Writing

Read this in the Chicken Soup for the Writers' Soul.

"I have come to believe that there are no new photos and few new stories, only unusual recombinations of things that have been told before. But what is new, and fresh and original is the author's lens through which these situations are viewed. Our gift, and consequently our responsibility as writers, is to view life situations in our naturally unique way and report the truth about their meanings and values to the reading public so they can have fresh insight into the human condition. We are each unique in the universe and therefore, so are the stories we tell."


Despite reading more than 10 Chicken Soup books and numerous storied from others, I can never get tired of them. I especially loved this one. It's freshly inspiring and a "must read" for anyone who is writing or wants ever to write.

Reading Tag

Read an interesting tag idea from here.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Mark in red against the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Can't believe all I have is 23!
However, now I have an excuse to read more:)
I tag Tapasya, Geetika, Phoenix ,Bhushan and Ash

Finding a match

Read this post of tapasya's
Couldn't resist replying here :

Finding a match is somewhat like finding the correct expensive shoes. You can't rush it and you have to try them on and know you are comfortable otherwise you are stuck with them and can hurt yourself seriously because once you have invested in them, you will be sure to continue using them!

Joy of Giving

This concept seems really interesting. 7 days 7 gifts.Each day give some gift to someone different...something they will appreciate. Doesn't matter if it's big or small or whom you do it for.

Just do it:)
More details on this link : http://www.joyofgivingweek.org/

This is it

This is it my dear friends
The road has a new bend,
It's forked in many new ways,
Scattered we have to move on,
Towards our separate means and ends

Together we cheered
Together did we cry
Moments of togetherness will bond us still
As we picture good old times
Comforting each other as the world jeered

Let changes not set us apart
Be those in the physical sense
Or those of our inner selves
For we will grow in our separate worlds
But we need not part at heart

FRIENDS

Serials are addictive! I mean novels calm you down whereas serials make you hyper. Still we love them. Been watching "Friends" recently. It' over now. At least 200 episodes of it (missed the beginning portions). At first I just liked it for being funny. But gradually I realized it's much more than that. It's about importance of true friendship-the kind in which you really care for each other. It's about actually believing in the happiness of the other even if you aren't part of it, about the beauty of forgiveness- when someone truly needs it, getting someone gifts without you being the giver and lots of more. Basically it's about love-for each other. None of these are new lessons but they are portrayed so realistically that it's not preachy. It actually touches you deep down while making you laugh. The characters are humanistic, not ideal. They are a weird group of people bunched up together by chance and also by choice. They all have their moments of insecurity, jealousy, pain, sadness , humiliation, even anger and manipulation. But they don't stray away from goodness in the real sense because they still care for each other.

I wish it wasn't over. But I am perfectly satisfied by it's ending. That's what happens in real life. We move on. After a particular time, we all have major changes in our loves and our priorities change. But it gives hopes that true friendships never do. They just evolve.

It's something everyone must watch at least once. (I guess most already have, I am late runner here!).