gaelikaa's diary

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurour and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”William Shakespeare
Shakespeare is a vividly descriptive writer.  Okay, so maybe many of his story ideas were not original, but there's no doubting the fact that as a descriptive writer, he was superlative.
I love storms and the wind.  I really feel for the people who will suffer when the storms start, though.  Here in India, where I currently live,there are many people who sleep under the stars or in makeshift dwellings.  But I enjoy listening to  the wind because it has such power.  Wind power can even be used to generate electricity.
I remember, years ago in Ireland, which is quite a wi…

A charming little romance which is set in the recent past.    Pakistan in the seventies, to be precise.  Chandni has been somewhat over-protected by her maternal grandmother in the crumbling haveli (palace) which is their family’s ancestral home.  They are, as you might have guessed, erstwhile Indo-Pak royalty.  Young, beautiful and extremely well read and educated due to rigorous home tutoring, Chandni longs for the love and affection of the father she has never known.  He seems, her father, to have been something of a heartbreaker, a life destroyer even.  Even before Chandni’s late mother died when she was a baby, pining for the man she had loved and been abandoned by, the same man had already loved and left the mother of Chandni’s elder brother Zafar to a similar fate.  Zafar’s mother had had the wherewithal to deposit her child in the home of her successor before succumbing to her fate.
Chandni’s overpowering grandmother has planned out her life and even chosen her husband, but Cha…

I have many wonderful memories of my last twenty years in India.  Luckily for me, the presence  of mobiles which take photos, not to mention social media, have made communication very easy.  I don't always have a phone with me when I go about, but when I've done so, I've got some great pictures.

You never know what you're going to see next in India.  One morning, I was just waving my kids off to school and I looked around and saw this little chap sitting on the wall.  Well, I'd never have seen him in Dublin.  I clicked this picture on my camera and uploaded it to Facebook.  I'm sharing it here now, of course.

Snake charmers are ubiquitous in India. They come around and show off their snakes every so often and expect money and clothes in return for the show.  When this man came around, we took the photo from the upstairs balcony.  My daughter had me in hysterics when she observed that the snake charmer was turning himself inside out playing his haunting pipe music…

A light read, a bright and breezy romantic comedy by an Indian author who could well be in the running to be the next Marian Keyes (you know who Marian Keyes is, surely?  The queen of rom com fiction and chick lit?  Who’s Irish just like me?).  

The plot is simple enough.  Writer Kairavi (Kay to her friends)  has foresworn men after a string of failed relationships.  An ill-fated night on the town leaves her hospitalized, however, with a tattoo declaring ‘Done With Men’ and considerable injury to her ego. A handsome Goan doctor with a poetical name enters her life and intrigues her, leading her a merry dance indeed.  Suddenly, the hardened journo is wondering whether or not being ‘Done With Men’ forever is a little premature.

I loved the humour and the romance, the ‘will she or won’t she’ intrigue and the Goan sunshine.  The writer has thoughtfully provided a list of Hindi terms at the back for those unfamiliar with the language, so this is a book which can be enjoyed by anyone who read…