Tread softly, I'm dreaming

Image by LilyBaySoap via Flickr

I woke up this morning with the gentle rays of the sun streaming in through the blinds on my windows. I rolled over in bed, hugged my arms to my chest, and let out a contented breath. Getting out of bed, I walked into my bright, sunny bathroom, done up in shades of white and blue. A spray of summer blossoms sat on the windowsill in an old ceramic mug, a collection of seashells and pebbles was heaped on one side of the marble bathtub, the other holding my collection of colorful bath salts and toiletries. I walked over to the little dressing room adjoining the bathroom while brushing away the stale smell of sleep from my mouth and got out my clothes for the day – a pair of rugged jeans and a white t-shirt – perfect for a day to be spent out and about with my trusted camera and sketchbook.

Once I was ready, I padded into the kitchen, had a hot cup of tea and some fruit, packed a sandwich in a brown baggie, collected my gear and headed out.

The Fujifilm FinePix S9000 bridge camera

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Welcome to my dream world, where I am a successful artist, photographer and writer, with a beautiful house in a small, beautiful community located very close to a bustling town. It’s a place where all the neighbors know each other and where I have some of my deepest and most lasting friendships. When I’m not busy with the constant demands of success – book signings, gallery openings and exhibitions, you’ll find me in the kitchen whipping up some tasty, exotic dishes or traveling the world and telling my stories through words and images.

I don’t know about the house, but I do know that if I put my mind to it, I can achieve my dream of being a photographer and artist – a writer I am already – I write this blog, don’t it? 😉

So, if you could live your biggest dream, no holds barred, what would it be?

Confessions of a bookaholic

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret today. Come closer, so I can whisper it into your ear.

I’m a hoarder….a book hoarder.

I have two bookshelves at home stuffed to overflowing, with enough books to start my own lending library. And yet, I cannot help myself when I walk into a bookstore. I ~~almost~~ always walk out with 2 or more books, no matter how often I chant to myself “You will not buy a book today, you will not buy a book today.” Well, actually, I never buy a book – I buy books!

And then I come home, bag of books in hand, look at my stuffed bookshelf, and leave the bag on a chair in the drawing room, until I figure out a way to squeeze my latest purchases in. That bag generally sits there for a week, with the books wondering when they will be taken out and displayed, only to be joined by yet another bag of books the next week, at which time I finally decide to take out said books and cram them somehow, anyhow, into my bookshelf.

Like I said, I hoard.

Which also means that I absolutely refuse to part with a single one of my books. Not that they are all masterpieces of literature. Some of them are downright unreadable, like Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja. But still. I cannot bring myself to purge my books.

The husband has been ~~nagging~~ telling me that it is about time I acknowledged my addiction, and that if I could not curb my urge, nay, my need to buy a book, the least I could do is to get rid of some of them.

Now, I think I am going to take some inspiration from my fellow blogger Debra, who is going on a de-cluttering drive of her own to get rid of some of her “things” even though she loves them. If she can do it, so can I!

Just don’t hold your breath…yet! I may need to join a 12-step program just to be able to start purging some of my books!

Recipe: No bake orange cheesecake

The other day, I had this sudden craving for cheesecake. Now, my absolute favorite cheesecake is the one made by pizza chain San Marzano. It’s a baked, fluffy, out-of-this-world cheesecake. But sadly, the restaurant has shut shop, and though I’ve heard that they opened somewhere else, I haven’t been able to locate it. I’ve tried cheesecakes at a lot of places, but nothing – and I mean absolutely nothing – comes close to that fluffy divineness.

So, I did the next best thing – I made a cheesecake at home! No, sadly, not a baked cheesecake, ‘cause I don’t know how, and I don’t have one of those fancy cheesecake tins either. I made one that sets in the fridge, and it is absolutely delightful!

Ingredients:

Ingredients for no bake orange cheesecake

2 boxes of Kiri cream cheese
1 litre orange juice
1 packet Marie biscuits
¼ cup sugar
40 gm butter
1 orange for garnishing
Chocolate shavings for garnishing

Method:

Put the biscuits into a ziplock baggie and smash with a rolling pin, until the biscuit is reduced to an almost powder-like form.

no bake orange cheesecake step by step recipe

In a bowl, mix the biscuits and butter until you get a nice, buttery-biscuity mixture. Go ahead, taste a spoonful – it’s divine!

Now, grease a loose bottom tin with butter and compact this mixture in the tin. Put in the fridge for 15 minutes.

In the meanwhile, smooth the cream cheese in a bowl.

Then add in the sugar and mix it up. Now, here comes the fun part! Start pouring in the orange juice in small measures, mix it up and taste. Repeat until you like the taste – creamy, orangey goodness!

Then, pour the mixture (which might be pretty darn thin, if you’re anything like me!) on top of the biscuit layer.

no bake orange cheesecake steps

Put it into the fridge and leave overnight. This is what your set cheesecake will look like:

With a knife, poke around the edges to determine the consistency. Its possible that your cheesecake is set, but it hasn’t set enough to cut it up into slices. But that’s perfectly OK.

Get out your serving bowl and a big spoon.

Push the spoon all the way to the bottom, until you feel the crunchy biscuit layer. Continue on until you hit the base of the tin. Scoop out. Repeat.

Pile up the yummy cheesecake goodness into your serving bowl. Try to get a scoop of only the cheesecake minus the biscuit as your top layer.

For the garnishing:

Peel an orange, then pull apart the skin and de-seed, so you have only the orange pulp. Set aside in a plate.

Shave off some chocolate curls from your bitter chocolate. As much or as little as you want.

First place the orange all around the cheesecake. Finish with the chocolate.

no bake orange cheesecake recipe

Bon Appétit!

Book review: Mosquito by Roma Tearne

The Sri Lankan civil war serves as the backdrop for Roma Tearne’s debut novel Mosquito. It’s the story of Theo Samarajeeva, a Sri Lankan who returns home from England after his wife’s death despite the warnings of his friends to not return to the war torn island nation. It’s the story of Nulani Mendis, a young and gifted artist, who blossoms to life after she meets Theo. It’s the story of their improbable love. And it’s a story of torture.

Tearne writes beautifully about Sri Lanka, capturing it’s beauty and the brutality of the civil war. She writes poignantly about the pointlessness of war, about the brutality of torture and the psychological damage it wrecks on the tortured.

The writing is beautifully evocative, as Tearne gives a sensory, color drenched feel to the location and atmosphere of the Sri Lankan coast. I fell in love with the beauty of the country while reading the book – it’s beautiful coastline, verdant forests and rich history.

The characters of Theo and Nulani Mendis are well drawn out. Sugi, Theo’s caretaker and friend, though a rather central figure to the story, may not have a well-defined character, yet, he is someone you can understand and connect with. Tearne also gives a brief sketch of the psyche of a Tamil Tiger recruit, and given the wide-spread terrorism these days, that is enough to help you understand the character of Vikram, the young orphan boy who gets recruited into the LTTE.

This is a hauntingly beautiful novel of love, loss and hope; of the pointlessness of war; of the physical and psychological scars of torture; of the triumph of hope. Highly recommended.

Ramblings of an overworked mind

What a month this has been! Work has been absolutely crazy, leaving me with no time for myself or the blog.

I reach back home tired and drained, with little will to do anything but flop down on the couch with a cold bottle of water and a book.

Sadly for me, though, the book I’m reading is doing little to hold my interest. It seemed interesting enough – a story on Chandragupta’s cunning about 2,500 years ago and a cunning political king-maker in the present day. But the treatment is shoddy, the characters aren’t well developed and the plot is little snippets of political games in the past and future.

But I find it really hard to leave a book mid-way, and so I’m plodding along with Chandragupta’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi, just waiting for the infernal thing to end.

One good, actually great thing, that I achieved this month was finally understanding the exposure triangle in photography. The combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO finally worked! I’ll share some pictures when I can bear to open my laptop again.

Just waiting for this month to end!

Book Review: You Beleivers – Jane Bradley

From the back cover:

You Believers is a powerful, cathartic story of casual evil and of how the worst things can be faced so that we might not only survive, but grow. A young woman goes missing, and her mother uproots her life to find her daughter. But it is not just the heartbreak or the deep mystery of the hunt for lost loved ones that Bradley so convincingly explores. Rather, with the help of an amazingly dedicated searcher, family and friends somehow learn to move past unspeakable horror and celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit. Offering a vision that is at once ruthless and utterly compassionate, Bradley renders the search for logic, meaning, redemption and even hope in the domino force that is human nature. Part Southern gothic, part crime, part haunting suspense story, You Believers takes us on an infinitely harrowing journey that rewards the reader with insight into how we might endure horrible events with faith, strength, and grace even while it reveals the ripple effects of random violence.

The book starts with Shelby Waters, a Southern girl from the small town of Suck Creek, recounting how she got her calling to become a searcher. It was because of her sister Darly, who got away from Suck Creek to become a nurse and get married and settle down. Then one day, she went missing. The rescuers found her bones in the woods, her head at one place, her body at another. This isn’t Darly’s story, though. This is the story of Katy Connor, the 30-year old woman who went missing a few weeks before her wedding. It’s the story of a mother’s pain, a fiance’s sorrow and a sociopath’s need to cause pain.

It’s classic, almost. Like the story of Persephone picking flowers in a field one spring afternoon. The earth opens. Hades comes roaring up in his chariot, black horses digging up dirt with their hooves, hot breath swirling from flared nostrils. With a quick swoop of thick, muscled arm, Hades snatches the girl, drags her down to the underworld. You know the story. A mother comes to the rescue, finds her daughter has eaten six seeds of the dark fruit, pomegranate seeds that crunched between the girl’s teeth, red juice running from her lips. And the mother’s world, the whole wide world, is changed.

Bradley keeps the story moving with a lot of the characters narrating parts of the story. Shelby’s character is well-drawn out and you can understand why she does what she does, what keeps her going, her sorrows and her determination. Liz’s (Katy’s mother) sorrow as a mother whose child has gone missing is palpable. Her effort to hold together for the sake of her daughter and her sanity are heart-wrenching. And then there is Jesse, the psychopath who picked Katy up, who raped and assaulted another young girl in his neighborhood, and his arrogance, his need to brag and to hurt and break things.

The narration could have been a bit tighter, but the story itself is gripping, so you can forgive Bradley her few ramblings. Being a woman, it was all the more chilling a read. We take so many things for granted, don’t observe enough, tend to be a bit gullible, and go through life thinking nothing bad could ever happen to us. But it can take a minute for your life to turn upside down – a slight delay in locking the car once you get in or ignoring your gut instinct could be devastating.

This book got me to give thanks for each day that I am safe, and to make sure that I take every precaution that I can – when I’m out and even when I am home.

Read it, it just might give you the push you need to make you more aware of your surroundings no matter where you are.

Harnessing the power of social media

I jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon less than a year ago, and am constantly amazed at how my “community” has expanded. I’ve bonded with fellow bloggers, met people who share the same interests as I do, learnt from some of the most inspirational figures of recent times, and followed breaking stories as they happened – minute-by-minute.

As I used the platform and starting interacted with people, I heard their conversations, learnt more about their lives and supported and cheered with them as they triumphed or grappled with life. So what if a lot of them stay half way around the world, or if I haven’t met any of them and probably never will? The conversations and friendships built are real enough. Which is why if one of them were to tell me about a social cause and ask for my support, I would help out to the best of my ability.

And I wouldn’t be alone, as a whooping 84% of the social media savvy aged 30-49 and 55% of those older than 50 used conversational social media to discuss philanthropy. The Philanthropy 2.0 research project also found that 20% of survey respondents between the ages of 30 and 49 gave more than $5,000 through social media discussions, demonstrating the huge potential for social-media savvy fundraisers.

Image by .imelda via Flickr

The funds being raised by leveraging technology are astounding. Twitter users alone donated more than $33 million to the American Red Cross fund for Haitian earthquake victims. Innovative companies like Twestival, which realize the potential of 140 characters and hashtags, are using social media for social good by connecting communities offline on a single day to highlight a great cause and have a fun event. Since 2009, volunteers have raised close to $1.2 million for 137 nonprofits. Of that amount, $15,734.53 was raised in India alone.

Image by taotsu via Flickr

Using the power of hashtags and retweeting, individuals too can make a mark. One recent example is that of @ourmaininabiko. Using an idea that was sparked in the shower, he sent out a tweet calling for eyewitness accounts and personal stories on Twitter. Less than 45 minutes later, the first submission came in. Based on the more than 80 submissions to that single tweet, 2:46 Quakebook was born – a Twitter-sourced collection of personal accounts and pictures of the 11 March 2011 Japan quake and its aftermath. The book is a collaborative effort between bloggers to help raise money for Japan – the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Japan Red Cross.

India recently witnessed its own political revolution of sorts, and a big portion of that battle was fought online – through the creation of a website and by leveraging social media to spread activist Anna Hazare’s message of anti-corruption. Millions of people across the nation joined Hazare in person and in spirit, as he sat on a fast-unto-death outside the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. His demand was for the passage of a Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen’s ombudsman Bill) that would give more power to the people to fight corruption in all areas of public service. Candlelight vigils and peaceful protests were organized around the country, forcing the government to accept all of the demands put forth by the activists and backed by the common man, corporates and Bollywood stars.

Social media has truly emerged as one of the most powerful Web 2.0 technologies. Not only does it allow us to forge strong friendships, it enables us to spark ideas that turn into revolutions that lead to the ouster of dictators, bring about social change, and raise money for those in need. Ultimately, how we use and leverage it depends on us.

Have you ever made donations or volunteered your services by leveraging technology?

An ode to books – Marginalia by Billy Collins

There’s an ebook revolution of sorts happening out there, which I am stubbornly resisting. I tried ebooks, still read them sometimes, but there’s something about a real, physical book that an electronic version just cannot replace. The smell, the feel, the notes scribbled in the margins.

June Abbas, "In the Margins: Reflections on Scribbles, Knowledge Organization, and Access"

Billy Collins captures this love I feel beautifully in Marginalia. Enjoy!

Marginalia – Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

– Billy Collins

Sweet little things

Lately it seems like almost all my friends are going through a tough time with their marriages. So many of them are getting divorced, or the love is long gone and they’re just staying together for practical reasons like their children or finances. And in most of the stories I’ve heard, it’s almost always the husband’s fault that things aren’t going right. There are the cheaters, the beaters, the emotionally detached ones, the downright insensitive ones. Every time I hear their stories, I send out a silent “thank you” to God.

I’ve been blessed to have a wonderful hubby. Yes, we have fights. There are days when he drives me absolutely nuts. There have been times when in the heat of a fight I’ve wanted to give the whole marriage thing up. There are times when I think he’s an insensitive jerk.

But even now, after 13 years of knowing each other and 7 years of marriage, my heart skips a beat when I look at him. Even now, he does the sweetest, most wonderful things for me.

Like never forgetting birthdays or anniversaries – a lot of my friends are amazed by that…

letting me sleep in on weekends while he finishes up the laundry…

just knowing when I’ve had a stressful day at work and turning the TV off to talk to me or give me a massage…

sharing the dinner heating and clearing up chores…

making an effort to come out with me on weekends even though sometimes all he wants to do is stay at home…

giving me my space…

letting me be all silly sometimes…

making me feel like a girl and a woman – I don’t know how he does it…

being cool with me having a slumber party with my girlfriends…

making me a fresh fruit gateaux because that’s one of my favorite deserts and he makes it so well!

Yes, I love the husband!

And with all the marriages breaking apart around me, it’s so wonderful to know we’re still rock solid, and to see other men out there doing special things for their girl. Like Debra’s husband Tony, who made her this wonderful chocolate cake!

So here’s a toast to the husbands we love and to remembering the little things that make our marriages tick!

I believe…in magic!

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I believe that our beliefs change as we age. When I was around five, I believed in the fairy godmother and the tooth fairy, I believed that wicked witches and jealous queens existed, that there was a forest somewhere filled with enchanted creatures that can talk, and that mushroom rings meant that there had been a council of fairies…

But of course, as I grew up, I lost the magic somewhere. Life became a what you see is what you get deal.

Neale Donald Walsch: Handsome Guy! (or: How b...

Image by ToastyKen via Flickr

That changed again, when I met the wonderful man who was to become the hubby. We got married despite great odds, only because I believed that this was going to be. Since then, I have slowly opened up to the mysteries of the universe. I read a lot of great authors and some wonderful books, especially Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversation With God series. Now, again, I believe in magic.

I believe that we have a loving, compassionate God. That we are made in his image so we can go out and experience life, embrace it, warts and all.

I believe that things happen because we choose them – the good as well as the bad. Our thoughts shape a lot of our life experiences, so I believe in choosing good thoughts.

Image by AlicePopkorn via Flickr

I believe that angels exist. They don’t have to be of the winged variety. That stranger who found an envelope with office money that I had left at the phone booth and came running after me to return it was an angel – I didn’t have enough money to replace what I would have lost that day.

I believe that we can see God in the natural beauty around us, in the moment before dawn, in the innocence of a child’s laugh.

These are some of the wonders of the universe that I believe in.

What do you believe?