My Honey Diet

I have always been a moderately good eater ever since I can remember. I never used to shy away from eating pretty much anything that was vegetarian and edible; in fact, the tastier and sweeter the dish, the more helpings I have. However, the fact that I was reasonably active throughout my school and college life meant that I never had to worry about putting on weight or being obese at any point in time till I was around 20 yrs old. A healthy dose of physical activities in the form of outdoor sports, the occasional exercise routine and some walking/running meant that I kept my weight and my tummy in check. I guess all that physical activity also meant that my metabolism also kept the calories from being accumulated.

And then graduation happened, and I stepped into the corporate world; a desk job meant that I was well into my journey to a sedentary lifestyle. Most of my waking hours were spent either commuting to and from work or behind desks in front of a computer tinkering around with word documents and spreadsheets. This automatically put me on a sticky wicket as far as my metabolism went. Coupled with the untimely meals and constantly eating out this meant that my fitness levels gradually started going down south and the kilos just kept adding on.

As if the sedentary lifestyle weren’t bad enough, since I strictly believed in working hard and partying even harder, I soon began guzzling down beer by the gallon. Although I developed a taste for the fizzy beverage somewhat late when compared to my peers, I would like to believe I more than made up for the delay in terms of guzzling down quantities like there was no tomorrow. All that aerated water went ahead and added up bang in my mid-section with the result that today it looks I have a Formula One tyre instead of a midriff.

While this by itself is not a cause for grave concern, the fact is that I am on the wrong side of the thirties and it is high time that I took corrective action to get back in shape and get back to my fitness levels of yore. And it is in this context that I am strongly contemplating beginning a Honey Diet. And what better source of information and readymade tips than Dabur Honey’s website http://www.daburhoney.com/.

The website is a veritable treasure trove of information on all the relevant topics for me such as Fitness Tips, Knowing all there is to know about honey, Expert Advice and the icing on the cake, some really easy to cook and yummy to eat recipes by none other than Chef Vikas Khanna.

While the Fitness Tips section has small instructional videos of some easy, quick, but effective exercises to stay fit, the 3 Click Fitness Test has an option where the website provides you with a relatively customized diet plan based on some simple parameters you have to input. In a nutshell, this website truly is your one stop fitness shop and is a boon for all of you who are looking to get healthier.

The All About Honey portion of the website very clearly brings out reasons as to why honey is better than sugar and as to how honey forms probably the best substitute to sugar in our daily lives. And as mentioned before, some lip-smacking honey based recipes from Chef Vikas Khanna truly adds honey to the cake (notice how I say honey instead of cake).

So then, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start your own customized Honey Diet at http://www.daburhoney.com/

Rekindling my love for photography

Call it bragging, boasting or blowing my own horn, but the fact is that right from a very young age I have had a knack of looking at things very differently. While the rest of the folks around me would see the fallen branches of trees and the clogged drains after a good thunderstorm, I would probably be the only one who would notice the rainbow in the horizon; I was the only one who saw the ‘silver lining’ in the clouds, so to speak. It therefore goes without saying that I was thrilled to bits when I bought my first digital camera, all the way back in 2004.

It helped that I was on the picturesque hill-top campus of IIM Indore back in those days where everyday life offered more than a vista of the surrounding areas as well as the wonderfully and aesthetically designed campus itself. Suffice to say that I had quite a ball back in those days clicking a crazy amount of photographs. For someone who enjoyed photography so much even with the regular point and shoot analog cameras as a teenager, a digital camera was a blessing in disguise in that it allowed me to indulge in a lot of experimental photography.

However, as is the norm with all of us corporate slaves, life and professional commitments got in the way and the digital camera got relegated to a dusty corner of my cupboard. Over the last eight odd years now, I haven’t even bothered to pull it out of its cover, let alone take photographs. However, all this changed when two important things happened in my life in 2011.

First, I bought my first smartphone with a 13 MP camera which rekindled my love for photography. What with the fact that the phone was always with me and also supported a whopping SD Card which could store more than quite a few pictures. Second, the birth of my angelic cherubic daughter in late 2011 meant that I had more than enough reasons to indulge in photography. Both the availability of a good camera and an ever enthusiastic subject meant that photography made a comeback in my life.

However, the smartphone itself was not quite good and was made by a particular Korean company whose credo was that their products would work really well for a year or so by when they would have launched a new flagship with better features and latest software which would render the old phones redundant. This meant that although I was enjoying my photography I was not quite able to keep up with the latest in hardware and software updates as far as my mobile phone was concerned.

This issue will now be addressed squarely in the face with the launch of the new Moto E. The second generation phone in its series, this phone packs a powerful punch with its quad core processor, all day battery, Android Lollipop OS and customization options in the form of Motorola Bands and Grip Shells. As if these weren’t enough reasons to buy the phone immediately, the fact that it comes with two cameras – a rear facing one as well as a front facing one means that I can indulge in my love for clicking pictures with great gusto with the new Moto E.

What is better is the fact that clicking pictures with this phone is as easy as flicking my wrist twice to activate the rear facing camera and twist my wrist again to take selfies with the front facing one. Taking pictures has never been easier. I guess it is time for me to start taking photos by the dozen.

If you need more details regarding the new Moto E, visit their site at http://www.startwithmotoe.com/ to enjoy the experience itself.

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This post has been written for the #choose your smartphone journey with the all new Moto E blogging contest being conducted by Motorola in collaboration with Indiblogger, India’s largest community of bloggers.

Real Happiness

In this day and age where people have no time to acknowledge the role that family members play in their lives, it is quite rare to find good friends and relatives who not only play important roles in our lives, but also acknowledge the contributions that we make to their lives as well.

I remember the stories that my dad used to tell me about growing up as a joint family with six brothers, two sisters and countless cousins in small town Kerala in the 50s and 60s. Almost all these stories had at least one brother or a cousin or an elderly uncle who had helped out with something or the other that has had a lasting impact on my father’s life; it could be something as simple as developing the habit of cleanliness or something as complicated as helping out in learning and mastering the discipline of Financial Accounting. However, one thing that stood out in all these stories was the unadulterated gratitude that my father has for all the contributions that all these people have had in his life.

As for me and my generation, given that almost all my friends and me have to endure terrible commutes to office on a daily basis and have to face extreme work pressure in extremely competitive workplaces, means that we probably don’t recognize or thank all the people who have had a positive impact on our lives. And on the rare ocassions that we do, those days turn out to be celebrations, no less.

And these days are celebrations of the happiness of the good times in life that are probably a direct or an indirect result of the wonderful contributions of these people. All the contentment, laughter and banter that are part of these days end up creating memories and form the topics of conversations for future get-togethers and gatherings. And the best part is that these celebrations don’t necessarily have to be large scale parties in posh hotels or pubs. They could be something as simple as a bunch of four or five friends getting together at a common friend’s place, having some good food coupled with some awesome conversations. And add the omnipresent Coca Cola to the mix, and lo and behold, you have some memories which last for a lifetime.

I am blessed enough to have at least three good friends who have been with me through thick and thin for the last three decades of my life. And to double these blessings, the family that I married into brought some wonderful relationships in the form of my in-laws and a wonderful co-brother as well into my life. This small group of people make up my small relationship circle, and whenever I am spending any time with these people, either in groups or individually, means that I am having a really good time. In fact, this post itself is being typed out at the fag end of one such weekend where my wife and me have driven down to Hosur, just to spend some time with my sister in law and her husband. Although there was no fixed agenda to the day trip, the fact remains that we are having quite a bit of fun, and that, to me, is what true happiness is about; spending quality time in the company of people who don’t judge you, don’t make fun of you, don’t expect anything in return, and who only have unconditional love and companionship to share with you.

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This post is part of the Coca Cola campaign to celebrate the International Day of Happiness. Check out their awesome TVC below

Unconditional friendship

A couple of weeks ago, P, an old friend of mine called up and asked me whether I was interested in accompanying G and him when they went to purchase a bicycle for P. I immediately agreed despite the fact that it had been more than two decades since I parked my butt on a bicycle. And the funny part was that while G, a reasonably avid bicycling enthusiast and P were discussing extremely technical details of what bicycle would suit P and were trying to figure out the options that would fit within his budget, not for one moment did I feel out of the conversation at all during the drive to the showroom itself. I guess, the fact that the three of us have been friends for almost three decades now helped the situation quite a bit.

In fact, after P was done paying for the new bicycle itself and we were on our way back, G started reminiscing about how it had been around 28 yrs since I first met him (and 24 yrs since both of us met P) and we laughed about some of the funnier incidents that we had encountered together. Pretty soon we realized that there was more to this friendship than the three of us could easily describe in words. There are very few times when either of us, especially P and me, are lost for words and this was well and truly one of them. And believe it or not, we ended the trip in complete silence, lost in our thoughts and memories. That’s what true friendships and true friends are about, they don’t need words, labels and hollow promises to keep them going. True friends just know that the others will be there for them, no matter what.

Somewhere in the second half of 2013, I once again had the opportunity to try and make similar new friendships, albeit in the virtual space. When the WordPress platform came up with this concept of daily blogging and published a list of blogging prompts for all the days of 2014, I conjured up this wild idea of putting together a small team of bloggers (initially four of us, which later expanded to around 25+) and participating in this ‘challenge’. And my first choice of the team members were Sakshi (www.sakshinanda.com), Sid (www.iwrotethose.com) and Rekha (www.rekhadhyani.com). Now the only reason that I chose the three of them was because all three of us were contributors to a parenting blog in those days and enjoyed each other’s writing quite a bit.

That being said, I did not know any of them well enough just to pick up the phone and ask them if they were game for this seemingly crazy endeavor of publishing at least one post for the group blog everyday of 2014, based on the prompts provided. But I did just that. Well, I didn’t pick up the phone, but messaged them on Facebook, laid out the plans and asked them if they were game. And surprisingly enough all of them agreed almost immediately. And this led to Project 365 (http://wepostdaily.wordpress.com) which soon became something that the four were known for in the blogging space. In any case, this post is not to talk about the blog itself, but something else, the friendship that started because of it.

Now, picture this. The fact that the three of them decided to take up this relatively crazy endeavor purely because they enjoyed my parenting related blog posts endeared all of them to me quite a bit. And pretty soon, in the few days of 2013 that were left, we all realized that there were more things that were common to us rather than just the fact that we were good parents and good bloggers as well. The fact that none of us let our egos get in the way, and we were all thoroughly professional and didn’t let down each other no matter what, meant that pretty soon we were good friends along with being team mates as well. We soon realized that the only way that Project 365 would see a post being published every day was if we all contributed in our small ways over and above what we had initially agreed upon. And the loosely coupled structure that we provided to the ‘core team’, that we called ourselves meant that one or more of us stepped in, when the person assigned a particular task couldn’t do it due to various reasons.

In more ways than one, Project 365 taught me a lot about how I performed in group situations, how I could make and more importantly retain new friendships, and more importantly have fun even under extremely stressful situations, on days when we were struggling to come up with posts to be published for the day.

Between these two groups (G, P and me) and the Project 365 one, I have well and truly experienced what true and unconditional friendship is, and I can quite confidently say that I will do whatever it takes to remain friends with these folks forever, if possible. After all, that is what friends are for, aren’t they.

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This post has been written for the Housing.com blogging campaign, you can follow them on Twitter using the hashtag #together or #lookup or on Google+ to check out their latest offerings and media campaign.

My Day

The date is 10^th of January, it is The Supreme Ruler’s Day today.

As is the norm, my faithful minions would have worked around the clock to ensure that all children below the age of 15 yrs have been delivered with books appropriate to their age and reading habits. After all, it is critical that future generations of this wonderful universe are equipped with a broad enough point of view on things which only a wide variety of reading can give them. Of all the good things done on this day, the book distribution remained my favorite one.

I still remember the first Supreme Ruler’s Day and how it was conceived all of a decade and a half ago. On that fateful night of 9^th January, the clouds finally parted way to let in a bright beam of light (funnily enough looking just like that light before the massive explosion scene in the movie The Independence Day from sometime in the 1990s, all those years ago). And then all of a sudden a voice which funnily enough everybody in the world understood informed them that going forward me, mahabore, of all the people would be their Supreme Ruler and that from the next day, the 10^th of January when I turned 19 yrs old, they would have to abide by my rules.

I was as surprised as everybody else was, but who was I to question the powers that be. And in honor of this joyous occasion, my first order of duties was to declare 10^th of January as The Supreme Ruler’s Day.

This would be a day where the administration took it upon itself to cook and serve food to the entire kingdom at official expense, provide all citizens with one fresh new pair of clothes based on their occupations, provide at least one book to all children below 15 yrs of age based on the specifications mentioned in the first paragraph, and overall a day of great celebration.

On this national holiday, the citizens of this great kingdom would take a day off from their regular occupations and celebrate the joy of being alive, active and thank The Supreme Ruler and the powers that be for their bountiful existence. Between what nature had provided them with, their own hard work and prudent exercise of authority by The Supreme Ruler, the citizens had everything they required for a comfortable life and were never found to be lacking in anything that was required to keep them happy.

On this day, the citizens therefore thank me, The Supreme Ruler and the powers that be for all the good things in their lives and hoped and prayed that they wouldn’t have to return to the dark days of yore where institutionalized religion and dirty politics played in the guise of democracy had effectively ensured that mankind had reached the brink of extinction.

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This post has been written for Project 365: A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was that I had been declared the Supreme Ruler of the universe and I had to describe a holiday or festival I had created in my honor in great detail.