Ponto de Vista

Since I got tagged by aditya, I’m doing a random post that doesn’t quite fit ☺
To be true to my own blog, the photo is of a place I have lived in. This cool dude used to show up and hang out in my balcony last year in Delhi 🙂

4 Jobs I’ve Had (in chronological order): Girl Friday at King College, News producer at boston.com, producer at an Indian radio station, & freelance radio content producer at my company News Radio India Sonologue.
4 Movies I Could Watch Over and Over: Dr. Strangelove (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb), (more…)

I’ve lived in many cities now and one reason Delhi didn’t work for me was that it’s too landlocked. Boston, Bombay, New York…give me water! When I feel restless, here in Mumbai, I can’t jump on a bike and go off for a ride (there are no sidewalks to even walk or run on) so these days I slip off towards the sea. And then I can see the sweep of the bay – punctuated by fairy lights and the vast futility of man wrestling with nature. Or something like that 😉

I hadn’t been to Juhu Chowpatty (or Jubeach as we called it when we were little) in perhaps two decades – until we were super early for a film a few weeks ago. We decided to kill some time and eat some junk food at the beach. On the way in, I could see small things dotting the skyline – and to my horror found they were not kites, but balloon alien monkeys. They remind me of a movie, but I can’t recall which. Flying monkeys … The Wizard of Oz?
(p.s. did you know chowpatty simply means ‘beach’ in Marathi?)

This is a Delhi photo – of course! I was nearly home when I looked to my left and to my right and found myself eye-to-eye with not one, but two Barbies. Most rickshaws have posters up of Bollywood stars. This was a first for me. In Mumbai though, last Thursday I was in a cab that the driver (also the owner) had furnished with a plush red and black, umm, carpet. It was on the seats, the ceiling, the flooring, and the dashboard. Then I noticed it was even on the inside panels of the doors. On further inspection and inquiry, I found out it really was the same furry fabric, only he’d had it laminated! How ingenious, no?

I’ve been ‘home’ for one year. A whole year!
That happened sometime late last night and I was too frazzled to even think about it. Walking with my mother this evening before dinner, discussing my impending move to Bombay later in March, I stopped in my tracks at the realization that I’ve made it through an entire year — relatively unscathed! I can’t even begin to enumerate all the great things that have happened to me and the awesome people I’ve met, the fabulous stuff I’ve learned, done, and become a part of … not to mention the amount of street food I’ve savored… (I’m going to gloss over the crap radio job, the horrid winter, the awful allergies/ migraines/ bureaucracies/ roads …). And to make it all seem most fitting, today, I was given my first fortune cookie since I left America. And it read “You will have new adventures!” No $%*#, Sherlock! HAH!

Indian Chinese food, as the expats know, is in a class of its own. Nowhere in China would you find any of the random things we consume here, confident that they’re “Chinese”. Or close… The noodles/fried rice van outside our high school sold “Chinesh” food…
(Random factoid: The dish we call “Manchurian” – veggies, chicken, and gobi – really was invented in Bombay.)
But here’s someone in Lower Parel making some pretty lofty claims.
The tagline, btw, reads “Where Chinese cuisine took shape” 😉

“What a nice smile you have. Wow! And you’ve definitely lost weight. You are looking so fabulous! My god, these jeans make you look HOT! And curvy in all the right places. You look perfectly marvelous in this color, too. You simply must wear it all the time. It brings out your eyes so well. We really don’t see you often enough, you know. It’s lovely to have you here, you make the place light up. Really…” 😉

This is Ollie — our vet’s cat in Mumbai. The last time I took Ruff to the vet, Ollie was more interested in grooming herself than Ruff (though she played nice with me.) Ruff, too old to bother about chasing cats was more interested in trying to escape everytime the door opened — so we took him out for a walk, leaving Ollie mistress of her domain again. The doggie in this picture is actually a poster that goes behind the pet weighing-scale, but she’s fearless, anyway. 😉 I’ve seen her reduce macho brutes to simpering fools & quivering, overheated springs. 😉 The vet also has a brown doberman who seems to snooze pretty much all day. Ah, it’s a dog‘s life … or a cat’s, if you’re Ollie.

I can’t wait to move to bombay and get a cat, allergies be damned.

…when you can have five little samples?

Ok, so I’m romanticizing wildly and anthromorphizing, as well. But when it rains and rains and rains in Bombay, everything looks like it’s smiling. Well, to me. Erm, probably because I don’t live there 😉 and don’t have to deal with crazy commutes. This past week in Bombay was super cool. After having lived in cold, cold rain for 12 years, I was happy to go out and stand Titanic-style on the balcony every time it rained because it was so wonderfully warm. I’d nearly forgotten how lovely and refreshing and welcome rain can be.