Will somebody tell these people that I don’t need another credit card?

Or a personal loan (I already have a few under my belt thank you!).

Or a life insurance policy (I have 2 and I only have one life last time I checked).

So, here I am in the middle of something important and the phone rings.

“Madam, we are offering you a free lifetime XXX credit card?”

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Brunches can prove to be rather harmful to your pockets. But just hanging out at a nice place, enjoying the breezy and cool Bangalore weather in the company of family and friends over a long, leisurely lunch is not an altogether unpleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon either. I would recommend it once in a while!

This Sunday, I got an opportunity to try out the brunch at Lido, the 24 hour coffee place and restaurant, at Ista. For those of you who might not know this place, it’s the hotel built in the same place where the old Lido theatre was located. It’s relatively new so a lot of people haven’t heard of it as yet.

Here’s the review of Ista and Lido and a whole lot of pictures!

This reminded me of my chance encounter around this time last year.

I ran into Param and Shruti at the place I was staying in Paris (they had just returned from somewhere and were booked into the same place) and we crossed paths. Shruti, I’d met once once before, but Param I only knew virtually! It was even funnier because we’d been trying to set up a meeting in Bangalore and never quite succeeded.

That chance encounter led to a lovely evening spent on a Paris roadside drinking wine, eating French food and also meeting another familiar face, Mahesh, who was studying there.

~~

This happened on Saturday morning. My car had gone for servicing so I was crossing the road, to take a rick for an appointment with the dentist. As luck would have it, a few ricks rejected me. Suddenly, a bike stopped right in front of me and a guy says, “Anita!” with a rather expectant look.

I look a little blankly, since he was also wearing a helmet. And I have a hard time sometimes recognizing people without their helmets, so this made it tougher. I definitely hadn’t seen the guy before, but he seemed vaguely familiar and he seemed really confident that he knew me!

“It’s me, Divs!”

For a moment I was totally lost for words! I mean what are the chances of running into Divs in the middle of BTM, while crossing the road? If I had crossed that road a few minutes earlier, we would have missed each other completely. But there we were!

But coming back to Divs - he’s been a frequent commenter on my blog for a while now. Probably over a year or so. And he’s been writing to me now and then. Just a few days ago, he wrote this really sweet post about how he was inspired to start blogging.

And suddenly, there is he is – the very same guy.

So that was my chance encounter that left me smiling for the rest of the day. Isn’t that what they’re all about? And they leave you with a totally overwhelmed feeling. Strange really, how people’s paths cross. And maybe not so strange, after all :)

Anyway, this one is for Divs, one of my longtime blog readers and now a blogger himself - another chance encounter I will remember for a long, long time!

So I’ve been looking for a place to buy. My mom thinks I should get “settled”. I think it’s a scary word and I have never quite understood why parents make it the purpose of their lives. If children are happy and content living their lives the way they want, why put so much pressure to conform to what they (the parents) think is the right way to live their lives?

Settling down in mom’s dictionary would mean having most (preferably all and more!) of the following - house, car, safe, secure job, money in bank, husband/wife, kids (not necessarily in the same order). While I don’t necessarily agree to this definition of being “settled in life” who’s going to do the explaining to my mom? Not me. I do want to live for a few more years :)

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Another two blasts in Guwahati yesterday. I called mom and dad immediately. My dad told me he was in the same area the day before. It’s a busy shopping centre so there’s likely to be quite a lot of people around. Mom travels to and fro work everyday and a pretty long distance.

It’s a little scary and unnerving as to how easy it is for someone to plant a bomb. The next thing you know is someone’s family is wiped out. Someone loses a father, someone a mother, someone else a sibling perhaps. And to what end? Right now, it’s more like violence for the sake of violence. They seem to be intent to terrorising the common man and wiping out their own people from the face of the state.

These days I’m making excuses to spend time in my car because of Radio Indigo, 91.9 FM. Where was it all along, I am asking?

I drive more slowly. This, in Bangalore, a city now known for its maha traffic jams, is not at all difficult. I try and find more places to go to. This too, is not very difficult!

Radio Indigo in my car. Worldspace at home. I’m all set.

And I am wondering where it has been all along? Ah yes, with Worldspace I read somewhere. But now that it’s freed itself from WS, I’m hoping that it doesn’t turn into yet another radio channel and keeps playing the great music it does!

Radio needs to cater to different sections of the audience. And since one can’t possible cater to all kinds of audiences, it’s best that the folks decide who they want to target and just go for that segment. Here, I’ve noticed, they try and please everyone and that is definitely not going to happen.

Just a year ago, we had no choice. But today there are many more channels to choose from. As people spend more and more time in their cars (especially in jam infested Bangalore) radio makes so much sense.

And while there are quite a few radio channels in the regional language with largely Hindi and Kannada content, it’s quite a pleasure for someone like me to tune into a channel slightly more cosmopolitan and where they play English music. And good music to boot!

It rocks. It’s my favourite channel now. I’m not buying that CD player anymore, thus saving myself a cool 12-14K!

I’m zimbly loving it!

Aqua and I were sitting at a place called Salon Mousse in Indiranagar getting our beauty treatments done.

In front of us was a huge glass window (and we debated whether it was sound proof since we couldn’t hear the traffic), a beautiful tree in front providing much needed green cover. It’s noon on a Wednesday.

As I stared out with a feeling of contentment, I feel I could get used to this way of living :)

These one day holidays in the middle of the week are very different from the long weekends. They are like guilty (and sinful) pleasures. You work for two days and then suddenly, you have a day off. It’s almost like you’ll hear your phone ring any minute with someone shouting and asking you to come back to work immediately. But no such thing happened thankfully.
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