Marathon Bloggers Prompt Post 1 – Colors -Fractal Art.

I am in creative mood.

Many years ago, in moods like these, I normally would take the paints and color the walls of my room. There were many such patches on the wall with blotches of paints here and there. Some near my bedside, some on the table, some behind the doors and some even in the stairways. But that was long time ago.

I can’t possibly do that now. Can I?

But still I do get creative sometimes, and since most of my time is spend on digital activities, photoshop comes closest to honing my creative spirit.

Working on few layers, with blotches of colors here and there, playing with vector design, I was able to create this fractal art.

This gave me an idea to work on an eye.

Quite happy with this frame, I decide to work on this eye on many layers.

In every layer, I played with transformation, changing the width, length and angle of the design. Added filters to some layers  and a circular 3-D effect

Voila! Finally made a visual digital fractal painting that looked like this.

Sorry, Wrong Number

image source

Last week I called a stranger who has been receiving calls from people in my contact list. He is an angry middle-aged man who gets irritated each time people from my contact list call him. They call him and ask him to call ‘Pushee’ he shouts back saying that he does not know any ‘Pushee’ and to stop bothering him.

I know it’s very frustrating when you receive call for a person you don’t know.

I decided to make a courteous call to him.

“Hello, is this…xxxxxx277, I am ‘Pushee’ speaking”

“Oh! So you are Pushee? I get too many calls asking for you, this is very frustrating because sometimes they insist that they need to speak to you even after I tell them they have a wrong number.”

“Well, I want to apologize to you, I am aware that people from my contact list are bothering you, but I am really sorry.”

I explained to him that I used to have two phone numbers, one with last three numbers as 277 and other with 477. I had surrendered my xxxxxx277 back to Vodafone and that number has been allotted to him. Most of my family members and my friends are not aware that I have another number too, I requested him to inform them, when they contact him and direct them to my line at xxxxxx477.

He softened when I said ‘sorry’ again.

“Okay, I understand” he said, “It is such a pleasure to speak to you. I am glad you told me. Now that I know I will give them your number as xxxxx477, and one more thing, you have a lovely voice.”

Hmmn, all that ends well with a compliment ends the best

Yesterday, I received a call from a friend who was directed to my phone when she made a call to xxxxxx277.

One phone call to offer apology, made a difference to his mood. He is no more irritated now when he gets a call asking for ‘Pushee’

“Oh ‘Pushee’ you mean?” he says gently, “you have a wrong number, can you call her on xxxxxx477 please?”

This post is shared with FB group Marathon Bloggers, who write one post per day during the month of December 2012

Lavasa Bloggers Reunion

Every morning after a cup of tea, I walk around the pages of Face book, Twitter, blogs and other social media channels to update myself with the latest events. I normally see the same set of people, most of them are unknown to me personally, but I know them well from their profile pictures, their postings and the news that we share.

I am never sure who reads my blog but I was surprised when I was invited by Windchimes to participate in Lavasa Women’s Drive2011 along with seven more bloggers to spend two days of leisure and tour around the city.

That was the first time that I met bloggers whom I had never met before. I may be very active online but otherwise I am quite reserved and don’t interact freely with strangers. It took me some time to interact but others were very friendly and full of news to share, soon I was enjoying with them, laughing, chatting and touring around the city.

Nisha Jha, the travel blogger, Kiran, blogger and author, Leela Shakti, DNA sub-editorand author, Monika Manchanda, the food blogger, Ramya Pandyan, a netaholicblogger, Anuradha Shankar, thetravel blogger, and Shashi, shoppingstories blogger were the eight bloggers whom I met the first time and Biswajit was our friend, our guide fromWindchimes, who would calm our nerves when things went wrong.

We spend two days together in the beautiful city of Lavasa and then we went on with our lives with just the memorable time etched into my mind.

Over the period of one year, everybody has progressed exceptionally well in their own field. I wanted to meet them all, at least once again, but getting them under one roof was bound to be a difficult task. Every month I asked if it was possible to meet up but always somebody was busy. Three months passed but we were not able to find common dates to suit all. I had almost given up and decided to try for one last time and wrote a final mail asking

‘Will we ever meet?”

Kiran responded saying that we could meet this coming Saturday but Shakti had already planned for that week-end and said she couldn’t meet.

 I wanted to call it off again but this idea had stretched too long and we decided to go ahead with whosoever was free on that Saturday. We discussed various venues and finally zeroed it at Lemon Tree at Bandra.

At 1pm, Biswajit send me the message that he had already arrived and was waiting at the top floor of the restaurant. I waited for Nisha, since she was coming from Panvel, 3hours away from Bandra, to attend this meet-up. We met at the end of my lane and took an autoride to the venue.

The ambience at this restaurant was very soothing and peaceful with beautiful decorative plates, vases and blue lanterns on the wall, there were artistically painted white logs and branches on the ceiling, the etched floral glass on the windows, white and mustard paint on the walls and white shades to keep the sunlight out.

The tables were distantly placed with enough privacy to each group. We sat comfortably on the soft seats with ample of cushions of different sizes to lean on. The quorum was not complete, unfortunately, Monica is in Bangalore, Shakti had her college reunion and Kiran had last minute guests. Five of us met, ordered the drinks and refreshed our memories of the days spend at Lavasa..

When bloggers meet what do they talk?

Blogging of course.

We started the meals with drinks, each one ordering their own preferences; they had interesting combination on their menu card like spicy guava, blue berry yogurt, Chunky Muesli, etc. Over the drinks, Ramya, who now conducts regular workshops on blogging, discussed the various methods she used in her workshops and how she uses visuals and content to her blogs to make it interesting.

The next, we ordered the starters like Mediterrian grilled salad, Cajun potatoes and chicken in green pepper sauce. In between our chat, we clicked few pictures of the food as they arrived, which amused the waitress a lot, who was so distracted that she brought the wrong order of potatoes, which had to be moved away before we finish off the plate. This year 2012, I had made a second trip toLavasa again with other set of people, I was happy to share my experience and how different it was from my last visit.

For the mains we had Basil Ravioli of oven dried tomatoes and olives, a Shepherd pie, Ratatatoville Risotto and vegetarian sandwich platter. The food was quite bland to our taste and we had to order extra tomato chilie sauce and Mustard sauce to alter the taste. I was specially amused by this long black pepper grinder which looked like a weapon of mass destruction. We continued our chat on different topics. Nisha had just returned from the Malayasian BloggersMeet and Award Nite, and also had spent two months, working with NGO in Cambodia teaching school kids in the rural areas. It was interesting to hear her stories of the natives and how rewarding it was to work for NGO and contribute to the society in our own capability.  

My Blue Berry Yogurt lasted throughout the meals; sipping slowly and relishing every sip so when they ordered Crème Brulee and Bitter chocolate and apricot mousse for deserts, I only watched them eat. Anu spoke about her romance of apple pie and how she has enjoyed at different places. I have never ever tried the apple pie but now am curious to try one at Yazdaan Bakery when I visit South Mumbai next. Anu has been travelling widely across India and she has a new hobby ofcollecting postcards and stamps of different countries, it was interesting to hear about her adventurous travel tales across India.

The lunch lasted over four hours, bill was paid but our conversation had not yet come to an end. We had to vacate the room for its closure during lunch hour. We moved to another room downstairs, which was cozy bar with wooden tables and chairs, to continue our conversation. Biswajit, who is the social media consultant, discussed the importance of virtual interaction on net and how useful it is to the corporate world.

Blogging is the informal way of advertising and bloggers should not be taken for granted. There may be paid news in the newspapers and magazine but a blogger cannot be hired, because he will be honest and true to his content, he may not hesitate to give negative review if he feels like it.

Blogging is a very powerful medium which plays very important role in spreading awareness. There are no monetary benefits, it is purely passion but much importance is given to the written word. A blogger is invited to different events by corporate in the hope that they will get free publicity, people feel pleased when they see a blogger making notes, clicking pictures but they are never sure of what review they might get.

Blogger is not looking for free-bees; he is just looking for news-worthy content, to share with those who are looking for right kind of service, be it a new product, a film, an interesting place or an event. Bloggers should never be taken for granted because they are creative, moody and sometimes fun too.  

We missed Monika, Kiran and Leela Shakti. We had hoped to listen to Kiran Manral discuss her new book ‘Reluntant Detective’, or Shakti discuss her book, ’Imperfect Mr Right’ or Monika for her culinary stunts of those beautiful cupcakes

But most of all I truly missed Monika gurgling laughter. 

‘Bloggers Premier League’ contest

I signed up for contest at BPL ‘Bloggers Premier League’, just out of curiosity. Didn’t know what I was getting into. Earlier I had participated in Blog-a-ton and had submitted few posts there, so I assumed that this would be something similar with group of bloggers in one team writing on the same subject. What I didn’t speculate was that there would be inter-action and we would be planning the content before blogging together and this is what made this interesting


The BPL was divided into six different teams of 10 members each. The names and logo were assigned to each team and with tentative shuffling I fell into ‘Inscribe Tribe’. I didn’t know any member of my team therefore I started visiting the blogs of the team members to get the gist of their writing. Before the actual event we were asked to make a post which wouldn’t be rated as a form of introduction. It said:

“Why not start with some serious fun before settling seriously in to the contest groove. Well That, My dears, you are going to do it yourself! Yes! How about an intro sort of thing with a little bit of self promotion of you and your blogs and a pep talk? Sort of sales pitch? An ad?! Oh no! There will be no marks for these, just pure fun. Just for the purpose of getting to know each other and also sort of warm up, before the real contests. Pure imagination and mischief … but with a small precondition (or rather two), to test your imagination and make it more fun. And ya you get free back links too! It has to be in a skit form or script form, the characters being yourselves .The post will be a single post representing the team. Meaning all of you get to crack your brains over it as a team”

Single post representing the team?, hmmn!! That would mean that we needed to network and discuss amongst each other to write one post. A private group was created on Face Book whereby every member was the administrator and we could post messages and pictures without outsiders peeping into our folders. So much secrecy!! For live discussion, we chose Gtalk. The timing for meeting was scheduled and then would begin our live chat to discuss what we plan to write.

Now my Gtalk was acting funny and I could not connect with other members. I checked into FB private group and started introducing myself while other three members were already chatting amongst themselves. I didn’t know how to get in touch with the rest of the group and I kept writing messages on the FB wall and chatting away at FB as if in mid air, introducing myself with imaginary crowd listening to me…and these people were busy chatting amongst themselves and devising the way to contact me but didn’t know how and I started screaming,”Is anyone there? By Sunday u have to submit the script, but still we have not even stepped on first talk, okay ,loooks like we are all looooooooosers” and immediately, like rescue operators in helicopter, they came, asking my gmail and sending voices and posting messages on my FB wall and suddenly, the messages started popping up on my screen….and before I knew, I was inside the Gtalk, air lifted by these rescue operators and I could read their Live chat.

It was fun chatting with them. We were just four of us and we started planning the skit, wanting it to be a humor piece. We discussed different options and then decided that each of us would write a humorous skit and then select the best. We decided to meet the next day at 4pm. I wrote down the skit after checking out from live chat and working late till 3am. I finished and sent in my skit to the group.

Next day, when we met again, only Diman and I were at Gtalk at 4pm and we started discussing my skit. Soon others joined in, one by one, they all came, as and when they could and gradually everybody started adding flesh to the skit, each one contributing his/her part and the live chat was on till 10pm. The graphic was organized by one team member while writing and putting together by another member, dialogues by another member and content by another. Everybody contributed to the skit. The live conversation was saved and sent to all the members who had missed the conversations and the final draft was written by one of the members at night. It was a great team effort and everybody contributed willingly and finally when the final skit was posted it displayed the creditability of team effort.

The polished post finally appeared on time HERE

Now that is what I would call a true team spirit. It’s a great team where everybody makes enough space for others to express their opinion before taking the final decisions.