::more than somewhat::

If the Shakra girls were on the rampage, I’d get out of the way if I were me. Which I am, in fact. On their new DVD, the three Shakra girls, Brownen, Hilary and Na’la, blast their way through a workout that the Americans would call “kickass”.It’s a stomping, kicking, punching workout, bursting with high energy. I think the marketing blurb actually describes it best. All that, plus the preview clip.

As a dance, it’s not my kind of thing, since I’m really involved heart body and soul in belly dancing. But as a cardio and strength workout, I can see how this would work because of the sheer move-move-move and energy.

The Shakra girls’ “Transfusion” dance has African, bhangra, belly dance and other moves all mixed smoothly together. The blend is remarkably smooth and that’s tough  because often people stick in a move from one dance into another in a way that makes it stick out like a sore thumb. I must say the whole effect makes me think it’s Bollywood on steroids and I’m sure people here would be able to pick this up in a flash. For me, it’s going to be a challenge. It’s a challenge I might take up though because I have no satisfactory cardio exercise going on. The cardio belly dance programmes I know look like cotton candy in front of this workout.

There are also stretches that most exercise-friendly people and dancers will be familiar with. The girls take turns to each you the moves and you do them along working up from “first gear” which is on-the-beat tempo, to “second gear” which is double time, right through to overdrive. Some moves that are too strenuous stop short of third gear though.You’re given safety tips — and I must say, they’re needed if you’re not used to such vigorous movement — and there’s a separate section to teach the moves.

I’ve never been very fond of dancing that isn’t pretty and feminine but this is really quite infections. And empowering. I rather like the idea of stomping dangerously around a bit. I like the idea of burning some fat even more.

Shakra’s Industrial Stength Dance Workout — Tribal Bellydance World Fusion is produced and sold by World Dance New York on Amazon. If you’d like to go with my favorite seller, that’s Oceanstate Media at oceanstatemedia.com. The video is a hundred minutes long all told.

Tags: Belly dance videos, Dance Diary by Mala
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I’ve decided to take one Pilates exercise a day, and add it to my dance workouts. Of course many of the dance workouts have yoga and Pilates inspired moves to begin with, but by focusing on one exercise at a time outside of the workouts I want to try and perfect them. It isn’t just that I’m obsessed with getting rid of my stomach, it’s also that these exercises really develop core strength, flexibility and stamina for dancing. By sticking with Suhaila-style workouts for many months I’ve seen a big difference in quad strength, the ability of my back to be flat and take all the bending nd undulaitons in its stride.

There’s a nice video podcast of Pilates exercises at http://pilatesonfifth.com/video/?p=9 . “:Pilates on Fifth” has 60 podcasts so far. You can download the separate videos straight from the site, if you like. Most are 2 or 3 minutes long unless it’s a bigger workout, in which case it gets to be a bigger file. But the instruction in each is focused, quick and careful. If there’s a commonly made mistake with a move, they show you both the mistake and the correction. For dancers or others who exercise regularly, it should be easy enough to correct, but for newbies, I’d say listen real carefully, both to the instructions and to your own body.

I have DVD instruction on Piulates, but I really like the idea of picking up one move at a time to really work on, getting the posture, breathing etc right. I find that too many instructors focus on quantity and speed, letting the momentrum do the exercise, but I prefer an approach where you learn the proper muscle work and pay particular attention on exactly how your posture must be. That avoids injury too.

Tags: General by Mala
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What you see here is the face of penguinphobia. Thanks to her uncle, this little girl is petrified of the curious, comical birds everyone else loves. The thing is, Pushpi is a force to be reckoned with and is afraid of nothing at all. Disciplining her or getting her to do anything, including take her medicine, is a losing battle for the adult. That’s where the penguins come in. She’s been told that penguins lock up little girls in icebergs all the way in the South Pole and the little girls cry and cry and no one hears them. Well… Pushpi will probably grow up not too fond of penguins, but she’ll grow up healthy!

The only other thing that scares her and keeps her in line is the prospect of meeting her way smaller cousin, Parna. That’s because Parna happens to be an even bigger force to be reckoned with and makes absolutely certain she doesn’t let Pushpi do anything Pushpi wants.

Tags: General by Mala
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I know I saw it on the video, but I still haven’t understood how it’s humanly possible to have such precise and clean technique. Which is exactly what Sadie has. This brilliant dancer also has the figure to execute and show off her skill. There are few performances of hers that you can watch without having your jaw drop in awe.

Well, in this video, Sadie makes a wholehearted attempt to give you something of her method and control, showing you what and how to practice so that you can take your dance to another level. She takes up the layering and combining of movements that can make belly dancing one of the most skill-powered dances in the world.

But right at the outset, I’ll say that this is a very challenging video. It’s actually meant to span learners of all levels and in a way it does. A chunk of this video instruction takes you through the foundational movements and the first of three levels of difficulty in each of the practice drills here are meant for the beginner belly dancer to work on. This is not a fitness or weight loss video, even if you can see how incredibly slim Sadie is. This is a video for someone who’s serious about belly dancing and who wants to put in all the hard work needed to hard wire the brain and body to do complex moves seemingly instinctively. Not a fun and frilly party of a video, not an all-the-basics video either. I think of this DVD as the beginning of a journey into richly textured belly dancing.

Sadie begins her instruction with a technique section (one of two on this video) and takes up some foundational hip and pelvic moves. This is where the base moves that you will layer on or use in the layers, are taught or refreshed. But from this point on, you get into the realm of layering or teaching your brain and body to do different things at the same time. You walk with different hip move timings so that the hip and feet timings are different. This is done with the ¾ shimmy on the up and down as well. You work with these to the music in short practice sessions. But wait, the drills haven’t even begun yet!

The drills accompanying Technique 1 are in three difficulty levels – like all the six drill sets on this video. They involve layering drops and lifts on some of the foundation movements. This is the point from which the video begins to be unique. You then layer this on a walk. As the difficulty level increases, you now layer on compound movements. So, you may be layering small, precise hip lifts and drops on a circle. Next, timing variations, increases in speed, and doing moves on releve increase the difficulty level further. And if this weren’t enough, you now may add half turns to this lot. So you’re doing sharp hip drops/lifts layered on a circle while you’re on your toes, you’re varying the timing – and you’re taking a half turn.

Moving on to the second technique section, we bring the rib cage into the layering picture. Keeping your hips going with moves in autopilot, you now learn to layer rib cage moves on top of that. That could be chest lifts and drops, diagonal or circular moves. And then, impossible as it may seem, you layer all this on footwork. This chunk is really challenging. Drill set 4 combines the ¾ shimmy with complex rib cage movements such as the rib cage triangle and rib cage vertical circle. And as is the pattern with these drills, we add the on-the-toes moves, changes in timing and traveling.Sadie also takes up the “semiha” or flat-ball step slide move and layers the ¾ on that. She adds rib cage moves to that too. Finally, Drill set 6 works with hip squares. For layers, we have undulations and reverse undulations, pelvic drops and lifts – all coming together with hp squares and basic traveling around.

Threaded through the entire set of drills are short practice sessions with music.

And finally you can relax and watch a performance by Sadie – Egyptian with a Sadie twist.

If you’re a beginner and plan on buying this video, make sure this isn’t your only basics or drills video. As long as you’re working with easier ones that focus more comprehensively on the basics, you can take up this one to start teaching your brain how to do different dance movements at the same time. If you’re an intermediate dancer, think about where you are in your drills journey right now. Again, if you have a ton of videos but haven’t worked through any of the easier drill ones, you may not work with this tougher one yet. But, if you’d also like to work on some neglected hard wiring for layering and are ready to bring this instruction into your practice routine in chunks, it’s not at all a bad idea. If you’re an advanced dancer, this video will sharpen your percussiveness.

Trying to compare with all the general basic videos and tribal videos I own, I think that there’s a whole bulk of moves and exercises on Thrillin that are not on the others in any significant percentage. There may be moves of this type scattered here and there, but that would be across choreographies and drum solos. For the more basic portion of this video, there will be other videos that do the same, but as the drills get into different difficulty levels, the video gets more unique in its content.  And although I often have a quarrel with how expensive IAMED videos are, with this one, I’d say it’s value for money.

Photographs here are used with Sadie’s permission.

Comparison with Pop Lock and Shimmy
At first I thought that this one was the closest parallel. I went through Pop Lock (which I must admit I haven’t finished working with) and found the two videos are quite different. a) Pop Lock’s drills are quite tied to the choreography for the drum solo and while the drills on that video will improve your hip work hugely, they may not span all aspects. But a more advanced dancer will have to confirm that. b) These drills feature the regular shimmy a whole lot. c) Here, the drills and moves are easier and less layered/complex. d) there isn’t much traveling with the drills. Will Thrillin Drillin give you something that Pop Lock doesn’t? Yes. Will Pop Lock give you something that Thrillin Drillin doesn’t? Also yes.

Comparison with Jenna’s Next Level
Come to think of it, this video is also supposed to be a course in layering and traveling – and transitions. But it turns out the videos are really very different. The whole approach is different from beginning to end. The choreographies may take up some moves that the Thrillin drills night, but the approach and format is too different to make direct comparison easy.

Comparison with Drills x 3
I guess Thrillin has more similarities with Drills x 3 than it did with Pop Lock. Both videos are good, but again both have enough unique content on their own. Thrillin has more complex and challenging drills, plays more with timing, works with traveling for every drill, and has 3 levels of difficulty for each movement group. It builds, in other words. Thrillin does a lot of the hard wiring you need for layering. There’s no work with the regular shimmy here – only with the ¾. The moves are more percussive than smooth (like mayas). A lot of the sharp hip downs and ups are used along with chest moves. Drills x 3 also has its share of hard wiring, specially with zils which are missing here. So, the hard wiring focus is different. Drills x 3 has a bigger variety of exercises while Thrillin goes deeper and builds on a few. Again, both give you something.  Drills x 3 is more immediately doable and good on an everyday basis while Thrillin is probably the next level up and better for the intermediate and advanced dancer.

Comparison with Sadie‘s drum solo DVD
It’s with Sadie‘s drum solo video that I get the most feeling of overlap. But looking closely, I find that it’s really more a feeling. After all they’re both Sadies and they’re both doing tricky technique. The drum solo does have moves that are there on Thrillin, but that’s true just for a very few and they’re in any case not drilled.  If you’ve already worked with this drum solo successfully, you don’t need Thrillin Drillin — or any drillin probably. But if you’ve put the drum solo video away because it’s too tough, Thrillin is probably a good prelude to the drum solo. The drum solo is of course much more difficult and doesn’t involve any real drilling and has rapid-fire teaching meant for the advanced dancer.

Comparison with Leyla Najwa’s hips video
Now this no-frills video I don’t have. I have seen a bit of Leyla’s lessons online, and going by those, again they are simpler than Sadie‘s with Sadie‘s technique being “bigger” and cleaner. But I’m unable to give anything other than a fleeting impression on this one.

Comparison with others
Trying to compare with all the general basic videos and tribal videos I have, I think that there’s a whole bulk of moves and exercises on Thrillin that are not on the others in any significant percentage. They may be scattered here and there, but that would be across choreographies and drum solos perhaps. For the more basic portion of this video, there will be other videos that do the same, but as the drills get into different difficulty levels, the video gets more unique in its content. I’m not comparing with Yasmina’s Technqiues either because those are anyway not drills videos; they’re more like explanations and a bit of try out. The moves on the Techniques are more varied and wide-spanning. Technique 2 however does have some of the ¾ shimmy work here – it’s a whole ¾ shimmy video, after all and explores layering it on many moves.

Tags: Belly dance videos, Dance Diary by Mala
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I have the tribal belly dancers to thank for whatever success I’ve had so far with muscle isolations. While some videos have shown me exactly how to work on them, it’s the tribal fusion videos that have actually got me working – almost every day since I got them. Well, definitely thrice a week anyway.

These are the videos, in chronological sequence, that I went through from a couple years ago to now.

American Tribal Style 1 and 2 – Kajira Djoumahna

Kajira, who won an award for her instruction on this video set, teaches isolations in a style that is somewhat different from the “regular” belly dancing isolations. The muscle work is essentially the same but there are subtle differences in emphasis here and there. I bought these videos before a series of tribal fusion DVDs began to be produced by World Dance New York. The teaching on this “ATS” set is painstaking, detailed and patient. There’s a lot of emphasis on cues because this is a style danced in groups. For beginners looking for information, this is not the same style as what is now called tribal fusion although here are similarities. ATS is considered the parent genre. It was working with this video that the maya was finally demystified for me. This set is however not as “drilly” as the tribal fusion that came later are. It’s also three times as expensive while not necessarily being three times as good. The DVD has ATS combinations and is great for someone exploring American Tribal group dancing. For isolations, there is much else available now.

East Coast Tribal – Sera

I’ve had this DVD for a while and am just as impressed with it as the day I first watched it. Sera is a fantastic, polished instructor and leads you through the workout and combinations on her video at an expertly smooth pace. She has a nice method of getting you to do an exaggerated form of a movement or isolation so that you “get it” and work through the full range of motion. And then she reins it in so that you can get control and precision as well. This video is fantastic for beginners who want to drill isolations because the workout is varied and movements are not hard and forced like they are in more advanced videos. The risk of injury, in my opinion, is way lower. I’ve worked with this video a lot. It’s helped open up the body for later work with isolations. The 30-minute workout here is not only a gentle way to ease into muscle drills, it’s a wonderful everyday dance warm up. There’s even a 10-minute shimmy drill. A little bit of everything to warm you up head to toe (yes, there’s an ankles warm up too) and an unstressful way to do isolations without pain. The combinations on this video are also very funkily lovely.

Tribal Fusion NYC — Darshan

I’ve so enjoyed working with Darshan’s video. She’s instantly likeable and has a way of engaging with you one-on-one so that the entire instruction is between you and her. She may be on video, but she still has a way of being with you, as an equal. And that’s rare. Darshan has a nice, active workout which, now that I have so many tribal videos to compare with, I can see has several unique aspects to it. Her workout is more isolation based and there are no yoga and Pilates moves. Her short arms drill is totally different from others’ and isn’t about plain old snake arms. She gets you to understand your dance space as you move and gives you exercises that will give you balance and posture. Darshan’s four long combinations are like isolation exercises in themselves – apart from being very attractive. Every now and then I feel like pulling out Tribal NYC and working with it.

Contemporary Tribal Bellydance and Yoga Conditioning – Ariellah

No matter what went before it and what came after, Ariellah’s video was a godsend. Through three hours of gentle and warm teaching, she leads you through a yoga strengthening warm up (available in short and long sessions) and then 35 minutes of basic drills followed by another 35 minutes of more advanced drills. I’d recommend these for any belly dancer of any style and any level. The pace, which I consider very important, is perfect and without frenzy or anxiety, the reminders on posture and safety are invaluable, and gives you what amounts to a whole workshop on disk. I’m not using this DVD these days but have done so for months on end and it remains one of my most treasured. Her tribal combinations – six of them – are easier than on most other videos, and are nice-looking and also make good practice, even if you don’t intend to dance tribal style. This is the one video in the whole that should be winning a bunch of awards.

Fluid Precision — Kassar

The tribal twins as I like to think of them – though they’re not – took the strength and conditioning workout to the next level. And that’s what I like best about their video. The isolations they take up are specific to the combinations they teach on the DVD. But the yoga-Pilates workout was a good challenge. I worked with this for a short while before progressing to Asharah’s. Kassar’s combinations are disappointingly short but very cool and smooth. They even take up two floorwork combos. All of these need you to have no knee problems because they love abrupt level drops. It’s a specialty for them and the way they combine this with smooth mayas and half mayas is wonderful.

Modern Tribal Bellydance – ­­Asharah

The DVD I’m using most often right now is Asharah’s. She too has a solid three-hour programme but these three hours are a lot more hard work than Ariellah’s three hours. The whole programme is pretty much hard work, in fact. And I love it. The strength workout is a whole 50 minutes or so long and is pretty much what Suhaila does in her Fitness Fusion videos. After that, Asharah goes on to take you through the isolations which you’ll find yourself doing on your toes, on one foot, seated, etc. And most of it with your arms up in 2^nd or 5^th position. This is no workout for the fainthearted. Because I’ve stuck to this workout for some months, there’s a visible difference to my strength, flexibility, precision and sharpness. Which is why I’m so grateful for this DVD. Asharah also has a big special section on breaking up the isolations into tiny parts which is amazing to work with. You may not like the automated and robotic elements that modern tribal uses, but the isolations will certainly give you no end of control over your movements. The combinations are a shade boring but again, make great drills – not that there’s a shortage of drills on this incredible video. I work with this video about three times a week – and don’t seem to be getting bored with it.

Then there’s a bunch I own but don’t work with.

Tribal Fusion Bellydance with Sharon Kihara

Sharon Kihara is an extremely exotic looking woman and it’s a pleasure to watch her dance. I’d say the combinations on her video are some of the prettiest. They have an Indian tinge to them and are even set to a Hindi song, Chhaiya Chhaiya. The ATS parentage of tribal fusion shows in the combinaitons too. She teaches them rather rapidly though, so you’d better not be too much of a beginner for this one. The isolations and warm up however, don’t match up in depth and duration to those on other videos. I never seem to work with it for isolations.

Tribal fusion bellydance with Nara and Jala

This would have been good for a beginner if it had only been made better and cost less. At the time I bought it, it was even more expensive, so it was a shock to find that the write up seemed a whole lot of more promising than the content turned out to be. I’ve seen it exactly once and put it away in utter disgust. Sometimes dancers make videos imagining that none others exist in the world and that anything at all that they put out will be lapped up. Well, it wasn’t.

Tribal Fusion — Yoga Isolations and Drills for Bellydance: Rachel Brice

I’ve never worked with this video. Well, maybe for a few minutes. This just isn’t the content dancers really really wanted from Rachel Brice. One can learn yoga elsewhere. And the isolations… well… Personally, I found Rachel Brice cold and closed up. She didn’t try to relate to the learner, she didn’t even look like she expected any learners around. Flat-voiced and matter of fact over a few drills.

Suhaila’s videos

I only have a few of Suhaila Salimpur’s fitness videos and they include yoga and pilates and isolations that the other videos actually draw from. So her videos would be like working with the source. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that others will have mixed in other stuff as wsell. Like combinations.

Here are some of my nomination to sum things up a bit;

Most fun instructor – Darshan
Best drills – Asharah and Ariellah
Best warm up – Sera
Best workout — Asharah (Suhaila, by implication)
Best combinations – Sharon Kihara
Easiest combinations – AriellahMost beginner friendly – Sera
Most hard work – Asharah
Most comprehensive — Asharah

Most of these videos are available from Amazon, where you’ll find more detailed reviews, including mine for some of these. If you’d like to go with my favorite seller, that’s Oceanstate Media oceanstatemedia dot com .

(Photographs are used with permission from World Dance New York)

Tags: Dance Diary by Mala
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When Sankar Sridhar puts iris and ink to work, he captures the stark beauty of the amazing places he travels to. Places that may soon never be the same again as progress blasts its way through nature and centuries-old habitat.

This isn’t a special effect or a man in levitation. This Zanskari man, like many of his ancestors have done before him, is actually walking on the thin ice that is the Zanskar River in Ladakh. Any day now, this will be a road.

See some of Sankar’s photographs at http://irisandink.com/ . He promises more soon. In fact, see if you can persuade him to put them up — and if you’re as concerned about nature as he is, write to him sankar dot sridhar at gmail dot com

Tags: General by Mala
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Here’s something mesmerizing, soothing and meditative. Ilana Yahav is a sand animation artist and paints with sand on a glass table. She swirls and throws and brushes the sand around till it flows. In the background, music and sounds flow too. The effect is rivetting. Watch her at her own website at Sand Fantasy.

Tags: General by Mala
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If there’s something special about Bozenka’s “Every Shimmy in the Book” I’m afraid I couldn’t find it. I’ve seen more detailed shimmy instruction on general belly dance videos, forget shimmy-specialized ones. Bozenka shimmies real smooth and pretty. But what’s the fuss about?

First of all let me point out that this certainly is nowhere near every shimmy in the book. I must say it’s a very confident title for a video that the producers must know doesn’t cover the subject comprehensively at all. Even the video by Samra that someone apparently ripped off (Belly Dance: Total Workout for Body Shaping) and the 101 series covers more than this one. If you have Leyla’s 21 Shimmies set or any of the others that everyone’s been using all this time, then Every Shimmy in the Book gives you precisely… sit down for this one… nothing. Except a good look at Bozenka, who has beautiful form and is a fantastic dancer.

I think if the video had been named more honestly or had even been called Shimmy with Bozenka, for lack of anything more clever, it would at least not create an expectation that isn’t met. The DVD has 12 shimmies that are the ones apparently most commonly used and are her own favorites. That’s fine and nothing wrong with that. But why every shimmy in the book, then?

Well, I suppose it’s no different from Leyla’s “1001 variations” which I’m still looking for. But I do think that titling videos just anything you like and creating expectations that aren’t met, isn’t a fair practice.

And as if it wasn’t enough o claim that this video will teach every shimmy in the book, it goes on to say, in the subtitle: A Bellydancer’s Complete Guide to Mastering Hip Perfection. Now would you look at the expectations all this creates? A bellydancer’s… meaning it’s probably not a beginner’s instruction. Complete guide? Is 12 shimmies all there is to hip work in belly dance? Hip perfection… is there practice? Some drills? In one word, no.

But to get on with it, the problem isn’t just a matter of a title that doesn’t precisely say what it gives. I couldn’t believe my eyes, ears and head when I timed one of the sections (3/4 shimmy) and found it was all of 2 minutes from beginning to end. Wow. One may argue that an intermediate learner doesn’t need any more than that – but then the content of the teaching has to be beyond basic. Instead, the shimmy is demo’d, broken down minimally, looked at closely and then finally done up to speed. That’s the format for the lot. There’s no detailed breakdown, no practice, no drills. There’s a warm up and cool down on the video but why I’m not sure because the instruction isn’t really formatted for do-along mode – it’s more demo mode. So each shimmy goes through in this format

–Let me demonstrate (30 secs)
–Let’s break it down slightly (30 secs)
–Look with the camera close at a slower demo (30 secs)
–Let’s try it together up to speed (30 secs)

Over and out. In 2 minutes.

So, I couldn’t even figure out the Hagala, which I’ve been trying to learn. She said you go up-down-up with one side and “add a twist”. But where does the twist come in? Is it up-down-twist-up or up-down-up-twist and back? There’s absolutely no detail. In the shoulder shimmy section it’s more of a demo than ever. There are zero tips on how to actually isolate the shoulders properly from the torso. I wouldn’t blame a beginner for trying to twist the entire upper body, which is what she looks like she’s doing, though for Bozenka it’s probably a result of the huge range of motion she has. If one is still learning the shoulder shimmy, it would be nice to get into posture, neck position, keeping the hands still, keeping it out of the chest, and so on.

So. The shimmies covered here are:

Shoulder shimmy
Basic shimmy
Shimmy on the toes
¾ Shimmy
¾ Shimmy side-to-side
¾ twist—Hagala
Bedouin shimmy
Egyptian shimmy
Tension shimmy – Freeze
Pelvic shimmy
Twist shimmy
Steady shimmy

No posture tips, no safety instructions. I seriously don’t know what we warmed up for but we do a few circles and gentle stretches for 4 or 5 minutes before the “instruction sets” begin. And another few head circles and arm circles and such at the end.

All said and done though, Bozenka shimmies beautifully. She performs a drum solo improvisation which is rather nice in its simplicity. But guess what… the same drum solo features in the bonus section! How generous is that! Thank you Miles Copeland! There’s an interview with Bozenka in which she tells you how excited she is about the whole concept of the DVD. What concept would that be? There’s also something about shimmies and how they’re used in many styles. And some nice bio background. There’s a little interview with her and Issam. They talk about the importance of improvising.

The exotic piece of music threaded through the video is Galactic Caravan’s Voice from the Moon. I like the piece.

Bozenka is such a smooth and wonderful dancer that I can’t help feeling this whole video is a lost opportunity – not to mention a lot of lost money. I got it for $14 or so, but on her website it’s listed as $30. This is Bozenka – she should have given you something more Bozenka-specific! Instead what you get is stuff you’ll find in all your other DVDs. If you’re a total beginner, then this video does not have enough breakdown or posture and safety info to work with. If you’re a beginner-intermediate (or knowledgeable beginner) you won’t learn anything additional. For everyone else in between.. well…

Miles Copeland does it again. Disappoints me.

Other shimmy videos to explore

21 Shimmies and 1001 Variations – Leyla Jouvana
More Shimmies! And 1000s of Variations — Leyla
Turbo Shimmy (drills) – Celeste
Technique 2 (indepth ¾ and layering instruction) — Yasmina Ramzy
Saqra’s Drum solo vocabulary and improvisation series (watch out for overlapping content)
(more coming up)

Tags: Belly dance videos, Dance Diary by Mala
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How to stop an argument: in two easy steps.

STEP 1

STEP 2

Tags: General by Mala
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I’m sure Gulabo will grow up to pleased she’s the first dog to make it to my blog – specially the cat section of my blog. Ha. Well, she’s way too cute not to. This little milky looking Labrador puppy lives in South Delhi, with eight other dogs – one mommie, six siblings, and a hyper-terrier. She doesn’t look anything like my black Lab puppy used to, but she sure makes me miss him. Sydney, as we called our riot of a puppy, was an intelligent, bouncy full-of-beans dog who would fill the house with joy – when he fell asleep. Everyone would then walk on tip toe and whisper and warm each other to shhhh, the dog is asleep! Sadly, sadly, sadly this most adorable of dogs died from that awful Parvo virus. It’s strange though how, many years later, I feel that dog is still a part of who I am.

Golabo looks like a polar bear but is sweet-tempered and docile. I swear these guys are just made for human beings! They’re the most people-friendly dogs there are. Gulabo’s siblings were pretty cute too. You couldn’t stand in that room because in a second one fat puppy or the other would waddle up and begin trying to figure out how to play with your toes. That tickles! Oh, she’s named for the pink ribbon she wears at all times.

Tags: General by Mala
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