La Belle Meunière

New recipe up at The Timid Cook!

Shameful plugging!

Well here goes : Finally, my food blog The Timid Cook

This is sort of a thankyou to R for her constant support and guidance about all things culinary. Also, I have so many food tales. Some about my experiments, others about R's cooking and yet others.

You may or maynot like my posts or even read them. But I can (thankgod for blogs) write and pretend that its a great blog. Can't I????

Viva Roma!

Got this one from Joe

And how true. Outside India and Calutta, Rome would be my first choice. I fell in love with Rome the minute I landed there. A thought that was because Rome is a bit noisy and chaotic. Anyhow, here it is, although why would anyone be interested in knowing which city I belong to...(blogger vanity)!

You Belong in Rome

You're a big city girl with a small town heart Which is why you're attracted to the romance of Rome Strolling down picture perfect streets, cappuccino in hand And gorgeous Italian men - could life get any better?

What City Do You Belong In?

Blog Day 2005 Bash

I have been so busy (bad excuse) that I have been posting less and less. And luckily I managed to check Rezwan's blog and learnt about Blog Day 31st August 2005.

In one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

And this made perfect sense to me since I have not really made any sort of effort to go beyond the few blogs I know and like.

Here are my 5 blog tags:

Aref Adib Pictorial blog (mostly) with really cool posts on look-alikes by a Iranian in the UK.

Entelechy Indian blog, by Radhika Nair residing in the UK -- well written, intelligent, thoughtful. A Must Read.

How to Learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons An American in Sweden.

Philobiblon Aussie Journalist in the UK...to be read particularly for her Femme Fatale Friday posts where she lists new blogs or new posts, by women.

Michael Chu's Cooking for engineers - great recipes, great layout, need I say more? Go check it out, particularly when you are feeling hungry.

Book Tagging

I am trying to get back into my 4 books per week schedule but with little success. Its been more like 1 book in 2 weeks. Blame it on work and home pressures. If it sounds like I did little but read earlier, that’s not true. I ran a home (everything and on my home and no domestic help). And any one who thinks running a home is no great shakes – well Try it. And for those who run their homes smoothly and brilliantly…well don’t tell me. I will forever hate them (yes pure envy).

Total books I own: Too many to count. But alas they are back in Kolkata. Here I have around 20 or so.

Last book I bought : Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1) -- by Christopher Paolini

Last book I read : Eragon. Am reading The White Mughals and Kriya Yoga (a little bit of each…no wonder am making bad progress).

Books that mean a lot to me: 1. The Diary of Anne Frank (although it was too traumatic for me to re-read it). It was given to me on my 13th birthday and that got me started on my own journals – a habit which I still maintain to this day after so many years and 22 diaries.

2. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol– Amazing.

3. Jane Eyre for Mr. Rochester and Pride and Prejudice for Darcy..but ofcourse.

4. The Century after Beatrice by Amin Malouf – One of the things I am grateful to France, for ever. I wouldn’t have heard about him or the book ever, and that would have been my loss, entirely.

5. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

6. The entire Terry Pratchett discworld series

And I am sure there are others, which can’t think of now and will remember as soon as I post this.


I have to, I believe tag five people and have them (don’t know if they will) do this on their blogs (but here goes):

Rezwan – This should be interesting
Parth
Sougata
Ashwin
Runa

That makes it 6....more the merrier??

Anniversary Blog!

Slowly, it crept in. On last sunday, my blog turned one!

What began as an update on my life in france for R, on A's insistent became a blog. And somehow, I have managed to keep it up through various moves and upheavels and illness, through unemployment and employment!

Many thanks to all of you who took time to visit my blog, leave a comment or email me. Can't tell you what it meant for me.

Special thanks goes to Debashish of Null Pointer, who held my blogging hands through all things tech on my blog through email and chat and when all failed, took my user id and password and did the changes himself! Inspired by him, I hesitantly began a bengali blog but it proved to be a still born. Debashish still hopes that I might restart it soon.

I left a moderately successful job, a very full social life to go to France and found myself in isolation. Even when I picked up the lingo, I still couldnt find a job. I wasnt too great as a house wife either. So blogging came to my rescue. A having set me in the blogging way, must have rued his decision when the dirty dishes piled up in the sink and laundry in the basket and I cooked abbreviated meals, all my concentration focussed on Blogging.

For very long time I was extremely shy about my blog posts and quaked everytime I hit the 'publish' button (I still am a bit shaky about it). There seem to be so many wonderful blogs around with so many intelligent matter. Not just a bored-housewife-blog. But each time some one wrote something to me, I felt better. So imagine my surprise when I was got quite a few emails from readers of my blog when I left france for India. Well, thanks!

Some of my favourite blogs -
Daniel Brett because once he wrote about Kolkata and because of Sabuj Neer;
Rezwan - read his blog and you will know why I like it.
Instant kaapi - for being nice to me in my early blogging days!! haha.
Null Pointer - See above for explanation
Bongo Vongo, Solilokey, Infinitelimits.....

Like all good things, this too will come to an end, someday...but not just yet. I am not through with it. No way!

To Rename or Not, that is the question.

An old quote begins what's in a name? A lot I should say. It gives me pangs and twinges, has me flinching, wincing and has me experiencing other assorted emotions. I am referring to the name of my blog. When I began nearly a year ago, little did I know that I'd be soon zipping around with no fixed address and living out of my suitcase. Earlier all my zipping around was within France. Then I found myself in Delhi, in Noida, in Gurgaon, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Mumbai and a week in France thrown in for good measure, all in the span of 6 months. And today, I depart for Delhi, again, where I will be, until further notice.

So, obvious choices for blog names are :
1. No fixed address. But Kaizad Gustaad (of that unsavory incident of the death of a production person on the mumbai train tracks fame) has already written a book of short stories by that name.

2. Variations of the Notes theme:
- Notes from everywhere (baaaaad)
- Notes from allover (not quite right that one)
- Sukanya's Notes (boring)
- Notes from my suitcase (??)

I do so envy people with clever blog names. I can't think of one. Didnot when I began, cannot even now. Notes from France. How boring, how obvious. Once I did a google search and apart from my blog, I got a million other results including Nuclear Notes from France.

I am not exactly techno-phobic, just a bit slow on all things techno and so even linking to a meta blog takes a lot out of me. And if I should rename my blog, would I have to go to all those places and make changes? Err...on the other hand, "Notes from France is now from India" is not such a bad name is it? Kind of (hopefully) grows on you, with time. And I can always add another country to it, wherever I should happen to be going next: is now from Africa, Australia etc. etc.