I did not know that about songs..

One of the things that I constantly accept these days is that most of the Hindi film songs that I fall in love with are usually blatantly plagiarized from some unknown foreign country band. I mean, I can't believe that some of the Indian music composers are so dumb that they think the people wouldn't have listened to the original in these much much global internet times ;-). For example "Kya Mujhe pyar hai" from the film "Woh Lamhe" - I really loved the song when I first heard it, but felt a little bit letdown after finding out that its a copy of the song "Tak Bisakah" by an Indonesian band called Peterpan. I still love the song, but yeah it has lost its charm ;-). Another song is "Kaho na kaho" from the movie Murder which is the note-to-note copy of an Arabic song called "Tamally Maak" by Amr Diab. I prefer the Arabic one not only because of the voice, but because of the unmentionable actors in the Hindi version ;-) :-D.

Hence recent songs, unless by some exceptional music directors, can be written off as a copy from some corner of the world or another :-p. So its not a very big deal (more examples are "Dil mera churaya kyu" from "Akele Hum akele tum" which is a copy of "Last Christmas" by George Michael, "Nazare mili" from "Raja" which is a copy of "Come September" and so on). But now when it comes to olden melodies, we still respect many of the directors and composers as true masters and all of their songs are held to the utmost devotion. Yes, there were many songs there too "inspired" by western compositions, one major example (atleast for me its a major one because I love the song so much :-D), is "Itna na mujhse tu pyar bada" from the movie Chhaya which is very much inspired by Mozart's much admired "Symphony No. 40". Another inspired song I came to know about as I was writing this post was "Babuji Dheere chalna" from the movie Aar Paar, inspired by a spanish song "quizás, quizás, quizás", though it has only about 2 notes in common :-p. I'm sure there are many other olden goldies whose notes were influenced from the then famous music from around the world.

But what led me to this post was the song "Kaun hai jo sapno me aaya" from the movie "Jhuk gaya aasmaan" sung by Rafi.

As I have said a couple of times before, Rafi is my most favourite Hindi singer and this song has been one of my favourites for a long time. Well, you don't have to imagine my shock when I learnt the song was a copy of "Marguerita" by another of my all time favourite singers Elvis Presley!




I love Elvis's voice and I have a couple of songs by him I absolutely adore ("Love me tender", "Can't help falling in love with you", "Its now or never" etc :-D), but I hadn't heard of this one until I read about the plagiarism part :-p. The initial part is obviously a copy, but even the stanzas seem a lot similar :-p. Well the shock did wear off after a couple of days and now I have 2 similar songs that I love basically because of the singers - I cannot let go of either Rafi or Elvis ;-).

Do let me know if you know of more such "inspired songs" :-D.

A blogger's best friend..

Thats what my blog has become in 6 years to me. Thats right, today is exactly 6 years since I started writing my blog. That certainly means that there have been atleast 6 posts including this one, talking about how much my blog has come to mean to me. Good excuse to write a post at the least :-D.

Seriously though, I cannot believe that I'm still writing. I mean, ideally I did think and do think that I will be writing all my life, but the situations in life don't really give you that kind of a comfort level or that kind of a time. I've seen blogs and the associated bloggers disappear without a word suddenly because of life pressures and I don't really blame them. When I had Snugli, there were many points in time when I did wonder whether I was 'neglecting' her by dedicating a bit of time to my activities (especially blogging). But there's my duties as a mother to her, as a wife to my husband, as a daughter to my parents and then there is a duty to myself. To do the things I love to do :).

And I do love to write. The posts have been slow for the past couple of months, due to the little one that I'm carrying. Call it fatigue or maybe laziness, but to be honest, I don't mean to give up on the blog yet. Have no idea how tough it'll be after the delivery, but right now, I plan to make some time somehow :). So hopefully there will be a post next year celebrating the 7th birthday of the blog if it goes as well as it is going right now. And to add, I don't really have that many commentators pestering me to write, so that must prove that this is purely for myself and few of my family/friends who are regular visitors :).

Another hindrance to blogging is the evolution of day-to-day social networks like twitter and facebook. I'm still not on twitter, thank God (cannot afford to update yet another one), but I am on facebook and I have to admit that its easier to put up daily thoughts there, than create a post for it on the blog. Obviously there is no detail-oriented stuff as it is here in this blog, but its good for a quick quote or a quick link pointing to a news I thought was interesting. Yet for me personally, that can never take the place of this blog - even though for some people apparently it does. I have seen people update 10-20 status messages per day, upload irritating photos of what they cook daily or see daily or do every second of every minute of every hour of every day and people updating the damn thing when they are attending weddings (right now while attending someone else's wedding, but I'm sure the day will come when they'll be updating during their own as well :-p), or watching cricket or doing anything. And everytime I see this I feel like shouting at them to stop and to enjoy what's happening in actuality rather than striving to keep strangers "updated" (sadly some even consider strangers as very good friends :-p). But oh well, its their life, their choices.

Anyways, a very happy 6th birthday to my beloved blog. Hope you continue to exist as long as I do :).

Craving and caving in..

I figured that I owe you all a pregnancy post after that abrupt update :). First of all, thanks to all who bothered to leave a comment and wish me, and to all who thought of leaving a comment but were too busy to do so (:-p). No thanks if you said "Meh" and walked off :-p.

The decision to have a second baby was for us, a combination of many reasons. For one thing, we both have siblings ourselves and we, especially I, wanted Snugli to have that experience, that particular companionship. Secondly we felt it kinda was the right time. We didn't want it too early (needed time to recover from the first one :-p, :-D) and didn't want it to be too late, when a second one will be more of an intrusion than a welcome. Thirdly, we had started to go through this terrible nostalgia about Snugli, hehehe. I mean the first year was full of frustrations, but it has been our lives' highlight to watch Snugli grow up (I think its any parent's life's highlight :-D) and we did want a repeat of that. Yeah, nostalgia, half the time ends up helping you make the craziest decisions :-p.

What I'm saying is that the second time pregnancy hasn't been as smooth for me as the first one was. Yup, the comparison begins now with the second baby still inside my womb :-p. While carrying Snugli, I literally had no pregnancy symptoms except for heartburn in the last couple of months. But this time around, man, has it been a wild ride! I have seen it all. First trimester (the first 3 months), I had morning sickness the entire day, every day. So well, "morning sickness" definition wasn't really suitable to what I had :-p. Thankfully I wasn't vomiting at all, but would feel queasy the entire day. Plus I used to feel tired. The tiredness was so bad that I would drop off to sleep in the evenings while sitting on the sofa! I was waiting for the 2nd trimester relief, but there wasn't any. The queasiness continued and so did the tiredness. No break. As of now I'm in my 7th month and I still have the morning sickness (it is thankfully limited to the mornings these days) and the tiredness - yeah you'll still find me nodding off in front of the TV some evenings :-D.

Plus heartburn made its appearance in the 2nd trimester end - so guess this little one will be born with a head-full of hair like Snugli did ;-). Thats not an old wives tale btw - John Hopkins actually did a research on that and proved that excess of estrogen causes heartburn in mothers and more hair in babies :-D. Jokes apart, the heartburn seems worse this time, sometimes I start feeling it even when I taste something while I cook! So yeah queasiness+tiredness+heartburn implies this baby is a troublesome one already :-p. My gynec says that the tiredness is basically due to the fact that I have a toddler to run behind and she insists that even the littlest things I do for Snugli contribute towards the strain. But honestly speaking, Sri has taken over most of the chores and it feels like all I do is laze around :-p. And did I mention how glad I am to have him as my partner? ;-) :-D.

And then there were the cravings. This is the good part, believe me ;-). I never had a single craving when I carried Snugli. My mom always would talk about the cravings she had when she was pregnant with me - it seems she ate a whole box of jalebis once and so on :-p. My parents weren't that well off then, so I would tease her that cravings were just excuses to eat whatever she wanted during that time, hehehe :-D. Well, this time, I found out how wrong I was. My cravings started with a simple McDonalds icecream cone (the 49 cents one which is like a version of our Bangalore Softy) and I think it was sometime in November. If you haven't tried it, believe me when I say, its not all that good. Its okay, a bit different from any icecream that you get. But craving a softy in winter was a surprise ;-).

But I didn't really know how worse it'd get until I started craving the Garlic bread from Pizza hut. Now, I regularly have frozen Texas toast garlic bread in my freezer (you just have to heat it up in the conventional oven for sometime and its ready to eat), but I didn't want that. I wanted the salty Pizza hut one and nothing else. After thinking (and drooling :-p) about it for about 3 days, I finally asked Sri to get that and a pizza from Pizza hut one night. There is a hitch in the Pizza hut garlic bread, the thing is that all locations don't serve them, a couple have them and a couple don't. The one that Sri went to didn't and the guy coolly calls me up and says that they don't have it and hence he is getting bread sticks. To excuse the poor guy, this has happened a couple of times earlier and I've always been quite okay with it. But nah, not this time. I literally burst into tears over the phone, shouted at him, slammed the phone and hung up on him. God!! I have never behaved that atrociously in my life ever. The poor guy went all the way to another Pizza hut location to get his crazy pregnant wife the garlic bread she wanted :-D. Moreover we always get 4 pieces, this time he got 8 and I ate 5 of them!

Phew, that particular craving was done after I had garlic bread a couple of more times. Today, if you ask me, I don't even feel like looking at the damn things :-p. After that there was gobhi bajji (cauliflower fritters) which I literally kept dreaming about for 2 consecutive nights! Then finally the third day I made them myself and ate to my heart's content :-D. After that, there have been jalebis (available in Indian stores here, but not very good ones), pakodas (made them myself twice) and little things like that. I keep teasing Sri that he should be thankful that I have been craving only inexpensive foods, otherwise he'd have been a goner ;-). I think he is more thankful that the raging maniac he encountered hasn't made a reappearance, hehehee :))).

So thats it, the journey so far. I have to be thankful that things have been pretty normal and it has been a low risk pregnancy. More will be up whenever my brain keeps recovering from the shutdowns it has been facing on and off, then and again ;-).