Bindiya

I have decided to give it another shot, to see if i have anything left in there. My first Effort is bindiya 

Bringing bindiya to life :)

Did u really Read the Book?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I have Bolded those books that i have read in their entirety, italicize the ones I started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. 

I will try to keep this updating with ones i read this year, and adding new ones which i feel is worth reading ;) .. Interesting enough.. gives u a nice list to choose books to read.

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 Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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 - A.A. 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 Inferno - Dante

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 - E.B. 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

My AddOns
101 The Immortals Of Meluha - Amish Tripati

Year that passed by

I got inspired by reading another blog and decided to list down the important moments from 2012

Things I remember from 2012.

1. I met Aamir Khan and Abhishek
2. I danced Thiruvathira
3. Dream came true at Disney land
4. Baked my first Cake for Christmas.
5. Went to India
6. Started knitting again
7. Parents visit to Chicago
8. Trip to Washington DC
9. Farewell to my roomie
10.To know that i am gonna become an aunt :)
11. Celebrated by 27th birthday 
12.New Year with family

Baked with Love

Its easy to remember the date: 24 Dec 2012
This day i baked my first cake..:) its such a wonderful feeling . I was worried at first, will i spill when i mix it, am i doing it too slow or is it too fast..did i miss something?..will it be cooked inside? why the color is not changing? Oh no is that a burnt color?..should i beat the icing meanwhile?.. so many questions ...thanks to my expert mentor..i ended up being confident about my cake.

The first time you bake a cake it must be the same kind of feeling when you have to make a speech ...Ha..isnt that a strange comparison.. As strange it might sound...when u put your cake batter into oven..that 25- 30 mins wait time, for the first time that anxiousness , the tension is same as you have when you are in back stage waiting for your turn for to go to make speech. Every 10 mins i used to look through the oven glass to see if its coming up fine, did the color change.. This was a important cake for me :)..And to my surprise it came out really well....and all that wait paid off with a beautiful cake . The best part was the feeling  you get when u decorate the cake , i loved it . The cake becomes the canvas and i become the artist :) .

 This is to declare I am a proud a baker of a Christmas cake and hopefully for many more cakes to come...;)

PS: I repeated the magic for New years eve too..But the first cake always remains the special one:)