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Issue #7 || 3 November 2022
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It’s November and the weather has finally turned here in Hyderabad. Usually this happens in October – a chill sets in that triggers a bunch of winter activities. This year’s unseasonal and high-volume rains ⛈️ made sure this was delayed.
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The moisturisers come out – the sure sign that winter has arrived is when you wake up in the morning and you feel the skin on your face being pulled in different directions. The Hyderabadi winter, enjoyable as it is, also forces you to moisturise, moisturise and keep moisturising. Before we moved here, we didn’t even have a moisturising routine. Now we have a plethora of moisturising products, leading us to discover brands we wouldn’t previously have taken a second glance at. Face moisturisers, body moisturisers, hand creams – these are the minimum requirements for surviving a Hyderabadi winter unscathed and unscarred. Those for different times of day demand different fragrances, and of course we each have our own preferences. This ends in many moisturising products strategically placed around the house, rather like the glasses of water in Manoj Night Shyamalan’s Signs.
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Then come the 🛌🏽 sleeping changes. The bedsheets and razais come out of the closet. We learned early in our marriage that the path to true marital bliss is clearly marked by separate bedsheets and blankets – so we each have our preferred ones. Early morning ⏰ wake-ups become tougher, and regular rising times get pushed till their limits.
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Our jackets and jerkins 🧥 and scarves 🧣 and shrugs come out. These are all clothes and accessories you cannot even think of wearing the rest of the year. But in the winter, everything goes!
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This is also the time we switch it up and all dining and eating out becomes al fresco. Most eateries set up outdoor seating, and we get to enjoy the pleasant weather along with our favourite food and drinks. This also means a lot of our regular haunts change during the winter.
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And then finally, the planning for year-end breaks and the secret Santa confusions (we have two each year – one with our friends and one with our co-workers!), the year-end work planning and the incredibly tricky New Year’s Eve planning – winter is here and we’re loving it!
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What are you up to and how is winter in your neck of the woods?
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A reminder: To ensure you don't miss any of our newsletters, move this email to your inbox. We always send all our newsletters from happystuff@sigamany.in – add it to your contacts so that you always get it in your inbox.
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Here's a Photo
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...instead of a thousand words
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A beautiful winter sky through an ornately decorated arch
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Chowmahalla Palace, Hyderabad | 2022
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Interesting Stuff
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Fun things we'd turn around and share with you if we were in the same room as you
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The 16th century in Europe was a time when you had to remind yourself that you could die at any moment. This led to people wearing reminders of death on their person. This picture is of a toothpick from the mid-1600s in Western Europe, and is in the form of Father Time’s sickle. In case you still didn’t get the message, a skull is helpfully included to indicate death! This toothpick is currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
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As some readers of Happy Stuff may recall, this is not the first time that the two of us have published something together. Way back in the early 2000s, 2001 to 2007 to be precise, we published Zine5, an online magazine. Recently, Navin was on a work trip to Delhi and he ran into Nikhil Pahwa, one of our regular Zine5 writers. That was a fun catch-up!
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We use the term painting on water to refer to something that is transient or ephemeral, and to words that may never become real. However, the technique of marbling is literally making a painting on water and transferring it to a paper. In Turkey, where it is called edbru, this has been elevated into an art form.
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Fun Poll!
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What's a newsletter without a survey!
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The results of last issue’s fun poll has made one thing clear – we’re NEVER going to a Happy Stuff podcast! While a solid 44% said they love podcasts, the rest were all falling asleep or had never listened to one!
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We decided to go with things most of us have done – reading 📖 and watching 📺 TV! So we keep it simple this time – what do you do more?
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Nostalgia Kick
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Growing up, the canvas shoes we wore to games class in school 👟 required regular whitening, and this white shoe cleaner was a standard fixture in pretty much every household. Of course, applying the whitener on the shoes and getting them to dry was a monthly production that was never short of drama – especially as we got more of it on ourselves than on the shoes!
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What We're Watching
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Because there’s no such thing as too much TV!
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We continued the Derry Girls celebration, binge-watching the final season. It lives on in our top ten comic series of all time.
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The Chestnut Man was eerie and boring by turns, and finally ended satisfactorily. Cold Case was keeping us hooked with the way it was made, before it was ignominiously removed from Prime while we were halfway through season 3. Talking about stuff going away, Hangover (yes, THAT Hangover) is gone from Netflix, but we managed to catch it one last time. In spite of bits here and there not ageing well, it still had us clutching our bellies in laughter a lot of the time.
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Like the blankets, we each also have our own shows to watch. Vidya sadly watched the last episode of what a critic called the “annoyingly pristine world” of Chesapeake Shores. For Navin, Rick & Morty and their genre-bending adventures are nearing the end of Season 4.
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All this talk of TV shows makes it look as though we are indiscriminate consumers of whatever appears on the screen. But there are shows we pass on (Breaking Bad, Lost, The West Wing, Dexter - the list goes on). We have something we call the ten-minute-test. The idea is to watch something for ten minutes. By then it’s mostly clear if the show is for us or not. The latest show to fail the ten-minute test is Harlan Coben’s Stay Close.
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That's it for this issue, folks! Feel free to write to us at happystuff@sigamany.in or just fill out the form here with your thoughts, ideas and good wishes :)
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See you in the next issue!
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Disclaimer: We have no affiliation, commercial or otherwise, with any products and services we mention in the newsletter.
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