I write because I feel!!

My name is not Khan and I am not a Muslim, but I just fell in love with the movie not because it has Shah-Rukh-Khan, simply because it is beyond being a Khan or a Muslim.

Not many would agree when I say I simply “love cooking”. In times of junk and processed foods it is often considered “madness” to sweat it out in the kitchen. But my love for cooking is growing deeper and meaning full these days and now I am very certain that "Cooking and falling in love are both very seductive processes. One has to let lose a little to experiment, to feel things and for sure to try things that one would not really try otherwise.” “Cooking” and “love” can both be hot and steamy affairs that not only require a little training, but also lots of effort. I wonder how can one who loves to eat, which most us do, can resist the temptation of not to try out those mouthwatering, lip-smacking goodies and celebratory meals that bind families and friends. Food has always been the way to explore other cultures and most importantly the best part of any travel. Bard, an American journalist and historian, fell in love with a Frenchman during a trip to Paris, married him and moved...

“ Aisi ulji nazar unse hatt ti nahi Daant se reshmi dor katt ti nahi Umar kab ki baras ke safaid ho gayi Kaari badari jawani ki chatt ti nahi Walla ye dhadkan bhadne lagi hai Chehre ki rangat udne lagi hai Darr lagta hai ishq karne mein ji ” Well writing a blog on a song…how trivial can one get, but how amazingly this triviality has been put in such beautiful Urdu dialect that I just can’t stop myself to say and agree with “ Dil to bachcha hai ji ” … Sometimes its better not to write too much and just flow with others’ thoughts, never enjoyed the depth and pain of “helplessness” as easily ever before…

Fresh are those childhood memories and I can still picture my classmate’s father (an uprooted Kashmiri) playing with him on my school playground. Every afternoon, during lunch break, he would come to the school to enjoy lunch with his son, would go through his notebooks, play with him and both father-son would be in a different world, talking a language (Kashmiri) which most of us didn’t understand in the plains (Jammu) in the early 90’s. Our fathers grew up in a different time, when a man was expected to show little or no emotion. Their bonding was admirable and like my classmate, even I used to wait to see a perfect father-son or rather an older and a younger friend, playing together with no inhibitions, sharing lunch and then those endless talks, as though they were running against time to finish all their talking. Lesser did my classmate know that one day when he would enter into his dad’s shoes to share much beyond his innocent talks, someone known would kill him. So small is this...

I often tried not to trust those oceanic deep twinkling eyes, For they always speak a language not matching with their words; Often fell for those true eyes, Just too pure and too honest in aught to disguise the sweet soul shining through them; The spark in those eyes just told me every thing that words otherwise would not have been able to express… How foolish I was to fall for those seemingly genuine eyes… And even tried to create a road from the eye to the heart, which I thought would not go through the intellect… How could those soulful eyes leave me alone and betray me…. And now I feel it would have been better to trust my ears than to trust those deceptive eyes???

So do you know which generation you belong to, whether Gen X or Y or are you still in a fix?? This thought passed my mind while watching “Love Aaj Kal”. I always thought “Love” a few years ago was selfless and admirable and thought, if at all, I would fall in love, it would be of that era when love was not considered a “stupidity” and most importantly was not a “calculative affair”. Finding the “right guy” that “clicked”, whom one sees and the bells start ringing in ears is considered bogus these days. Reality hits me hard every day when people of both generations (X and Y) tell me that one has to be “real” and often tell me that “bells ringing” in this time and age is a bit too much to expect. People I know of Gen X think that its “childish” and “immature”, and feel that one has to change with time. My own peer group feels that to live in this era and then expect things of yester years is “unreal”. But why can’t we have best of both worlds? I asked this to a councellor aunt and...