gaelikaa's soliliquy - Blog Takeover Day

so there i was roaming around as if in a distant dream thinking that the fun website which analysed my writing style as resembling that of james joyce has a lot to answer for because after all i never write a single thing about sex or heavy breathing or anything like that in spite of the fact that id quite like to write romantic fiction but im just not good at it but then again there's the work to be done you know what i mean the kids to feed and send out to school the man to get out to work and earn a crust for us to live on not to mention the various cultural and social adventures one encounters as an expat day in day out not to mention the veritable gorgon of a mother in no scratch that out it just wont do what if someone saw this for whom it was not intended and got offended one more problem to add to the many well if you want to write you have to get your work done first thats all there is to it but ill say this much my daily round of deeds and days provide me with quite a lot of experiences from which to draw inspiration to put pen to paper or should i say fingers to computer although having what could possibly be called an irish voice is great but im like a fish out of water here i just dont know whats going on at home in the ould sod at all given the fact that its been a dozen years since i set foot over there and heaven knows when i will again so what should i write about im out of touch with irish life and im not indian so where who and what should i write about well being expat didnt stop joyce from becoming a literary giant and i have a huge one up on him given the fact that he never had a blog so there

This post was written to join in Blog Takeover Day hosted by Sally Quilford over at Quiller's Place. To join in, write your blog post in another person/character's voice and link up. Apologies to James Joyce who provided the inspiration for the above post.

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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…

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