Please donate for a good cause!

Hi friends

Please visit this page and donate for a good cause.

http://www.giveindia.org/give/pledgepage/chiranjib

Give India !!

When was the last time you provided food to an orphan?
When was the last time you gave clothes to a beggar?
When was the last time you fed ailing babies on the streets?

Well, the volley of questions above was not to baffle you, neither is in a bid to write something off-beat! Rather, the aim is to turn the attention towards something we forget while running through our daily chores - CHARITY! We forget that we, indeed, are more fortunate than many others. At least, we do not need to think about two square meals a day, a shelter over our heads, pieces of clothes to keep us warm in times of chilling winter. But believe me, there are people in this world who struggle for these BASIC necessities. Pity, we cruise through our fashionable clothes donning sunglasses ad what not! We feel overawed by a guy who just bought a brand new car, wishing, "Oh! I could not achieve that!". It is really good when we look up, strive for betterment, strive to achieve bigger goals. But, in a bid to do all of these, we often forget those people, who also had a dream - who dreamt for a shelter, a bowl of rice... those children, we couldn't care less about, still work in the roadside dhabas - to hell with the child labor laws and all - who cares! Yet, we never protest! Even, myself, the self proclaimed blogger and writer - I write, yet do not have enough capability to drag that child out of that damned dhaba and give him some food and water.

The question is - how much can we really do! Readers may argue - "We are busy with our jobs" "Careers take away most of the precious times" "But how can we help?"
Exactly so - I was indeed waiting for that last question. How can you help! Well, I just received a mailer from Indiblogger to write blogs for the cause of charity and I thought - why not!

Here is what needs to be done.
1. Visit the Give India page. What is Give India?

"What is GiveIndia?

GiveIndia is a NGO that raises funds for the poorest of the poor in India by helping you donate money to 200+ trustworthy charities. All NGOs on GiveIndia have been screened for transparency and credibility."


Please go to this page. Here is the url in case the click does not work.
http://www.giveindia.org/default.aspx
2. Register to the site. Go through the links. You would find plenty of Indian NGOs associated.
3. Login and find the links to donate. Options include getting an amount deducted from the payroll every month through your company payroll. Several companies are listed there which could be found in the drop down menu.
Last but not the least, this donation for charity comes under the purview of Income Tax benefits under section 80G (50% tax benefit). Yes, you would receive receipts.

Friends, let us come together! Say YES to charity! We would earn lots, but donation towards needy ones would really go a long way in putting a smile on some of these faces.

The Fat regime!

I was browsing my Igoogle page for the daily updates this morning and decided to add a new frame - guess what! The Fat Loss window! However, I am pissed off on seeing the tips! Whatever I love to gorge on are a strict NO NO! It's something like window shopping that I am doing right now - seeing the tips, appreciating it wholeheartedly, however I am apprehensive about trying them out.
Indian cuisine as such is very spicy and when we consider the subset Bengali cuisine which I am so fond of, things get hotter and spicier. Take the instance of the simply 'machher jhol' or fish curry in English. My mom is an artist when she cooks it for me. But take my word, it is spicy! Indian restaurants worldwide are a favorite destination for people from almost every nationality. However, many of them are either run by a Pakistani or SriLankan. Of course, food, in this part of the world is almost the same. Yet the name is in favor of "Indian" cuisine.
In a bid not to divert from the topic, today's tip in Igoogle tells me:
"No carbs after 9 p.m. Eat no bread, cereal, or pasta until morning. Extra carbs eaten at night often convert to fat."
Ironically, we follow sort of a reverse order. Our breakfast is the most light and this is the order.
BreakfastLunch>Dinner
We should have a heavy breakfast, then the body is able to burn out the calories gained during the entire day of movement. When we have a heavy dinner, and go to sleep immediately or sometime later, our body hardly gets the chance of burning down the calories, instead they get absorbed into the body and turn into fat.
With an work culture, such as mine, I hardly ever get a chance to exercise apart from the regular 20 minutes of walk that I do daily while getting back to home. Ahh.. I should not give an excuse, but really, that's the way things stand at the moment.

The Blogo-gloom?

Recently Alice commented on an earlier post of mine on the growing blogo-gloom! Now, what is that! For those who are not very accustomed with the term, well, it simply means 'a gloomy atmosphere in the blogosphere'. By gloomy, we mean, more and more people are feeling more and more reluctant than ever to write full fledged blog posts. Why is that? Let me take this opportunity to scrutinize it a bit further.

With the advent of high tech social networking sites and micro-blogging sites, are people more inclined to write within a sentence or two, whatever they feel like?

Facebook and Orkut, the two premiere social networking sites have n-number of features which make it easy to share thoughts, comments, pictures, videos, articles and what not! With the age of less time-more work, more and more people are hooking on to them. And yes, how can I forget Twitter. Of course it is the mother of micro-blogging!

The resultant, writing a long blog post and meticulously placing relevant photographs, making the content catchy and beautiful is not exactly the order of the day, any more!

However, there is a different kind of flavor in full fledged blogging and helps to bring out the true writer in you, which can never be accomplished through bits and pieces commenting and status updates.

Regarding the intermittent gloom in blogosphere, well, I am pretty sure that this is a temporary phase. Everyone needs varieties. [At least I need]. Life usually goes a full circle and would be true in this instance as well.

So, when the phase of Facebooking and Twittering is over, blogging will return. For me, it has already... that is exactly why, you are seeing this blog post.

Alice, I broke my jinx. Let us see when others break...