Just some random food for thought

It's too easy to criticize hope
And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.

~ Seth Godin, again (what can I say the man is wise)

Natives of the Solomon islands could literally yell at trees that they wanted to chop down, these trees would subsequently die.

~ Aamir Khan, Taare Zameen Par

My country, Torn, Tattered, Proud, Beautiful, Hot, Humid, Cold, Sandy, Shining India. My country.

~ Mahasweta Devi

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought — particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

~ Woody Allen

"Look, sir. Don't worry about me," I said. "I mean it. I'll be all right. I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?"

~ J.D Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.

~ Jane Austen, Persuasion

Being an optimist is overrated, at the end of the day all you can really be is a hopeful pessimist.

~ Arinha Dey (yours truly)

life changing lessons from ranch dressing

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.
~ Seth Godin, marketing guru and my new personal hero

Today I made a discovery; fat free ranch dressing has more carbs then regular ranch dressing and regular ranch dressing obviously has more calories. It was as though ranch dressing was giving me an ultimatum, either I go low-fat or low-carb, I mean after all you can't have the ranch and diet too.

So what significance does this have in my new self-discovery journey? Well other than proclaiming a self-declared ban on ranch dressing, I have realized that it is more than impossible to make something or someone perfect.

During this self-discovery process (before the ranch incident) I wanted to make myself perfect. A perfect daughter, perfect employee, perfectly healthy, just you know perfectly perfect. I was determined to do it all lose weight, go back to school, give back to society, and become an author but in the midst of it all I realized that all I was doing was becoming perfectly tired. The thing is just like beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, perfection lies in the eyes of the perfector (yes I know that's not an actual English word but what the hell I am not perfect).

I have started writing again. I am dancing and working toward my rang pravesh (graduation ceremony of sorts for odissi dancers). I have officially given up diet coke. I wash my face and moisturize it daily (as opposed to doing it once a week earlier). I am determined to do complete the 60-mile cancer walk in September. I am taking screenplay-writing classes at UCLA.

If you ask me that is as close to perfect as I ever imagined myself being.

P.S. For those of you who are helping me keep count 3 down, 362 (days not pounds, thank god!) more to go.

To my fellow tribes(wo)men, those who belong to the tribe of minor majority, this is for you.

Minority…that is what society has labeled me. Being an Indian and a woman, qualify me as being a part of the minority community in most countries including India (for reasons of being a woman evidently). The obvious irony in that statement being of course that as an Indian, I belong to the second largest population in the world and as a woman, I am one of the key reasons why the male majority exists.

There has been constant debate about women being minority. Most faces of society, including many men and most feminists (no offense to either parties), believe that men subjugate women and relegate them to the status of minority in the society. And then there are others (a more unpopular group of which I am a member occasionally) that believes its women who often times underestimate themselves, bowing down to traditions written long ago, in a different time and by an infantile civilization, and indirectly end up coining the term minority for themselves.

Maybe my parents were too idealistic, too liberal or just plain crazy but despite growing up in an extended family of mostly boys, both my sister and I were raised in a relatively gender neutral environment. Like all little boys, my cousins too went through a phase of "girls have cooties" or "girls don't play cricket" but my sister, the enforcer, made sure to beat that out of them quite young and since then there has been nothing but healthy competition and fraternal teasing between our brothers and us.

The clichéd thoughts of "oh my parents never treated me different" or "they raised me like a son" were never really an issue in our family. I don't think my parents have ever treated me as anyone but their child (as sweet as that sentiment maybe it can also get claustrophobic sometime, but that is a topic for another post). If I had a flat tire, my dad would say is "get it fixed mamma, it's your car" and my mother constantly nags, "straighten your hair, it looks prettier that way".

Being a member of one of the oldest civilizations of the world (Indian civilization, in case you were confused), tradition is a huge part of my identity and legacy and tradition has not always necessarily favored the Indian woman (although there are exceptions like Jhansi ki Rani, Indira Gandhi and many more). These traditions have included rituals such as sati (being burnt alive on your dead husband's funeral pyre), making widows shave their heads and live in pitiful conditions shunned by most of society, and the awful practice of giving and receiving dowry in return for marrying the daughters. Today, I am happy to announce, sati has been legally abolished, widows are not forced to shave their heads and can remarry if they wish and dowries (although still somewhat of an issue in many rural parts of India) are not the deciding factor of whether or not a girl gets married.

My point is that the Indian woman of today has evolved, as have Indian traditions. Indian women today are scaling heights equal and in some cases even greater than their male counterparts (the ones that belong to what society considers the majority). They are CEOs of fortune 500 companies (Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo), award winning authors (Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer and Arundhuti Roy won the Booker Prize…and many others who have achieved equal success), internationally acclaimed filmmakers (Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Gurindher Chadha…to name a few) and are globally considered to be some of the most beautiful and influential women in the world (Sushmita Sen, the first Indian Miss Universe winner, Aishwarya Rai, Miss world winner and one of time magazine's 100 most influential people.)

So you can imagine my apparent confusion, when a (non-member of the minor majority tribe) acquaintance makes a comment, "It must be easy for you to get a scholarship, being an Indian woman, you are a minority after all." All I can say to her is when I do get my scholarship for my 3.6 GPA and my cultured and broad minded intelligence, I will definitely recommend that they give you a scholarship as well so you too can someday have a chance at belonging to the minor majority tribe of successful, cultured and influential women, who have defied their male counterparts and traditions and are rapidly progressing toward conquering the major majority tribe.

and so the journey begins...

Notice how little "comfort" actually is provided by comfort foods
compared to the misery of being fat?

~ Michael Nelson, INC 21 server guy

These are the words that I finally started my diet with today. To give you a brief background, skinny is a word that tends to describe the opposite of who I am. Even as a baby I weighed in a whopping 8 and some lbs (most babies weigh around 6). Losing weight is an intransitive verb that could probably sum up the entire purpose of my life so far. Weight watchers, Atkins, personal trainer, you name it and I can assure you I have done it and yet here I am still "losing weight".
My parents seem to think that the best solution would be to use my hard-earned (trust me if you were working where I do, you would underline that word too) money to pay for professional weight loss services but considering that weight loss has almost become a sort of career for me, I figure I could probably teach the (usually skinny from birth and never had to struggle with weight loss) professionals, a thing or two.
Not that I have anything against skinny people, but it just seems unfair that I didn't get much of say in the genetics that determined my body type, and yet I have to suffer the consequences.
Winding down the basic point of this self-deprecating first post is that I have finally launched an offensive against the genes in my DNA. As of today, I am an official Low Carber or as my sister affectionately likes to say, I am now an official Royal Bengal Cub (my father being the Royal Bengal Tiger, of course).
Now all I have to do is give up chocolate (which in my opinion is better than sex), sugar (I feel the withdrawal symptoms already), rice (I am Indian, need I say more) and go to the gym (have I mentioned that laziness was a genetic gift to me as well, they had to cut me out of my mother's womb because I was a post-mature baby and arrived 10 days after the due date, my initially clean shaven dad had a full blown beard by then to prove it.)
Long story short, 1 down and 364 days more to go…wish me luck!