mundane monday - # 40

its my belief that theres a bit of a francophile deep inside everyone. consciously or subconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly. it just varies by degree, in my opinion. if anyone claims that they have no interest in visiting france, well, they are just living life wrong.

today's  mundane monday pic is a mug from paris, because today, of course, is bastille day !

14th of july is bastille day, or the french national day. in 1790, it was a day which became a turning point in french history.
the french people had long been suffering under an unjust reign that burdened them with unfair taxes and left them starving, while the royalty and nobility were living off their labour.
resentment due to their grievances going unheard reached boiling point, and a group of people was formed to fight back, and to arm themselves, they decided to attack the prison of bastille. bastille was a prison in a fortress - it was a symbol of the monarchy's power, and had a large store of ammunition and gun powder. the group gathered outside and stormed the prison - starting a revolution that would result in overthrowing the reign of monarchy and establishing a republic of the people.

though the storming resulted in a lot of lives lost, the prison itself had only 7 inmates housed in it at the time.

bastille prison was later demolished and the unpopular king louis xvi and his wife marie antoinette were excecuted on the guillotine.

coming to the mug, i had bought it in paris airport when i had a connecting flight from there. i have always wanted to go to paris (and france in general) and ironically, paris-cdg was the first international airport i set foot in, outside india ! (sadly, i have not been inside the country yet. )

im pretty sure i was staring wide eyed at the sprawling airport and the never ending line of perfume shops - (no smartphone back then, and no selfies, so i just assume i was wide-eyed, anyway.) but i dont really care for expensive perfume, so settled on a mug instead. 

someday, though, i hope i eat my way through the numerous patisseries of the country and have my fill of buttery croissants and sinful macaroons. 

read more on the bastille day here and more on the background of the events leading to it, here .

On Thoreau...

I learned that today (July 12th) is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau .Thoreau was an american author and philosopher, a lover of nature and a believer in simple living.

Thoreau is a name that should be of special significance to Indians, since it is by him that Gandhi was influenced in his civil disobedience movement. Gandhi read Thoreau's writing when he was imprisoned in south africa, and it strengthened his resolve to adopt the strategy of civil disobedience -  against the government there, and later in India, where he gave it the indian name of 'satyagraha'.

Gandhiji wrote to Roosevelt, "I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson" .


read an excerpt from Throeau's writing here, which offers a glimpse into his philosophy. more on Gandhi and civil disobedience here.

mundane monday # 39

i dont get sports. i have no clue about most sports, and least of all football. but seeing this mug on my shelf just reminded me that this is the one opportunity i have, to write something using the words 'sao paulo' or 'brazil' in a sentence.

i received this mug from sao paulo, brazil, last year - and its apparently from a chocolate shop called cacau show and it came filled with truffle like chocolates.

apparently, the words on the mug 'pra vida ficar mais show' roughly mean 'let there be more show to life' - if google's portuguese translation skills are to be trusted. cant argue with that philosophy though, especially when it comes to chocolate. and if you are a sports fan, i do hope you are enjoying all the show thats going on in brazil right now, and having a great time.

so there, i (too!) made a topical post, and managed to bring in football, brazil, sao paolo and chocolate, all into a couple of sentences. everything sounds better when chocolate is involved, of course.

from 'powerless' to 'empowered', in 3 weeks.

i had ended up spending three whole weeks being 'powerless' - as a result of the power adapter of the laptop deciding to give up its life without any prior indication whatsoever of the impending horror. and owing to one thing or the other, somehow getting a new one had taken three weeks (rounding off to the nearest whole week).

considering that i am someone who likes to be left to my own devices, literally and otherwise, i feel like i should pat myself in the back for surviving three weeks or so without throwing a fit. it certainly feels good to have your own device back.

i did have a tab in the meanwhile, which i used for checking mails and a quick browse now and then, but its not something that i am comfortable with for extended periods of time. especially to write or create something - hugely annoying, to hold it in one hand and poke on the screen with another, all the time going back and forth to correct typos. it could come in handy for those looking to make brevity a habit though - you cant really keep typing long sentences without getting annoyed. at least, i cant. 

if there is one thing that such long breaks away from my pc make me do, its contemplate. i am always amazed by how so many people go about life being satisfied with just basic stuff like food, a roof, clothes and such... without the need for anything that is intellectual, artistic or even just plain fun. 

how do people survive on food alone, day in and day out, without feeding the brain anything ? it baffles me. im not a genius or a nerd by any stretch of imagination, but i just dont get how one can be educated and yet not have a curiosity to know new things, a craving to seek new experiences, or an urge to see new places. well, it does take all sorts to make the world. 

coming to other things, its june 21st already, the official beginning of summer. (though if you have lived in a country like india, you know that summer has practically ended in most places.) the longest day of the year, hmmm. and thats a reminder that half the year has sped by and you wonder what the other half has in store. 

you know i like to go through old pics - i happened to fish out this one taken on june 21st 2009. thats the apartment where i was that year. seems like it was a beautiful golden day :)

this was taken from a panasonic lumix i had back then.

the existential crisis that is life.

there are happy days, and there are sad days. i think either of those are pretty much straight forward to deal with. 

but the most challenging kind are the days which seem to go off in an existential crisis. you know, the kind when you are neither too happy nor really sad, but just cant fathom why the days are grinding along in some dreary monotony. 

much of life seems to go off in trying to figure out if there is a purpose to life. why the hell am i here, really ? what am i supposed to do ? how to really 'live' life ?

sometimes (many times) everything seems meaningless, just a never ending cycle of the same set of chores.

lather, rinse, repeat. day after frickin day. 

the emotional stress and the physical pain seem to be so interlinked to one another, that you dont know which causes which, but all you know is you are caught in a cycle that you have no clue how to break.

there seem no answers to the whats and the whys in life... you think of a million ways to make yourself feel better, but at the end of it all, you just feel 'and then what ?' ... no matter what you try to do to escape, there is no escaping the fact that you have to come back to the suffocating grip that the tentacles of life hold over you. 

mundane monday - # 38

hi y'all ! how are things going... i had a not too bad, not too good weekend, though i wish there were some parts of it that could have gone better :)

and btw, did you see the details of the blog makeover that i had posted on friday ? it was one project that was long time in the works and finally got checked off the to-do list :)

coming to this week, this is a picture of a keychain made in india - it was something that i had bought when i had been to ahmedabad 8 years ago. after having moved my stuff in and out of almost 12 houses in these 8 years, i didnt even remember i had this, until i found it unopened in a bag a few weeks back ! so now, the little camel with his colourful hump carries my house key around :)

blog makeover - with detailed release notes !

In the 5 years that this blog has been in existence, i havent given it any great deal of attention beyond the basics. i have changed header images, fonts, colours here and there, and for some brief period had installed a third party theme.. that was pretty much it. but i had decided it was about time for a detailed overhaul, and this had been in the works for quite some months now. i wanted to do it in january, but couldn't then, so finally pulled together most of what i wanted now.

i spent more time on deciding what i wanted than the actual implementing part - whenever i saw blogs that i thought were looking beautiful, i looked around and noted what it was that i liked about them.

i'm not a techie and don't know a single word of code, so i always scroll down to the bottom of the pages to see what theme they are using, and i read up a lot of 'how-to' tutorials whenever i saw something but didnt know how to implement it.

i created another test blog, kept it private and made every change there to see how it would look. i spent a great deal of time deciding on colour and background patterns - it was as if i was painting a house ! - i made 'swatches' for so many colours( in google drawings), noted down hexcodes, changed them around a lot to see which combinations i liked. it was time consuming since i learnt many of the do's & dont's along the way, and you have to be either super talented with design stuff, or super-patient, to get the results you want - i can tell you that. (i'm the latter, of course.)

here's the before and after !

so, whats new in this version - :)

Blog Name - i had it named 'random rambles' for 5 years now, but decided to change it to 'simply sowpar', so that it matches the url, and is more a reflection of my real name. hopefully less confusing too :) there is no url change involved.

Theme - i had the 'picture window' theme for the past few years (and used one of my own pictures). i have now installed the 'simple' theme - it gives you a blank slate to work with and you can add so many customisations.

Header - the present header is an image made with a combination of google drawings and picmonkey - the fonts are from google webfonts and the motif design is a picmonkey overlay.

Blog Background - i made a design in picmonkey with a series of overlays alternating in two colours. (you do need a good deal of patience for this, and a word of caution- picmonkey doesnt have an option of saving- if you close it you lose it.)

Fonts - phew. if you are font crazy, it takes a lot of time to decide and settle on something :)
             Header - Blog name - Rogue script, Blog description - Satisfy.
             Tabs Text (the menu of pages below header) - PT Sans Narrow, 24px.
             Date header and sidebar headings - PT Sans Narrow, 21px.
             Post title - PT Sans Narrow, 30px
             Page text (main content of posts) - PT Sans, 15px

Colours - I took a white background, and used only two colours. the light blue that you see, is close to a 'robin's egg' blue, and is inspired from this pic which i had pinned -

(source of pin here ) 

the hex code of the robin blue i've used is #1fb7c4.  the hex code of the dark blue, close to navy, is #133165. i've used the same combination all over - in the fonts, in the header design, as well as the background design.

Social media icons - i downloaded and used the ones from this set - 28 vintage social icons from iconstoc.com . To use them, i referred to instructions from A typical english home.

About page - ha. after 5 years i finally decide to have an about page, people ! (i'm never that good or comfortable when it comes to describing myself, and for this one reason am thankful i havent had to attend too many interviews in life ! )
there are also links to two new pages in the header, one explaining a little about my pics and the other linking to all the mundane monday posts.

thats pretty much it, i hope i got all the major stuff covered. do let me know what you think, and if you like something you see, and need more info than what i've given here, feel free to ask !

keep peeping in every now and then - i'd love to see you often! (ok, as long as you dont stay for dinner.)