Gulab Jamun is a dessert item and prepared less costly and can be made with easily available materials. The thought of making them at home never occurs to any of us – the reason being the dreary, strenuous procedure involved in it. But these gulab jamuns are not just easy to cook but also delicious to taste.

Ingredients:
Bread
Milk
Cardamom
Sugar
Water as desired

Method:
For the sugar syrup, add one cup sugar and 2 powders cardamom in one glass water and boil till it becomes thick syrupy in consistency. For the balls, cut out the brown edges of the bread and mix with milk till u get a dough consistency. Make it into small balls and fry in oil till golden brown. Put these balls in sugar syrup. Serve when cool. It is a good dessert.

Image Source - Wikimedia

Via - Zeenews

Ibars customized an old gaming light gun by putting in some slant-sensors and connecting it to an alarm clock. Wring off a few cycles for a little snooze action and you can also set the alarm and time with the gun. It is only an abstract design, so just envisage shooting someone when you strike on that alarm clock every morning.

Via - gizmodo

Can’t tolerate the sweltering heat of summers? Yearn for some solution to beat the heat with something chilled and tasty? Try this out...Mint Lassi!

Ingredients:
1 cup Curd
2 cups Water
1/2 tsp Black Salt
1 tsp Ground Cumin
Pinch of Black Pepper
1/2 Cup Fresh Mint Leaves

Method:
Toast the cumin in a small dry skillet over low heat, stirring frequently, until fragrant and lightly browned. Combine all the ingredients in a blender and mix at high speed until the mint is well blended. Serve chilled.

Tip: When adding liquids and ice to crystal, place a silver spoon in glass to minimize temperature change on glass. Remove spoon after filling.

Image Source - Hormel

Via - Zeenews

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, the saying is apt for all...including pregnant mommies. Ladies, who are heavy with child, should consume apples and the easy way can ensure their to-be-born baby would be protected from developing asthma later in life. Cool, isn’t it?

The study done by researchers from Netherlands and Scotland tracked dietary intake by nearly 2,000 pregnant women and examined the effects of the maternal diet on airway development in more than 1,200 of their children five years later.

According to science portal EurekAlert, the researchers found that the children of mothers who had apples had considerably cut down on risk of developing asthma and childhood wheezing.

Asthma, being a never-ending ailment of the airways, gives rise to attacks of wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness and coughing. And there is no permanent treatment for the disease; however symptoms sometimes decrease over time. An appropriate self-management and medical treatment can endow the lot with a normal life.

Via - mumbaimirror

I wish I could hold time and hack into the day when I was choosing which college to single out for my graduation. Rather, which course to pick! I would have preferred journalism lessons instead of settling on English (honors) classes. But alas, time doesn’t take the pain of reversing itself, come what may!

Though I am not feeling much forlorn for what I did then (it’s been six years now), but still wish I had brooded over it comprehensively, taking into account my long-term goals. (I would be happier and at an advantage today). But no qualms now (though I have alluded to it already… bang, bang, bang!).

This ‘I wish…’ reverie is seen, rather fantasized, by almost everybody (and if you think you are an exception, you must be a genius I must say). We act, we regret and we wish… to alter those follies, don’t we? Many a time, we do get a break to put it right, but when we realize that a particular wish can only be pulled off in a fairy land, we yet again regret (for the moment we slipped up) and we yet again wish.

I overheard my parents once (not so long ago), wherein my mom was being apprehensive about her own demeanor of treating my younger brother and letting him do whatever on earth he wanted to, since his very early age (now that he is 12 years old, he is ‘famously’ labeled as a spoilt brat). Even after those 12 long years and even after knowing she was left with the choice of mere wishing, she couldn’t resist saying, “I wish I could have controlled him in a much better way.”

A wish is spawned when either we really desire to do something (at present or in future) or we really covet we should have done something else instead of a particular endeavor, in the past. Well, not going into the philosophical sense of what I just said, let’s hop on to a yet another phase in the process instead. When ‘I wish…’ is fulfilled by ‘wish granted’, what follows is… well, a fresh wish of course!

Indira Gandhi must have, once upon a time, wished to become the prime minister of India; she also must have committed a few mistakes and wished to have been more serene and sensible in those moments. Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan, the Shehenshah and the badshah of the Bollywood respectively, must have fancied ruling over the Indian film industry (no matter how modestly they state they didn’t!). In a nutshell, an achievement is the outcome of a wish.

Just imagine how dull and dreary a life would be, if there are no wishes. Wishes, undoubtedly, make a life action-packed. If truth be told, a wish always helps you live in an affirmative and optimistic atmosphere.

“I have no more wishes to make now, ever in my life,” ever heard someone saying this? No! You won’t! Reason being very simple… every person wishes to have something more that what he already possesses. It does hurt and upset us when a wish is not fulfilled, but even then, we can’t refuse to give in to wishing afresh.

As I decided to write on women issues, I found myself up the creek. It is, indeed, a daring job demanding spunk in you to produce such ‘real’ incidents. So here I am… writing my first such piece; not going far, I penned down my experiences so far.

MY GRANDPARENTS (predominantly the female one) wished for a grandson when I was in my mother’s womb. And all hell broke loose the day I was born. My first experience as a girl! Thanks to my parents (once again, predominantly the female one), they loved me.

“Your grandma refused to even cross the threshold of the hospital ward to take a look at you,” my mother gave me this depressing piece of information when I insisted on her for this. It only left me grief-stricken. “And the moment she saw you for the first time, all she said was, ‘She looks like my son and it would have been better if the god had sent her being a boy’.” Now you can ascertain why I can’t bear crossing my grandma’s threshold.

Is it really important to own a son/grandson that my grandma had forgotten while commenting on my gender that she herself belonged to the same group? I guess, yes! Else, she wouldn’t have ever been able to latch on the difference between these two sexes; now, when she is old enough to use a stick while walking, she is not looked after by her so-called sons (three, she has!), but is given regular visits by her daughters and daughters-in-law to enquire after her health! And she knows what she has lost – my love (and respect, to some extent) for her.

Anyway, let’s come back to my experiences part. A pungent treatment at the very first day of my life was an indicator for such impending episodes awaiting me at almost every stage. From the parts that are fixed in my mind, I shall sally forth with the time when I was in class III. As far as I can commit to my memory, I rubbed eyeballs with the very first occasion of harassment in my life when a boy from my class itself wrote my name with an ‘I love you’ message on the girls’ washroom door. It only left me in tears, as I didn’t know what else to do when I was the object of everybody’s gazes in my class. This boy was given a tight slap each by my mother and my class-teacher the very next day.

The next year followed, so did such affairs. I can never overpass one incident that rolled in when I was in class VII. Every morning I used to enter my class, I would find one letter placed on my desk – an anonymous love letter! Its content (that asked me “not to discuss it with anyone or I’ll defame you”) terrorised me to the extent that I feared every boy present in my class. I don’t know why I got so scared of the word ‘defame’, albeit I had no real idea what it actually meant! But the kind of milieu created by that single word had left me vulnerable. And so is the state of many females’ minds that keep their dumps and blues uncurtained.

Well, in due course, I was informed by one of my classmates (a boy, to be precise) about the person behind all this. A boy I thought was a very good friend of mine was the culprit! And I was standing with my class teacher with all those letters the very next moment; that offender was penalised severely – a week’s suspension from the school! And this time, I did it all by myself, without calling my mother to school the next day.

I have lost the count of such episodes I chanced upon when I was in school. Thanks to my mother, she never let me resign myself to the so-called fate of a girl in this society. But what about those deprived girls with no mothers bracing them up at such hours of need? They end up loosing their confidence levels much before bricking it up. Parents are our maiden teachers; if they don’t endow us with buoyancy, then who would? And when it comes to building up a girl’s mental state in a country like India, it becomes even more imperative.

If institutions like schools and colleges are not considered safe for women, then why to blame open roads? One fine morning (sometime in 2007), I left home for office only to stumble on yet another bad trip to add to my kitty. This time, it was an obnoxious bus journey! I boarded the vehicle and within a few minutes, I discovered that a jam-packed bus could be a nightmare, especially for girls, for then those frightened-in-the-open hands don devil-may-care spirit. And that day was no exception! But the only difference was that I turned and gave that hideous fiend a tight slap in the face. And believe you me, he felt really humiliated and got off the bus as soon as it stopped at the next stop. Once again the question goes to those countless females who remain tight-lipped in such situations, which only provoke the wrongdoers to move one step ahead followed by turning into rapists at times – aren’t you yourselves behind your miseries related to molestation issues to some extent?

These are a few incidences I could recount due to the shortage of space. But the two messages I wanted to put across are, I guess, clear. One, to the parents (especially mothers) – girls are not meant to be dominated. Instill loads of confidence in them to face the world and fight all their battles themselves. Two, to the females – you are not the weaker of the two sexes. Take an immediate action at the very first sign of any sort of abuse and put an end to further chances.

“Shit! …. Thank god! It didn’t dribble on my clothes,” I gasped and expressed gratitude towards my god at the same time, in a split moment, staring at the man who was just on the brink of spoiling my day. The man in question was nobody I knew. An absolute stranger! But that couldn’t impede me from awarding him with the most grisly stare I have ever given to anyone in my life. No, this is not an episode of a roadside molestation at a busy bus stop. This is a centuries old notorious custom that has clasped a large section of Indian society. Yes, I am talking about those who do not mind dirtying a public place in order to release themselves off dirt!

They are criminals. There should be laws against those who carelessly spoil the roads; others have to be extra careful to even move a step forward. I remember an unpleasant incident that just came to pass when once I was walking leisurely on a not-so-crowded road. A lady, probably in her late twenties, was ahead me. We stopped at a bus stop, so did a bus to stack it with maximum number of passengers (as is the tradition followed by all the buses). Before I could realize, a spray of orange-brown paan (several ounces of it, to be precise) someone in the bus had been chewing came flying out of the window and nestled right on the head of the lady in front of me, spilling a few drops on her shoulder. The dumbstruck woman couldn’t believe her fate (and I thanked mine for obvious reasons); and before she would have evened the score with the offender (I wonder what she would have done!), the bus had already made a move.

The desolation doesn’t come to a halt here. You can’t trust looking downwards while walking on an Indian road, especially near areas like bus stops, vegetable markets, small narrow lanes, construction zones, and many more. A sickening dash of sloppy spit, a careless way of blowing nose, an intolerable stance of tossing banana peels and other fruits’ seeds, etc. are simply dreadfully annoying to the individual who happens to glance at it. Another negligent approach is letting one’s pets excrete in the open (do they follow the same ‘negligent’ attitude inside their dwelling places as well?). Now that is what the extreme chance of all to curse those grumpy roads and the anonymous doers!

What calls for a serious attention here is few steps to be taken, not only by the government but also by both the individuals – one, who are responsible for such acts; two, who are the victims (starting your day with such ugly experiences is in itself a suffering, isn’t it?). If asked me, I would like our government to outline an austere rule of fining (a hefty amount of money) the wrongdoer the moment he executes such outrageous act. The goaded citizens should come up with their active participation via alerting the ‘criminals’ as and when such affairs transpire. And last but not the least, the offenders should themselves have to understand that if they won’t like the idea of smudging their homes’ floors and walls with spits, paan-sprays, their pets’ craps, vegetables and fruits’ peels, then why do they do the same to the country they claim is their own?