Have you ever....

Wished upon a shooting star – I remember doing so once around 6-7 years ago( Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was still fresh in my mind ), cant remember what I wished for or if it even came true, I haven’t seen too many shooting stars though I may have seen the occasional orbiting satellites or something!!!

Well now that I’m in the U.S., the land of UFO sightings, the X-files and alien abductions, I think I should start looking out for space ships. Anecdotally , I have a cousin who lives in Roswell, Georgia , ( Roswell, New Mexico is famous for UFO sightings). So this is the conversation I had when I found out my cousin lived in a place called Roswell (he’s been in the US for a quite a long time).

Me: Cool so you stay in Roswell, have you seen any aliens lately?
Cousin: Huh???
Me: No like there’s this place called Roswell in Arizona or Nevada or something , which is famous for UFO sightings, I think the place where you stay is different.
Cousin: Well, a lot of people who stay here behave like they are from another planet..
Me :Ok….

( To make things clear for all you people who reside in the US , I’m talking about aliens from a different planet, not from a different country!!).

Wished on a fallen eyelash??? All the time ....

Drawn water from a well…yeah lots of times more often when I was younger and used to vacation in India , lot less when I actually started to live in India, its fun I could do it the whole day ….

Used a hand powered water pump….yeah been there done that, again part of my Indian holidays ……I never did the real fun stuff like climb a tree or anything ….. I was a really blasé child that way ..still am…..

Fallen asleep while talking on the phone? Yea, at times I come close ..I’m not much of a phone person……

Thought of something funny and started laughing out loud in the presence of others? Yes, though more often I just smile to myself.

Used your city’s telephone directory or parents address books as casual reading – I used to at times especially as a child and some times even after that, but it had to be in the same house as my parents and I’d have to be terribly bored and jobless… I never READ the directory , just skim through to check out various surnames and phone districts.
Eaten kim-chi (a typical Korean food)?
Yess, yess just last week !!!!

Have you after reading all those Three investigators and Famous Fives ....formed a detective agency ?

Yes along with my childhood friends. we had fingerprint identifiers, magnifying glasses , invisible ink , clue books the whole shebang , just didn’t have any cases to solve.

We also formed our own circulating library consisting of our precious books which we kindly donated and kept in a box which used to circulate every week between our three houses …admittedly we were the only patrons of the library .

Oh and inspired by all those Enid Blyton’s we used to have our afternoon tea parties under the building staircase…. cookies ,chocolate ,ice cream, mint cordial and ginger ale ..not all at once: ) … gosh those days were fun ..we were five of us who stayed in the same building and we used to meet pretty much everyday for about five years playing hopscotch ,blind mans buff, net ball along with our crime solving , book circulating and tea partying. I got back in touch with two of them after 10 years, that was great ,still on the look out for my friend Gigi Tun , who was the mastermind behind all this fun!!!!

Have you ever had a really memorable New Year's Eve.. of course all New Years are events by themselves, but I think the millennium New Year’s Eve was especially cool… we went way out to make sure that we started the new millennium with a bang … It’s a good story , will probably tell you if you ask …


Have you a recollection of where you were…..

The day Princess Diana died ? We found out a little late, i.e. when my dad picked my mom ,sis and me from the airport, we were on a flight from Chennai to Dubai when it happened. A week later Mother Teresa passed away, and the day after that was Teachers’ Day in school , when 11th and 12th graders get to wear saris and act like teachers ,anyway mom was a bit bummed out with everyone dying and so was I to an extent ; and we didn’t have the enthusiasm to dress me up in a sari ( it would have been my second time in one ) so we decided I would wear a nice salwar kameez instead, Anyway when I went to school , you guessed it , I was the only girl who hadn’t worn a sari… Oh Well!!!
You cant say I didn’t mourn for Lady Di and Mother Teresa!!!

September 11 ,2001 … I was at home in India, it was the vacation after third year undergrad ,it was around 7 in the evening in India ,and Dad was surfing news channels, where we saw the day’s events unfold.