deponti

Virender Sehwag 293 [254] caught and bowled Murali. Murali will sleep well tonight!

He was just 7 runs away from history!

Good show Sehwag!

Originally published at Mind over Matter. You can comment here or there.

There were some incidents, discussions and revelations over the last few days that got me thinking in the direction of the dressing sense of various people. It is not a secret, but one does tend to think many a times that certain kinds of dresses will not suit him/her. This may be the case even though when the person actually wears it he/she do look quite good in that particular dress.

For example, right from childhood I have felt comfortable in certain kinds of dresses whereas I used to think that I don’t look good in other kinds. There were stages during my schooling days when I used to wear only formals. Then there were times when I used to wear tees with only vertical stripes. For ever I have worn loose dresses since I have always tried to cover the excess weight that I have been carrying around since childhood. In the recent past, especially when I go to malls and large chains of cloth stores I have liked a lot of different types of dresses, but I have never had the courage to wear them since I always used to think that it will not suit me and that I will not look good in them.

But at one point, I decided to just go and buy some radically different types of tees and pants that what I am usually seen around with. I got myself a nice shirt but which was short sleeved as I later discovered, and also a long sleeved, but a little tight fitting tee. I also got me tight fitting jeans than the usual baggy jeans that I normally wore. At first I was quite conscious when I wore them and I felt that it was a little too tight and that it would not suit me. Then I decided that it would indeed suit me and that I should not be unnecessarily conscious. When I wore that and went to office, I was really surprised by the comments of many of my friends and teammates. Almost everyone that I met that day came up and told me that what I wore was looking very good on me and other compliments. Partly the comments were due to the fact that I had worn something so different from what I had been wearing for the last few years, but the great thing was no one told me that I was too fat to wear such stuff. And I have enough friends who won’t miss an opportunity to poke fun at me and they didn’t tell anything bad about my dressing style, so I knew that what I was wearing was actually suiting me and didn’t look bad.

On the other hand, there were some types of dresses that I think look good on me, but common dressing sense says that it should not. For example, I think business suits with solid colored shirts, like red, blue, and without tie look nice and as long as the occasion doesn’t call for really formal dressing attire, it is not totally inappropriate. However, my wife is of the opinion that business suits are usually worn with light colored shirts(contrasting with the dark colored business suits that I have) and doesn’t look good without a tie. But then, I feel confident wearing these business suits in an informal fashion and I carry it off well since I am confident about the way I dress.

Remembering these incidents again got me thinking. Even if one does indeed look good in certain types of dresses, if he/she is not confident about his/her own dressing style and is always of the opinion that it is looking awkward then for sure he/she will not be able to carry it off well and everyone will feel that something is wrong just because of the way the person is carrying off the dress. When I had started wearing tee shirts, I used to always walk with a slouch since I didn’t want the shirt to stick to me and hang loosely. If someone had seen me like that, for sure they would have thought that there was something wrong with either me or my dress. This recent time when I got those tight tees and jeans, I really didn’t care what other thought. I looked at myself in a mirror and I felt that I look good in that dress and I carried it off confidently.

So dressing style is not just about what suits you or what others think you look good in, but dressing style is actually feeling comfortable in what you are wearing. If you don’t feel comfortable in certain kinds of dresses, then you just shouldn’t wear them. I have come to believe this.

Many international magazines have rated Britney Spears dressing sense as atrocious, but then if she is comfortable wearing what she does, then who is anyone else to stop her from doing so?

You know how Facebook keeps publishing your updates. Suchitra created her FB profile after two of her classmates asked her to. And so we were able to our name in the married to box. After which this is how Facebook put it. As far as the comments go, besides the one Nair [Diji] all others are LJers.

A man and his wife were celebrating 50 years together. Their three kids, all very successful, agreed to a Sunday dinner in their honor.

"Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad", gushed son number one. "Sorry I'm running late. I had an emergency at the hospital with a patient. You know how it is, and didn't have time to get you a gift."

"Not to worry", said the father. "The important thing is that we're all together today."

Son number two arrived and announced, "You and Mom look great, Dad. I just flew in from Los Angeles between depositions and didn't have time to shop for you." "It's nothing", said the father. "We're glad you were able to come."

Just then the daughter arrived, "Hello and Happy Anniversary! I'm sorry but my boss is sending me out of town and I was really busy packing so I didn't have time to get you anything."

After they finished dessert, the father said, "There's something your mother and I have wanted to tell you for a long time. You see, though we were very poor, we were able to send each of you to college. Throughout the years your mother and I knew we loved each other very much, but we just never found the time to get married."

The three children gasped and all said, "You mean we're bastards?"

"Yep", said the father, "and cheap ones, too!"

You mustn't look straight ahead as you walk along this path, or when you arrive at the sun, you will be blind. Just glance to the side, or keep your eyes closed, or look down, and by the time you get there, your eyes will be strong enough to look at things directly.

This is the worst joke I've encountered for a while. Read on at your own risk...

Tiger Woods is changing his name to Cheetah.

http://agelessbonding.blogspot.com/2009/12/half-plus-seven-and-all-that-jazz.html

Last night while surfing channels I heard a lady drop a pearl of wisdom in some program on a Hindi Channel. She was telling her daughter that since women tend to age faster, they should always marry someone older than them. When the girl tried to protest she authoritatively dismissed her saying “Now you won’t realize it. Twenty years down the line you will regret this.”
Memory flashed back to a time 40 years ago when we would receive letters from families of prospective brides for my uncle. Post-lunch we would open the envelopes, pass the photos around while one of us would read the letters aloud. Then the analysis would begin.
‘Girl’s features are lovely even though she is only wheat-ish” mother would begin
“Girl seems tall enough for the boy. 5.6 is a good height for a girl even though the boy is 6.1” an aunt would add.
‘Educated but not more than the boy which is good’ another relative would add
“All that is fine but she is just one year younger than the boy. That is a problem” grandma’s voice dripped disappointment.
“Why is it a problem Paati. She is still younger no even if it is just one year?” I asked.
“Girls tend to mature faster than boys. In a few years she will look older than him even though they are about the same age.” grandma explained.

It was a time when people did not attempt to defy age. They let nature take its course. They gained weight and wrinkles without worrying about them. By their mid thirties men were bald and paunchy and women gained a matronly frame and wore a silver crown. So they did not want a woman looking even older than her husband and ensured this through adequate age differences between the spouses.

There were also other reasons. Traditionally among Indian marriages, the wife was expected to look upon her husband as her ‘lord and master’ and our ancestors must have felt that this would be easier if the girl was younger than her husband. Men possessed more authority and wielded more power – all this was more easily achieved if the woman was younger and more quiescent. They tried to make sure that the woman was less qualified, younger, more docile. My father had a friend who had 3 sons and he and his wife were keen on finding brides who were not more than eighteen years of age. Their reasoning was that it would be easier to mould the girl to fit into their family structure if the girl was young. Those were times of joint families and the brides had to live under the same roof with their in-laws of various generations.
An aunt who is a gynecologist finds medical sense in this arrangement based on the psychological and physiological structure of the male and female of the species. According to her, emotionally women are capable of motherhood even by their late teens while men are not ready to accept fatherhood until their mid twenties. They also need this time to become financially self sufficient. A healthy age difference also ensures that their sexual drives reduce around the same time thereby avoiding the possibility of infidelity and associated mess. Apparently women lose their sex drive by the fifties and men around their sixties.

One of my aunts is 10 years her husband’s junior. At 80, he still considers her young. The 70 year old aunt complains “when do I get to be old?’ while she rubs oil on his feet for his arthritis. :) I wonder if she would have been happier to have been the older one and have a younger husband attending to her needs in her old age.

In today’s time the structure of family, the power balance between the man and his wife have changed considerably. They live together more in mutual respect than as a protector and protégé. Women take good care of themselves and there are enough aids to mask their age and look younger than they really are. In any case many women do not opt for early motherhood and usually have children only in their early thirties. They need to look at their career demands first and then fit in motherhood at a convenient time. Many opt not to have kids too. Marital relationships are more open and less inhibited in every way.

In this changed scenario, does age difference between a man and his wife still have any validity? Except for the wisdom from experience, a man or woman of 25 is as mature as a person of 40. I know a couple where the man is balding and out of shape at 30 but the woman is svelte and fit at 40 but people still have problems accepting their union and keep waiting for the day when the man would cheat on her and the marriage would fall apart. Terms such a Cougar and toy-boy are used cattily with reference to the relationship. But in my opinion they are a very happy couple who seem quite made for eachother. if at all anyone has a chance of finding another mate in this case, it is the woman and not the man. So all their predictions are simply born out of an inability to accept a reversal of an age-old tradition (pun intended)

So what are your thoughts? Is the difference required? Is it already changing? Are younger men marrying older women? Is age difference a consideration at all in today’s spousal equations?

Muttiah Muralidaran 19 0 118

Second time in this series Murali gives away a hundred runs! In just 19 overs that too!

Virender Sehwag Batting 202 [168]

6th double ton! First Indian to hit 6 doubles!

Virender Sehwag * Batting 171 [151]

Man when he gets going he gets going. Imagine getting 171 from just 151.... and this is a test match!

An amazing number of C-130 being stored at the Davis-Monthan AFB, Tucson. For possible scrapping?

Watch my brother play with Tanvi what can only seem to be the local Yakshagana folk dance complete with music;-)



Another one of her crying just before waking up from a nightmare. What kind of a nightmare do 7 month olds get?

Here is our little niece complaining about something to us, while trying at the same time to grab my mobile.

"Unrequited Frost" is a love story that knocked my socks off when I read it for the first time, some three years ago. I yearn for it each winter, but this year I discovered it was no longer available on the Internet. I asked the author about it, and she kindly posted it on her blog.

People who like love stories, fierceness, and winter should enjoy this story. And people who write stories about the love of a body of water for a woman will maybe also like it--intertribal!

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

Whither movie-making?
I spent two hours this morning with my partner in the Movie-Making Class from the American Friends Service Committee, Lori. We're brainstorming where we might find the money for the next class, how we might structure it differently. She thinks that four hours every Saturday for 12 weeks is too long and too hard to get people able to commit to that.

Whither son Raphael?
Yesterday, Raf and I went to talk to the director of the master's program in film at UNCG. I'm of two or three minds about this application process. Could he get into the animation program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh? Or is it Durham? Down that way, anyway. An hour and a half away. He almost got in last year. But if he got in, could he negotiate all the administrative rigamarole necessary? Not sure.

But would the film program be a kind of sidetrack for him, since he's primarily interested in animation? Or could it actually enhance his resume in ways that would eventually be beneficial? And all the social interaction...oh goodness...it's just a minefield. And yet, and yet...maybe it would really help him with his social skills. Whew...we'll see.

Look what osprey_archer made: a portrait of M--, from the Pen Pal story!



Thank you so much!

Folks, osprey_archer has a great journal. She posted an analysis of Bella Swan that really made me laugh, she writes fanfic so good that you will like it even if you don't know the shows, AND she is an artist as well.

Frost came in the form of a fox, and seeing all the naked things that would shiver in the cold, he breathed fur onto them, a thick white pelage.

He enfurred the candle...




and he enfurred the stick...


Now they will not shiver!

The same, of course, is true of us. If he should manage to grant us that thick white coat, well, we'd be quite still too. Not shivering at all.

No pictures of the Christmas tree 'cause I don't have any decorations on it yet, but I do have some pictures of an event this morning that doesn't take place very often in these parts!



It was lots of fun for Lucy who had to go out and experience such a phenomenon first hand.



Not so fun for the dogs. Charlie is not too sure about this cold white stuff.



Now its just raining and has already washed away all the snow, but for a brief time we were in Narnia where magic happens.