Chhavi Noticed This!

…the sense of humor to view all things around me with some equanimity…and to stay in the moment without spiraling out of control. Like when the idiots at the stop light outside my house think that honking will vaporize the idiot in front and miraculously clear a special path for them.
Anyway, this was taken months ago in Hong Kong and while it’s a modern sculpture, there was definitely a sense of serenity around it. I kept, however, wanting to speak into my communicator watch and say “Giant Buddha…into motion!”

So the BMC has decided it will now prune trees to prevent stray branches from falling. You know what that means, right? They’re just going to start chopping everything down in sight. My neighboring building society head told me that they’d chopped down the tree between us because “mosquitoes are breeding there”. He claims to be a horticulturist. Who never went to school, evidently. Because in his next breath he also told us it didn’t matter because “Only Tulsi” gives out oxygen, other trees are not important. I nearly slit my own wrists. Maybe these little clay gods will protect this peepul from being ‘pruned’ BMC horticulture style …

This nearly rivals the one shop banner I saw in Saki Naka that had Sale, Rital and Holsail on it and baffled me for a good 2 minutes after I’d passed it, by which time it was too traffic-y and too late to turn the auto rickshaw around for a photo. This gem is in Byculla, a little way from J.J. Flyover. I’ve pointed and shot at it many times but it always came out blurred. My favourite driver slowed down for me to get a legible shot

The doors of the loos at the Salt Water cafe in Bandra. Are these super UN- pg-13 or is my mind just in the gutter? What do you think?
In Boston, there were two hotspots with uber-cool loos. One is “33″ where the basins of the men’s and women’s loos are back to back and though there is a wall between them, there are some spaces so you can see other gender hands And there’s “Mantra” where the men’s urinal is communal and sports ice and the women’s stalls have 2-way mirrors. From inside you can see girls fixing their lipstick and pouting at, well, you! (Except, of course, they only see their own reflection.)

 err, cos I’m a new vegetarian? I knew a vegetarian? I’m not sure, either. What do you think it’s supposed to mean?I spotted this flapping in the breeze on 31st road, Bandra, out of the corner of my eye. I kept walking and I guess somewhere in my head, I was trying hard to process it and figure out what it really said. Then I just had to go back and check it. The seller was more than happy to let me take a photo If you want one of these, let me know. I’ll take orders in S, M, L and XL

I wanted to put up something Christmas-y and I guess I’ve been in a quirkier, lazier mood than usual so this is all I got! Merry Christmas all, from Chhavi Noticed This! and a bloom from my very own balcony “garden”.
It’s the only one we’ve had, although the bougainvillea is drooping with blossoms. Where I lived in Mass. had wonderful soil for roses – there were houses boasting 60-year old bushes that were pretty much knotty, gnarled trees with massive, fragrant flowers. I’ve never been crazy about roses, but these were heady. And then I had a friend who once stopped on the bike path and made this elaborate show of deviating, stopping, and sniffing. I made a point of stopping and smelling the roses every day after that.

And that’s the moon over Bombay’s skyline. But, the moon, however, wasn’t orange – it was pink. Seriously. Twitterstanis who attended @adese’s birthday will vouch for it. Taken with my mobile phone, it’s actually amazing any colors came through at night, though!

In March, I visited Rani Baug, which houses both Mumbai’s zoo and the Victoria & Albert Museum, now the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla. We had such perfect timing, we chanced upon the albino peacock just as he unfurled his beautiful tail and tried to get the attention of the very coy peahen (visible on a perch on the left.) It was gorgeous! Very soap opera-esque. Yeah! Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo We saw sleeping rhinos, a python, gazelle, neelgay, sambar, beautiful birds, including one of paradise – all with bad or no signage. The bird of paradise, an unusual red and green specimen was identified as a “mynah” – a terrible travesty.
The only decent sign we saw, however, was … audacious in its sheer stupidity. Click on the peacock picture to see the only sign of explanation

So, you know the potato crisps you get at the old-time movie theatres? Not the branded ones shilled by film stars – the ones that look like hey, they could have been fried and packaged in a cottage industry around the corner? Well, turns out that they kinda are! This was the glimpse I got into a wafer-ki-dukaan in Kotachiwadi one afternoon. Behind the posh, clean counter with the sealed bags of all kinds of fried farsaan was this massive man with an even more massive set of utensils. Look at the size of that ‘pateela’ and the fryer he’s using to literally paddle the crinkle-cut potato wafers in the scalding oil! Don’t miss the salli (as in salli-boti) and the already fried chips in the forefront.
P.S. Kotachiwadi was beautiful; really a small glimpse of Mumbai’s colonial past with the Portuguese architecture and the brightly painted cottages

It was janmashtmi – nothing, as far as I could tell, to do with Hanuman but voila, we turned a corner near the Metro cinema and there he was, being readied with much dusting and oiling to be taken elsewhere in the city. Later that same night, we ran into him on Mahim causeway!
I guess you can get an idea of how large he loomed from the perspective around him. So very cool!