Frickin mad!

Ok so I'm really pissed off with the sudden onslaught of spam comments on my blog! I don't know how they manage to find their way to my posts and it's driving me INSANE.

These are typically nonsensical comments about trained dogs & pills and other such absurdities that keep posting themselves on my blog. WTF! Is this some sort of a virus? I'm pretty certain clicking on these links will mess up your comps so please consider this fair warning.

Does anyone know how I can put an end to this attack? The most annoying thing is that all comment notifications come straight to my blackberry message inbox between meetings, outings with friends, working on presentations and instantly eff up my mood!!!

SOMEBODY HELP ME... PLEASE! :'(

Living like a guest :)

Some of you might recall that my brother works with the Oberoi Group of Hotels. He was promoted and moved to their new Trident property at Bandra Kurla Complex soon after 26/11 last year.

While the new hotel will formally open to guests sometime in December, currently families & friends of the staff are being invited to be part of the 'Live like a guest' program. We were scheduled to enjoy the hotel on Thursday, a day after the almost cyclone 'Phyan' wasted a lot of precious time in the lives of us Mumbaikars! Cyclones, tremors, terror attacks... I think Mumbai will go down a lot before 2012!!

My initial plan was to take the day off on Thursday so I could take it easy & book myself for a spa. (Yeah like that would ever work out!). After much deliberation though I decided to go in to work instead because taking a day off when other people are working and can technically call me every 20 minutes doesn't work out so well for me. As a result I missed out on an awesome lunch at the Indian fine dining restaurant 'Maya'. By the time I checked in it was almost 6pm so I just had enough time to read for about an hour before taking a long shower & joining the family for dinner at the Italian restaurant 'Botticino'.

The food kept finding its way to our table courtesy the attentive staff (my brother's colleagues!). We ate way too much food... soups, antipasti, two types of risotto, a main course each (I had the New Zealand tenderloin with mushrooms & asparagus) & two types of dessert. The food was really good and the staff was friendly & helpful. We were also given the best table in the house - a floating table overlooking my brother's restaurant O22.

After dinner my brother gave us a guided tour of the hotel & we took a couple of pics of the place. In the evening we'd called for a couple DVDs to watch after dinner but by the time we got to our rooms it was past 12.30am, ensuring all our previous plans got shelved. The next morning I barely had time to get dressed and have a quick breakfast at O22 before heading to office. My sister managed to go for a swim though & got herself clicked for posterity LOL.

The rest of my week was pretty uneventful barring the customary banter & madness that is now a part of my work life!

Posing for the camera :D

Mom & Sim enjoying some fancy drinks

Hairband in my world = bad hair day. Pics of the two of us together are

getting rarer to come by

Aerial view of the lobby. I love this chandelier

Sundeck by the pool

The swimmer in our family makes a pretty picture in red

Of weddings & other plans..

Have you ever loved a song so much you wished you could spend your whole life lost in it? That's how I feel about the soundtrack of the new movie Tum Mile. If you haven't heard it yet I'd suggest you pick it up right now! Onto more 'sane' matters...

A close friend is getting married in December. Finally got my tickets booked for the wedding in Ahmedabad this weekend and also managed to meet up with the designer for my outfits. Can't believe I actually toyed with the idea of wearing a saree. The one and only time I did wear one (school farewell) it kept threatening to come open every few minutes. I still remember going home and crashing out for 12 hours from the sheer exhaustion of keeping it together :P

Will begin working on my pet project sometime this week - a trip to the US next summer. Figuring out leave from work + visas + finances is not going to be an easy task! So far the itinerary includes NYC, Long Island, Maryland, Washington DC, Boston, Rochester & Niagara Falls.

It's funny how life comes full circle... I'm back to being super busy (to the extent of not being able to blog even once a week, much less read up on other blogs) and loving every minute of it. Don't know how I crammed in meeting up with friends twice, a trip to Pune, a family dinner, a movie at the cinemas & reading Twilight into the last two weeks! Another work week begins tomorrow...

Everything's changed, it's all remained the same!

Been too caught up with the daily motions of life (not what you're thinking sicko! :) to visit my favourite place to vent for a while. As a result my blog is kind of dated and not showing up on anyone's reader these days. Thanks to all the recent ups and downs I've had zero time to just be and catch up on stuff I love doing - minus meeting friends ofcourse.

Diwali came and went & fortunately I had three days off to go back to Pune, spend some time with le famille. Mom's cousin (my aunt) was visiting from the US along with her hubby & little daughter who turned out to be one of the most entertaining 8yr olds I've met in a while. She wants to be an actress and a singer & has decided to become a "hollywood actress first because I can't speak fluent hindi". Hahaha... She packed in quite a few laughs.

On the work front things are really looking up with a whole bunch of deals getting closed in the last few months. Unfortunately one of my colleagues moved out of the company last week. So now I'm solely responsible for a truckload of stuff. I've been looking for a smart kid to intern with me while someone new gets hired in my team. All I need is a spunky kid with exceptional written & oral communication and a willingness to learn between the age of 20yrs to 23yrs . Apparently thats a lot to ask for :( Do you know anyone who fits the bill? Someone who wants to learn the ropes of media marketing and be part of some interesting projects? Please have them get in touch with me!

Oh and before I forget (as if!), I bought two awesome pairs of Aldo shoes yesterday. You know the best feeling in the world? Walking into a shoe store with humongous feet (size 10) and being spoilt for choice. Here's one of the two pairs I purchased.. couldn't google the other one and too lazy to take a pic right now :D

You like??

Friends, formula one and festivities!

So these three words basically sum up my week. And copious amounts of alcohol but that wouldn't quite rhyme ;)

With Diwali around the corner & the festive season underway work has been more demanding than usual. Thursday evening was spent with all my colleagues from office at an impromptu party we put together. This is where most of the alcohol binge happened. Infact I lost count after 3 caipiroskas and 4 vodka shots. It didn't help that I had an event the day after. We've had two back to back events this weekend. The first one was on Friday night and since it was a last minute thingy it took a lot out of us.

The second event took place this afternoon. Noted formula one driver David Coulthard drove down the Bandra-Worli sea link in an F1 car. While the actual drive and the donuts took less than 10 minutes, putting together an event of this scale took almost two months of hard work. We guys were radio partners & did an entire show live from the venue. Got to hang out with a couple of my friends along with my office peeps while enjoying some pomegrante redbull and awesome music!

So onto my crazy Saturday night story... My pal R was here from Delhi for training this week. After spending the week at the Four Seasons along with her colleagues she came over to my place on Saturday morning. We spent the afternoon mall-hopping and shopping and decided to catch some drinks in the evening. We didn't want to travel too far and landed up going to Hawaiian Shack in Bandra. This is generally one of my most preferred hangouts because its really laid back and the DJ plays 80s music! Unfortunately by the time we got there it was 10pm and there was no place to sit. After getting ourselves a drink each we hung around near the bar and started people watching. Two guys, an indian and a firangi were busy making asses of themselves dancing like lunatics. We had a good laugh at their expense before managing to get a small table (with no chairs) at one end of the pub. After a few more drinks and some appetizers we moved back to the bar. This is when the two looneys sidled up to us and started a random conversation. The indian dude had a warped french accent and the firangi was supposedly french. After exchanging pleasantries and informing us that they were both slightly drunk they asked both of us to dance. The indian dude pulled me to the centre of the floor while my friend was stuck dancing with the frenchman near the bar. Precisely five minutes after I pretended to have received a phone call and went back to my friend. She managed to get rid of the firang only to discover some other idiot had been stalking her from one end of the pub to the other. We quickly managed to get out of the place and get to Barista at Bandstand. Spent an hour or so catching up on conversation there before heading back home and calling it a night.

So as you can see I've had a terribly gripping weekend. How was yours?

Three day work week :)

Ok so this was officially the shortest work week in the year! Drove to office straight from Pune on Tuesday morning, Monday being Dassera and drove back to Pune on Thursday evening because it was Gandhi Jayanti yesterday and the powers that be decided to declare Saturday as an official day off from work.

Managed to pack in quite a lot of action in the three days though including dinner at Global Fusion (second time in five days!) in Bandra. The agenda this weekend was dual-fold -

1. Unwind and;
2. Prep for Diwali because it's unlikely that I'm going to be able to make another trip to Pune before that.

Watched Do Knot Disturb (crap!) Wake Up Sid (excellent + loved that there were two hotties in one film) & My Sister's Keeper (nice but I preferred the book). Also checked out the new & improved Zamu's. The food was awesome and I sat with my legs folded on the couch... Yeah, "unwind" is right!

Got my outfits made for Diwali. This is probably the only indian festival I enjoy celebrating & make it a point to wear traditional clothes for the puja. Spent a couple of hours prettying up in the parlour yesterday and it feels awesome. No major plans for tomorrow except spending some more time with my sister before I head back to Bombay.

I have a really loooong week ahead of me and am going to be working through the following weekend. We have a big event lined up. Will probably blog about it once its through.

Blackberried and other short stories

Things have been manic in my world lately hence the absence from the blogosphere and my beloved blog! I've recently acquired a blackberry (which I love to bits!) and am trying to figure out a convenient way to post on here from it but am stuck with the formatting text part. Is there any application that allows one to post directly on the blog making life simpler? On the upside, not being able to blog has made me an avid twitter-er. Is that even a word? LOL. Also, if there is an RSS reader that allows me to follow your blogs and post comments on them I'd love to know how I can download it on my BB.

As usual too much has happened since my last post so I'm going to quickly recap things of consequence -

At work: Closed two ginormous deals at work; Been working late nights for almost a month; Today marks the last day of a ten day on-ground event; Have another spate of events lined up in the second week of October; Been bonding with work pals.

At play: Got myself a Blackberry (how did I ever live without it?!); Been out socializing atleast once a week; had two friends come and spend a weekend each with me in Mumbai; Planning my Ahmedabad trip for a friends wedding in December; Called the cops and got a noisy, destructive party canned on Friday night Muhahahahahahaha...

On the home front: Managed to spend time with each member of my family individually; The five of us went out for dinner on my parents 27th anniversary this week; Came back home to Pune twice; Hung out with my brother a couple times in these few weeks which is more than we've done in months now!

And this is why I've been missing here. Hopefully I will manage to strike a balance soon :)