You call it a water sprayer. I call it Phus-Phus. You think it is elementary and mechanical. I think it is the smartest invention. While you think spraying the plants is no big deal, I claim it is an art, an acquired taste that evolves with time...

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Before you, there was no love in watching the plants grow!

Watering the planters had become dreary, a daily activity that had to be done. With you, I have so many angles to explore. I understand the effects of wind on water stream or spray patterns better. I understand how to control the thumb pressure to control the intensity of spraying. While some people call this misting the plants, it feels like I am nurturing something, and you are the medium through which I express my caring for things that otherwise have nothing to say, nothing to complain about, and will never answer back. You help me connect with the most innocuous things despite being undemanding and unpretentious yourself. In a way, you exude the type of wisdom that must keep monks grounded and humble. 

Until you came around, there were no hand & arm warm-ups!

I use you every day, just before the morning tea. Your loaded spring does wonders for my otherwise genetically weak wrists and arms. You give them tendons and musculature a good stretch. Until you were there, I would rarely know how to warm up my arms that are always bandaged when trying to lift heavy. Nobody knew that you could be my distant gym buddy. Now that I employ you daily, I cannot imagine working out without having spent some minutes with you.

Your Performance is Unconditional, without excuses. You Always Deliver!

In times when I am surrounded by people who are not ready to grind it out, where people exercise their hands to do only the unmentionables and smartphone jerking, you set the example with a dutiful aura about it. I have woken you up from long nights and days of slumber, but you were never lazy like me in the mornings. I have forgotten you on the balcony, but you never complained about the sunburns. You don't need a heads-up for a double round of misting. You don't find reasons to fail. There are so many forms to you, but in design, every bit of you is essentially driven to work hard.

You Don't Fret about Emerging Challenges!

The Phus-Phus knows it has a short life. I tend to trigger in a harsh way, repeatedly misting the plants. No matter for how many weeks, the Phus-Phus will stay true to its promise. It does not choke upon seeing the workflow. IT does not quit. It realizes the replacement is always there in my spare cupboard; younger contenders with stronger springs, better plastics, and improved nozzles will keep arriving. Yet, the Phus-Phus works without any complaints - a perpetual performer, it has the outdoor stamina of worker bees doing their rounds to keep up the beehive alive and humming with activity.

Psychologists should recommend you more than Gardening!

The Phus-Phus has played a role in conditioning my morning hours better, to help me start the day in a more relaxed manner. Almost like a daily ritual, spraying the plants, the young & old, creates a sense of getting the job done, and when you are getting backlash at the workplace for projects not that well-executed, this is almost like a sense of achievement. Yes, doing it/that longer with your wife is more akin to that feeling of victory, but this counts too. Anything is better than medicating yourself and this is like Prozac with an eager, easy-to-personalize trigger action but without the chemical overload.

Tomato puree has been replaced with over-sweetened ketchup. Stringy, real cheese has been substituted with dry and less flavorful cottage cheese or paneer, and now, we have pizzas that look like a bouquet of vegetables you were supposed to eat as a child!

If pizza were styled as a place to linger, it wouldn't score big, i.e., if the place were located in Delhi.

The cookie-cutter lifestyle has somewhat narrowed the options we have for eating out. Saying that it has helped expand our gastronomic horizon would be lying blatantly. Urbanity is closely related to easy foods, and pizza is the king of all things easy to assemble and deliver at short notice. However, something very wrong is happening in the world of pizza-making in the city. The non-European vibe has been replaced with utter stupidity. Even the most culturally well-endowed urban centers are now guilty of molesting the cultural fabric that constitutes a pizza. Today, the slice has lost its appeal.

Stopping a contagion means identifying the infection first

The triangular wonder has given way to cheap replacements, and even Stephen Hawking won't be able to explain what the paneer is doing to the global favorite. Just like corporate immunity, pizza creators in the city feel like they can easily find a cover-up for their crimes. The result is a pizza that is highly uncivilized. There is nothing great or Italian about it. Leave the global aura; there is nothing edible about it when it is overloaded with those grumpy pieces of paneer. This is not creativity, but the people doing it don't seem to understand the difference between getting artistic or resource-savvy when remolding a classic.

My opinion does suffer from the patchiness of data. After all, I have not tasted pizzas from every eatery of repute that is redoing this otherwise fantastic food. In culturally parched parts of Delhi, the pizza is suffering from localization to the extent of losing its identity. Real sauces and gravies are being replaced by stupid replacements that have nothing to add in terms of real flavors but do the job of filling your mouth rather well. Cottage cheese or paneer is nothing like the many types of cheese that are found overseas. Paneer is too granular and bland. The milkiness is replaced by a totally offsetting type of dairy-ness. I say this without a haze of grumpiness that a food blogger might own.

The city pizza is being made with increasing impunity towards being judged. There are not many food bloggers who are raising a noise where we need a blast to be heard. The impassioned pizza is overloaded with poor selection, and the base is still too thick, too chewy, and too flipped on being more bready rather than a humble base that bites well. The inducement for a better pizza has to be criticism right before something gets viral and starts setting the wrong examples!

All Floral Prints are Not Flattering

This is about wedding invitations sent via WhatsApp and other lifetime moments that are communicated via a messenger that some people interpret as being rude or impersonal. I find this rather useful. When everything around us is getting digital, the sanctity of the wedding invitation, too, has to be transformed. WhatsApp invitations are just an extension of the way we function. It is a soft copy, contains easy-to-share data, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Calling WhatsApp wedding invitations cheap or impolite would be making a statement about our entire lifestyles.

While some people stick to WhatsApp invitations only when the entire event is a bit of a last-minute arrangement, or when they don't want to spend lavishly on wedding cards. However, wedding invitations were never that expensive. They get printed rather easily, and these days, the postal system or your logistics service provider can mail them instantly. The problem lies in the entire effort associated with it, more about the time you can devote to designing and creating the card's layout, rather than the spending or the slowness of the procedure. In comparison, WhatsApp wedding cards are easy to create. You have the leverage of laptops, phablets, tablets, smartphones, etc., all around with cables plugged into their energy source. You can get overtly creative here. There are no inhibitions as compared to the more intimate and lovable physical wedding invitation. This is why some couples have used different variations of their WhatsApp wedding card - a standard and a naughty version. These are shared or WhatsApp-ed depending upon the type of bonding with the guest in question. I guess the printed card does not provide this degree of flexibility.

But the romance of it all?

This aspect stands compromised. You cannot make me agree on a digital invitation as compared to the beauty of ink on paper, even if the ink was channeled through a digital system. The mechanical assembly of a printing press notwithstanding, a real, old-world wedding invitation has this charm. You can feel the texture, the choice of paper makes a difference, you carry it for some days or stack it in the drawer, you compare it with your own wedding card, or if it is from someone you hardly know, you use it as an investigation tool, trying to fathom what type of financial integrity you are dealing with! In comparison, even if someone creates an entire website dedicated to the pre- & post-nuptial phase, including the invitation web page, the impact cannot be the same. You might not have noticed, but the printed ink on wedding cards tends to age in a rather unique manner. This varies across all types of cards. Dark maroons can turn slightly purplish. The glitter on paper can turn bronze-like, somewhat vintage. Would you actually revisit a wedding invitation URL after a few weeks or months?...would it have anything different to show?

There has always been a certain segment of psychologically-rich lifestyle bloggers who talk a lot about treating yourself. I totally agree with this approach as a life-management skill. It is easy, too practical not to do and makes you feel better. Plus, you are not depending on anyone else. This self-pampering is rewarding yourself for something you stuck to, managed to be stoic when flowing with the moment was easy, could say NO when everyone expected you to nod your head...there are so many battles we fight each day and if we can make some rules and stick to them, the effort should be appreciated - by who?...YOU!

Couples' therapy can be very DIY, still effective and so easy to find that you won't believe it. You don't need to exchange notes about your list of favorite movies, you don't need more candle-lit dinners and Viagra cannot infuse the warmth you want in your relationship. Couples need to spend time together and vacationing is not the only way to do it - you can do something every day to strengthen your bond, to understand each other more. Just knowing her favorite colors does not make you a good husband. If she remembers the birthday diary of your ancestors, it does not amount to her being a kick-ass wife. The real magic lies in watching TV together even if it is the most hopeless piece of digital content ever produced but just lying there, together without speaking too much - that makes it look romantic.

Like anyone who was born in the 80s, I have had some fascination about postcards mailed by people from faraway cities, especially international destinations. As I grew up, traveling seemed to get less challenging, more celebratory and without the premium that people once put on postcards. The traveling demographic today is rather different...so drastically convenient that perhaps a good journey or a memorable trips seems readily attainable. Back in the day, receiving these postcards meant a lot of sighing.

Anyone who has been at my blog, even twice, would know there is a definite difference between how I perceive thoughts and situations and react and how the more normal world behaves. This includes the pattern in which a cup of tea makes appreciable contributions to my everyday life.

I realized one thing the other day when viewing some real fancy sneakers on Jabong the other day – every time the phrase limited edition was used, it grabbed my attention instantly. Immediately, I concluded that these items would be worth the big sticker price, the materials would be exquisite and the style…wouldn’t make sense to argue it because anything with this tagline would have all ticked every checklist ingredients…right?

This shade of blue is trending a bit these days – around me and in my life. I just bought a dumpster-cum-storage sort of home accessory in this color. Why?

There is something very appeasing about it. I specifically found an image where this hue of blue is used in a typically sad background. However, this shade manages to retain its cooling charm but I don’t want to use words like ocean or river-like in my description. Actually this is not about describing the color but just that it seems to be found in the smallest accessories, in the most unnoticeable forms and still it manages to make an impact. This is not about blinging the ambiance. There is nothing oceanic about the color but just that it has an adrenaline-boosting aura to it. You don’t need to choose complimenting or contrasting colors with much care. Nearly every shade, from dark grays to pale pastels make sense with this shade of blue. I recently bought a couple of lanterns for the living room, that can accommodate a tea-light or LED, in the same shade. This color has another thing that stands apart - despite what hue you are looking at, there is a certain amount of texture involved. Don't know the scientific reason for it but must be about how this color reflects light.

There is something wrong with my perception of fashion and prints in particular. Just the other day, I shared a fact that white trousers or lowers or any kind look lost on most men. My friends were aghast. I believe some of them must definitely have at least a couple of white track-pants or casual lowers in white. I then decided not to share another thing that stays a constant in my mind - the failure of polka dots or dotted patterns of any sorts to make an impression on me. In essence, I am slightly overwhelmed with them.

There is too much going on there - the visuals tend to fight for attention and I cannot figure out the actual silhouette. The shape or pattern of things seems lost. I first felt this when watching a zebra close-up on one of those wildlife Sunday marathon shows. The zig-zag pattern was still easy to digest but when they compared more patterns, using the close-up of a leopard cup, it had the same effect. It was as if I was trying to find symmetry which did not exist. Is there some medical condition or cerebral limitation that causes this? I find this issue with too many dots on steering wheel covers, jackets, handkerchiefs, umbrella prints, Tees, stationary, etc. 

Tea Infographic from www.divinitea.com

You see a vase and you start imagining the type of flora and fauna it can host. You enter a business meeting and seem impressed with the flower collection. You buy another pair of floral-printed denim and feel that this time, the print is really unique. Do you think you create happy vibes? Wrong!! You are nothing close to helping people feel better. You are predictable and therefore boring, in a suck-it sort of way. I have encountered so many of these instances. Yes, bright flowers are something I love too, spread across the room in a minimal, subtle way. The fragrance can be seriously uplifting - after all, many potent essential oils are actually flower extracts. However, calling a home charming, a room outdoorsy, a workplace welcoming, a hotel lobby glamorous, a beauty queen ethereal, or a guitarist in a floral ensemble, a true Boho gypsy sort is a stretch. I truly believe that everything that is themed around nature, natural, organic, beautiful, earthy, and real does not need to be floral all the time.

This is not about hating floral themes in any way: Please take a minute to navigate to the floral dress blog that I did some time back - just go back to the Home Page and use the bottom-placed search bar to look for "floral". Please note that this is not about hating flowers in any way. When done correctly, they are obviously lovable. But an overkill, complete with wearing a floral dress, floral scent, floral-themed phone case, and florally decked-up handbag, perhaps overdoes the entire thing. And this comes from me, despite maintaining more than 100 planters across four balconies, I still feel I have stayed away from the florally biased love. When I found out that sunflower was the chosen flower for 2021, I loved the idea of it, but ask me about putting up sunflower-print lampshades with a sunflower print wall hanging in the background, and it is a sure-shot turn-off for me. Yes, summer fashion is always highly floral, but only when combined with an equally generous dose of muted hues and lots of whites to create the perfect contrast. This is why, when soft neutrals came across as the chosen floral design trend for 2021, I loved the idea. Similarly, some fashion experts have been quoting big, graphic, and oversized as the way to do floral fashion, and I agree, but again, the balance has to be maintained - staying away from the excesses! 

What seemed like an empty patch of floor in our reserve bedroom now challenges me - I must do mountain climbers and skull-crushers to ensure my physicality is maintained to some extent. I haven't stepped out, not compared myself with others at the gym, or done anything drastic, and still, this challenge is huge, as daily motivation levels can vary, and I tend to be dicey with time management. What am I talking about? The fact that your home itself can be the canvas for some adventure-type activity without Googling the best nearby locations for a weekend break!

You can easily do things that help to challenge your overall fitness with basic supplies at home. There is no camping or hiking gear involved here. This is about getting adventurous with the least important things that are found in nearly every household. Lately, I started doing mountain climbers, and as compared to push-ups, these are much more full-body involving and can be done in so many ways. But then, there are a million push-up varieties too. So, let us not compare them. If you could combine mountain climbers with push-ups, 30 minutes can seem like an eternity. Plus, all you need to do them is a plain, empty floor and a towel, because you will sweat a lot for sure! These are two core-killers and seriously, even if you happen to be in good shape, 5 sets of each, alternated, can leave you panting, sweating, and almost blushing...just like the after-glow. The rushing of blood also kills the anxiety pangs. It keeps you occupied even after wrapping up the session, as the body is trying to cool itself and recuperate from the torture you just unleashed!

One Exercise for Most Core Gains - Fast, Slow, Sides Variations

Another home-based exploration can be DIY car care, inside-out. Everyone knows how to wash or wa,x and clean a car, but how many people actually do it all together? You have to start with dry dusting, followed by soaping, pressure washing, and then allowing your vehicle to dry. Take a breather while the car dries up. Now, coat the insides and external surfaces with a good waxing compound and buff. This has to take at least 1 hour, and by the end of it, you will have completed the most complex, full-body workout without even knowing it. This tires your body and engages your mind in the most unexpected ways. Every inch of your body feels stretched. It is like a complete workout, cardio, and muscle with good stretching, and helps to use up those free hours and tires you sufficiently to fall asleep like the dead.

USE SPRAY PAINT TO REVAMP WORN-OUT DOOR MATS: homesthetics.net

You have to try spray painting. The spray cans are easily available on Amazon stores these days, and there is so much you can do with them. From planters to pots and all surfaces that are rusting, you can spray-paint them into new glory. The only thing is doing some prep in terms of covers and sheets that don't allow the underlying and surrounding surfaces to catch the spray. You want painting and not discoloration or spotting, so ensure the spraying room is pretty much free from stuff that can be wrongly coated. Try to play around with colors. Have patience of allow each coating to dry before applying the next one. This is easy, artsy-crafty sorts, and brings back the enthusiasm we once had during the schooling years. You can even find reasonably priced finishing cans, overcoat supplies, and items to lend the perfect finishing touch. For the uninitiated, this can be really engrossing and fun. There is so much to self-learn, learn via self-exploration. Just Google priming and you discover a whole lot of science about surface preparation when it comes to DIY painting jobs.


Try the single-legged pose and its many variations. What seems easy and doable can be a bit embarrassing and gives you the opportunity to laugh at yourself. If you can do it already, perhaps it is time to hold the pose for a much longer period and time yourself. If you are a starter, this is like discovering how your body communicates to balance itself. Yes, you realize the mechanism via which the upper & lower back, the hands & arms, waist & sides, and your mind work together to uplift and keep the body positioned in a different way. It is like uncovering new zones and sensations in your body. Give it a couple of tries, and it will roll out to be more interesting than it seems. Remember, you are not doing this to lose weight but just to do something different! No goals. No objectives. Just for the sake of trying it.

Explore Other DIY-themed Discussions

Try to be a dust-buster. When is the last time you really did any type of home-care activity that shone through? Nothing can be as rewarding as cleaning up the house in a way that your entire family or your partner craps their pants. No wait, no crapping of any type needed. That would neutralize the cleaning thing. So, what I am trying to say is that if you really get into cleaning the garage and the basement and the attic, there is so much that you will uncover and perhaps even reconnect, within the same home you have been occupying for ages. Attack the cobwebs that need to be destroyed. The floor mats are not your friends anymore. Those niggling crevices need the seriousness of a nuclear scientist. The peeling paint strips are a shout for help. All damp patches are your enemy, and the mopping tools are now your weapons of mass destruction. Every & and any of all types of Dust, Debris, and Grime should feel your wrath!