Happy Deepavali

Happy Deepavali

Happy Deepavali to all my readers.

all of u might b thinking that where have i disappeared from the blogosphere.

it was all because of deepavali and also performance appraisal.

as all of u might have known that i have resolved to blog only on weekends. so the weekends were busy for shopping and so no blogging for two to three weeks.

god knows what are girls made of. they never tire of shopping, not even my 5 months pregnant bhabhi.

so today that deepavali has ended today and the pooja is over, i am blogging because of no better things to do.

no, i prefer to spend the day with family. so no gambling, no visiting friends, also no fire crackers (because of a death in the neighbourhood, diwali is a low key affair).

but i like decorating my house.

this time i had also committed to prepare a gharkunda (it is a small mud house that we prepared when we were children). but until today the chances of preparing one were bleak. then suddenly things started happening. and the gharkunda was prepared and decorated with colourful papers, lights, etc. not satisfying though.

this time we decorated the house well in time. in past years, the decorations used to stretch well into evening.

i did the pooja this time. i insisted on bhaiya and bhabhi doing the ganesh laxmi pooja. also it was their first deepavali after marriage. but they didn’t because of a small spat between them – you know the usual spat about girls. sometimes these things can be hillarious – once my bhabhi woke up from a dream and started fighting with brother. why? because she had seen him being friendly with a girl in her dream.

so deepavali is over for us now. ate many sweets. there are more. also dahi vada – prepared on special order. there is more on menu – will eat once this blog ends.

let’s talk about performance appraisal quickly. in this times of recession, economic slowdown, and job cuts, it is strange that we are getting an increment on salary.

performance appraisal was due in october. but 3 more days left for october to end and appraisal is nowhere to be seen.

thought that boss would give his decision on the eve of diwali. but he didn’t break his silence.

talking about pre-deepavali and everyone looks forward to what gifts is one getting from office.

we didn’t hope to get a good deepavali gift. last year we got a box full of local made chocolates.

but this year boss has been extra generous- he gave us swiss chocolates.

also we look forward to gifts from relatives, friends and neighbours. but that also means that we have to give others equivalent gifts.

okays, i am ending now. it’s time to hit the plates.

Here comes the 101st post on Phulki.com

First lemme share with you the good news that my blog has now 100 plus 1 post.

and what better way to share good news than with songs, filmy ishtyle.

tell me where you listen to your favourite hindi songs. raaga.com? musicindiaonline? smashhits? there are many and there lies the problem.

so what do you do when you are not able to find your preferred songs? look for the song on the other website. if you are fortunate, you get the song on the other website. in other cases, you keep surfing the web for hours.

how good would it have been had there been a search engine just like google for searching music.

your prayers are heard and here comes Phulki.com - a search engine for music.

hey Phulki people, pay me something for giving you advertisement on my esteemed blog for no cost at all.

but I am really impressed with the website and so i decided to share it with you people.

you just have to type the song you wanting to find and phulki.com searches it for you on raaga, smashhits, musicindiaonline, mp3hungama, and more websites.

the player is available just beside the search result. so if you want to play the song, just click on Add to Player. It doesn’t open any other popup. time saving, isn’t it?

want to download the song. just click on download and it starts downloading immediately. no need to register with different websites in order to download. gr8!

beside each song are given small boxes in green, orange and red which signifies high quality, medium quality and low quality respectively.

on the home page of phulki.com, you can find recent searches by Recently played songs, Popular searches and Featured Playlists. There are also New Releases.

you can make an account on Phulki.com and you can save a playlist by your name and hear it later.

so i will recommend it as a must try for all my readers. presently, it has hindi and tamil music only. hope that they will start a search engine for english and the other regional songs in the future.

all the best to phulki.com

Songs from my memories

the other day there was a story of celebrities listing songs that make them nostalgic, force them into memories of the past and similar other feelings. since i am not a celebrity, i didn’t get a space to list the songs that are attached to my memories of the past. but i am the celebrity of my blog and here i list those songs.

films like ’souten’, ‘betab’, ‘ek duje ke liye’ etc. were released at the same time as my release on the earth. so, the beautiful songs like ‘teri tasveer mil gayi’, ‘ham mile tum mile’, and ’shayad meri shadi ka khayal’ were the first songs that entered my ears.

father was a great film enthusiast. until marriage, he wouldn’t miss any film and spend half his income on movies. mother forever chides him for being selfish since he didn’t ever take her to any movie (she was a village girl). then one day father decided to shut her by taking her to see ‘nadiya ke paar’. it was a rajshri film and a big hit of that year. and which are the songs that i remember from this film? ‘jab tak pure na ho fere saat’ and ‘kaun disha me leke chala re batohiya’

slowly video cassettes became more accessible. and which was the first film that the thakur and ojha family saw together (the cost of video cassete and cassette player was shared by the two families)? ‘jai santoshi mata’ – another big hit. and the aarti song ‘jai jai santoshi mata’ made such a big impression on my mind that i was humming it at class the next day. and once the good morning address subsided, the humming sound was easily audible. had it not been for RB, who declined hearing any sound, i would have been standing out of the class for indiscipline.

i was growing and the loss i felt most was my sweet voice. my voice was shrill but as teen age approached, my voice became hoarse. so much that my brother once told me a crow. that didn’t mean i stopped humming songs.

and then i got an opportunity to sing. yes, i awaited Ms. Mukherjee’s class because she gave us an opportunity to sing. and which was the song i chose – ‘mere sapnon ke rani’. this i stole from my brother’s diary. he noted the lyrics of all his favourite songs. I didn’t have this much patience. before the class could hear my golden voice, i irritated my family and neighbours with the rendition of the song.

there was one more time that i irritated my father with a song. I heard the song ‘dream girl’ in rangoli. since it was a sunday, both father and i were home. I am very bad in remembering the lyrics of songs; so it was just the one line of the song that i was repeating again and again – kisi shayar ki ghazal, dream girl; kabhi to milegi, kahin to milegi, aaj nahi to kal, dream girl, dream girl. having heard the song some twenty times or more, father finally boiled out and dared me to sing once more and he would thrash me.

then once i irritated my brother with the repeated rendition of the song – ‘muthkudi kavadi kadan’ by asha bhosale.

i heard the songs from the film ‘ashuiqui’ during subhash mama’s marriage. so if i don’t remember when was the marriage of subhash mama, i just check the year when ‘ashiqui’ was released.

i think it is the incidents attached to the song that make it more special – although you might have heard it many more times, it will appear new. ‘piya tosey naina lage re’ from ‘guide’ was performed by neelanjana, my first crush (not hers though – i mean she was too beautiful to give me any line). then i also liked her in another song from quayamat se quayamat tak (tu mera dil hai, dil kya jigar hai, dil de diya, tuje dil de diya) where she performed as the extras.

‘hawa hawa’ was a hot favourite during durga visharjan. another song that i heard during durga puja was ‘dil to pagal hai’ from the movie by the same name.

there are many songs that appear better when heard from other people than in movies. Ms. Mitali Mukopadhyaya sang ‘ek aise gagan ke tale’ during teacher’s day; and going through the actual version by kishore kumar, i found the one sung by Ms. Mitali to be better.

later when i came to delhi, i had greater access to songs – there was FM radio and two FM channels that kept pouring in more doses of songs – old and new. some particular songs from this period were ‘aaj kal paon zameen par’ and ‘tu hai wahi’.

talk of songs and i cannot forget swati mam, a senior, who sang ‘tumhe ho na ho, mujhko to itna yakeen hai, mujhe pyar tumse nahi hai’. and the version by salma agha was not as appealing to my senses. later rameshwari, a classmate who knew how much i liked the song by swati mam, sang it during our farewell.

so these are some of the songs that make me nostalgic. why don’t you list yours own.