Tidbits: Website developed for music lovers
January 6, 2010
An entertainment related website-www.unltdentertainment.com- is developed where music lovers could listen to and download music at free of cost.
The features of the website include:
English Song: 50 Cent, AbbA, Aerosmith, Air Supply, Alice Cooper, Back Street Boys, Bee Gees, Best of Boyzone, Best of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Sabbath, Blue, Bon Jovi, BoneyM, Bruce Dickinson, Bruce Spring Steen, Read more
Charla Muller gives husband a year’s worth of sex for his 40th birthday
May 2, 2009
0 Husband sometimes tried to get out of it
0 “Sometimes I had stinky breath”
0 “Worked better as a couple”
A US woman has written a book about the unusual gift she gave her husband for his 40th birthday – 365 nights of sex.
High-flying PR exec Charla Muller, from North Carolina, hit upon the idea for her salesman husband Brad, now 42, and has written a book about the year.
Here’s some of the excerpts Read more
“There’s something about labels that can make you feel safe”
August 5, 2008
Ms Adventure
“There’s something about labels that can make you feel safe”
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
My friend, who is one of the last bastions of Romantic Idealism and I were driving along Marine Drive the other day, when I asked him about the status of his current relationship.
“It’s not a relationship,” said The Last Bastion, “It’s a thing.”
“A thing?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “I don’t believe in labels.”
“I see,” I said, growing more amused (and, it must be admitted, rather bemused), “So if we were at a party and I hit on you and I asked you whether you were seeing anyone, you’d say no?”
“No, I wouldn’t say no,” said The Last Bastion, calmly, “I’d say I had a thing.”
“But a thing could be interpreted as anything! It wouldn’t stop me from hitting on you because, well, you’re clearly not in a serious enough relationship to call it what it is.”
The Last Bastion seemed impervious to my steadily escalating tone. “While I’d be very flattered that you would hit on me,” he said, making me roll my eyes, “I wouldn’t respond and you would soon realise that my thing isn’t just any old thing, it’s something.”
In the immortal words of Carrie Bradshaw, ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ whether our avoidance of labels was really an aspect of commitment phobia. I mean, it seemed a lot easier for me to just say, “Yes, I’m seeing someone” and end the conversation there, rather than enter into the dynamics of something versus nothing versus anything.
In the spirit of complete honesty, I suppose you’d feel morally obliged to explain that while you were dating someone you hadn’t exactly used the ‘exclusive’ label yet, but you were not okay with dating other people.
Fair enough. But who really wants to hear about all that? There’s only one reason people will ask you whether you’re seeing someone (caveat: by ‘people’ I mean random strangers you meet at bars and parties and things, not like your best friend you haven’t seen in years) it’s so that they can get a red light or a green light on going ahead and hitting on you. Saying, yesbutkindabutnotreallybutmaybe is like the yellow light-the most pointless light of all, it doesn’t say yes, it doesn’t say no, it says perhaps.
The problem with people who do the yellow light is that they all suffer from what I call Chronic Monogamitis. I have it too, as do a lot of people who dance in and out of relationships. Serial monogamists date a lot, date seriously, flirt with the idea of random hooking up briefly, but then are quite ready to settle down in a couple of months.
But, while this all looks very pretty on paper, by the time relationship number six rolls around, you’re so wary of calling it anything at all that you say nothing till you’re actually expecting your second child.
There are so many people in my generation in this country that have the same thing-and of course it’s a country thing. We’re the generation of the internet, of being young and liberal, of having parents who recognize that they can’t tell us what time to get home, let alone who to marry, and yet, we live amongst people from highly traditional and conservative families.
And all of us know at least three people from school or college who have “settled down” with kids and things, and while there’s no pressure, there is sort of a subtle oh-my-when-is-it-your-turn? We’re responding to both that and the influx of media from all over the world which tells us alternately that it’s okay to be single and bombards us with stories of old women dying alone in their flats only to be found a week later semi-eaten by their cats.
So we’re wary of labels. We’re wary of saying this is the One, because then it might mean that we can’t undo it, that a verbal contract has been made and we’ll have to be together forever and so on. It’s a little bit scary for people like me who are used to having one year contracts at jobs and for whom, even the term ‘notice period’ can make you break out into a cold sweat.
Oh no! A commitment! On the other hand, there’s something about labels that can make you feel safe. To use a food metaphor, just like neatly labeling the garam masala and laal mirch in your kitchen can make you feel like a Housekeeping Diva, using ‘boyfriend’ or ‘husband’ or even the coyer ‘Significant Other’ can make you feel like you’re in control of your life and that you wield the remote control in at least one arena. You know where to look in your mental shelf when you’re looking for the box marked ‘Dating’. (Perhaps I’m stretching the analogy a little bit.)
The Last Bastion and I have agreed to disagree. I think he’s avoiding using a very obvious definition. He thinks my need for labels is an oversimplification and a very lazy way of putting people in boxes. I’m happy he’s happy though, with his ‘thing’ and I suppose that’s all that matters, no matter what you call it.
Courtesy: MumbaiMirror
“Mumbai is a great place for being single”
July 30, 2008
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Once upon a time, in the city of Delhi, lived a girl. And then she grew up and moved to Mumbai and lived happily ever after. Well, okay, not quite. And that’s not the end of the story. I like to think of it more like a beginning. Happily ever after sounds kind of, well, boring, if you ask me.
My decision to move to Mumbai actually didn’t have much reasoning behind it. I was bored of Delhi. I had done pretty much all there was to do. I’ve been living alone for close to four years now – two years in Delhi and almost two in Mumbai – but it felt like I needed a change of scene. A friend was moving, in a moment of idle drunkenness he suggested I make the shift too and I said, “Okay!” That was really all there was to it.
I moved to this city-bag and baggage, which really didn’t involve very much more than a mattress, some books and a television set – in January of 2007. I was nervous and excited, but mostly filled with anticipation. My friend / flatmate had gone ahead of me, so he was already ensconced in the house, and had scattered household belongings everywhere, so I literally just had to come in through the door and unpack a suitcase. That done, curtains put up, I leaned back and wondered what I was going to do next. It was 11 pm on a Tuesday and I was in a brand new city. I called one of the three friends I had here and he said he’d pick me up and take me somewhere nice. Enter Hard Rock Café and the thrill of seeing a bar crowded, well, crowded-ish on a Tuesday. I loved the city then, instantly, irrevocably.
That wasn’t quite a happily ever after either. I learned about homesickness. I learned about missing food and people and places that were as familiar to me as the shape of my thoughts. I learned that even though it’s the same country, things were different from one city to the next. And I learned that setting up a house in a new place is very different from living alone in a city where your parents are just a drive away. Oh, boy!
There was one more essential thing I learned. Being a single woman with a fairly liberal family means you have been ‘dating’, having boyfriends etc from the time you were about sixteen or seventeen. Boyfriends in Delhi are a whole different ball game from the ones in Mumbai. For one thing, I was allowed anonymity in the city, anonymity that by virtue of having grown up there, I didn’t have in Delhi. This was both good and bad. Good, because, hey, I could do whatever I wanted, see whoever I pleased, walk down a road holding hands because there was no one around to see me or care. Bad, because I suddenly felt as though I could be on date and killed by a serial killer type and die and no one would know until it was too late.
The city would let me disappear. (I had also been reading a lot of crime fiction at this point.) But, if you’ll forgive me for drawing broad generalisations, Mumbai men too were different. They didn’t kiss and tell. In Delhi if you slept with one person, their entire circle knew and word would spread and spread and spread until it went all the way around and came back to you in a poisonous little parcel. Men who lived in Mumbai didn’t care about where you were from or where you were going. Like the city itself, dating here is very much about the here and now, what you project yourself as, as opposed to who you really are. No one has time to scratch the surface, you meet people at bars and air-kiss, dinner dates happen, but after work, and most people don’t have the time to run back home and change. And definitely, there’s no picking you up or dropping you home. I kind of miss that sometimes, but there’s something nice too about the independence of getting into a rickshaw at two in the morning and knowing you are safe. It also gives you an out from a boring rendezvous.
I jumped into this new liberal world with all the gusto of a born-again. I revelled in dating. I was a Goddess, the supreme power of my universe. I learnt anew the ways of successful flirting – the eyelash drop, the half smile, the texts to send. I felt giddy with what my boundaries were, how far they extended and I recommended to all my single friends that they move to Mumbai ASAP.
Then I discovered the catch in it. (Did you think there wasn’t going to be a catch? You obviously need to read up on your fairy tales.) Mumbai is a great place for being single. Mumbai is a great place for singles. But Mumbai is not a great place to be a couple in. It’s too fast, too rapid, too many options, too many cases of the genuine battling with the fake. As a couple, it seems to me, you have to always be on your guard, trying not to buy into the shiny illusion the city tries to sell to you. It took time, but with a little detox, I think I know how to go into battle now, shields up, sword drawn. And I meet other knights like me, and we retreat and watch the world go by, happy to be where we are.
Courtesy: MumbaiMirror