these are a few of my favourite things….

so the first ever professional play i did was ‘sound of music’ directed by nosherwan and meher jehandgir and produced by hose vasunia….an incredible experience for a girl of 14 years of age…i learnt how to dance, sing, act and learnt to explore theatre my biggest passion yet!

i played liesl and for 50 odd shows sang ‘i am 16’ LIVE every night!

shiamak davar watched over 25 of the shows and always sat in the first row starting the claps after every song, every time! that’s how i met him….theatre lover, lover of the arts and sound of music fanatic…!

one of our songs was ‘favourite things’ …so today on a friday (my favourite day of the week!) i thought it might be nice to list a few!

so here goes-:

i love-:

  1. fridays (cos they signify the start of an amazing weekend)
  2. chocolate
  3. teddy bears
  4. valentines day
  5. pink!
  6. tons of pretty stationery which i ‘need’ to pick up….not sure whether i’m ever gonna use it!
  7. hubba bubba sour berry flavour!
  8. funky handbags!
  9. huge chunky jewelry
  10. rom-coms!
  11. dinner on sat nights with friends!
  12. murder mystery parties
  13. entertaining guests at my home
  14. going on date nights!
  15. dancing in the rain!
  16. my face song on repeat on my itunes player
  17. singing!
  18. reading responses to my blog!
  19. laughing….like really laughing!
  20. being surprised!
  21. baking n cooking
  22. planning parties
  23. planning vacations!
  24. seeing new places
  25. exploring new cities
  26. decorating my house
  27. walking cookie
  28. learning to play a tune on my piano
  29. learning to sing a tune!
  30. COFFEE! – actually coffee should be number 1 -anyone who knows me at all would know that!!!!

this is what i got in 5 minutes….would love to add some more…so blog in your favourites and who knows maybe i can make some new favourites of my own too!

NOW THE POINT OF THIS POST– is to make sure my week (next week) is more exciting!—so every day next week i’m going to indulge / do atleast ONE of my face things!…it’ll give me something to look forward to on monday and beat those monday morning blues!!!! 😉

love bytes!

so it’s the month of cupid and love is in the air…atlas for those of us who still believe in hearts and fairytale romances and ‘the bachelor’ …( which to be honest i’ve almost lost faith in…considering the 2 God awful reruns on star world recently!) BUT…anyway I still love love! I love romance . I love candles and orchids and teddy bears and mush and so it would make sense that i would write a play about romance called ‘let’s talk about love!’ the play is about 3 couples in different stages of love relationships and 1 single guy searching for ‘true’ love!

the play premiered to a full kala ghoda festival and the crowds love it so much…i decided to finish the play and write what happened next….

the result- LOVE BYTES! which plays on the 13th of february at the ngma at 6:30 p.m.!

talking too much about the play…well its about love…it makes sense and well i love love!

i’ve never been the kind of girl who hid roses from people who liked me or threw away cards from those who cared,

i loved when people bared their hearts…i love when men dared,

in a world of sadness and a world of hate,

if we took time for love, took time to appreciate,

the power of beauty , the joy of life,

i think we’d have a world , with less anger, less strife,

if we celebrate the power of love, even if just for one day,

it’ll brighten up a world so full of grey!

i love love, i always have and i always will,

i love hearts and rainbows and flowers on my window sill,

i love that when you say you love me and me heart still skips a beat,

i love that special rush i get whenever we still meet,

i love that love gets simpler as it strengthens day by day,

like a part of your body true love comes to stay.

so even though valentines days may be cliched and old for you,

it gives me a chance to celebrate my love and to say…’i still do !’

….to all the people i love ! (cookie and aditya… u still top the list …and yes (IN THAT ORDER)!) 🙂

To be with you…in sickness and in health!

So the joy of having had a neurological illness like ADEM is that my immune system is shot to hell! Now this article will be very bitter and annoyed ….but sometimes it’s just hard to be un-annoyed when my brain and mind wills me on and my body seems to be happy crumbling!

So…. the husband was sick! Now this is good–not that he is sick …but that i get a chance to worry about him, look after him and check whether the temperature is lower or whether he’s inhaled! All was going fine…i got him into bed early, felt I was a very good wife and even tucked in myself!

2 am and I wander into the bathroom only to suddenly realise I’m blacking out…yell for aditya. He effortlessly , even in his sick-state puts me on to the bed where I then proceed to throw up! Considering I hadn’t eater dinner, it was worrying….and so he’s out with all the correct tablets and carefully tucks me in and i go to bed for the second time in the night…now feeling like a very bad wife and a very sick person!

I awaken to aditya looking after himself with haldi-milk and steam and he asks ME how i am feeling….just as I am about to embark on a ‘I’m fine…let’s worry about you…’ conversation(the good wife in me wants to be good!) ; I’m interrupted by a dry cough from my throat and a splitting headache that won’t allow me to open my eyes…

As this article goes up…I am now nauseous and have a cold that won’t quit.

Dearest Aditya…I promise to be with you …in great health and greater health….In any sickness, apparently my body will steal it from you, and create a brand new more annoying version of your sickness…so for that I am sorry!

Cough Cough!

Time travails!

So we each run around talking about how we don’t have time. we don’t have time for this or that….and that we wish we had more hours in a day….but do we actually make PRODUCTIVE use of that time…???

an actor with a day job i was speaking to once told me after a rehearsal that his job with a well known tv channel was really not that challenging… he came in by 10. 10- 10:30 he had breakfast with a co-worked either at his desk or at the co-workers desk. and then he went back to work, where he logs in to gmail chat…finishes his work in an hour and chats online the rest of the time or better still facebook’s! then it’s lunch and he and his group usually take a long lunch from 1- 2:30, after which it’s an hours work and then off to tea from 3:30-4:30 and they pack up by about 5:30 ish…

Productively he has 2 hrs of work…the rest of the day the company seems to just want seat-warmers!

that’s the one thing i learnt at stanford…it didn’t matter how much time u spent at the books…what mattered was what you gave in….results mattered….it didn’t matter whether you could absorb what you read in an hour and party the entire weekend , starting friday morning…it mattered what you gave in at the next class.

companies lay too much importance on desk sitting and less importance on actual competence! my friend at stanford finished his entire under-graduation a year early–where did he find time, with his excess partying and trillion extra-curricular activities…i don’t know…but i do know that he was valued on his work and results an not how much time he sat looking at books! sitting for 8 hrs at your desk does not make you productive, finishing deadlines, completing tasks- that does!

google and so many other software companies in palo alto have chilling rooms where employees can play ps3 , bounce basket balls ..even go for a swim-DURING THE WORK DAY to INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY!!! there is even a software giant who has a sleep room for a quick afternoon siesta!

PRODUCTIVITY is about making optimal use of your energies …

think about it….

walk into an office and you’ll see 9/10 employees on social networking sites. that’s great- they need the downtime! but wouldn’t it be better if you worked with them basis deadlines and not basis 9-5 p.m.!that way maybe you’ll even end up saving on electricity bills and have a happier group of co-workers….

so today….just start setting personal deadlines for you and those in your team (WORKABLE personal deadlines) and then let them be adults and make them deliver on their deadline… surprisingly ,like what happens in palo alto software companies a lot of employees because of the time freedom they get end up working a lot later and a lot harder….so its win-win!

Dealing with that MONDAY morning!

so you’ve got the monday morning blues….which becomes the monday afternoon blues and sure enough makes for an exhausted monday    evening where you’re almost too tired to get home and crawl into bed….each week you think monday’s are going to get easier …Each week they  don’t! Each week you hate monday mornings and each weekend you dread the onset of this awful day!

Let’s change that! Well you’re having a bad monday. You take it out on assistant. Now assistant has a bad monday. He takes it on peon. Peon    takes it out on the next in his food chain and soon before you know it..everyone is snappy, everyone fed up and everyone exhausted!

What we do wrong I believe…is kind of the vacation syndrome. Like after a vacation you need another one just to get over how exhausted you  are….on mondays we put all our plans for the week and try to accomplish them all in ONE day! it’s impossible. it’s ridiculous. and it most  definitely will kill you! so let’s try  a more structured approach to the week…on monday start your days a bit slower and more organised. figure out  what you have to do and how you are going to achieve it. try and schedule weekly meetings on a tuesday where people can tell you what they can  realistically achieve by the end of the week and not over-promise and under-deliver. start the week differently. do a coffee session. say hi to fellow workers without snapping at them…work your way in to the day…so mid way thru the day it already feels like a thursday-more relaxed, more focussed..less frantic.

by the end of the day start focussing on what the week’s goals look like for you and therefore on a tuesday morning you’d have thought them out…got rid of the weekend’s excesses, tackled the monday morning blues, worked thru it systematically and without any mania figured out how this week plays out for you!

i’m not saying do nothing on a monday. i’m saying use monday to put your week in order and make it more productive for you. planned & productive monday. planned & productive week!

don’t let monday crush you! CRUSH MONDAY INSTEAD!

starting over again…and the other things fun in my life!

It amazes me…the resilience of people or may be it’s just my resilience to keep starting over …I mean you’d think it gets old after a while! You start a blog and then it’s wiped out, start a new one, then you find that one doesn’t work – the marvel of computing and human error and then you start a new web site and start all over again! I mean that’s NOT FUN!

BUT IT IS!

Every time I start over , I get the chance to do it right this time… to make it good, to correct it, to make promises I can keep, to write more regularly and better, to BE BETTER!

That’s kind of my life too…. I realise.

I have started from scratch so many times, I can’t remember how many times I’ve hit the floor. So many times, that I have become a very experience ‘faller’ as someone once told me! I’ve fallen hard, but I’ve managed to stand up and as I have also been told (yes these are real comments) ‘ I’m the neatest faller someone had ever seen! 😉 ‘

I mean …let’s look at this I started  out with theatre, moved to films, found that films was more about the sleeping around and the sleeping with whom and realised that this was not a place for me ( a 17 year old)…. went back to theatre and started Balancing Act Productions. Needed to do more than just act , so started producing and directing…learnt the ropes, fell on my face and learnt to roll, crawl  and walk again! All was going perfectly when bang I fall and get ADEM (Acute Disseminated Encyphomyelitis)-  a single attack of multiple sclerosis and am left side paralyzed, lose my ability to speak, swallow, see and hear on one side and I start over. 37 kgs extra in one month (thanks to steroids fed to me via a tube up my face) and after being in coma for 2 days; I start again…sitting, teaching, creating and working!

And now as Balancing Act Productions moves from stage to television and even to film…it’s like I’m back on the floor learning how to put the bricks up, watching people try and push me down, hurt me, will me to fail , will me to fall down and to them I say-   I’ve fallen down so many times, it’s not starting over any more…it’s RE-INVENTING!

And God! That is FUN! 😉

So…to new beginnings…to joyful first steps and to great successes!

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