Angelic white these are, Blackthorn blossoms at Spring.
Bursts of yellow popping up to greet you, these Wild Daffodils steal your heart.
Spring snaps these little beauties out of their slumber. The until then dreary park around the corner comes alive with colourful blossoms and delighted children.
Everyone hits rock bottom every once in a while, but what really matters is rising back up and showing up the next day. This is life. To me, Spring mirrors life!🥂
Icy winds in my hair
Sunshine dancing to its tune
On a half frozen lake
I fall in love, all over again.
We’re nearly at spring, with the daylight saving time sneaking in tomorrow. But the weather simply cannot seem to make up its mind! We were experiencing little to no snow this winter, until this morning when we woke up to gusts of swirling snow.
The snow persisted for well over an hour and immediately afterwards there was rain. Well then, the snow melted and it was like it never happened!
Cheers to a crazy winter with crazy memories!🥂
We only recently moved into a temperature zone such as this and I am still in awe of all the winter activities I see in Instagram. So we decided to try one, and zeroed in on Camelback Resort at the Poconos. Got tickets for snowtubing and off we went.
This activity is well suited for beginners and kids. The chill air rushing past you as you slide down the slope gets you all the more fresh and excited! I’m glad we tried it with our Five year old who wailed all the way up the slope that she didn’t wanna do it. The very first slide later, she was running wild, grabbing a tube and racing up the hill, not bothering to wait for us! The colorful light display on the lanes added a nice touch, as the evening progressed.
Only make sure you’re dressed appropriately. Warm socks, Thermal gloves and Scarves makes the cold much more bearable and lets you have the best experience.
Trying new things takes effort and a certain quashing of uncertainty, but in the end it’s all worth it! 🥂
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
If I could, I would not only ban it, I would altogether abolish the meaning of the word, ‘Scared’, take it out of all our systems. And I believe that will help me and everyone else who get that “I’m scared” panic, at the face of trying something new.
New experiences are the reason life goes on. Throw away the scares, live it all! 🥂
After an almost no-snow January, it was a pleasant surprise to see my backyard covered in a thin sheet of snow when I woke up today.
Of course, snow hinders our daily activities a lot, but personally I was hoping for it to snow. I like the scrunch of it under my boots, it’s color bringing in purity from the skies. The sheer strength of snow is amazing to me. It falls all flakey, simple flurries no heavier than the smallest of flowers. But it settles hard, us huffing and puffing to shovel it out of our way.
Yes, I’m a winter lover through and through!
We’ve been planning a trip to Vermont for quite some time, and we had a chance to visit it during fall. We left home in the evening, the city bathed in twilight. Night settled in along the way, all around us. We drove on straight to Stowe, not stopping for coffee, a tiring six hour drive. We were nearing the Airbnb, when proper roads disappeared and we were driving on wild terrain. We could see only what the car’s powerful headlights showed us. Beyond that, all darkness.
At long last the map beeped and we had reached our spot. The car was at a slant, the hand brake anchoring it in place. I opened the door with a relieved sigh, eager to stretch my legs. A chance look at the sky stopped me right there, one leg out the car. Stars as big as diamonds. But to me, even more precious! I stood up at some point, transfixed for the better part of an hour. Right then and there, I wrote this in my journal.
An experience for a lifetime!!💖
Cheers to another stretch of ups and downs,
another year rich in emotions,
another year brand new to spoil!🥂
2020 was just dawning! I’m still trying to get a hold of how 2021 ended. But now another ‘new’ year has rolled by and I’m at a loss to understand what just happened.
When years seem to fly past and our hopes and anticipations keep getting higher and higher for the future, it’s important to stop, take a beat and look back at the path we were on.
For me this year was rocky as a railroad but there are some precious memories I want to take with me well into the future. You believe something is about to happen in your life, but a wild current abruptly forms and take you with it all the way to an entirely different side, the one possibility you positively ruled out. You can either fight it, or make the best out of it. The choice is ultimately in your hands. And this one thing, be it 2023 or 2058, will not change. Cheers to unpredictability. Cheers to new normals.
As I’m only beginning to blog, forgive me if I don’t make it more interesting or orderly for the readers. Here I want to share with you some events that grabbed my attention all through the past year.
‘Just stop oil’. These were the words on their shirts when two young climate activists threw contents of Tomato soup cans at Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting, ‘Sunflowers’. They even glued their hands to the wall. This happened in room 43 of London’s National gallery, one of the greatest collection of paintings in the world. I know this isn’t exactly ‘art’ news but it’s one thing that held my attention for a while and leads me to my next topic.
Statistics like a rise of 1.15 degree Celsius in the global mean temperature and the melting glaciers in the arctic have been around for a long time. There were loud news about rising sea levels too. But this year I began to feel it firsthand. Weird climates all through the planet. Really hot summer and late winters all beg our attention to aggressive rise in greenhouse gases and carbon emissions.
On a serious note, it might already be too late for us to save the planet. But inaction is the worst form of destruction. We can do our part by planting a tree and simply turning off electrical devices when not in use.
No one can deny the hype that skyrocketed around the release of the movie Ponniyin Selvan I. Surely music composer and recipient of BAFTA, Golden globe, Academy and Grammy awards, A R Rahman’s magic never disappoints. But his music to this movie really had me and still has me hearing it on loop. Even though the movie, to me personally was a bit disappointing and overhyped, the effort on its music was groundbreaking.
After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, there were promises made initially to ‘allow’ women to exercise some of their rights. But as words are simply words, the situation of women quickly worsened and various restrictions placed then under constant threat and supervision. The height of it all hit me when I read that women were banned from long distance travel without a male chaperone. Being banned to travel is a whole new form of freedom?
Without a second thought, a Tamil movie that pops in my mind is Vikram, directed by Lokesh kanagaraj. I’m not usually a fan of the Action genre, but this had me hooked, in terms of acting, screenplay and the sheer variety in music. The way everything was molded together, simply genius in my opinion. I find every scene carved with utmost love for the plot and the actor. A fanboy’s tribute to his hero.
A die hard fan of the HBO series ‘Game of thrones’, I had pretty high expectations for its prequel, ‘House of the Dragon’, which happens nearly 200 years before the events of Game of thrones. The series is set in a period when the Targaryens were extremely powerful. And they justify that power with a number of dragons to their side. The locations and cinematography brings us back to the epic, making us feel like we never left. A bonus treat for all GOT fans.
The Hubble telescope has been one of our most powerful equipments ever, to try and understand the universe. It’s known for its stunning images of distant stars and providing major breakthroughs in astrophysics, like decoding the history of the expanding universe. But in December 2022, a more powerful telescope, The James Webb Space Telescope has been launched by NASA. The sky’s not the limit, not even the space beyond, however vast that is!
An absolute treat to football lovers happened in December 2022. The FIFA World Cup 2022. Argentina won, beating France at its penalty shootout. The thrills and chills the match brought, has rightfully earned it ‘The best World Cup ever’ tag.
However, one more sports event had me reminiscing my childhood, when I would be looking for the sports section in whichever newspaper I could get my hands on. Roger Federer’s retirement. 20 grand slam titles and 103 tournament wins later, the legend walks home proud. His final match when he partnered with Rafael Nadal at the fifth edition of the Laver cup held much entertainment. It made memories and brought memories up, long forgotten.
I won’t pretend I follow much news in business. But Elon Musk, the world’s richest person taking over twitter for a whopping $44 bn raised quite a sensation. The only thing that turned more heads was the ensuing firing that took place. From top executives to sales workers, Twitter has lost almost 5000 employees since Musk takeover.
Altogether, 2022, I believe was only a grand preview of 2023. The war is till ongoing. The threat of job cuts and recession looms larger. Global warming quietly gets into our daily lives.
But still, I believe humanity holds the key to change it all. We’d better use it now, for the good of our future generations. It’s not fair to let them suffer in a place far worse than the one we were born into. Let us start with little steps. With a little more conviction.
Happy new year 2023!
There are heaps of Tamil movies releasing over the months, and the teasers and trailers provoke us to watch it all. Here is a humble review of Vada chennai from me.
It is a once in a blue moon experience for Tamil cinema. Actor Dhanush has done justice to his role Anbu. The background score is amazing. The language used earns the movie’s authenticity.
Stop here if you still haven’t seen the movie.
It’s a gangster movie alright, but has intricacies that many others don’t. For example, there are drug networks operating. But for us to see how they work, not in a secluded dungeon out of town, but right in the middle of a metropolitan city, right under the noses of hundreds of policemen providing what people consider the highest of security, was a smack in the gut.
The fights are realistic. And scary. The fight sequence between rows of clothes and another within the tarp has one on the edge of their seat. And there’s the gruesome murder of Rajan (ameer) that leads to the story.
The reveal near the end of the movie portrays a strong, revengeful Chandra (Andrea Jeremiah). Hence the movie has a strong female lead too.
The one thing I noticed about the movie is, we actually sympathize towards most characters at some point. Even the murderers Guna (Samuthirakani) and Senthil (Kishore).
The crew has worked really hard with the changing timeframes. Making us believe and live for sometime right inside a rewinded Vada Chennai.
I’m just trying my hand in writing movie reviews. Hope you liked it. Do drop comments on ways that I can improve.
Thrum 