Genuine Smiles :)

• When you are getting drenched in a heavy rain, that auto driver who takes you all the way home (though it is just 50 steps away) and refuses to take money from you(He doesn’t even wait, saying ‘It’s ok! I don’t need money!!’). He instead leaves abruptly, with a smile, not even giving you enough time to thank him.
• When you are waving a friend goodbye, that little girl (who sells plastic bangles in a very busy part of the city) for a split second thinks that the bye was intended for her and waves back a loud bye. You wave her a bye too like any human would and she sports a smile that you do when you acquire a new friend.
• That old uncle who takes his dog for a walk and sees to it that his ‘Champ’ does not prevent others from enjoying their morning walk.
• That girl who sees that you desparately need to get ahead of others in queue and gives you the much needed way.
•  When all of a sudden, you remember that when you were a kid, you strongly believed that if Tom can fly using self-made wings, then so can you.
• Those friends who always ask you to message/call once you reach home.
• When you are surging with confidence or a sense of achievement,  those few moments that you spend recollecting the days you felt completely lost and hopeless.
• When you look at little souvenirs or momentos that you recieved from people who mean a lot to you.(A more special case, a gift from your first crush! But that does not make your other souvenirs any less special)
• When you read and re-read a slam book  
• Deja-vu / History repeats itself moments
•  Old photographs.
• That little 2 and a half year old, in the far corner of the street who yells a ‘Tataaa’ everyday, even (read especially) on days when you are actually getting late to office, despite the fact that you are a stranger to him.
• Visiting your hometown/birthplace after life takes you to so many other places.

Aha! A little smile is always a great feeling, even though it gives a hint of madness to people around you. After all, life bestows upon you enough moments to experience and enjoy. Huge achievements indeed matter in life. But over the long run, it is these little moments that we are going to cherish forever and ironically enough, most times, these little moments come from total strangers or people whom you know (or talk to) the least , which makes it a bit more special

BBC’s list of 100 books

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other potential book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens  — I hafta read this, for some board exam!! Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book !!
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom  — Read this one whenever I feel like reading it!
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (English)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

And I tag my usual bloggie pals : Somsie, Prithi and Raji