"these are the days when it never rains but it pours"

Two weeks left. Just the facts, ma'am.

Current life theme song: Under Pressure - Queen and David Bowie

Health Status: just getting over a nasty chest cold thanks to Pishimoni and roasted ginger

Tastiest snack: The baked mushroom cheese toast at The Tea Table - Park St.

Best purchase of the week: A bunch of CDs from Music World, including cheesy Bollywood soundtracks Fanaa and Golmaal, slow Urdu love songs known as Gazals and a load of Golden Oldies Hindi karaoke discs for my Dad (Kishore and Asha and Lata--oh my!!!)

Number of times locked self out of house: 1

Number of family jokes made about scatterbrained bideshi niece: innumerable

Nerdiest thing I thought to myself: "I wonder if the word Sanskrit shares a linguistic root with the Latin word scriptus. The link seems undeniable."

Nerdiest thing I did: Googled the above query and found--much to dorky delight--that the words Sanksrit and scriptus do indeed share an ancestral root word from a Proto-Indo European language. Boo-ya.

Mosquito bites: 12 (gotta dig out that mosquito net!)

"Totally Kolkata" activity for the week: wandered over to Rabindra Sadan Saturday to see what was going on at Nandaan film centre and the Academy of Fine Arts. I happened upon a seminar called "Modernity, Development Paradigms and Displacement," an informal, interactive discussion with artists, academics and everyday Kolkata armchair intellectuals. The session was 1/2 in Bangla, 1/2 in English, both of which were spoken on levels far above my comprehensive abilities, but I was totally loving the true-blue (tru red?), cerebral Marxist Kolkata experience. Wish there were more women participating, though. All male speakers.

Just finished Reading: The Calcutta Chromosome - Amitav Ghosh. I totally didn't get it.

Currently Reading: Elements of Style - Strunk and White