What I've Read Recently

The Proud Wife by Kate Walker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Romance is a popular fiction genre and one I enjoy occasionally. I liked this one a lot. A satisfying read for anyone who enjoys emotional drama. Only two characters and a few bit players. A couple get together to discuss their divorce and realize that they're still in love. Through the dialogues we learn the backstory, how they met, how they parted and how they find their way back to each other again. If there is a message and I do believe that all good fiction carries a message, it is that when you are swept away on a sea of passion and tossed on the tumultuous waves of desire, the events of life can still bring you back to earth with a bang and love needs commitment and work rather than going with the flow. Well isn't that what our mothers used to tell us?

Kate Walker is easily one of the best writers of romantic fiction today and she writes well. The sexual description is tastefully done.

Romantic novels generally have fantasy settings. Exotic locations, handsome, foreign lovers sweeping the heroine (with whom the reader identifies, obviously) off her feet. Come to think of it, my romance was very like that. We had it all. Well almost. The handsome, dark foreign man, my Indian husband, Yash for writing purposes. We had passion. We had the exotic locations, Dublin, London, Delhi, Kashmir. The most exotic was definitely Dublin. The only thing we didn't have was the freaking money and that's what brought us back to earth with a bang. That, and culture shock, post-natal depression and the in-law blues, a universal malady which afflicts most marriages and works both ways. We even still have our moments of passion. Well, we would if the kids would let us.

Anyway, we lived to tell the tale. I shall be looking out for Ms. Walker's next book!

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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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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.

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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 …

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