The life of a Pigmy Hippo !

Well , to give the devil it's due credit - the term Pigmy Hippo was first coined on September 1 2006 by a close friend . Of course this came into being , when I made the mistake of asking him who I resembled ( of course I expected something like Bipashu Basu or Kajol ) but no ,he had to come up with this creative (according to him ) description and he came up with Pigmy Hippo !!

Well , The Hippo bit I could understand well errrr mostly because I have a rather ball shaped nose with big nostrils and well , my current size does well resemble a Hippo ( in certain ways ) but the Pigmy bit is rather unforgivable !! A little over 5 feet I would definitely consider myself the height of the average Indian woman and Pigmy !! well is just pushing it . Anywayz , he wuz above 6 feet 2 himself and a good Friend and all so I let it pass.

Well , It wasn't really dat bad until my own mother !! my own flesh and blood , went and bought Junior Complan for me @ the age of 20 saying that I have to grow taller and now forces me to drink it three times a day :D oh yes I do get a host of advice from my Grandmother ( even she is taller than me !!! ) and she thinks if I hang from a window for 10 minutes everyday my bones and muscles will stretch and I will grow taller !!( yes yes , wnt it be fun if i just fall off the window pane now ???)

Well even this I can take but every time I switch on televsion it is almost as if the stupid TV is mocking me !!!It always plays juts one programme and thats TSN and for some weird reason the only one product I alwayz see advertised are :yeah yeah ! "The grow taller slippers" - a pair of rubber chappal looking things with some magnets strewn in between and it claims that 'the magnetic induction will increase the working on such-and-such muscles and increase growth by 4 inches in just 2 months ( yeah right ! and I am Andrea the gaint) , Of course this is again validated by some hot model who says that she never got her big break in the industry until she she used "magic slippers" and grew tall !!! sigh !! - a la Fair and lovely !

The list dosen't end , I can barely reach the clutch in my car !!My gym instructor stifles a giggle each time he setz the exercise cycle height to level (ummm 0)!! Yeah and for some weird reason I alwayz end up with a six-footer right in the seat in front of me at movie theatres !

Well , I should say my size has it's perks too , I still remember fining a 2nd year student Rs.500 while I was in the Student Council for ragging me , thinking I was a fresher when I was in my final year ( evil smirk - SWHEEEEEEEET REVENGE!) and I also love the way I can scare people with my voice (for some weird reason people think size and voice have some sort of co-relation) , I can still go jump on a bouncing castle ( hehehehe I still stand below the requisite height bar )and yeah everyone thinks I am this sweet , little girl who needs to be protected from the big, bad world ! ( hehehehehehehe - How true I say !!!)

Anyway , so well back to my friend ,I gave him a dirty look and screamed and stomped and shouted how rude !!! but I secretly liked the name and so my blog is named hence :D of course as someone recently told me "itz not size which matters but how well you use it" !!

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Fire dance 1995 (Oil Pastels)

my first attempt at abstract and
also the closest to my heart , I think at that point of time I was just trying to achive movement
through abstract strokes .

"Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp






I doodle occassionally and make the odd little sketch on the back of a napkin... unlike Picasso restaurants tell me they'd prefer the cash though!

Roger Moore


MS- Colour pencils on textured paper - 2003





Every portrait that is painted with feeling is
a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde

Man-Dry Pastel and ink on paper 2000


Still not sure , if this is a portrait or abstract , think
this one to me more represents the emotion behind the idea than the visual behind .






Baby Croc - Colour Pencil - 2003

My first and I think only sketch on which I spent
more than 1 hour , took me almost 2 and half hours.

Fair and lovely ???!!!!!!!!!

I just got back to Chennai after spending over 8 months in Banglore and the first thing people say when they meet me is " O my god , you have tanned so much !! how ??? ", after which they usually proceed to give me a host of totally unwanted suggestions which includes everything from fom smearing turneric powder to cream to ugh! just about anything on my face , This is ofcourse punctuated with the usual don't go out in the sun ( what they expect me to go out in the snow in Chennai !! ) and use fair and lovely and go for a bleach .. blah blah blah ....

Of course it's not that I take offence to such concern (which ofcourse is never shown with regard to my career or other interests ) but dosen't it strike anyone that maybe I am happy being the way I am ?Black !!Dark-skinned !! (well I'd prefer the adjective dusky ,ofcourse ) . Seriously , what is this obsession with fair skin ??Read through any matiromonail column and I bet one of the three main adjectives used to describe any propsective girl they are looking for is "fair" ofcourse 'homely" ( which I btw still don't get what da heck homely is ! ) runs a close second .

But seriously , what is this stupid obsession we have for fair skin ????? I mean there is a "fair and lovely" - for women , a fair and handsome ( for men) and fair and teen ( for teenagers) and a fair and god knws what else!compare this with the west , where u have an equal number of tanning creams to make them look darker !! God ! messed up ain't we ???

First of all , I would attribute this to the host of stupid "fair and whatever" adveertisments which are shown on TV ! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr .. here a womn getz a job , getz a marrige proposal, gets famous , getz noticed by the guy she likes , gets discoverd by a film director all because she is fair !! I mean are u seeling fairness lotion or some sort of genie inside a lamp ??

But ofcourse that is nowhere near the worse !! what is worse is that , we actually fall fro rubbish like that - and that's whay 80% of the face cream sales in India is fairness cream !

Well , belive me , fair is not beautiful !!! I have a very good friend , fair enough for all the fairness cream companies to fight to put him in as a model but the poor chap getz ragged terribly and is called everrything from snow-white to GE bulb to ahem! vanilla pudding !!!!!!!!!!!and yeah no amount of aroaming/travelling/wandering in the sun has made any difference to him , and if anything it looks like he has only gotten fairer !!The fact that he is a really nice person , has a great sense of humoour not withstanding most people only remember himmas the "white/very fair guy "and I don't think he find that very funny or complimentary.. poor chap !!( last known , he was playing basketball at 12 noon to get darker:D)

lol well here goes , first of all ..LEAVE ME ALONE , THANK YOU VERY MUCH , I AM VERY HAPPY BEING THE COLOUR I AM ( well , Bipasha Basu is the same colour :D), secondly .. GAWD PEOPLE , PLS. GET OVER THIS OBSESSION , ITZ IS OK , IF 99.9% OF THE MEN WHO ADVERTISE IN THE MATRIMONIAL COLUMNS FIND ME UNSUITABLE ... I don't care !!! I MIGHT NOT BE FAIR BUT M DEF LOVVVVVVVVVEEEEELY :D

DEAD END -2 ( people who didnt see the end !)

Well , couple of days ago I had written asking people if they think they were confronted with a choice between 2 institutions one reputed with a good course and one unreputed with a much better course , if they would be gutsy enough to go for the unreputed one (without placements etc.)just for the sake of passion for the subject .

Well frankly , I wouldn't have had that kind of guts and a friend of mine ( but from IIT ofcourse !) who visited my blog left a comment saying " we all need to make money , no one has the guts to say fuck everything , and I will follow my passion ".Well , at least for the fact that he made such a comment , I decided to write about the few people who think otherwise . People who ave inspired/influenced/affected me in a positive way , prob making me believe that there is still hope from the path we are conditioned to follow

Well , the two biggest "cracks" I know are my two bestest , closest friends , well if u prob ask either of them to describe me in one word the would probably say "weird" (yeah right !) well , Monte a.k.a Amitha Maria D'monte is one of my best friends from school , well if u probably see her the first thing which will strike you is how good looking she is , well she is one of those other snobs I was was talking bout "the good at everything types" , here is my babe , who topped school effortless ( yeah she went for a party one night before her Business Math exam and ended being state first in the same subject) , topped college again ( obviously!)and finally decided to follow her passion ( believe it or not - hairdressing !!! ) and this woman had to take a lot of shit for this , people coudnt understand why someone as smart as her wanted to be a barber !! she is thrilled doing what she wants to do and shez bloody dam good @ it , so what da hell !

Now we come to my other favorite carck.Prarthana.another brillaint child , who got some 97-odd percent in SCIENCE GROUP ( gasp ! and m sure got into half da engineering colleges here )and then ended up opening her own dance school :D ofcourse da woman is a fantastic dancer but starting out on her own @ da age of 19 , taking a bank loan to start something totally on her own with no support and doing dam well , just to follow her passion , well amazing !!

I was studying with a 54 yr old software engineer in Bangalore ( yeah54 ! ) who quit his incredibly high paying job in the US , came back here and is starting out afresh as an junior animator , family friends who gave up fantastic jobs to open up a library for children , a guy who ragged me while I had gone for my NID interview who put his diploma project on hold for more than a year to fight with the college administration for m guessing better facilities for students (after her leaves ) !!

M sure there are many more prarthanas and Amithas and Ganesh uncles who I probably dont know , but when we see people like this we all think they have prob lost it or they are just crazy , well stop , coz I personally admire all these people and think Itz amazing what they have done , dunno if either of us will ever have their guts !!

over-achivers!!!!!!!! uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggh !

well , here I am a very normal person leading a rather happy normal life like any other normal 20 year old , well , I have always been an above average student , with a decent amount of interests which include sketching , cartooning , debating , eeeeeerrr writing ( k dnt go by how bad da blog is :D), of course for a long time I have never really felt that I wuz lacking in anything , until one day I came across a rather old crush of mine on orkut :D , well it had been long since I had seen or heard from him and I was well curious as to what this "cute guy with curly hair " ahem .. coz that was solely what I knew of him ,was upto . Of course I was thinking , he would have either ended up as a model or a cabin crew with some airlines or whatever whatever , I mean ain't the cute ones always dumb ?????????


So well , I casually scrapped him asking him if he remembered me and well , SURPRISE ! he actually did , oh well .. so we got talking and all and yeah as I was generally asking him what he did and found out that he was from IIM (gulp !) and a topper at that too (sigh!) ofcourse there are still a lot of things in life , fer example ( he could be a snob , terrible at sports , mebbe have a bad gas problem .. yeah who knows :D) so I mollified myself and spent the next 1 week trying to figure out the teeniest detail as to where he could falter , well , I wasn't succeeding ( yeah I mean he did have his moments of terrible wit and da occasional "yeah , I am God " attitude )but I was pleasantly surprised to find him with a firm head of his shoulders and yeah also happens that he is an athlete to boot ( dam dam dam !)

Of course , with my flowery description you would probably think I am in love with him by now , but oh no ... The bottom line being - I would have prob liked him way more if he was just and average goodlooking guy with a mind of his own, I mean why is he so perfect , so too good to be true ?? Of course studying in a girl's school and a girl's college , I have spent numerous days chatting with my girl pals about what kind of guy we want but when u actually find someone like that , what it with the whole too good to be true completely scaring us off ?????? is it because of the little-green eyes monster ? is it because being around people like that gives us a sense of insecurity ? an inferiority complex ??????? why is that that only "over-achievers" get along with "over-achievers" and why is it that we turn up our noses that people like that ?????

Anyway , coming back to him (btw , he also happens to be a fantastic writer and incredibly creative and m posting something he wrote below this ( without his permission of course :D))yeah , well to prove my point - believe it or not , the guy is actually single :D so any women out there interested ?????

DEAD END !!!!

Am I the only one or does everyone at one point of time feel that they had reached a kind of dead end ? I mean like u dont know what the heck you are doing and you are just doing what you are doing without knowing why you are doing just for the sake of doing ?

I mean lately I have begun to think so , like i really don't know what the hell I want , despite talking so much about passion and dreams, but then agagin I wanna know if anyone really knows what they want ?

I mean , for example , letz say, right now Ive just given my IIT exams ( yeah pretty sad for a vizcom student , no chance I know - Thank you very much ) , now I dunno why I want IIT , do i wannt go there because it is IIT ?Do I want to go there becasue I wanna be away from home and independent , being able to make my own decisions , or do I genuinelly have a passion for the course I am applying to - Visual Communication ??? If u ask me it is a bit of all three , but then shoudnt it be a decision solely based on passion ? i mean would u still do an MBA frm an intitute which was not IIM but then better in terms of coaching ????? In a place which didnt have a fancy hostel or culturals as elaborate as Saarang or campus placements which start at 6 lakh/p.a???????

( to be contd.)

Why eggjactly am I blogging ?????

wogay , first of all my spellings suck ! ok good just saw the spell check on the toolbar ( me happy :) )

well , where wuz I ? yeah , m one of those types who put my nose up when ppl started creating blogs ,
a) I thought it was a waste of time ( I mean who da heck wants to read what u write anyway unless your Sydney Sheldon or something )
b) My spellings suck , so even if i start posting , noone is going to understand.
c)Itz for losers with no life - I mean , who just sits and writes stuff
d) well a-c is all untrue itz just that I am too lazy and well not a talented enough writer to prob keep people's attention.

anywayz , now m coming to terms wid the fact that i guess most importantly i should just write for myself first , mebbe it will deliver me frm my temporary insanity and my neverending need for approval :D so well !