Rant

Today I got my self worth evaluated by a girl who thought I was too average looking or not smart enough to be styled by a celebrity.
I am known as a nice person among friends and colleagues (family will doubt that, because they get to experience my occasional outbursts). In addition, I have a master's degree in electrical engineering. I have aced all my exams. At work also I work hard and give 200% to everything I do. Apart from this I am also an accomplished runner. 
I am an educated, strong, empowered person.
So why did it sting when the girl passed this remark and was even dismissive and thankful that the celebrity would not have to style me?
I am worried because I let this get to me.
I am worried because this is how a lot of people, girls/boys included grow up. Their self worth targeted by someone who is probably insecure about stuff in their life. 
The girl in question probably wanted someone who looks good on camera and the celebrity could relate to. Well in that case, I ask the PR team to do some research on my facebook profile and pictures. Only mirror cracking stuff there!

I cannot pretend and be fake. At the same time I do not judge people who are fake. Probably that is how they get by in life. Which is fair.

But at the same time I do not think someone with poor PR skills and only the ability to impress celebrities, has any right to comment on my 'being too average looking' even in subtle terms.

P.S. A brand new Forever 21 store is opening in Pune. They ran some treasure hunts as part of brand campaigns in which I and a friend won a gift voucher worth 5000 Rs and a styling session with a celebrity. We also clicked pictures after the contest. Since I could solve the clue in the treasure hunt, my friend and I agreed to submit my name and phone number for the styling session. When I showed up at the event today, I realized it was going to run longer. Due to other commitments I asked the 'said lady' at the store that I would like to pass on the voucher and styling session to my friend. To which she happily replied 'Yes of course. I anyway had passed on your friend's picture to 'the celebrity' for styling'. End of story.

P.P.S. judge me all you want for taking part in a treasure hunt run by a fashion brand to girls targeted in the 'forever 21' category.

Kashmir

Travelling to Kashmir has been one of my childhood dreams. It came true in an unexpected fashion last week.
After the quite epic and never ending #anshitanukulkishaadi in Jammu, we headed to Kashmir. The wedding and kashmir culture merits a super long post of its own. And I think the beauty of kashmir and its description is best left for personal experience. So I'll write about touristy stuff and general do's, dont's, scams to be avoided and things to be covered. This is going to be a long list.

1. Always check weather before entering the valley. We were well equipped with winter jackets, caps, gloves, boots, pairs of socks to tackle the untimely and delayed snowfall. 

2. If possible stay in Srinagar and travel to and forth. Gulmarg is an hour's drive away and Pahalgam is 2-2.5 hours drive away. Sonmarg is 3 hours away. So one day trips are possible to all major touristy spots. Of course, if the weather permits and you want to do elaborate hikes at pahalgam and enjoy skiing at gulmarg then makes more sense to stay overnight.

driving around dal

3. If staying in Srinagar, try to stay around the scenic drive around Dal lake. We set camp 5 minutes drive away from Dal. So everyday when we headed out, we would get to witness life around Dal. Also gives you a chance to take a good run, if you are a runner i.e.

4. I found food particularly cheap in Srinagar. Krishna dhaba offers good vegetarian options. Ahdoo's and Mughal Darbar are must try for non vegetarians. And please don't eat chicken in Kashmir. Mutton is the real deal!
Food is comparatively expensive at gulmarg, where the altitude and tourist destination tag, justify the rip off. For eg. a plate of maggi costs 70 rs at gulmarg.

maggi and chai!

5. At gulmarg, you get winter jackets and snow boots on rent. Its a good idea to take these if you plan to play in the snow. This way your winter clothes remain dry and safe. Rental price is 250-300 Rs. per person depending on how much you can bargain. Buy the extra pair of snow proof hand gloves if you are not carrying them. These will come in handy at other destinations as well. Don't buy sunglasses, carry your own.

6. Once at Gulmarg base, you may have to travel by a different vehicle, owing to snow covered roads and safety issues. We took a sumo for 1500 Rs. for to and fro ride and the vehicle stayed at the base of phase 1 for the entire day.

7. We found the sledge rides at the base of phase 1 to be a scam. We took 2 sledges and later figured out that the distance to the gondola station could have been walked easily. Unless you have senior citizens with you, I suggest NO-NO to sledges. If at all you take one, then bargain as if your life depends on it.

8. Same applies for a tourist guide. Don't take one if possible. And if at all you take one, bargain! 

9. If you are not taking a tourist guide then buy your own gondola tickets to phase 1. These cost 600 Rs. per person. If there is heavy snow around, then a visit to only Phase 1 is worth the money. If you are into advanced skiing then makes sense to visit Phase 2 as well (ticket is additional 800 Rs.). We visited only Phase 1 and were quite happy. 

10. If you are walking your way around Gulmarg, then don't miss the walk through the golf course.

the romantic in me could not get enough of all this!

11. Route to Pahalgam merges and separates to the route to Jammu from Srinagar. So make sure your driver has fair ideas of security checks. 

12. Eat at roadside dhabas on the way to Pahalgam. Once you have crossed Anantnag, things get super exciting in the form of a scenic drive. So having a meal by the road side with the lidder river flowing alongside makes for quite an adventure. 

13. Make sure you have checked which points are open and which are closed before heading to Pahalgam. Saves disappointment once there. Also if you are staying at Pahalgam, don't miss the hike to Tuliyan lake. We did not do it because of bad weather, but its supposed to be extremely amazing.

14. In Pahalgam as well, do not spend on guide. Do spend on winter boots if its snowing. We spent 30 Rs. per person.

15. You have to leave your vehicle at Pahalgam taxi stand to reach any point around. You can take ponies to Aru valley from there or another car to Betaab valley. The prices are standard according to taxi stand union. So no bargaining here for taxis. There are few temples on the way which are worth a visit, owing to Pahalgam being one of the start points of Amarnath Yatra.

16. In Srinagar there are 8-10 major attractions. If you can, then miss one of the gardens and include coffee drinking experience atop a hillside cafe instead. I know cliched but worth the time!

17. Keep aside 4-5 hours in Srinagar for shopping at Lal Chowk. Paper mache, wood carvings to stoals and shawls, one cannot say no to anything!

18. The Srinagar airport has a lot of security checks, so leave for the airport 3 hours in advance. Usually there's a jam outside the airport, so would save you a lot of anxiety. Also, post all security checks one has to identify baggage personally. Don't forget to do this!

These are the *only* tips I have from my experience. The culture and people of Kashmir are warm and hospitable. Learn a word or two of Kashmiri from them :) Ending this post with the surreal shot of Betaab Valley, Pahalgam.

'In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.' - Albert Camus

shifting wifting haaye rabba

• You start packing your stuff. You stumble across stuff you never knew existed. You label boxes. Make a note to use things which you still dont want to throw away. You throw away some stuff willingly. With some stuff you are just reluctant to let go. For eg. the beautiful glass bottles you collected to plant trees in. But never did anything with them for the past gazillion years, because well you never thought you would leave the house. 

       I am sure everyone goes through this cycle.

• You start loading your stuff in the movers' truck. And the helper guy says 'Madam kitna samaan hai' (Madam, how much stuff you have!) and you lose it. I mean you spend an entire day packing those boxes neatly, by compartmentalizing and arranging stuff and labeling the boxes. So instead of rewarding your OCD with a compliment, the guy tells you that you have too much stuff! You start plotting revenge on the helper guy.

• You get the house you are moving into cleaned well before the actual move. That exercise gives you a brief lesson in how the new house is different from the place you have got used to calling your home for the past n years. That I think is the perk of living in rented houses. Each house offers something different and annoying. Which then becomes a matter of getting used to.

• Everything has now been shifted to the new place. You are now in that terrifying zone when you have to unpack just enough stuff so that its sufficient to get you by for the shifting night/day and enough so that if you want to arrange stuff, getting that out will not hurt the larger scheme of things like the final arrangement of unpacked stuff. 

• You take one last shower in the old house post all the shifting drama and hassles. The accumulated dust* in your lungs and on your body/clothes doesn't want to let go. If you have allergies like I do, every sneeze takes you closer to that dreaded cold where your nose becomes waterworks incorporated. You realize while taking shower that you are going to miss this home. This washroom. The tiles. The arrangement of soap cases. The tiny cohabitants like the spiders** in the remote nook of the wall, where its impossible to get a mop given your height constraints. (which is why you never really bothered to move the spider family out). You cry a little. Because water washes away water.

• You want to keep going to the house so a part of your packing OCD struck brain subconsciously lets you not pack everything in one go. You keep some trinkets. Important enough to not letting go. But just enough for another round the next day. You clean it for the next tenants. You want them to treat it the way you did.  The house is now empty during your next visit. You soak it in. That's the emptiness inside your mind. You let it go.

• You still cannot sleep in the new house in spite of the same bed, mattress, bed sheets, pillows, lights, books. The mind still longs for comfort zone. You know its going to take some getting used to.

Do you also go through all this and more while packing and moving ?
* Dust is an integral part of your life if you live in India.
** so are spiders inside your home!

SCMM 2015

These are some really long notes about SCMM and running.

Sometimes I think in my perfect world I would never register for races. Nor would I travel to different places just to be able to run in an organized fashion. Its not my perfect world, and hence for above reasons I take decisions from time to time to register for racing events and train for them with experts. 

Before every outstation event I go through this :
i. make travel plans a month/15 days in advance
ii.  plan my clothes (its a big part of how you fare at any run!) well in advance. Shop if required and practice in them.
iii. Excitement starts building up in the race week.
iv. The Friday before the race is full of travel anxiety.No productive work gets done. I still go to office (Must thank my stars that no one bothers me with important work on such fridays!)
v. Dream about things that may go wrong. For eg. What if I do not reach the venue on time and they disqualify me. Such positive thinking makes me full of nerves. I am *this* short of outbirsts.
vi. Travel. Travel. Travel.
vii. Meet friends to keep mind off d-day. If possible shop, eat out.
viii. Try to get minimum 6 hours of sleep. Though my brain clock wakes me up at ungodly hours like 2.30 am, 3.30 am and then finally 4.30 am.

Till now (this was my 4th half marathon), I have not missed out on showing up at any event. Things haven't gone as worse as I play the what-if scenarios in my head. But all this has somewhere made me a better human being. 
I look at the positives. I make plan A-G to be executed during any run. My failover scenarios are ready. And I feel as if I am raring to go. Exactly 2 years ago when I started running, I would not have been able to say a single word about all this, of course for lack of experience. These stretch-your-limits experiences have taught me to be prepared and not prepared for elements of life. I am also not sure if I am conveying any meaning out of the words I just typed. 

Anywho, the point is this is my way of tackling pointlessness which loves making its presence felt in my head from time to time. After every race pointlessness takes a backseat and I gain one point. You see the point I am making ?

So if you are a runner in India then SCMM marks the official end of running season here. Its one of the oldest, well organized and prestigious events here! 
I signed up for SCMM to nicely seal off my training plan for the year and later to serve as a marker to analyze running performance over the year. I had a good amount of rest in the race week, showed up well before flag off at start point, clicked selfies with friends, ate almonds, calmed my nerves by remembering favorite bollywood songs. Somewhere I was not feeling that strong, but I had following goals laid out :
A. Target the 2.15 hour bus, wherever the pacers were. Run my own race as all the 5 pacers of the 2.15 bus had weird pacing strategies. If I finished 9.5 km in one hour then I would be able to finish in 2.15 hours by staying strong in the last segment i.e. post 18km.
B. Do a personal best.
C. Run my own race. Did I say this already ?

I started really slow as planned, gained pace over the majestic worli sea link, got steady with every passing kilometer. Surprisingly, I did not have to take a single walking break till 17th km, even for drinking water. Even during the infamous steep Pedder Road incline. *humble brag* I could not run a single kilometer without walking breaks 2 years ago and in my last half marathon I took 10 seconds walking breaks just to gulp water. A huge shoutout to RP and their training!

I was taking 2-3 sips of water every 5-7 minutes to compensate for the humidity in Mumbai. My body showed first sign of weakness in the form of salt loss at 16 km with cramps in lower left abdomen. I immediately switched to sipping enerzal from a nearby aid station. They went away fairly quickly. The next event happened post 17km. Lower right abdomen started cramping. This time I walked for 10 seconds, sipped good amount of enerzal and water. Willed it to go away. Bugger did not. It kept on making its presence felt even if my body took a slight bend or tried to do something different to steer my brain away from the pain. I let the body take over the brain which was in such a good controlling position till now. In a way I knew my race was over specially goal A. I walked a bit more. Let time slip by. Post the 18th km marker, I decided I would walk every 20 seconds. But. But. But. The mumbai crowd and excellent support system in the form of bands playing live music, dance troupes, motivational songs, showed up. Damn! How could I even imagine to walk when so many unknown faces were cheering all of us weirdos for no particular reason to keep going. So I kept going. At a slow and steady pace. The pain went away. I crossed the finish line with a timing of 2:21:25. And fainted. This is what real electrolyte loss feels like, I told myself. I steadied and made way to the amazing and special recovery area for women athletes (if I may call myself so without any pretense). 

#scmm2015 memories

SCMM is a really well organized event. Water and aid stations are plenty and well placed. If you have studied your race route well, you would find water/aid stations exactly where you were supposed to find them. In addition locals setup stalls to help poor, thirsty and hungry runners. 
But this year's race felt too crowded for my taste. There was not a stretch where you could have the patch of a street to yourself. That's my only grouch. I can imagine how tough it can be to organize an event on such a massive scale so my only plea to the organizers is to cut down on entries. Pretty please!

So what am I up to now ?
I am still recovering from the race. I have showed up at work. I have achieved my personal best timing. And I have learnt to run my own race and enjoy what I can by planning what I can plan for during a run. I am also grateful to the support my friends and family give and sometimes plan their life around my running schedule. I am now going through marathon events in India this year and listing down interesting ones. I'll plan a part of my year around them. Because as I mentioned at the beginning, in my perfect world I would never register for or run races.

Book Love 2014

I read 23 books this year. 2 more than last year. Yay!

Though I had planned to read many more books, as I always do, I could not because of other stuff happening in life. Altogether I am happy from a completely analytical perspective, because 23 > 21 and the genres I touched during this year were much varied than last year's! Despite that I did not have any absolute favorites like previous years.

goodreads link here : https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4760161-yamini?page=1&shelf=what-i-read-in-2014&view=covers

Special mentions for The ocean at the end of the lane, Principles of uncertainty, On the road, Anna Karenina and Burmese Days.

What did you read last year that you loved ? Share ?

To my aaji

Kadhi is one of my favorite staple Indian foods. I remember chilly winter evenings in Chicago when I would only make kadhi and drink 4-5 cups of it. It gave me comfort. I learnt how to make kadhi from my aaji (mother's mother). I would always tell aai, how aaji makes the best kadhi in the world and aai could take tips from her. The honesty of childhood!

Aaji passed away about a month ago. It was not sudden, but it was expected. She was not keeping well for past two years. During every visit I, over the past 6 months, I could see the life waning out of her. But no one wants to prepare for such inevitable. No one wants to lose a part of their childhood.

I spent many summer holidays spending time at my grandmother's. With nothing much to do apart from reading books, I would often poke around in the kitchen. Trying to help her at times or learn things. She would be impressed by this curiosity and teach me things. But only if I behaved. The lady always needed her space. Specially when she was frying something in the kitchen. She considered it a bad omen to have anyone standing in the kitchen behind her, when she was frying things. She would always shoo us away. I used to compulsively annoy her with my presence. 

Over the years the house she lived in with my uncles and aunts changed. It was made bigger, with multiple stories added. People changed, they started living and cooking separately. Lives started being better but different. 

I am not sure how aaji, even for that matter aajoba (grandfather) took these changes. We always saw them being happy and contented. Their lives had always been shared. With big extended families. The idea of privacy and separate rooms must have been strange to them. But they accepted it gladly. That's what I feel. 

Because, whenever I visited aaji would still cook things for me. Over one such summer after my 10th standard examination, I told her I wanted to learn how to make chapatis. Aaji with all her heart taught me the magic was in the dough. Always. The better you knead it the better your chapatis would turn out to be. She would say, dont put pressure at the center while rolling the chapatis. Try to put it uniformly. And then the crucial part, how to roast them. She told me to cook one side longer than the other and roast the other side directly over flame. 

My aaji was the most curious person from her generation who I knew. She would read entire newspaper. Solve the puzzles and crosswords. Keep them ready for me when I asked for some entertainment. Tell us random bedtime stories. Let us pull her leg when we teased her how handsome her husband was. Listen to my translated version of harry potter.

These are my vivid memories of my aaji. Taking pride in my sillier achievements of roasting a chapati perfectly. Or hearing from aai about my kadhi adventures away from home. I am sure every grandparent must do the same.

Now we have a maid who makes chapatis at home. So I make chapatis rarely. I was telling a friend how aaji taught me the art and smiling. I am sure aaji must be proud. Still.

On love

The past two weeks were a lot of activity and full of daze and drama. The runner in me can handle continuous activity but things were happening on auto pilot and it had become difficult to put my finger on what was going through my head or what I was feeling.

And then I decided to attend the wedding of a friend almost on a whim to get away from everything.

When the groom's eyes lit up to the bride's entry under फूलो की चादर accompanied by her brothers, things started to settle down in my heart. That 'singular magic moment' when magical happy smiles were exchanged between the two, must have been what drove me to Delhi.

I have exchanged many notes, emails and thoughts with Someplace else. And on this Monday morning, when my vacation has ended, I am feeling nothing but a weird satisfaction. 

Because its not just the movies where you meet your Shahrukh khan on a train journey. Sometimes fairy dust makes these things magically real.