Provoked

Provoked, the true story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a Punjabi woman who leaves India to marry her British-Indian husband. For ten years she suffers his abuse, mental, physical, and sexual.

In an attempt to prevent him from chasing her, she tries to burn his legs, and succeeds in giving him fatal burns, for which she is sentenced to life imprisonment. The efforts of a team of dedicated activists allow her story to come to light, and her sentence to finally be remanded to the over 3 years she had already spent in jail.

Aishwarya Rai plays her so sensitively, evoking such emotion, her facial features perfectly reflecting the turmoil of her soul. A touching movie - brought tears to my eyes.

All-nighter

Lots of problems today, in fact the whole week, so here I am after knock-off time on a Friday evening stuck at the office, lucky me, running a job to load up data so I can give it to the users for testing. Oh joy.

Finally get the job started at 7pm. It runs. Actually a better description would be it crawls. After crawling for a couple of hours, and based on the number of records in integration, I estimate it will finish at 11:30, so I head off home on the train to spend a couple of hours with the family.

Get back just before midnight and its still going. Of course. Check its progress every 10 minutes. Its gone past the number where I'd should have finished. It finally hits me that its just going to keep running forever, just to torture me.

Listening to loud music. The office is completely deserted. Start singing. Get a bit crazy. Start dancing. Wander around all over the floor, find someone's candy jar, leave a quarter for a mini snickers bar.

Feel like passing out around 2ish, so lie down and power nap for 30 minutes. Up again, job keeps on going, UAT is a wet towel. Eventually ends after 4 and I do the extract and send it out and leave at 5am.

So looking forward to my nice warm bed. Walk to the car park and stare in disbelief. The car park is closed. My car is locked behind mesh doors. It doesn't open till 8am. OMG.

Shuffle around Stamford for 3 hours, half asleep. Eat breakfast at Curleys, a 24 hour joint, not exactly classy, but by that stage I don't notice. Finally get home 24 hours after I started work the previous morning. Curl up in bed exhausted.

zzzzzzzzzzz

Bangers and Mash

Rack'n'Roll, a cheesy dive not far from work with an only half-decent bar (no red bull, but at least they have smirnoff ice) and way too many pool tables. Its only redeeming grace being 2 foosball tables. Bright, Manju, Albert and I turn up tonight to find Leo and Lester already there, so we all order a drink and some medium spicy wings, and start playing. After a couple of games Sruthi turns up as well and joins in the fun.

Bright spins the foosball men with raw power, Albert goes for the cunning corner shots, Sruthi sneaks it past the defence, Manju encourages the ball with "yes, yes, yes!" It's been a while for us all, so we take a little while to warm up and get good again.

"Bang that ball!"
"You really get hot and sweaty when you bang it hard!"
"Go on, ram it in fast!"
"Bang it straight into the hole!"
"Everyone is banging now! Woot!"

Man, did we have a good time or what! High fives all around!! :)))



And the dessert afterwards (tiramisu, pistachio gelato, and chocolate mousse) was just icing on the cake :p