Little Realistic...

Though not excited, am definitely looking forward to see where  Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) is gonna open its first store in India. My bet is on Bangalore and Mumbai. H&M is the second largest fashion retailer in the world. It might offer some good deals and have advantage on its side as India is pretty closer to China. My observation so far is that material supply for H&M is majorly from China, Bangladesh and some cotton clothing from India. I wonder if one has to go ga-ga over this store? Apart from H&M, there is one more Swedish giant trying to land in India. It is IKEA. Definitely a "watch out" outlet for cool home and office decor.

Food is something you can put in a lot of creativity. My husband, being a researcher never agrees to it.  With my creativity it is impossible to reproduce the same taste. Well, am less bothered by those comments as I am not trying to produce some data or results to prove any theory as he would in his lab. All I am trying to do is to get something cooked for good health. So my voyage through kitchen and cooking is usually random. I stick to no rules and my ingredients basically hang around what is required to be eaten in terms of protein and carbohydrates. If you try a hundred times, you are bound to strike the target at least a few times. With all my random experiments I too succeed to get an incredible combination of ingredients that produces mouth watering taste. Schade, I can hardly reproduce the same as I forget what I had used after a while. So I thought of a solution that could help me reproduce the recipe when I want to. The solution is that I can post my trials on my blo...

Whenever I read K&R's C book or Bach's The design of Unix Operating System, I wished there had been a bit of creativity and enthusiasm in the way the concepts were explained. For a beginner it was a super hard walnut, though the inner nut was healthy, crispy and yummy. Cracking the outer shell was brain draining. It had taken quite a few studies for me to understand Ritchie. Complains apart. I won't say complaining, lemme say, i am sharing thought of plenty of those who take-up something new to learn.  Learning never stops, and the need for books to teach us how to do things. This time around am learning a hell lot of new things and in bad need for something simple to make understand quickly. I started to learn Android app programming. I had a stint of Kernel and device drivers in the Android stack but App was a distant concept for me. So some strange turn of events made me do Android apps and I liked it. Maybe because it tricked visually active part of my brain. ...

I liked my visit to a region of Eifel last week. Eifel is the kind of place you wouldn't regret losing way in. Oh I forgot to say, "in summer" :).. The place we went for treakking was Vogelsang. Vogelsang came as a bit of surprise as we didn't expect a Military training camp there. The camp was build during Nazi rule. After 1946 used by the British and then by the Belgian. Yet, it made quite an interesting day trip. We took a guided tour of the place at 2pm and later walked into the woods. The tour that lasted for 90 min gave an overview of the place. Vogelsang is spread over 100 hectare, doesn't fail to bewilder you in many ways. The training camp has a big theater to show movies(only war movies), football stadium, swimming pool and lot more. Best of all, it was surrounded by the beautiful Eifel forest which was cut through by rivers, the Rur and the Urft. View of Eifel forest from the Training Camp Rock Solid building,a part of the Camp Place to ...

A beautiful Christmas tree at Astrid's home My first Christmas celebration began with a warm welcome at the Franfurt Airport when I returned from India after a month long warm holiday. It was not as cold as expected in Germany. Just got lucky with the weather. Every year during Christmas there will be Christmas Market in all cities here. Full of lights, colors and Christmas trees. Somehow it reminded me of Deepavali back home. I found myself lucky to be invited by Astrid to celebrate Christmas with her. She did it the German way. We attended Christmas Service at a church near her house on Heiliger abend (Christmas Eve). At the church they gave lyrics of the songs that were going to be sung so it was easier for a stranger like me to get along as I'm completely ignorant of the German songs.  After the service we were back home. There were Guests from different parts of the world. We had kids from China as well. Astrid shared memories of her childhood Christmas cele...

Interviews will remain a puzzle for me forever. Some say it has got to be your day to get the job. May be. But I tell myself that one has to prepare to the best before the Interview. After the interview leave it as if it's a matter of luck.  In a foreign land it's more challenging to find a job as the priority goes to the native. For many reasons I find it quite agreeable. Be it in Germany or any other country with the day-to-day language other than English, for  foreigners it poses a great challenge with the job opportunities. One is required to have a mastery of the language to land in a job. After all the hurdles you get the interview call that you have got to handle like an "endangered species" :). I also had to handle the "endagendered species" a few days ago. There are many things one need to take care but I found interview etiquette remained same as it is in India. I was more prepared because the job interested me more than other opportuniti...

I received a mail titled "A warning" from one of my friends whose writings I read without giving it a miss. This time I decided to share with as many as I can because of the important information is carried. A Warning Something bad happened today, passing on the story, so that this doesn't happen to you too :) -   A 74-year-old British friend of ours and I went for a walk this morning near Indira Nagar, at 6.30 AM, and we happened to come across a small wounded puppy in the middle of the road, in a quiet residential area. Now my friend Rowena is an ardent dog-lover, has dogs back home in Venezuela, and she immediately bent down to pick up the unconscious puppy to move it away from the centre of the road, where it would have been run over.  Before we knew what was happening, the mother dog, which was hiding under a car nearby, rushed out and attached her viciously. 4 times, she came back to bite her. And then it came for me, but she just managed to get the loos...