Doing the above gives me
shirish@Mugglewille:~$ sudo tar -cjf /tmp/shirish.tar.bz2 /home/shirish/.aptitude /home/shirish/.aptoncd tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
Doing the above gives me
shirish@ Mugglewille: ~$ sudo tar -cjf /tmp/shirish. tar.bz2 /home/shirish/ .aptitude /home/shirish/ .aptoncd
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names