Little Jumping Jacks

The fascination that kids have for jumping around is something that I have never really been able to understand. Yesterday a couple of four year old nephews of mine had come over to my place. Since these kids were meeting most of us in the family after a long time, they spent the first 10 minutes in hiding their faces behind their mums. The 11th minute was the beginning of what I’d put in a simple term – chaos. Yeah, both the kids would spontaneously come up with little strategies of where to jump from, how many times to jump, the distance to be covered etc. One moment they’d be jumping from the top of the dining table down to the floor, next they’d be jumping on the dining table for about 100 times, next on the cot, from the top of the sofa, cousin’s lap, computer table, study table. Basically not one jump-able place was left uncovered by them!

The apartment that I live in was subjected to a mild tremor not only because the kids were running around, but also because on a couple of occasions I might have tried to outsmart them by running faster :$ I also figured that one of the reasons why earth quakes occur is that little ones all over the world must be jumping around at the same time with the same frequency thereby causing resonance. And with the adults running after them only helps in causing an increase in the intensity of the earth quake. Yeah I know it’s a silly thought :P

Anyway, looking at the kids jump reminded me of those days (not too long ago :P) when I was a kid. Yeah, I used to jump like a maniac and out of every nook and corner of the house. During the first few years after my birth, we stayed in a house that was on the first floor. I proved to be a big menace to the people downstairs by giving them sleepless days and nights with my jumping prowess. It was not too long before my parents understood that no amount of yelling could stop me and hence we ended up moving into an independent house where I could jump to my hearts and legs’ content :D

I was never aimless when it came to jumping. I would set extremely competitive targets for myself like covering a distance of about 8 ft (roughly equal to around 5 or 6 square tiles) on the ground from the top of a table when I was barely a 4 footer. And the distance to be covered only kept increasing by the minute. I also used to imagine that if I achieved this target, somehow somewhere some superpower (maybe God) would be impressed with this “special ability” of mine and reward me with a 1st rank in the class examinations without having to study much. And now, as I write this, I realize I want several things from life at this point like – another onsite trip, an MBA, a visit to the UK and other places across the world, oh yeah ( I almost forgot!) clear internal certifications etc. The wish list is just endless!! One important thing I have to mention is that I want the people (family and friends) whom I love so much to be always there at every friggin point in my life. So now, what should I do in order to get all of whatever I have mentioned above?? Well, maybe I should jump from my cot (which is at one corner of the room) to the other corner of the room. Okay * looks at the heavens and whispers a silent word of prayer* So here I go... *JUMPS*


Ooouuuuch!!! Oh oh :(

PS : I did not succeed too many times in getting a 1st rank (most of the times a 2nd rank holder :@) but yes, I did succeed in winning the 3rd prize for my house on sports day in the high jump event when I was in the 9th std :)

SWEET NOVEMBER – Part 1

It is again that time of the year when I am relatively jobless. At times like this, quite often, my mind travels to the past and tries to re-live those precious moments that have gone by in the last few months.. There has been so many that writing about each one of them is going to take me forever! This time, I would like to write about the month November 2007 :) Yes, it was a sweet November :) :)

Culmination of the GMAT season

The GMAT fever had smitten many of us. We were eagerly waiting for November as most of us had our GMAT scheduled during the end of October. It was not that we didn’t do anything at all while studying but just that whenever we did something, we would do so with a tad of guilt of not doing any justice to our preparation. I remember having a series of THE-LAST-PARTY-BEFORE-GMAT during this period:D

The Road to Bear mountains :) (November 3rd-4th)

We had an excellent run up to the trip :D November 1st being Kannada Rajyotsava day was a holiday and last year it fell on a Thursday. Some of our friends working in Bangalore DC chose to spend the long weekend in Mysore by taking the Friday off. On the night of October 31st, we went to Gufa (a good restaurant in Mysore) for a sooper dooper treat. We looted this person who had managed to smash the GMAT with a score of 710! It was my first trip to the restaurant, and I was quite fascinated with the Gufa like interior decor of the place. I felt like a lioness feeding on a prey in her cave (ok I jus made that up). It is NOT NORMAL for us to get back home once we decide to go out and celebrate. So as usual, after Gufa, we did the metropole (place with a coffee shop that is open 24 hrs for people like us). We even managed finding accommodation in a lovely hotel for a couple of our friends from Bangalore at that hour in the night (must have been around 12 or 1)!

On the day of Rajyotsava, we woke up a little late than the usual ( Mysoreans have this upper hand over people working in other DCs. If you have your own mode of transport, you can get to sleep till about 9 in the morning and still make it to work by 930 :D ). The agenda for the day was simple - eat well, chill out and parteh! If I am not wrong, we went to Metropole for lunch and then to corner house for dessert :D. We girls decided to pamper ourselves at the parlour and then go shopping for the party :) We got to know that a new club called The Road was opening that night. We girls found out the phone number of the place and went there to make reservations for around 16. Most of the time, it was only the girls who planned everything. The boys were very lazy in this regard and needed constant pestering and persuasion to be pulled out of their dens. In the night, we went to The Road and partied in the only way we knew! We clicked a lot of pictures with friends and with strangers :D Some of us danced and some of us (like me) jumped up and down on the dance floor to our hearts content :D. I can’t remember what we did after The Road. We must have gotten back home keeping in mind we had another night of partying to do :D

The Mysore DC people went to work the next day. All of us were eagerly waiting for the evening. We had more friends from Bangalore joining us in the evening. The plan was to party at X (the Hookah at planet X) on Friday night and to go on a trip to someplace around Mysore on the weekend. We x-ed it with great style that night. A trip to X is not complete without doing the Chamundi. So we all headed to the view point and spent some time there learning to climb walls :D jogging, taking pictures, playing music etc etc

The next morning was spent in deciding on a place to go to. The responsible people in the group decided to take us to Bear Mountains, a resort in Bandipur. I didn’t know until much later that it was the resort that was named Bear Mountains and not the hills in Bandipur :D . I think we went in 2 cars and a tempo traveller. It was a peaceful drive to the resort. I remember seeing an elephant on the way :)

We got there around 8 or so in the evening. Some of us got rooms and some of us got tents. I obviously wanted to spend the night in a tent and we girls did just that. Before crashing, we had dinner and spent the rest of the night in high sprits listening to music, dancing around, imitating each other and of course clicking a lot of pictures in funny poses:)

The next morning we woke up to a slight drizzle. The plan was to go on a trek up the hills. Before starting for the trip itself I had decided not to do anything that would put my legs in danger (I was still kind of recovering from a knee surgery I had undergone earlier last year. I had also suffered from a tissue injury in the ankle of my other leg a couple or more months before the trip). Hence I did not even bother taking sport shoes or even floaters for that matter for the trip. Anyway, all of us had a good breakfast that morning. The girls spent the rest of the morning gossiping while the boys were getting covered with dirt playing volley ball. In the afternoon, the group that wanted to go on the trek decided to leave. Even the ones who didn’t want to join decided to go including me (yeah I’ve never had a firm mind...). I decided to go up the hill with Hawaii chappals. I have a piece of advice for everyone – never trek wearing Hawaii chappals !!

The trek up was a little tricky. Because of the rains, the ground had become slippery. The plan was to use the grass as much as possible. Those with shoes and floaters did not have too much trouble going up. I had a terrible time though because of my chappals and I slipped several times. On one occasion I even fell flat on the ground and got my pant dirtied behind:( Yeah, that was enough reason for people to keep laughing for the rest of the day, week and the month :'( Jokes apart, it was an amazing experience! Completing the trek was like a milestone to me and I could achieve it only with the help of my friends because they were willing to hold me and walk whenever it was becoming difficult for me to take the next step:) After reaching the summit and soaking up the mind blowing view, we got back to the resort and then back to Mysore in the evening.

It was a perfect start to a beautiful month! Five continuous days of fun was more than what any of us could have asked for and the month was already promising us better times ahead! I realised this blog is already too long to accommodate anything more so I am saving the rest for later :)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

It is almost a month past Christmas and New Year but the memories of what I used to do during this time of the year, while I was growing up, are still fresh. I used to eagerly await the Christmas holidays scheduled after the 2nd term exams, which would get over in the 1st week of December. The 2nd week of December was spent in singing carols and preparing for those exciting Christmas class parties for which each one of us had to wear color dress to school. (I used to decide my dress 2 weeks ahead of the party :) ) After this, the school would declare a 3 weeks break for Christmas and New Year.

My mother believed in sending greeting cards to all her friends and relatives and I used to play an important role in executing this task of hers. I used to accompany her to the greeting card store and help her select cards. I slowly learnt the importance of choosing cards that we could relate to. We used to get a set of seasons greetings to be sent to people who shared a formal relation with my parents, one set of cards for their friends , a different set for the relatives and a couple of special cards , selected solely by me, for my friends. At home, I used to take up the responsibility of filling in whatever little I could in these cards. Most of the time, I would fill up the empty space with lines borrowed from other cards and decorate the remaining space with smiley, hearts and animations of different sizes and colors. Later on, I replaced my version of comic sans font with the calligraphy writing I was taught at school to fill up the empty space. To my friends, I used to write a long letter and send it along with the card. While mom would write the addresses of all her friends, relatives and colleagues, I would do this on my own for the ones meant for my friends. It used to give me great pleasure to write our names (Dad, Mom, Bro and mine) in the “Loads of luv” section and to leave the note “Open with a great smile :)” that could be seen as one opened the envelope to pull out the card.

The activity of sending cards would nearly last a week or two and my biggest motivation to be a part of it was to win words of appreciation from my parents. It is amazing how parents can make you feel like the best person to be ever born. Every time they said something good about my creativity (sometimes I wasn’t even creative), I used to dismiss it with a “It was a piece of cake... I could have done much better if I wanted to...” but deep within, I used to cherish every single word that made me feel special and important.

I used to also look forward to receiving cards sent by the others and would decorate the living room and my room with a whole lot of these and would also look for any bright ideas that I could incorporate in the next season.

This slowly started fading away with the advent of computers and Internet in our lives. Greeting cards were slowly replaced by e-cards and e-mails and I used to still be a part of sending them in the early days.

This again slowly began to fade with the numerous forwards that are exchanged via mails and SMSes. I have about thousand unread forwards in my inbox and e-cards might just be a part of them. I lost the importance of sending e-cards just like how I lost the importance of sending forwards. Surely technology has shrunk the world to an unimaginable extent and staying connected has never been easier. But this has also led me into thinking that the people I want to be in touch with are just a click away or a phone call away and I can do it anytime I want to. Days, months and years go by in pretending to be busy and then it just feels weird to be writing and calling the same people whom at some point I was dying to be in touch with. I don’t know if it is right to blame technology for it (because I know it is entirely my fault and I can still do something about it) but somehow doing so makes me feel a little better because without it I probably would have still continued sending those cards to everyone I know, instead of quietly thinking about people and wishing them in my mind. I certainly long for those days and I hope to revive them soon. Till then, the lazy part of me ( I don’t know if any other part of me even exists! :D) will continue to blame myself and technology…

P.S: I take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Year!! I'm guessing it’s a little too late to wish Merry Christmas, but I’m hoping everyone had a good time :)

Blog Address

This blog comes after spending a life time in deep contemplation of starting to blog. Yes, it was always my dream to blog some day but was possessed by laziness to do so. I would be lying if I said that being lazy was the only reason that kept me from writing. I’ll talk about why I did not blog some other day but I can tell you what made me blog today. Well, off late I’ve been trying to write essays to apply for b-schools. After being bored out of my wits writing serious stuff, I decided to write something light.

Just when I decided to create a profile, I was asked to enter the blog address. Had I been a little younger, my blog address would have been any one of the following:

1) sangisings.blogspot.com - Yeah, I thought of this and gave myself a pat on my back. I’m called Sangi and I LOVE singing. Plus my name also means music.

2) sangisintellectualthoughts.blogspot.com - This almost made it to the blog address field if not for the length.

3) sangeenius.blogspot.com - I have a couple of email ids with the name sangeenius. I walked with my head held high, from one room to the other in my house for about 100 times, the day I came up with the name (approximately 6 years ago). It was a result of a careful analysis of myself. I used to call myself a genius (I still do! :D) and hence decided to combine the noun with my name (Sangeetha) to produce SanGeenius. This explanation has been repeated innumerable times to several people across the globe. Anyway, I enjoyed the address for nearly 6 years until recently when I had to mail colleges and sometimes even my onsite counterparts from my personal id.

I realized that I'm a "professional" now and may be a little too old (sob sob) to have such addresses. A part of me refuses to grow up and wants to continue with silly names and addresses. But then, if I don’t grow up, I’m just wasting time. And therefore, I decided to take the first step towards this process of "growing up" by keeping the blog address simple - sangeetha-venkat.blogspot.com. I also have a mail id with just my full name and use it for personal yet official purposes.

After spending nearly an hour on the blog address, during which I almost gave up the thought of blogging, I clicked the continue button to fill the next set of fields. To my dismay, I found that the blog title needs to be filled. I panicked for few seconds but regained my composure soon enough to come up with the title Sangi Days.

Some things will NEVER change. Just how the Sun will NEVER stop rising in the east, Sangi will NEVER stop being a genius (just kidding!). I can NEVER stop amusing myself with my silliness and will NEVER let this little source of happiness deplete for anyone or anything.

Besides, some day, I would like people to describe their happy and glorious days as Sangi Days instead of sunny days....