Pinku-Enchanted Life

Winters do something to me. While others get swaddled in layers upon layers of woolens I cherish the cold and welcome it. It makes all my dormant desires come alive. I want to experience new things, touch forbidden territories and create new road maps where none existed. It also makes me impatient. It makes me strain against all that binds me. I find it difficult to keep my head down and slog on as I usually do. The need to step off the highway of life and smell the flowers, turn the leaves becomes very strong. So strong in fact that at times it scares me. Winters are when I want to travel, explore and be curious. Winters are when I want to discard the old and try on the new. It’s as if my soul flirts with everything, unwilling to bind itself, unwilling to settle down. Narcissus, my favorite flowers are ones that can be seen at Delhi florists for a very short while during winters and their ephemeral fragrance haunts me. My biggest joy is to spot a bunch of thes...

Partying till midnight on a Sunday is bad news for Monday. Especially when the Monday has back to back meetings planned. More so when the said Monday also happens to be your sixth anniversary. Waking up with a hangover and groaning out of bed, we went about getting chores done, the fact that the day is also our anniversary and should be special nagging at the back of our minds.Managed to get through the long day somehow and finally at 9 in the evening we ventured out to have dinner and thus mark the passage of this landmark in our relationship.  ITC's WelcomHotel happens to be really close to our place so we thought of checking out what eats it has to offer. By the time its your sixth anniversary the idea of doing something special gets heavily tinged with the idea of 'Special within comfort zone'. The property was earlier a Lebua hotel that was taken over by ITC. Walking in we found the hotel getting ready for Christmas celebrations and that is something which always cheer...

Six years is a long time. Long enough for the polish to rub off. Long enough for the passion to dwindle. Long enough for the family (mom, dad, dog, baby) to take precedence over the partner. Long enough to also make you sometimes wonder, ‘what did I see in this person back then?’ Six years mean you have shared causes, holidays, books, taxes, burdens, friends, costs, relatives, dreams and blame as well. Six years mean you still have shared causes, holidays, books, taxes, burdens, friends, costs, relatives, dreams and blame as well to get through. Six years mean you have come a long enough way to be able to think of newly weds as ‘those newly weds’ Six years is also a long time to get so used to each others eccentricities that they don’t seem so anymore Six years mean …you have seven and eight and nine and ten to look forward to. At least I do.

Dwarka where I live is a big sub city populated by middle to high income families from almost all over India. So it really surprises me why the place has so few 'swear by' eateries to boast of. Every time I think of having a meal to remember, I have to head for South or Central Delhi or towards Gurgaon which in the past few years has come up with quite a few note worthy places. While I do so my hunt for worth mentioning places in Dwarka continue and as often as I can, I try checking out new places in an attempt to figure out nice options within the sub city. One such attempt had led me to Baba Ganooosh - a small eatery in the sector 11 market which had an interesting name. I walked in to find that true to name they do serve Lebanese dishes and hummus, falafal, shwarma, labneh etc were all on the menu. Though limited demand meant the owner who had been a chef in Saudi Arabia had to also offer Chinese and Indian dishes to sustain. Happily I ordered two Shwarma rolls as takeaway a...