Happy Diwali to all of you who celebrate this wonderful and bright festival of lights.

I am celebrating this festival in the land of vikings (Sweden!) and it is first time that I took it on myself to celebrate the festival.

All these years, my only resposibility(can I say that!!) was to get as much as crackers from the market and soak them in the sun to make them more loud!!

My Mom and Sis used to prepare everythin for the puja and we waited for my Dad to come home and perform the Laxmi Puja. 

I just waited to complete the entire process and then junt pounce on the firecrackers and blast my through... :) good old days...

This time though I dod not have any opportunity to burn crackers. Since, there is no Indian Community here on Göteborg, we could not go to any community place where they celebrate the festival.

But I did celebrate this one in a more different way. Using my recently acquired cooking prowess, I prepared Dahi wada and invited my colleagues over to my place.

It was a wonderful evening. I will post the pics as soon as I upload them.

I have started following this schedule to able to do one hundred pushups in a single go. I am in the week 2 of the schedule and going good. I find it interesting as he states that we will be able to achieve the target in 6 weeks.

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Saw this video on youtube. Simply loved it. The thing I most liked about this video is that it tells us the present position of Earth in a very subtle and understandable manner.

He should also have included how many people from the community of 100 will strive to give something back to the society. That will be very less I guess. Everyone I know wants do social service to an extent but most of them are content in just saying that rather than showing that in action.

Happy Dussehra to all the readers.

I have a tradition in my family to go to all my relatives’ homes and greet them on this festival no matter how far they are!! (but in the same city, of course :-P )

This time it was a double treat.. it was my cousin’s birthday as well..Happy Birthday bro..

Ever wondered if there are any tourist places in your home town that YOU haven’t seen yet? Well I realized that yesterday.

One of my Managers, whose a Swedes, is going to India tomorrow for a Conference. And what’s more? he’s going to Hyderabad – my home town(may be city...).

So, as a true Hyderabadi, it was my tacit responsibility to suggest him some tourist places for which Hyderabad was famous for. He has only one evening to tour..so this made my job a bit tough coz I had to give him only a couple of places which are close enough to his place of stay (Novotel) as he cannot move along the entire breadth of the Hyderabad in one evening given the mind boggling traffic we have there.

I decided to give him a couple of famous cultural places those he could find only in my city. The entire process had one important by-product. It made me ralise that out of the most sought after tourist places, I hardly visited couple of them. For instance: I did not see Salar-Jung Museum till now. Same is the case with Taramati Baradari, Falaknuma Palace, climbing Char Minar,Chow Mohalla Complex to name a few..I visited Golkonda a few months before I arrived in Sweden, thanks to my Chennai friend who asked me to show that when he visited Hyderabad.

How many of us have visited all the famous tourist places in our own Home Town? We go to as many places as we can, even some not-so-important places when we go visit new places, then why do we neglect our own city? Well, I don’t say that every one is like that but, most of the people I know are.

People take their home towns for granted. So they don’t think about them in that perspective. Any thing which is perennial and is all yours doesn’t has that lustre. That’s true in every sense. Rather than lazing in home watching the idiot box which airs some traumatic soaps or listless reality shows, we can go visit some good places in our city or at least our neighbourhood.

I have decided that when I go back to India and Hyderabad, I am gonna cover all the remaining places that didn’t previously.