The Guards on the Gate

I remember years ago when I lived in Dublin, a friend of mine had a bedsit flat in an area called Rathmines. Sometimes I use to go to her place to have a cup of tea after work if I had time, because my house was on the other side of the city. On the way, we used to pass the house of the current Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach). I remember there was a booth right at the gate with the policeman in it.

I live in an area in Lucknow where a number of VIPs live. One of them is a judge. At the gate, there is a tent. A fairly large one. There seems to be a posse of policemen there day and night. I try not to look here and there as I'm not nosy, nor would I like to be seen to be. But sometimes you catch a glimpse of policemen asleep in that tent. There are even clotheslines beside the tent and washing on the line and everything.

I can't help wondering at times how interesting it would be to be a VIP and have policemen camping at my gate. I think it would make me feel very important indeed. And what a status symbol! It's probably just as well I don't have any such luxuries. My ego would probably go through the roof!

I've just had a new comment system installed. If you would like to leave a comment, please click on the title of this post and allow a little time for the comment system to load - thanks!

Comments

Five Ways Social Media Has Changed Our Lives

Has social media changed the way we live? You bet it has! I’ve been in India for 22 years and have visited home in Ireland maybe half-a-dozen times. The biggest challenge about this, for me, has always been coping with the difficulty of making contact with old friends and family. However, that’s all over now, thanks to Facebook. I check my phone every morning and read that uncle Ned in Dublin is furious over the biased referee in the boxing match or that my cousin Paula in Dublin went to see Take That in concert (or whoever!). I speak to my cousin Veronica in Scotland every few days thanks to WhatsApp. We haven’t spoken this frequently since we wrote to each other as kids. Social media has definitely changed our lives forever. I can think of at least five ways that social in which it has affected life as we know it.

Social media makes the world more accessible to us. This is a fact. The world is at your fingertips. Find out which of your friends and family are on Facebook and once you …

Kipling Got it Wrong! Or Eastern and Western Culture - Reflections

What Is Culture?
I’m opening this blog post with a question. What is that elusive concept which is commonly known as ‘culture? Culture is way of life. How we live. What our values are. Our customs, attitudes and perceptions. And also, I suppose, how we express ourselves in art through, such as music, dance, theatre and cinema. It’s quite a comprehensive area and not too easy to define, really.

The Journey
I was born in what is commonly known as ‘the west’. I lived in Ireland for the first thirty years of my life. When I was thirty, I married my husband and came out to India to live here with him. That was the beginning of an interesting journey, which is still evolving. I must have had some east/west comparison stereotypes in my head. But in India, I found that the people I met had huge stereotypes in their heads about what they called ‘western culture’ and ‘western way of life’. Not long after I arrived in India, I was struck by the number of people who said things to me like ‘in the …

Impatience

Many years ago, when I lived in Dublin, I met someone nice and started dating. I wasn't serious, I just thought we could have nice interesting discussions about India, which I found absolutely fascinating, as I was working in the Embassy of India back then. I had no intention of getting attached with a foreigner, with all the attendant cultural problems. I was happy living in Ireland and the idea of marriage couldn't have been further from my mind.

We both thought we could just keep things in control. One day, after a lot of emotional turmoil and denial, it hit us both that we were in love. Truly. Madly. Irrevocably. To the point where we couldn't live without each other. I'd known about the Indian system of arranged marriages and when it occurred to me that he would probably be married off by his family as soon as he returned to India, I felt physically ill at the thought. We are both tenacious and patient people. We realised that bringing our two worlds together would…

gaelikaa's diary

Search This Blog