not new and this is surely not the first time I got my hair chopped. My first big hair cut was back in school when I had very long hair (little below my waist) and the next day I walked into the class room with a boy-cut! The hair dresser was in tears when she cut them. Well, I had to do that cos of the never ending "lice" in my hair. I am sure all of us in school have had those dreadful black color creatures running on the scalp (yuck!! :-(..) Since then, I completely lost patience of growing and maintaining long hair and cultivated a liking of chopping my hair when it is least expected :)

The longest I have resisted and kept my hair growing was from Sept 2008 to Nov 2009. My hair grew pretty long and I kept longing for a haircut. Every time I stood before the mirror, I would ask myself - "Should I get a haircut?" and my mind would say, "Do whatever your heart says" and my heart would reply, "Do whatever your mind says". I ditched both of them and asked hubby, he simbly said "Cut it if you want, I wouldn’t mind either ways" - hmph! “Neutral answer” I thought. Then went to the Mom-in-law and hinted that I badly wanted to cut my hair. She said "Your wish dear, I like it both ways"; again the same kind of answer. One fine day, I finally made up my mind and got over my long hair avatar!!! Yippeee :).. and this is how I looked ;)

Trust me, I was so glad and excited about the new look! Almost everybody at home liked it (May be they were just nice to me). But when I returned to work, I got surprised looks and funny comments. People saw me in shock and moaned for my loss of hair. In a few days I felt bad that I actually cut so much of my hair and all my excitement of the new fringe and bob had drained down :(
It is 6 months since that happened and guess what - my mind is already thinking about a hair cut! (I told ya!!)....so I went to my favorite parlor, sat before the mirror and ordered - "Cut it!" - She asked me a zillion questions on what cut do I want?? How short? How small? How straight? How "U"? How "V"??...phew! After 15 mins - I came out with a new hair ishtyle...Tadaaaaaa! :)

This is so called "Layer cut" - Not so long, not so short. Takes advantage of my wavy hair and makes it look like a step cut :)..Now waiting for the world to react ;)

My first IA Experience!

It was again one of those painful trips I had to take in order to satisfy the team needs and recruit more people into the forest! The office admin could not arrange for decent flights and we landed up with "Air India". I have personally never travelled in an Air India flight, I have of course heard a lot of people literally swearing on the service they provide but have never taken them seriously. I always thought, what can really go wrong in an airline? Even if it is government owned? It still needs customers and has to work for the customers in order to be in business right?? WRONG!
They don't give a damn, they have no "customer" obsession nor do they care about who fly with them and who don’t - they always get left over crowd and they are happy with that. We reached the airport 1.5 hours ahead of departure and stood in a long never-ending queue to check-in. We as a group gave 9 tickets to the lady at the counter. She kept staring at the screen for more than 10 mins. No response. She looked around went to the next door aunty, no expression on her face, when we asked what was going on. No response. She took all our tickets and walked off, don’t know where. After 10 mins she appeared and we still didn’t know what was going on and were losing patience. We had to board the flight by 4:00 and until 3:45 there was no sign of boarding passes! The lady then walks to another uncle at the counter and he tried to print the boarding pass. We were lucky to have gotten 1 out of 9 boarding pass and were relieved that we are finally checking-in. Guess what!? The printer got stuck!! We were moving from one counter to the other until uncle found a working printer. After he found, he issued boarding passes for everybody else in the queue except us!
This was getting highly irritating and we started bugging uncle and all he did was Nod and say "1 min" - he did that at least 10 times...We finally followed the lady to the back office and she said, 1 min. it was 4:10 (15 mins before take-off) and we were still standing there waiting to check in. She finally came out and handed over the tickets to the same lost uncle and disappeared. Uncle took print outs of our boarding passes at 4:20 and we rushed for security check! While we were standing in the queue the IA lady announced "This is the last call for all the passengers boarding the Bangalore flight on Indian Airlines". We broke the line and ran to the gates, the lady was pissed off and didn’t even smile (like we care, do hell with your smile).
We reached the flight to find out that my seat was already allocated to somebody else and the lady was kind enough to ask me to sit in Business class (somebody was finally kind I thought!). I was finally happy that we got compensated for the wait and got business class seats. I guess I got too carried away, the air hostess were no better. One lady - Who looked half pregnant, another one who looked deprived of food and the other who looked as if she hated being there! Totally 3 ladies to serve us "first class" and make us feel that we are the bad boys stealing away their life from them! There was no Smile on their face, no please in their vocabulary - you would simply wish they didn’t exist.
So much for a 45 mins flight to Bangalore - I would have rather taken the train!