The Uninspiring Title

I remember the day Jimmy was born. Twelve years ago, in the quaint drawing room of our downstairs neighbour. Blacky was in labour, and in a matter of minutes a 13 year old bright eyed little girl witnessed the miracle of life for the first time.  The bright eyed girl was me, and Jimmy is the youngest of three in my family. Jimmy is my 12 year old Dalmatian, my mum's only son, and fulfilling all expectations, her favourite (mum's always have a soft corner for sons!). About 4 years ago Jimmy developed his first tumor. A lump on his left front leg, the tumor was operated upon and found to be cancerous. However our vet, Dr. Prabhakaran and the entire team at Friendicos did a marvelous job and scraped out as much of the tumor growing on his bone as possible, but this did not stop stop the tumor from coming back. What followed was a harrowing 4 years in which the tumor came back thrice and removed twice more.  When the tumor came back for the fourth time last April we...

For most of you who know me, one of the first things that comes up, in a conversation with me is the fact that I'm fluent in German. I have been learning the language for 11 years, and it is one of my biggest passions in life. So in any conversation I tend to slip in the minor detail. In December last year I, along with 8 other crazy people, who I now call friends (Shashank, Piyush, Pranav, Swadhin, Divi, Niket, Gunjam and Simran I love you all to bits), decided to sit for the C2 exam in German. For those of you who don't know, the European language system has been standardized, so C2 is the highest level available anywhere in the world for any European language. After spending an entire year preparing for it, and in my case giving up a job, we were very gung-ho about the whole thing.  The result however, contrary to expectation, was a nuclear disaster the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. Only one of us managed to pass the entire exam (yes, ye...