classic

love this one !

Manipal :)

jaigurudev !

landed here on the 18th for 6 days of total craziness :) the funnest YES!+ happened ! the participants were beeyond awesome ..volunteers were an epitome of perfection .. so obviously the course was a rave :)

towards the end ashok ji said lets go meet guruji .. and so 15 of us jumped in .. reached the famed tiger circle to catch the bus , only to see the bus driving away without us , but with our tickets :)
in an almost bollywoodish attempt to save the day we catch four autos and rush to udupi (next stop) to catch the truant bus .. somehow tumble in .. bags n all ..quick head count ..everyone made it !! yeah , off to ashram ! three blissed out days in ashram.. went to shakti kutir .. sadhana at sumeru mantap.. gowshala..ved pathshala.. radha kunj ..
these guys came back ..i stayed on for two days of glorious laziness at lee aaty's home ..

and then to mangalore to co-teach a three day foundation YES!+ with vini .. btw her house is nothing short of a cottage in a resort .. sunlight streaming in thru palm trees , a picturesque well, dainty lil road, flowers in full bloom.. beeautiful :) plus her mom is the most amazing cook ever :)slurp.. the memory of that divine huli( kannada for sambhar) is going to linger for quite a while :) another place not to be missed when in mangalore is pabba's ..its ice-cream heaven.. i want like a life time membership to that store

reached manipal yest morn.. was blown out of my socks by the way the YES!+upgrade went ..all teams rocked it .. had amazing chai at shashwati's house afterwards and then dinner with the sooper YES!+ crowd ..

wow guruji :) all this in 12 days .. talk about whirlwind

lots of love
tanu

ps- ( coming up - a post bout our trip to kollur mookambike , a stunning devi temple near manipal )

Dido ( die-do not dee-do ) ;)

jgd :)


im a huuuge dido fan and have been wanting to write this post for a long time but was waiting for dido's newest album to come out so that it could be a comprehensive review of sorts .. and it did, so here i am :)

now i first listened to dido when i was 18 and i was instantly lost in that velvety smooth voice .. in the lyrics .. the music ..which grew like a creeper at first demurely peeking in and out of my mind and then quite firmly as a constant element of my days in college; quite like a good friend .. i wanted to keep listening to her and then again some more :) :)

that album was her first and was called " no angel " .. its still my favourite of the three that she s made .. most of her songs are about heartbreak and loss .. and i usually gravitate towards happy songs so i was a lil surprised that i liked her music so much but i guess the blend of strength and vulnerability and above all a sparkling honesty in her songs left me no choice.. the songs from this album that touched me most i think were "thank you"and "Im no angel"..

then came the next one after about two years i think - it was called " Life for rent " .. It was a beeautiful album ..one in which its impossible to pick favorites , but the moment i heard " sand in my shoes" i had this really weird feeling of secondary deja vu ..like being introduced to your own thoughts by someone else .. he he ..this sounds retarded .. and there was this one song called " this land is mine" ..

then last year came after the longest break her next master piece - "safe trip home"
dido's people did an awful lot of publicity for this one and i was afraid it may not live up to all that one begins to expect..but well i was totally wrong.. it was more beautiful than i could ever imagine .. there was a distinct dido flavor but there was this amazing newness .. the lyrics as always were outstanding.. each song a piece of art.. carefully moulded around a feeling.. subtle and yet very lucid. And her voice rising above everything else with a quality that cant be described with a word. my favs of this one and the ones that i politely suggest you must listen to once at least are - us 2 lil gods , lets do the things and the day before the day. Now the last one (the day before the day) is about a person losing a family member .. about how the world could move on like nothing happened .. about not getting to say goodbye ..

and then there's the really happy "us 2 lil gods" .. a song about two people in love..

i pray she makes music for as long as possible :)

lots of love
tanu