“You may pick your own strawberries,” deadpans the man with the bullhorn. We’re let loose, allowed to run amok. A real strawberry field! The Beatles hadn’t been lying after all.

Ravishing cherry tomatoes, pale Japanese cucumbers and jade-coloured capsicum, all grown on fresh mountain water and air, crowd thick and wild in adjoining pens. They taste preposterously wonderful. Half an hour later, we emerge covered in crushed strawberry, and beaming.
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Tunics, tight-fitting dresses seem to rule the party scene as does the colour red. It seems to be the hot favourite colour this season, but there are pinks, purples, oranges and greens too on the party scene.

Style it up
Fashion designer Bhumika Shodhan says, “This season, short dresses with frills and short, fitted skirts with loose blouses are in. The silhouettes will not be too sleek, instead it will have volume. Controlled embellishments will be seen. Long skirts with loose blouses will be a hit.” Fashion designer Barsha Dutta agrees, “Sequin work will be minimal this time, as it’s about being simple, yet elegant. For youngsters, short dresses with frills, spaghetti straps, halters and sleeveless will rule. Bolero and jackets are also seen. Long cocktail dresses will be picked up by middle-age groups. Some will be seen flaunting leggings with short skirt.” Dutta observes that scarves and stoles are back with a bang. “This is the season to wear short and skimpy clothes. There will be a lot of short dresses. A lit bit of sequin work will be there, but no embroidery at all,” Dutta adds.

“Tight fitted dresses and loose tunics will be preferred,” says fashion designer Bobby Grover. However, fashion designer Mandira Wirk predicts that the draped Grecian dresses will continue to dominate. Designers say that this season is also about controlled volume. “Quirky capes, cropped funky capes will provide an alternative to sharp tailored jackets, while long leather coats can be worn over sleek shift dresses,” they say.

Full of yards
Designers say that one can choose from a variety of fabrics. “Chiffon, georgette, silk, suede, leathe, there are a variety of fabrics from which you can choose the best,” they say. “Bold prints like modern art in flowy fabrics will be seen this season,” says Bhumika. Adds Barsha, “A mix of georgette, satin, silk and crepe will be seen and prints will be the hot favourite. But we are not talking animal prints.” “Velvet prints will be the new pick this season,” says Mandira and adds that tweed fabrics will find themselves reinvented in sexy silhouettes like the shift dresses with unconventional cuts.

Cool hot colours
Pink and red will rule. Metallic shades will be a new refreshment. According to Bhumika, the new colours will be acid yellow and citrus orange. Mandira predicts the use of metallic colours as opposed to an overdose of loud colours and heavily sequinned textures. “Choose from plum berry, rococo red, fusion coral, teal blue to a combination of fuchsia and soft pink,” she says. Barsha recommends, “Electric blue, bright green, burgundy, purple and black are the best picks.” However, while you get your style quotient right, don’t forget to carry a jacket or pullover along with your micro mini outfit this season.

When will you give us the good news? Most young married women have been asked this dreaded question within the first three months of tying the knot.

But, when the good news takes more than the average time to come along, more often than not, older relatives begin to cast anxious looks and in some insensitive families, also make obvious hints.

Stress causes cracks
Family and social pressures apart, when a couple has to face the truth that they cannot have children, there is disbelief and then, sorrow. This may begin to eat into their marriage. Sex becomes mechanical.

It’s time to understand
If the couple cannot sort out the situation on their own, it is better to go in for professional counseling. The guilt of being the sterile partner can be a heavy burden to carry.

Who says you can’t?
Adoption is a boon for a parentless child, but more often than not, adoption proves to be a blessing for the couple involved as well. Anuradha Talwar, 35, who adopted a child after six years of marriage says, “After we adopted Niharika, a curtain of sorrow was lifted from our lives. Earlier, we were resigned to the fact that we would always be miserable and unhappy.”

Look beyond
Develop new interests. Share outside activities like sports, clubs, dramatics, music and social groups.

Accept and blend in
It is important to accept the situation and not alienate yourself. Some time or the other, you are going to meet other people with kids. How long are you going to avoid social situations like these? So what if you don’t have kids? You have each other. Cherish, love and deepen the bonds that tie the two of you together. There’s a lot more in life that you haven’t experienced yet!

Building a farm or joining the Mafia Wars on Facebook is just as much a part of your daily routine as checking your work email. Crappy movies, boring parties and bad break-ups are all fodder alike for acerbic Tweets. Pictures taken on your cellphone make it on your Orkut profile page at the speed of light, and padding your friends list is your favourite pastime.

Our lives today are increasingly submerged in social-networking websites, like millions of others worldwide. In the last year, the number of Indian visitors to sites such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Twitter increased by 51 per cent to 19 million (according to comScore’s 2009 report). And where people are,the phishers, scammers and spammers go.

Popular targets

“Social-networking sites have become one of the most popular targets for cyber criminals,” says David Freer, vice-president Consumer Business, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec, calling 2009 the year of attacks against social-networking sites and their users. “These sites have a huge number of users (Facebook alone has 350 million), and cyber criminals have a fairly simple modus operandi— go where the people are.”

Amit Agarwal, one of India’s top tech bloggers agrees. “The threat is very real,” he says. “You often read about these things but don’t know the people affected, but this is actually happening, everyday.”

For instance, he describes a recent attack on Twitter, due to which passwords had to be reset on a few thousand accounts. “The attack took advantage of people’s innate laziness,” says the blogger. “Many of us use the same credentials — username and password — on multiple websites, which means that the guys at some questionable site you visited, let’s call it xyz.com, can now log on to your other accounts, such as Twitter.”

Once they have access to your account by any means, your entire contact list becomes vulnerable to spam, phishing or ‘drive-by download’ attacks through links or notifications that are sent out. “By their very nature, social-networking sites are about a group of people who trust each other,” explains Freer. “If you get a request to look at photos on Facebook or click on shortened URL on Twitter from a friend, you tend to trust it automatically.”

Those links could take you to imposter sites that ask you to enter your credentials again (standard phishing), or more sneakily, simply take you to a site that silently download malware onto your system, i.e., the ‘drive-by download’. “Last year, this was the fastest growing form of attack — there were18 million drive-by download attacks in all of 2008; in 2009, we hit that number just between August and October,” says Freer.

The buzzword among experts for these attacks is ‘social engineering’ — using people’s behaviour patterns to target them for attacks. “The actual attacks are the same as what we’ve seen earlier, via email, etc., but the false sense of trust and security existing in social networks makes it easier for criminals to deceive,” says Na. Vijayashankar a.k.a. Naavi, cyber law and techno-legal consultant.

Third-party applications on websites such as Facebook — those fun games and other time-pass applications you add on — are also frequent offenders, exposing your system to malware embedded in the application itself or in the ad on the side of its webpage. “The bad applications are usually banned after a few reports from users, but on day one of the attack, no one will know. There are 500,000 applications on Facebook, for example; it’s just impossible for them to keep track of them all,” says Amit.

“A lot of these game apps involve money transactions, so they get your credit card details, and scams do happen,” adds Tarun Shan, a 22-year-old student of Hindustan Engineering College, and an online entrepreneur. “People think these sites are so cool and just get addicted, but they need to be careful.”