I once lived in a house with a lily pond. I don’t live there any more.





I had to meet a friend at Amethyst on Saturday. She couldn’t make it at the last minute so I clicked a few pics of the lily tubs in the driveway and left.

I haven’t been there in ages which is a pity. The coffee needs loads of improvement but in terms of ambience... well, it always seemed to extend this open invitation to while away entire weekend afternoons quite guiltlessly, enjoying the sea breeze. I was only too happy to do that. Also some weekday afternoons.

And here's Monday again.

It’s good to know there are other people in this world who accord the same importance that I do to dessert.

Lunch with some friends from work last Saturday at a place called Via Milano. Nice décor, nice food and yummy dessert. That’s ravioli with the olives pushed aside by moi:) and tiramisu and an orange cake with rum something thingy. Note the kiwis and strawberries.



This weekend I was in Chennai. It rained, and then it rained some more. In an unparalleled display of efficiency, I finally sorted out some work at the bank I've been meaning to do for the last 6 months , shopped a bit and window shopped a bit, hogged at Cakes and Bakes (the quality of pastries remains excellent but the service quality is down many notches) and Mansukh’s which has improved by leaps and bounds, and for no clear reason dragged the parents through the fabled portals of a certain discount store for the first time ever on a Saturday:o. They are most amused by the experience.

In all the while I’ve been in Chennai through countless hopping visits on family holidays en route to elsewhere and through two jobs, the last two years that I spent there were probably the only time I ever, to some extent at least, liked being in the city.

And while I guess most of that was due to the old workplace, I think the only things that stopped me from actually proclaiming a liking for the place were - the weather (humid is a season!), the results of the last assembly election and that one huge negative of where I lived (and therefore, the awful commute it involved).

Getting from home to work or to the library or to anywhere where I could shop, watch movies, have a coffee, or even order a pizza (we were well outside city limits!) was a chore in itself, and actually involved 'planning'! The road I lived on was a stretch of national highway that was at best a country road masquerading as a 2 lane tar road, with potholes at regular intervals, frequented at all hours by trucks in all sizes and shapes at least one of which broke down at least once a day. Just reaching city limits could take the best part of an hour. I don’t need to describe what happened during the rains.

And then I moved to Bangalore.

And now the road outside my parents’ house is a 4 lane highway soon to become an 8 lane one, trucks are barred from 8 am to 9 pm and you can reach the city limits in 20 minutes. and this weekend, the weather there was slightly breezy, slightly cloudy and overall prety decent.

There is a lesson somewhere in all this, I’m sure. But I still don't want to return there.