The Bravenet guestmap is my new toy. Thanks to fellow blogger Manjusha for the pointer. The funda is this — your visitors come to your blog, go to a map and place a pin on it to indicate where they are visiting from.

Over time, you get a geographic distribution of your visitors, with lil comments, cute icons, flags and all that goop. Just the kind of cutesy sparkly thing that i’ll get all excited about for now and probably get tired of in some time. But while its around, its my new fancy, so please humor me and go place your pin on it. Thankoo! Convenient link provided above and on the left. Yes, unsurprisingly, it is the globe with the pin stuck in it.

This is to formally announce that I am now accepting Diwali gifts. Cash, checks, demand drafts, ancestral property, gold coins and mithaai dabbas (pure ghee only) are welcome. Other creative ideas will be subject to consideration.

Avoid last minute rush. Send immediately!

Happy Deepavali to all! :)

Look at how high Firefox is on the list of browsers used to visit this blog! And see where IE is! *wiping tears of joy* My precious readers.. you have done me proud!

Yes, I know these are results for just *one* day, and come tomorrow, some IE-happy user might skew it in a different direction, but still.. even if its only for the moment, it makes me one very happy bunny!

*hops away*

Nirupa Roy (aka Kokila Balsara) passed away last month (October 13th), I learnt only today. An actress who made a career out of playing the teary-eyed (sometimes blind) long-suffering mother, she was a costume designer’s joy (one sad-looking unwashed saree for the entire movie is not too hard to stock).

Jokes apart though, here was an actress who had no qualms in playing mother to an actor older than her (Dev Anand in Munimji (1955)), at a time when heroine roles were still being offered to her. Her pre-glycerine-factory career included playing the heroine in over a hundred films ranging from mythologicals and social dramas to off-beat cinema classics like Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953) against stalwart Balraj Sahni.

Amidst the angry-young-man, wounded-hero histrionics of Amitabh, she stood her own and shone as the moralistic mother in Yash Chopra’s Deewar (1975). Playing a mother who chooses righteousness over the love for her son, this was arguably her most famous role of all for moviegoers of today. A role preserved in time with the famous dialogue —

Vijay (Amitabh): Mere paas paisa hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai, kya hai tumhaare paas?
Ravi (Shashi Kapoor): Mere paas maa hai!

(Translated : I have all the wealth and luxuries in the world, what have you got? I have a mother on my side!)

May her soul rest in peace.

Something that was on my mind thanks to a recent conversation with a friend —

Presumptions and generalizations are the very bane of communication, aren’t they? The more we assume about people, based on stereotypes, the less we give them a chance to be themselves. So much that eventually, the person you think you know is more a creation of your own conclusions rather than who they really are. A total waste of getting to know someone, methinks.

And so often anyway, it is the exceptions that prove the rule. So isn’t it best to just let a person be, discover them for who they are, the opinions they hold .. and be pleasantly surprised at how different from the so-called norm they are? Soon enough one realizes that there is no norm in the first place.

Reminds me of a line from a recent mail forward —

We always create images and perceptions about people and then try to make them prisoners of those images …

Something to think about, isn’t it?