I am Back!!

Let the drums roll and the fireworks burst, as Cartic is back, with the "Liebster Blog" award!! And this time around, it's not a witty post or a ten-pointer post, but it's a question-answer post for a change. As one of the budding bloggers, Ashitha, had woke me up from a long slumber with the Liebster award (indeed the first one for me), I am back here again writing a post after two months.

Rules

The Liebster Award is for bloggers with less than 200 followers. Award winners share 11 facts about themselves, answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who tagged them, come up with 11 of their own questions and tag 11 more bloggers with the award.

Thank you Ashitha for the award and most importantly for helping me overcome the writer's block I was facing lately.

I will skip the 11 Facts section as I have already mentioned many a facts about me in an exclusive page on my blog. Hence, it would be redundant to put again some facts here.

Here goes the 11 questions from Ashitha and my responses -

Yet to grow up or Grown up?
Growing up is an ever evolving process. I am still growing up. Meeting new people, gaining new experiences, facing situations, all these would help me keep growing.

Well, that seemed like an answer I would have given in an HR interview. But that's what it is.

Forbidden fruit- is tasty or bitter?
I would say bitter.

Fantasies or Real?
I am a person more into fantasies than reality, indeed, fantasies attributed with sheer weirdness.

Most prized possession?
When it comes to something materialistic, it is the golden beast, my bike!

Others include my blog, books(I consider books as non-materialistic, as what we derive from those is not physical in nature), and loved ones.
 
Person who most influenced the way you are?
Paulo Coelho. Reading around ten books of him should certainly influence anyone. What say??

First thing that attracts you to others?
I think others gotta say this.

Ever been ditched by a girl? 
An unanswered question for me too[Shrugging my shoulders].

If you are writing a book about yourself, what would you like the last lines to be?
"It doesn't end here. All the hell broke loose just now. Wait for the second part!!" :)

Premeditated or Spontaneous?
Premeditated.

If you had only six months left to live, what would you do with the time?
Go around the world. Eat. Drink.

Rate your blog out of 5
This is left to the readers. For me it is always a 5. He he!


11 Random Questions for 11 other bloggers [This must be an easy part for me] -  
I thought I would keep the questions simple. Here goes the questions -

1. What is your blog to you?

2. The most funny incident that had happened in your college days.

3. The last call you made, the last night, before 11PM.

4. Your favorite quote.

5. Who comes to your mind first when you think of 'The Dark Knight Rises', Bane/Batman/Selina Kyle(Anne Hathaway)?

6. Road Fighter/Super Mario/Adventure Islander/Mappy/Lode runner?

7. The book you are currently reading (Or the one last read)

8. What is your cousin's neighbor's daughter's son's pet-name? If you don't know, please call up your cousin, let him/her take the trouble and get the name for you! ;) 

9. First follower of your blog?

10. Believer of Love at first sight?

11. What was the facebook status update done by you that recevied the most number of likes?

I have nominated 11 other deserving bloggers and have informed them on their respective blogs.

Just books! Nothing else!

It was more than a year that I caught up with some good book to read. The last weekend, a read of this post made me restart my reading journey in this new year of 2012. Also joined here, and created an online shelf of the books I read and the books to read this year. And on the Sunday, I went to 'Odyssey', my first visit to this book store, all this while I used to buy the second-hand/pirated books at Jayanagar 4th block.

I entered level two of the building, and as I moved in further inside, I was only welcomed by some kid stuff - children fiction, stationery and some toys. I approached the store-helper and asked 'where do I find the other books, uh, the adult books?', he gave a half-grin and said 'I didn't understand what you said', I broke into a smile as I realized that I just used a wrong word there, or rather used a word wrongly. Later, my mother-tongue came to my rescue, and he asked me to go a level down for the 'adult' books !

Yeah! There it was! A sea of books, ok, a good number of books to say. I loved that sight. I always loved visiting the book stores, picking the nicest of the books, sitting on the stool and turning few pages. During my college days, whenever I visited Forum, I made sure that I stopped by Landmark, at least for a window shopping or to get to know the best-sellers and to make a mental notes of which books to buy from Jayanagar 4th block at a price 1/4th of the price of the original book. Somehow, I wasn't that guilt about buying a pirated copy that time.

Back to the scene, I had few books in my mind, mainly some biographies, so checked the 'BIOGRAPHY' section for  'Open' , 'Truman',  'The Story of My experiments with truth' but found none.

Then, for a while I thought I should read some philosophy, and checked some Robin Sharma's, but for some reason his books failed to impress me, may be because I am very much influenced by Paulo Coelho's thoughts, and hence the former really failed to make a mark on me.

Then moved on to fiction, I had two books in my mind, 'Midnight's Children' and 'The Fountain Head', while checking for these, a book with the bold letters , 'GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ One hundred years of solitude', caught my attention. I remembered reading about this author the day before and picked up a copy of this book, read the review by Salman Rushdie, who described the book as the greatest in any language of the last fifty years. I thought it would be nice to read a book just like that without doing much research on it like how I buy the 'wildstones' or 'the park avenues' without testing them once. Most of the times the choice would turn to be good and at times a dud! Whatever the outcome be, the surprise factor that comes with it would still be great!

So there I go, bought the book, read a few pages, and updated the 'Currently reading' section in my goodreads account.

PS - I wish facebook would add a plug-in to update our 'Currently reading' status, that would help some lazy readers like me to read more for the heck of utter show-off !!

Here's one more dimension of what I said above, a pic of the book from my new HTC Wildfire S!