From top 12 to top 3!

After three days of audition comprising driving test, travel documentation, and route plan discussions, we were selected as one of the top 3 couples in the Great Driving Challenge.


We are on road now. Today is Day 3. Could not update the blog as we were flagged off soon after the results were out. Since then, it's been 300 km of driving and another 5-6 hours of blogging.

Do check out our regular blog updates at http://www.greatdrivingchallenge.com/unny. Follow and cheers us through this journey. Hope you'll enjoy the blog posts!

Will you follow us?

Thanks for all who voted for us and helped us make it to the top 12 pre-finalists of the Mitsubishi Cedia Great Driving Challenge. We hope to get your support for the next level as well.

Auditions for selecting the 3 finalists will be from August 3 to 5. Before that we have to maintain a blog on the TGDC website, get as many followers as we can, get them comment on the posts and cheer us up. That’s how you could support us now. It seems this online activity is one criterion for selection!

So please go to the link - http://www.greatdrivingchallenge.com/ee/index.php/nomines/blog/unny-bindhu/ and do sign up as our follower. Do visit this blog often and post your precious comments.

Remember that you can follow only one couple as followers of the 3 finalists and the winner also get some prizes.

Hope to see you on the blog. :-)

Cheating

Rich and handsome! What a combination!

“If only…” A fleeting thought; enough to make her feel guilty.

She turned and asked her husband, “On seeing a rich and attractive guy, if I thought ‘if only…’ is that cheating?”

“Of course not,” he replied.

Relief swept over her.

What’s the point in saying yes, he thought.

Wrote this '55 words story' for a contest. Got short-listed; but didn't get any prize. :-)

Who will scoop the poop?

A few places in Mumbai have the look of a well-maintained city. Marine Drive is one of them. Neat, long promenade, a broad seawall-cum-parapet where you can sit, relax and enjoy the sea breeze, no hawkers to pester you – all these have been made possible by the corporation along with the active participation of the residents’ welfare association.


But there has been one persistent problem – dog poop. Dog walkers too find the promenade interesting. The relaxed dogs relieve themselves on the walkway, to the disgust of others using the promenade. Reportedly, many have been unfortunate enough to step on the poop and skid. Now, the corporation has issued a final warning to dog owners who walk their dogs on the promenade to either clean up after their pets or face a ban from using the promenade for dog-walking. The rule is to be implemented from August.

This has sparked a debate about the where the responsibility of the corporation ends and the dog owners’ begin. Apparently, quite a few dog owners argue that it’s not their responsibility to clean after their dogs. Two years back, columnist Tavleen Singh claimed to be doing ‘civil disobedience’ when she refused to clear the excreta of her dog or pay the fine. Her argument was that the rule was not being enforced in other parts of the city and that the authorities did not provide plastic bags to pick up the poop. Reports also said that she wanted BMC to stop people from defecating in public before expecting her to scoop her dog’s poop. Phew! I’ve swore not to ever read her columns.

I wonder why supposedly educated people make such silly arguments. Will any human being defecate in public, provided he/she has a choice? People live without a roof over their heads and lead a hand-to-mouth existence. They can’t stop attending to calls of nature until after they have access to proper toilets. And there are limits to what any civic body can do without the cooperation of public. If people like Singh decide to obey laws only after everyone else follows them, they need not follow any law in our country.

I am not sure how the fight between the corporation and Singh ended. But I guess she would not have paid the fine.

When will we stop blaming others and take responsibility for our actions? When will we start ‘being the change what we wish to see in the world’? Till then, who will scoop the poop?

Great Driving Challenge

I and Unny are participating in a contest by Hindustan Motors – the Great Driving Challenge.


Do help us to get into the final by voting for us.

Follow this link to vote – http://www.greatdrivingchallenge.com/application/Unny/

Your vote is counted only after the email verification.

Every vote counts.

The lesser-known me

25 things few people know about me! Ever since mixedblessings89 tagged me (it’s quite some time now), I was trying hard to figure out what few people know about me. I secretly(?) went and checked some of the blogs that took up this tag. No, I didn’t have the slightest intention to do CtrlC-CtrlV. Anyways, I was still clueless after reading a few posts.

Does that mean I am so transparent? People can see through me? Oops! That could also mean I am hollow. No way! I am full of substance, though few people know that. There it is… The first thing few people know about me.

For the remaining 24, I ‘made up’ this list. :-)

2. I am quite romantic though I don’t look like one.

3. I have three birthdays. No, I was not born thrice. Just that my date of birth in official records is two months earlier than the original one, and I’ve a star birthday.

4. My first poem (in Malayalam) was published in the children’s magazine Lalu Leela some time in 1980s. It was about my cat.

5. I had cats; 16 at one point of time. Reared and buried quite a few of them.

6. My first short story (in Malayalam and last so far) got second prize in a competition held by the local fine arts club and it was later published in the school magazine.

7. I remember most of what I hear except the classroom lectures. So get bored when people tell me the same stuff again and again and sometimes contradict themselves.

8. I intend to write my autobiography.

Enough of gloating.

9. I get angry fast.

10. I can be nasty at times.

11. I don’t bother about what others think.

12. I’m not religious, but I know there’s God.

13. I (we) decided not to have kids even before marriage.

14. I like kids when I'm not responsible for them 24x7.

15. However, I feel responsible for the whole world, but too lazy to save it.

16. I like being alone and I like being with family and friends.

17. I was crazy about Hindi movies in my teens. My favourite hero was Mithunda.

18. For washing cloths, I don’t trust anybody except myself, my mother, sister-in-law, and IFB washing machine.

19. I like only the curd I make or the packaged ones.

20. I don’t like to see oil in my food – I mean in the non-fried ones.

21. I’ve tried many times to become a vegetarian and failed. Then I married a pure vegetarian. That did work partially. I am a vegetarian most of the time.

22. I get put off by insincerity.

23. I like those who act over those who just talk.

24. But I often talk and not act.

25. So I believe, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung

Now I feel I can write more. Who will have the patience to read it?

Meanwhile, mixedblessings89 gave me the Honest Scrap award.



I honestly made this 25 things up. :-)

Sunday selections

The title might ring a bell to Keralites of my generation. All India Radio, Trivandrum used to air a programme for dedicating songs, every Sunday at 3 pm. Not sure if they still have it. That was a time when cable TV was unheard of. Probably, it was the only programme where the audience could mail requests to broadcast English songs dedicated to someone of their choice. I don’t know if it was a popular programme because English songs were (and are) alien to me.

Today, TV channels are inundated with mutants of phone-in/write-in/SMS-in programmes.


I pooh-pooh the people who calls or writes with much passion and enthusiasm. Who has the time to do all these? Non-bloggers might be thinking the same about bloggers.

Then I realised I am a hypocrite.

Long back, I too had written to Sunday Selections. Well, not exactly. I hadn’t even heard about this programme until a hostel friend explained it to me. We were a gang of 17 gals and had named ourselves DDTs. Can anyone guess the expansion? We even had a logo. Okay, let me not digress. We made sure to celebrate everyone’s birthday. A gift was given and a treat was taken in return. Once, for G’s birthday, R came up with a new gift idea – to dedicate a song to G through Sunday Selections. That was when I first heard about it. We bought a post card (15 paise – misers we were!) and sent in our request. I don’t remember the song we had requested. G would be at home on Sundays. Somehow, we managed to get her listen to the programme, without revealing our secret. Those who were doomed to be in the hostel got a pocket radio. A red one, I remember.

So we sat at different parts of Kerala on that Sunday afternoon eagerly waiting for our letter to be read. Sadly, it was never read. Later, someone told us that they would give preference to letters written on fancy papers. Our humble postcard didn’t even stand a chance. Next day we told G about our failed attempt to sponsor a song for her.

I remember listening to Sunday Selections a few times after that. But it didn’t have the charm to retain my interest. But our excitement and the later disappointment is something I should consider while scoffing at the participants of today’s programmes.

Other than the song dedication programmes, I don’t like the reality shows, which many are crazy about. I can watch the former for its songs, but I can’t stand the latter. Facebook is another place where I feel lost. All these “What kind of a cat/dog you are”, “Do you have brains”, “Which famous people share bad hair day with you,” stuff do not kindle my curiosity. I ignore requests to join groups like “I love Upma”, and “I like the smell of drain – oops, rain”.

Does age has anything to do with lack of appreciation for all these new trends? Maybe.