Carrot Puddings

I had started with the idea of making gajar ka halwa for my cousins last weekend. But on Thursday on lunch from work, I bought my first cake tin :)) So I thought it wouldnt be fair on my new cake tin to make another dessert before baking a cake in the new tin. The result:

2 Carrot desserts - one Indian - Gajar ka halwa & one English - Carrot and Banana Cake with orange zest
It didnt take long before portions started disappearing and as 2 of my flat mates said - Yummy!!

Mission ITIL

Finally, after mulling over it for more than a year, I have booked myself for ITIL V3 certification on 3/01/11. Now, I just need to get through several thousand pages of service management theory to get the requisite 65% to clear the exam!!

It is my christmas gift/challenge to myself. If I clear the certification it would be some sort of achievement for me (in quite some time). Also, I find it comforting to have short term goals in sight.
May be I was a bit rash in paying the fee but I guess it was needed to get myself into the action mode. I hope I will remain motivated towards it till the exam.

I will update the blog about my progress. It will be a good way of telling myself what I did and what I didnt.

Any help for study material/sample papers will be much appreciated.

Good luck to me :)

What does family mean to you?

Some of the titles for blogs which I noted down during this trip were - presence of US Army in Kuwait and striking ambience of Asia. But when I saw ‘What does family mean to you’ posted on a forum, I thought it is rather relevant to my trip back home after more than a year.
I have moved out of my family home fairly recently – 3 years to be precise. However, the distance made sure that I have seen them only twice in more than 2 years.
On this trip I realised that for the time that I have been in London I have got used to being on my own. And to the idea that it is sufficient to speak/see my family over the internet. I am not ashamed of the fact that I am not homesick. I have never been the one who cries at airports or longs for reunions.
But meeting my parents, my siblings and other family members I realised that being detached with something/someone is not one way.
Even though living outside the geographical bounds of my family’s home has made me see my life as ‘mine’, they have not separated their lives from mine. Their joys, happiness, strength, emotions, grievances and everything else is still woven around all 5 of us. I share these lines from Shashank’s blog –
"For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy." Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
This trip has brought back to surface the deepest bonds I had let dust in the background. And the fact that family is not about you – even if you are 100 years old or 10000 miles away – it is always about us.