it was raining..i thought it was andhi at first of course, but i was told it wasn't..anyway, it was beautiful rain....with no fan, the room was even fresher than before..n i just continued sleeping comfortably :)
oh n then breakfast, phulka-butter, or rather, roti-butter
lol
bindu, the help's lil girl, who i'm supposed to be helping, just said, 'didi, aap mujhe math ka kaam kara dena'..n i just sorta tilted my head in that way that indians use as an 'okay' lol...the nice comfort zone one experiences with kids...as in, we know more than them lol. easily. at least in some/many things. :P
[n me n my brother just concluded that 'they [kids] are quite against everything we strive for']
eg: they get hurt -> they cry n announce it to the world
*we* get hurt -> we try to suck it up n not give anyone any trouble about it
heh...but uknow...this reminds me...when i came to school in india in 6th...it was a new experience for me to have lil kids call me 'didi'...n i loved it.... :) i dunno why lol, but i really did...having someone look up to me like that (n i didn't have much doubt back then as to my deserving it)......n when i was given the responsibility of pohoncha-ing two such lil kids to their respective nursery classrooms (just from the bus!), well...i really enjoyed that lol...that kinda tiny responsibility... hehe
ahh...somehow, lol, i feel like i'm missing out on all the excitement of thesis-work right now! if i'd been in mb helping...i would've been in the middle of it...lol...instead i'm sitting here wasting away...not too sadly, but that could change soon..
oh yes, speaking of 'wow', i went n saw akshardham yesterday. i'm not feeling the excitement just now but i do feel it needs mention......(quoting from a chat here, a lazy but convenient method lol:) "i actually felt it was worth it [despite it being a temple], the models, the sets (if that's the word for em), the...movie, they were all pretty good". heh, 'pretty good' as in, it left my mouth hanging...n my eyes gaping the whole time... twas just really beautiful! n the whole time i was thinking of how they must've made those models...n what improvements coulda made them even more realistic...but lol, shud i mention they were robots or something? cuz they moved. and quite well, too, that was *really* cool.as for the architecture. heh. well, my first impression...besides it being big n beautiful in general, on a closer look, was that the carvings somehow looked fake. i realized that that was cuz of the stone they used (and the actual carvings and designs themselves..)....it was extremely smooth...'soft stone' i was told. contrary to the ones in hampi, where the rock wasn't actually smooth..but they had somehow made it smooth (at least on horizontal surfaces)...such that it got an actual shine on the surface, yet u could still see n feel some texture...much more so than in the stone used in akshardham. overall...that was kinda disappointing...by the end of the evening however, i ended up convincing myself that this was some kind of modern-day version of ur usual carved temple...where the whole thing...lol, well looking at it, i seriously did find myself capable of imaging the neat-lined computer drawings that must've been behind it...whereas, with the temples in hampi, i would be able to imagine blunt-penciled sketches on paper at the most... but also about my overall impression....i mean...i had to sorta remind myself...that ok, i'm in a place, much like one of those palaces they show in jodha-akbar which i've always wanted to visit, to experience....it had the air flow...really nice weather we had too yesterday, as i mentioned....it had the open-ness, the greenery, the scenic look n all...but like i said, the fake-ness...that made me have to remind myself, that ekta, ure in that *kind of* a place...so what if it's not the real thing lol, but u can pretty well pretend and imagine what it'd feel like...in hampi, however,...it was simply..very easy to picture an olden lifestyle, and the people living there the way they did at that time...even if i don't have specific knowledge on how that was. i'm still talking about the feel of the place (akshardham). um. so it was like a museum. i seriously liked the fact that we weren't required to take off our shoes except for just the main central temple (scratch that, whether it's centrally located or not, i'm not sure lol). the waiting. my gosh, we went in at abt 4 i think. maybe a lil later. n got out at abt 11:30. can u imagine that? lol when we got into the car in the parking area, both cellphones were ringing n had a ton of missed calls lol, cuz they don't let u take ur cellphones inside. i mean how insane is that! seriously....do something, anything, abt it, if u don't wanna let us take photographs (or whatever their safety reasoning is), but for gness sake..they have to find an option better than ridding ppl of their only contact with their friends n family for a period of several hours. cuz when we got out lol, everyone was so worried why we weren't answering our phones. so yea. why'd it take us so long? i think cuz it's the summer holidays now, and it was a sunday afternoon. akshardham really has become huge...as a craze...oopar se, it's a religious thing...genius idea, cuz i mean..combining religion with business, with social service lol...really genius, i think.
anyway, getting to the main temple. we had finished with the whollle internal thing...the museum part, as in, the tour through these beautifully made sets that tell u the whole story play by play, then the movie, then, whatever was next...n finally i thought it was all over. n then apparently, no, it wasn't. cuz there was the boat-ride (through history) left. so that was also great. really, seriously, i was in awe lol, at the beauty of all the models they had (that someone/something had made)......it was that nice! :P
so ok, finally we got out n thought since we're here, it doesn't make sense to skip the actual inside of the main temple lol, so we took off our 'boot' lol n headed in. i enjoyed running up the stairs barefoot, cuz the marble was clean, and steps were a good height for running. except for those lil grooves on em..that they *think* r gonna make it safer..maybe they do..but i didn't think the granite, i think it was, was that slippery anyway...the grooves did however make it uncomfortable for going up em quickly either in shoes or barefoot... anyway.
the main temple. the inside was beautiful. simple beautiful. it was made of marble pretty much. the vaulted ceilings...my gness...lol, i just kept looking n looking...some places especially, the designs..where they show him, neelkant, posing in his meditation, in a jungle, were amazing...
overall, i was really glad we 'stepped in' :P
but once again...the main sorta huge pedestal or platform (like we have for hindu dieties' statues) was made of whatever, but supposed to look like wood...except it didn't in the least...it looked like 'whatever' painted a nice brown, laminated to be rather too shiny and once again fake-ish...and ok, the carving was nice...but maybe too intricate for my liking...the statue of neelkant aka swami narayan itself was in gold (color), so it was a color combination of white, brown and gold, with most of it just white. nice. but yeah...still rather...public-appeal-in-mind type...but it was nice, so ok!
did i mention i had dahi bhalla (at the very end, in their food court)? lol i'd been wanting to have some sorta really nice chaat/gol gappe (well actually, both) since a long time, and especially at least once, before i leave india for 2 months :P so that happened. couldn't manage to have more than 2/3 of it but it was pretty delicious :P
anyway, i find kids annoying. sigh. i do find em cute too but really, i can easily find them too annoying to handle.
anyway, leaving in annoyance..that's it for now.
