Wednesday, August 27, 2008

"The mystery of cashew-burfi"!!

Well I made it back to the USA after three months of bliss at home..and I thought I should get lil somethings for the people at my work place and also thought that I would share some Indian dessert with them, knowing that none of them had ever tried anything "Indian" before(this is SGF the village am talking about!!lol..) So I got them "Cashew-burfi/Kaju Katli".
So I go around the office distributing the sweet and each of them taste it like I have filled it with chillies!lol!(Any Indian food=spicy!) and then some pretend!(ya pretend!) to like it and some others exclaim that it tastes weird in their mouths, whats it got they question me..I say cashew, milk and sugar..they go on to say no its something else..curry maybe??!!I was like WTF no!lol!crazy Americans!

Dirty old man!!

this funny instance(atleast some of us found it hilarious!) occurred recently here at sgf and I wanted to put it down in my blog so i dont forget it! ya its that simple..Well, to give a brief preclude, a couple of my friends stay in the on-campus apartment and this particular dorm has this old man as a maintenance guy..now he is known to flirt with all the pretty ladies and once came down to one of my friend's place with a smirk on his face asking if she had left behind her undie in the washer-dryer?! and she's from this small town in India and isn't accustomed to such questions!!lol! so u can imagine the look on her face and I shall let your imagination take over as to what happened there after {coz imagination gives everybody a kick and I want everyone to experience that! :) } so you can guess the image the old man had created for himself in the other Indian girls heads.. and this is where the current story kicks in! The old man started chatting up 3 of my other friends in the dorm and told a couple of them that they were decent (In USA that means you are OK..nothing to do with decency!) and told the other one that she was 'onery'!
( I still dont know what the spelling is for this word! and I would be highly appreciative if anyone corrects me) Now this girl got highly offended and called him names and yelled at him and refused to talk to him for three months! why? because she thought it was some synonym for "Horny"!! Lol! Lol! None of us had heard of this word before and google or dictionary.com did not help either! So we turned to an american friend and asked what "onery" meant! turns out that it intones naughtiness and mischievousness!!lol!so it was us and not the old man who was dirty after all!! ;-)

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

'kismat konnection'!

well..this hasn't got anything to do with shahid or vidya!so if u r looking for the movie's review u r on the wrong web site, however I would still ask you to read on for this 'konnection' may thread u too into the garland of pearls! God created beauty and to unfurl that beauty he seems to have sent guruji as his messenger, I say this 'coz I couldn't imagine how else millions of lives could transform just by a look of this noble man. I am no evil cruella..but I myself have observed such subtle changes in me that I am convinced that Guruji is omnipresent and takes care of every soul that depends on him. Take for example this journey that I made back to the states after 3 blissful months with my family..it started out with my bags being over weight and me having to part with 7 kilos of all the good stuff that I had bought and re-sorting some clothes into the backpack ..[carrying which,I felt one not with the universe but with the donkey brethren!!] I then thought that everything happens for a reason and just surrendered to guruji all the unpleasant thoughts I was feeling at that time..No I did not feel elated the very next moment but I did find the strength to ward off the unpleasantness and could accept the situation without cribbing or grumbling (that's a huge huge change!..believe me I could win a whining competition before guruji entered my life!) I then landed in JFK and had a connecting flight from New jersey at 2:10 PM..having a 7 hour wait I thought I would call on apartment owners in the town I study to rent a place for the semester..but none had any vacant apartment to rent and home sickness started to ensnare me in its claws at this very inopportune moment. I felt myself slipping into a mode of self pity and immediately started praying to Guruji and again surrendered my problems to him( ya.. poor guruji..he has to take so much!) and within an hour's time I got a call from a friend saying she had a cousin who was desperately looking for a roommate and would I accept sharing the apartment with her!!(moreover the apartment is very close to the previous apartment that I used to rent and is very very close to the college!) 'Awe' and 'gratitude' couldn't even begin to describe what I felt at that moment.. Moving on to the rest of the journey..

I reached JFK on time and immigration and customs check went by smoothly..and then started the nightmare! The weather was all cloudy and rainy in New jersey, from where I had a flight to catch to St.Louis at 2:10PM and it was from St.Louis that I had to board a flight to Springfield at 6:15PM. As we had landed on time I enquired at the New jersey airport if I would be allowed to fly out on an earlier flight, but, as the previous flight was at11:15 and I had reached NJ airport only by 10:30 she wouldn't let me do that, so I thought I would just wait my turn. I was already feeling the strain of not having slept for over 20 hours and then I got to know that the stupid weather had caused too many cancellations the previous day(which was a Sunday and u can imagine the huge crowd that got stranded!) so they were putting all those passengers on a priority list ..that was OK had my flight not been delayed..but My flight kept getting delayed and in the end it was scheduled for 6:30 PM! I went and spoke to the representative only to find out that the last flight to mera gaon was the flight which I was supposed to board at 6:15 and there wouldn't be any other flight till Tuesday 6:15 PM(I had landed on Monday 7:00 AM!) and moreover there were no flights available to St.Louis from NJ on Tuesday which meant I was stranded either in NJ for 2 whole days or stranded in STL for a day! I just freaked out and asked him to put me on a standby for an earlier flight to STL..U wont believe how crowded the airport was with all the stranded passengers! some had missed 6-7 flights and were in the airport since 2 days! So I had kinda lost hope that I would make it before Wednesday to Springfield and was making alternative plans to stay with Sin..but she was busy and hadn't answered my calls and as she stays with her cousin I was not sure If it would be OK for me to stay on with them. I then started to pray to Guruji..(Ya i did that..can see the smirk on your face!:p) and it was nothing less than a miracle that they put me on the 4:30 flight to STL though so many of my co-passengers got stranded as the flight got canceled!!!
I then made it to STL only to have missed the last flight to SGF. I requested the rep to route me through another port and she said it would add an additional 5 hours to my itinerary, I was so relieved that I didn't have to wait a whole day in STL that I immediately grabbed the offer and flew to Dallas from where I was to fly into SGF in just over three hours . This flight was at 9:45 and we landed at Dallas at 9:30 and I had to go to another terminal!!! so I was sure i would miss my flight this time too! I just prayed on and ran(had my chums..couldn't run too fast! double whammy!) and guess what?? the flight had just started to board at 9:45! so with prayer and gratitude to guruji I Just boarded and made it to SGF by 11:30! Hig and ash, had come to the airport to receive me. Boy!was I glad to see them! My bags hadn't made it with me to SGF and was told that they would be delivered to me the next day! but if not for Art of Living courses I would have probably cribbed and cried from exhaustion!
Just before you go into any 'critique'ing mode I would suggest you do the Art of Living course..give it a fair trial and then talk or criticize it (I am sure you yourself would be writing a similar post!) Jai Guru deva :-)

p.s. oh on the flight from Dallas to SGF, when I thought I could finally rest for a while, there was this old man who was so very interested to know about Indians and Hinduism that he spoke and queried me for all of those three hours!!Ya that was the icing!:-)