lovelessworld’s blog

Words that touch me and made a difference in my life.

There’s difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek
communion with the divine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of
talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat Pray Love.

These are simple words that really triggered something in me… Listening to God. Have i ever listened to God?
I was taught to chant a word that has some significance to me again and
again to start with, during meditation. I had to focus my mind on the
one thing. Think of nothing else. It wasn’t so simple. Thats when my
mind used to bring in the most wonderful moments of the worst
nightmares. Meditation was a chore that i’d rather do tomorrow.

Now,
that the word has been equated to something so simple as listening, i
am not terrified anymore. Listening. Listening is easy. Listening is
fun. I love to listen to AR Rehman’s music, the birds in my garden at
noon, my garden gate creaking announcing the arrival of my husband, the
happy laughter of my kids.

I now love to sit in my room, alone, silent, visualizing the infinite black of the universe and listening.

Amazon out sells ebooks than the regular books. For every 104 ebooks, there are 100 books sold…

Ebooks no doubt are a revolutionary way of reading.

• Hot news as and when it happens: Most of the Ereaders have Wi-Fi access or
  are 3G enabled that let you instantly get news and stay connected
  anywhere, anytime with anything.
• Remembers the page: Ereaders remember the pages. So, no time wasted in flipping through pages trying
  to figure where you left it last time you read the novel.
• No Clutter: All ebooks downloaded into the reader are stored and sorted and
  can be readily found out when needed. Books unfortunately require
  physical space to be stored and if you are like me, cannot find it right
  when it is needed the most.
• Conservation of tons and tons of paper along with trees and the rainforest.
• EReaders have come up with pearl e-ink technology which supposedly is easy on
  the eye so as to let the reader go on with hours of reading, without any
  bother. They even adjust depending on the light levels.
• All kinds of formats are now supported by the ereaders like pdf, images, html.
  Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle are supposed to be in color.
• Ipad can be used as a newspaper in the morning, browsing for information and playing
  with the apps and as a novel to sleep with which adjusts the light
  level according to the surroundings, at night. Convenient!

Dont you think it is going to be tough for our good old books to be used in
the future? Once my son asked me, “Amma, what is that tough
keyboard-like thingy that is used with paper?” He was asking about the
typewriter. Will books follow that way? Will libraries be a thing of the
past? Will the feel of paper on our hands while curling with a good
book on a rainy day be a long lost memory? Maybe not for my generation. But
certainly there on the cards…

• This nagging problem about my son’s long uvula:
  Uvula is the fleshy hanging thingy that is present in the roof of the
  mouth at the back of the tongue. Suddenly, i see that it is elongated,
  that it almost touches his tongue!!! Woah! It just freaks me out!
  I quickly google it and find the actual word for this fleshy thingy
  (uvula) and why this happens. I couldnt find any child-specific reason.
  So, i try with my neighbour aunty who always has some ancient herbal or
  ayurvedic or just a good diet advice up her sleeve that usually solves
  the problem. Though she did say ullikai paste with honey was good for
  this, i had no clue what ullikai was or where to get hold of it from.
  Anyway, i go to the dr to find out that is probably happens due to cold.
  Plenty of warm water and gargling with salt and water. Great!
• 35% of the Hindi spams are generated in India and India ranks 6th in generating malicious code!
  I have been getting these emails in my inbox, which have announced that
  me, my car, my email address and much more have been selected to win
  huge amounts in pounds, dollars and Rupees  from the royalty in England,
  some Nigerian official, BMW, Yahoo, Microsoft and many more… Some
  mails even come from my friends’ inbox saying that they urgently need
  money as they are stranded without a passport in some weird city in
  England… Pity, i have to mark it as spam not reply to claim my prize
  in dollars or pounds or Rupees….
• Mystery of the yellow cup:
  I wanted to pet a cat as there seems to be a huge rat in my garden. I
  leave a cup of milk that the cat cleaned it up the other day. Yesterday,
  i leave a yellow cup filled with milk in anticipation of the cat
  returning so that it will keep the rat at bay. Today, the yellow cup is
  missing… I am sure the cat was interested in only the milk… in
  whatever cup. Is the rat upto no good by removing my yellow cup so that
  the cat wont return?

It is so beautiful in my garden.

The fresh greens spotted with the reds, pinks, orange and yellow blossoms.
Glorious blooms all bright and proud;  Yesterday’s flowers bent and
looking sad. Beautiful butterflies fluttering around, crows cawing away,
squirrels rushing around as if there is no tomorrow and people chatting
as though it would continue till tomorrow. An occasional car zooming
past, happy voices of toddlers returning from school.

My home is all clean and shiny. Clothes all neatly folded. Books all stacked and in
order. A place for everything and everything in its place; No blaring
TV, no app to attend to on the ipod. No cellphones ringing for
attention, no noise, no sound.

Just me and my mind. My mind is zooming at high speeds, checking if the dinner is acceptable for all
members of the family, clothes are ironed and ready for the kurta-day;
composing the shopping list for the weekend shopping and cursing myself
for never being able to get a good idea to blog on; Ever waiting for the
phone call from my husband to confirm the fact that he does think about
me away from home, impatiently checking at the facebook page to see if
there is anybody is doing anything fun.

The clock strikes 4 and my
world has changed upside down. My home is messy, shoes carelessly
thrown around, sand and grime contrasting on the beautiful off-white
tile on the floor. Dirty clothes on the floor, Change of clothes on the
laundry basket, socks just everywhere; Noise has occupied my home- TV,
ipod, cellphones, quarrels and all. Kids complaining and congratulating
while beyblade-ing on my garden, stomping on my plants, bumping into the
hangings; Cellphone reminders incessantly irritating, constant voice of
my husband deliberating into the phone. Complains, moans and whines and
an occasional compliment signifies that dinner is done, dishes are
dirty and i have more cleaning to do tomorrow too.

and brighten
up a blog or a website. It is also used quite often used when
commenting in Orkut, MySpace and other social networking sites. This
creates a unique distinction to both the commenter and the commentee.
These jaunty images can be created quite easily online and for free! It
really takes only a few minutes to create them, download them and then
upload them on the blog or the website. Buttons for a menu item or just a
plain old submit button in a form doesn’t have to be drab anymore.

There are many sites that offer free text, logo and font generators. These
are the quick-n-easy, no-messy-software downloads-required kinda text
image generators. There are ofcourse lots more toughies that do allow
minute control over the text and logo generation process.

• Cool text: Easy-to-use, straight-forward and customizable with colors and fonts.
• Font Image Generator: Sorta ok to use, takes some time to load and everything, has a lot of
  other extra features including rotating the image, inverting colors,
  pencil effect. My favorite one was the Kodak effect that renders the
  text like a photograph with borders.
• Glow Text: Just choose your fav design, write in your text and bam! you got your image!
• Your Gen:Has some glitter and cute designs.
• Sparklee: Has a lot of font options.

After creating the fancy text, right click on the image (the text that you have created). And click on the Save Image As
button. Download it and save it in your computer. (you can even rename
it) The fancy text is now ready to be used as an image on your website
or blogs.