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As my rangOli shaNmukhi (six-faced) appeared, another shaNmukhi was making its presence felt on the east coast. The last time we had a white christmas was six years ago. The storm we had yesterday was monstrous. We had more than 20 inches of the white stuff (half a metre), unusual for December. We generally have big snow storms in January through early March. Basically, the whole area was shut down, a big letdown for the merchants during the last weekend before Christmas. It took four hours, four hands and four advils to shovel the snow. I always compare snow with a cobra.

Thank you very much Dinamalar for the reference!

The main page of the site has been redone. Let us know if you experience any difficulties in browsing. The Arts and crafts section has been reorganized too. The rest of the site has not been changed and no changes were made to your gallery pages. And, this is a work in progress...

Thank you.

Hello members,
Some of our members had emailed their contest rangolis to the wrong email id. We just recently discovered it.
Please do not mail your querries to mail@ikolam.com, because we do not use it. I thought we had made it clear that images for the contests were supposed to be uploaded directly to the site. The subsequent emails went unanswered too, because we don't check/use mail@ikolam. There was a disappointed contest-participant who emailed me recently to let us know the email he/she had used to send the entries.

Members who had space constraints should now have some space in their accounts.

Today is International Aids Day. More than two decades have passed since the human immuno deficiency virus that causes the disease AIDS made its appearance. This has become a raging disease now. No corner of the earth has been left untouched by the suffering caused by AIDS. Lives have been destroyed, families have been uprooted and countries have been devastated. Yet there is no cure. But the situation is far better than what it was ten years ago.

On this day of Thanksgiving, it is our solemn duty to be thankful to all those who made what we are and how we conduct ourselves. Of those to whom we owe our thanks, our parents, teachers, relatives, friends and colleagues occupy a proud place. All these people are known to us and we also are aware of their deeds of kindness and generosity. However, there are quite a few to whom we must be thankful. Many a time we had either a brief momentary contact or no contact with these great souls.

The site is due for its maintenance work. Please bear with the inconvenience.

Sunday 10:15 pm Update

After working over the weekend, we have the site finally up. I will update in detail about the downtime tomorrow. For now, things are back online. If you notice something out of line, please drop me a line.

Monday 9:00 am Update

We have upgraded to a new server, as we had serious problems with our old server. However, there are a few issues we have to work with in the meantime. Members can upload images as usual, but we do anticipate minor problems until we complete the entire migration process with the site.

Tuesday 7:30 am Update

Our internet service provider was down from yesterday evening (monday 7:00pm onwards) onwards. We just got back online. Hope the downtime ends here ....

Thursday 11:00 am Update

imehandi is functioning too, and hopefully all the maintenance work is done for now.

The day of Sarada and malli's departure arrived. Chandru’s father accompanied mallI and Sarada up to Bangalore. He returned home as if he lost something and was looking everywhere for it. After almost two days, she called from her American home. Till we heard she reached safely, I did not feel like eating anything at all. Yet I had to eat as I was a nourishing mother. The phone calls became more frequent now. We were exchanging notes as to the growth of our little ones. One day, it was she turned from side to side with ease. Another day it was me telling that he began to crawl.

Don't be carried away by the title Actually the full title must be something like this - How to win women's hearts as far as rangOlis are concerned. Since I did not want this long a title, I shortened it. Now you get it why I am writing this. While my artistic side of the brain was enjoying the aesthetic delights of the rangOlis in the contest, the other side was trying to make sense of the whole thing and analyse the results. The aesthetic side was overflowing with waves of joy.

Nice to hear from you.
The following message has to do with your comment that you left here ( http://www.ikolam.com/node/7190 ) regarding me not leaving a comment for your rangoli. There might be a few more members who might feel that way. Sorry for not getting to it on time. I'll try to catch up.