The pet I've always wanted. (:

 I've always wanted a pet. My choice was a tiger cub.Haha! Yes, the baby cub.

But, school taught me, that tiger is a wild animal and not compatible for domestic caressing. What if it starts loving me back and takes a grand leap mistaking it for a hug? Fatak!The end.So considering this,I compromised. :p

But my love for these ferocious big cats is a never ending saga.

I like their paw prints.

I like their thunderous roar.

I like their royal charisma.

I like them for their unique stature.

They fascinate me in a manner i cannot explain or define.
P.S - I dislike calling them cats :/ because I don't love cats.Lacking the rich lustrous colour and thunderous roar of the biggies they don't appeal much to me. Okay yes, I accept the fact that they belong to the same cat family and hence i take back all my negatives notions. But the sound they make, their cry, Ah! No match to my biggies.Okay, I shall stop.

They're the protectors of the jungle.
Majestic animals in Indian History.

Magnificent predators.
Meet the most glorious big cats of all time - the mighty Tigers. 

Tigers are the largest members of the cat family and are renowned for their power and strength.

India - Kingdom of the Tiger.
*Pride*

Here are some nice things to know -

Tigers have eyes with round pupils, unlike domestic cats, which have slitted pupils. This is because domestic cats are nocturnal whereas tigers are crepuscular – they hunt primarily in the morning and evening.Despite not being strongly adapted to the dark, tigers’ night vision is about six times better than humans’. Tigers are completely blind for the first week of their life. About half do not survive to adulthood. Tigers have color vision like humans.

Tigers cannot purr. To show happiness, tigers squint or close their eyes. This is because losing vision lowers defense, so tigers (and many other cats) only purposefully do so when they feel comfortable and safe.

When several tigers are present at a kill, the males will often wait for females and cubs to eat first, unlike lions, which do the opposite. Tigers rarely argue or fight over a kill and simply wait turns.

The stripes on each tiger are unique, like human fingerprints.

Tigers have antiseptic saliva. They lick their wounds to disinfect them.

Like those of other cats, the upper side of tiger tongues are covered with fleshy bristles so that when they wash themselves with their tongues, they simultaneously comb their fur.

Cats in general have been found to have a better memory than any other animal, including humans, being several hundred times better than dogs and dozens of times better than primates. Tigers’ short-term memory alone lasts about thirty times longer than humans’, and their memories are made with stronger brain synapses, meaning that they can remember more and do not forget things as easily as we do.

Tigers have a brain that weighs over 300g. It is the largest brain of all carnivores except the polar bear, and is comparable to the size of a Chimpanzee’s brain.

Tigers can mate with lions and other cats in captivity to produce hybrids.A male lion and a female tiger produce enormous offspring, ligers, whereas a female lion and a male tiger produce the much smaller tiglon.Ligers can be over 4m long and are the largest cats in the world.

India: TheKingdom of Tiger is a documentary, based on writings of Jim Corbett, about man-eating tigers and the conservation efforts of the tiger in India.

Jim Corbett National Park is the oldest national park in India and was named after Jim Corbett ( know more about Jim here ) who played a key role in its establishment. The park was the first  to come under the Project Tiger initiative. It was established in 1936 as Hailey National Park to protect the endangered Royal Bengal tiger. It is located in Nainital district of Uttarakhand in India.

A night camp at Jim Corbett and a personal sighting of a Royal Bengal Tiger would make a tiger lovers dream come true! (:

P.S - Not very sure about the tigers memory.Do let me know if otherwise. :)

Nancy - her first book friend (:

Set in high hills.There stood a school.So huge,to take it all at one glimpse.It was a great learning environment with so many buildings painted in cream.It was another hot-summer-afternoon.They had their cycle tests coming up next week.Their lunch break just ended.All the hustle-bustle settled down.The sun was all bright,lighting up the empty quadrangle like a golden chandelier hung from an invisible ceiling.The second bell rang, marking pin drop silence.They had a session outside their classroom.They lined up and started moving. The walkway seemed to go on forever, the coloured mosaic floor continued to support their steps till they reached a huge hall.Hung everywhere were signboards which read 'SILENCE',they droned gently to the hot summer wind. 

 To the rear end was a rectangular-spectacled stout women sitting in an old chair reading herself to a book. That dimly sunkissed hall, was the guardian angel of books - The library.Its walls lined up with large wooden almirahs stacked up with story books, science journals, nancy harry novels, tin tin magazines , all possible newspapers and a vast collection of books boasting records as old as 30 years from it's past.

While the whole class was in queue for Goosebumps.She went on to pick up a Nancy Drew.Like she always did. Nancy is quite the super girl - good looking,well dressed and excelling at everything - be it sports,dancing,cooking or problem solving.A hotshot in short! :D

The character had a profound influence on that little girl.She admired her.Though there were TinTin magazines spread all over the old wooden table.She eagerly looked at her new nancy novel.Feeling it through her fingers ,she kept turing pages and stopped when it read Chapter 1.All the whispering sounds around, started to vanish,comforting her with a new friend on an adventurous journey.The library was left behind and she started solving the mystery along with Nancy-her first book friend.

P.S - From Old Clock to The Thirteenth Pearl,(The classic #56 novels were written by various writers, all under the pen name Carolyn Keene.),Nancy goes about solving mysteries.She drives a dark-blue convertible.She lives in a large red-brick house in the fictional town of River Heights with her father,the famous and successful lawyer Carson Drew and the housekeeper Hannah Gruen who helped raise Nancy after her mother's death when Nancy was three years old.

Happieee Mother Language Day! Yaay! :)

It's the International Mother Language Day today! Yaay! :D

My mother tongue is Telugu. It is one of the six languages designated a classical language of India.It is spoken by 74 million people around the globe.It is thirteenth in the Ethnologue list of most-spoken languages worldwide.
Pride.

My telugu wasn't a cake walk.It was more of an adventure into a world I've never been before :)

Long long ago..in 2002, my second language at school was hindi, till my 5th grade.Then suddenly my mom gets this tinge, that I'm losing out on the language I belong to.In my 5th summers I was taught to walk, talk, read, write, dance and draw in telugu.I had a 98 in hindi ,and i couldn't get a hang of why my mom was behind a new language i haven't learnt before.Tadaa and 6th class had telugu in store for me.All I wrote was shit!So many spelling mistakes.So many errors.For someone who's done everything in hindi, it was troublesome to do the same in telugu all of a sudden.It started hitting me hard when i lost the race for no 1 in class because of *Telugu*. (Ya it mattered very much :p)My teachers were very patient.I must mention - without my Mom , Rama Devi maam and Gopala Krishna sir I wouldn't be able to read & write 'anything-telugu' so efficiently today.
Gratitude.

But it was fun back then, challenging myself with an all new language,what my friends learnt in 5 years was something I had to learn in one summer!

My mom made sure I learnt everything and everyday about the language I belonged to.I used to have an icecream bowl beside and the task was to write all the alphabets neatly twice or thrice before it melts and turns into milk.She has been instumental in keeping the connect through stories, books, classics and strictly maintaining a 'speak telugu only'household.She put in as much effort as I had to.It never felt difficult.Hardwork,Yes !A lot of that went in.We both did it together.

With few spelling mistakes and few more dictations and more and more telugu running through my nerves ,the years passed and I was in 10th,5 years passed,it was 2007!

We had an awesome telugu teacher-Gopala Krishna Sir,who is a walking telugu dictionary.Not just dictionary.Everything telugu.Pure, perfect telugu.He often said this one liner in class -  "Aikamathyame maha balam".We used to laugh it off then.
Now it all makes sense.That's what leadership is - to work with a team and reap better! ;)

I would have missed out on so much fun, hadn't my mom set me up with telugu early in life. I'm a linguaphile.My love for language always makes me curious to express myself in every language i know, but, the beauty of expressing emotions in mother tongue cannot be matched to any foreign language.I love speaking in telugu ,and my love of it propels me to pick up these one liners from movies(thats the only form of active telugu I get to interact with these days) I watch, effortlessly I store and I make sure I throw them on someone :p
Mana bashalo matladthe oche kicke verabba.Aaan :D

P.S - India is home to 780 different languages and 86 different scripts. The sad part is, we have lost nearly 250 languages in the last 50 years.

Let's make sure we don't lose telugu.Keep talking.Keep listening.Keep spreading the ♥ love. :)

P.P.S - You might be wondering why I'm posting something SO telugu in english :P
1) I don't want to spoil the script by typing it in english.

2) Too lazy to find a script converter :p

3) 1 & 2 again.

*Swarnakamalam* - A tribute to Art!

Each time i watch it,I start loving it all over again.

A story SO wonderfully potrayed.

Every human emotion addressed at it's best.

Seshendra Shastry - A father who desires his daughter to take over his asset - Art.

Chandrashekar - A guy who truly admires art and puts in all his effort to see a fellow artist soulfully enjoy and appreciate art.

Meenakshi - A girl who aspires to reach the skies and beyond.

Main story line - Chandu plays the role of a catalyst in Meena's journey from skepticism to devotion in her pursuit of dance.

The story is beautiful in every aspect and when good music is laced with some exceptionally splendid poetry,the song becomes a saga.

Songs from the movie that sweep me off my feet are - Ghallu ghallu & Siva poojaku chigurinchina sirisiri muvva. Both the songs are argumentative conversations between Chandrashekar and Meenakshi.It's a tough challenge for the lyricist to potray two different schools of thought, when both have valid points to support their argument.The lyricist - Siri Vennela Seetha Rama Shastry garu did an explicitly outstanding job.

P.S : Ghallu Ghallu -The song is beautifully picturized on a win-win pattern.Both of them have different perspectives.Both of them listen to one-another.(But only chandu understands what meena says.Meena only projects her ideas and is busy contradicting whatever he says. :p)

It's a pretty tough movie for me,coz I myself am a classical dance admirer.I love dance and that need not be the basis to argue that Meena in the movie is a duffer for not liking it.She might like something else.

Everything is fine and then it hits me somewhere.The hero believes,she being an airhostess or a receptionist or whatever ,is not the right choice for her.But what if her dream is to be one of them.What if she really desires to be an airhostess/receptionist?
Why should her dreams be let down just because he thinks her choice is downmarket compared to his choice for her.How can he make decisions for her?
All she desires is freedom and when she strongly believes that she'll get what she wants by changing her profession,why not?

What makes me continue to love the movie is : May be he's not making decisions for her.May be he's just helping her make a decision of her own.Probably the one that's right.May be he's just trying to show her, how each of her choices look like.

Ya but as usual I continue to contradict myself saying - How can one speak for another.One can speak only for themselves and none other.So,the decision of her life is solely hers and not his.

As the story continues, he proves me wrong (For reasons of my own,I'm SO glad he did!) and he actually plays the role of a catalyst in her journey from skepticism to devotion in her pursuit of dance.

The journey of her transformation is the beauty of the whole story.How well chandu helps her transform is the journey.Transform here is not *change*.He doesn't change her.He helps her *discover* herself.

Eventually she experiences the beauty of dancing soulfully and appreciates it.He feels contented watching her dance. In the end, it's a happy-happy ending! (: