As we wander, we wonder
It’s said that desire is half of life, and indifference is half of death. These days, I’ve been swimming in the shores of death. As the year draws to a close, I review all that has been in the past 11 months and I’m surprised by the richness of its activity, yet its poverty in […]
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There are times when I wonder if social media travellers have spoilt the fun for us. I imagine that if I stumbled upon Sidi Bou Said without having a strong impression of its instagram imagery beforehand, I would have fallen more deeply in love. However, having known what it looked like before seeing it live, […]
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It was the beginning of a hot gulf summer, and we decided to take a short weekend trip to Saadiyat Island from Dubai. The selection criteria were – outside of Dubai but within less than 2 hours from Dubai, a hotel on a beach, and preferably a Marriot Bonvoy property so I could collect some […]
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I fancied myself a pretty competent independent traveller but things became shamefully co-dependent once I got married. In a recent long flight on my own where he wouldn’t be waiting at the airport, I was a ball of nerves. What if I got lost at immigration, what if I didn’t find my bag, what if […]
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Tunis has been floating in my dreams since I was a youth.. in this curious fascinating seductive strip of North Africa lies memories of the Roman empire interwoven with a melange of different languages, culture, history, hopes and aspirations…whatever remains today is only a whisper of the majesty that once was but already it moved […]
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Hot yoga has been around since the 70s but it only slipped into my radar about a decade ago. Friends who have tried said it was satisfying to perspire that much, but no one could really confirm if it had added health benefits to other forms of yoga. Still, the novelty factor got me intrigued […]
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I stumbled into the yawning jaws of mild depression in the last quarter of the past year. It was mild because deep inside I had some confidence that I would eventually come out of the tunnel. That eventually, the compulsion to wallow in terrible melancholia will slowly start to ebb away. In its replacement, a […]
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The idea started a few months ago. My friend and I were trying to figure out what to do to amuse ourselves during the incessant lockdown and suggested we could do some painting. Initially I scoffed at the idea given my non-existent artistic prowess (pretty sure the last time I did art was when I […]
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For anyone who has been following me, I can only apologise for the state of this blog since April this year. It’s just been such madness and sadness of a year and writing wasn’t something I could really commit to. There’s also always this tendency for wanting things to follow a specific system and order […]
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Questioning the merits of living life in a value-bubble has been with me for awhile, even pre-Covid. Essentially, as we get older and accumulate a better sense of our identity, likes and dislikes, we start to remove people and circumstances which don’t fit with our life values. There is a logic and usefulness to this, […]
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A few conversations lately made me recollect the first summer holiday I enjoyed as a young adult with a best friend, and not my family. It was the summer of 2001, and I couldn’t have felt more grown-up. Whatever ambivalence we have about our past, there’s no denying the intoxicating excitement of being so young […]
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I had dinner here twice circa October last year. My friend read a good review and initiated us to give it a try. I loved how it looked from the outside – something different, fresh, inter-galactic. I felt like I was transported somewhere else, another city, another country, another time in a zeitgeist quantum of […]
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The blog has been shuffled into the background as life got in the way, and inspiration ran dry. As KL shifted into yet another semi-lockdown, new daily patterns emerged and reflecting on the interior self became harder. I decided that I would only write if a musing pursued me, instead of me pursuing musings. And […]
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It’s been almost two months since my last update. Life during a pandemic has been a little bit surreal. While living in the thick of it, our vision is myopic. In hindsight, and hopefully there will be a time for hindsights, the individual and collective human experience will probably be understood better. Initially the journey […]
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Recently, in order to break away from the nauseating routine of our days at home, we stayed for a night in town at the Ritz Carlton. There was a really good promotion on offer and being a Marriott Bonvoy point collector, it seemed like a lovely opportunity to collect some points and not face the […]
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Different themes of retaliation often whirl through my thoughts. It is the one feature of human behaviour that has debilitated our growth as an individual, a community, a nation and geo-politically. There are countless examples of how cycles of retaliations eventually demolishes us into human rubble – World War II, the Yugoslavian conflict, Rwandan genocide, […]
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My sister and I agree that we are visual creatures. Everything that has aesthetic value fascinates us and we are often poring over various images of different fabrics, homewares, interior designs, architecture and exchanging notes about beautiful things throughout our travels. She recently came across these exquisite tiffin carriers and fell in love with both […]
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We popped by here spontaneously one evening. For obvious reasons, my other half is a Mughal Indian food snob. Nothing quite meets the bar here in KL, apparently. I struggle to recommend any good authentic biryanis here in Malaysia, is a constant lament. And the posher a place looked, the more he disdains, certain that […]
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It seems to be the grand desire carved into so many of us – that if you haven’t ‘arrived’ you haven’t then ‘fully existed’. People tend to be enraptured by those they believe have earned a social standing, have won some recognition and public status for their visible achievements. In whatever social tribe, a hierarchy […]
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September 2019 feels like a century ago. The mechanisms of how our memory functions has always been quite a mysterious fascination and I am curious about how everyone is reviewing their lives this time last year. Back then, I had no idea what was in store for us in six months. For us it, it […]
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It’s been a challenging year, and it is shocking that we’re about to enter the last quarter of it. We organised this getaway for my parents, and mother in law to just remove ourselves from the daily routine of being trapped in a limited routine for months on end, and at the last minute my […]
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For some, so much of life has been about the deifying of another. Whether it’s parental deference, or how we elevate our life partner. It is inevitable that as life adds day to day, and we move through it all in close intimacy with our loved ones, realities emerge. I heard a saying once about […]
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This year, life was about being indoors. I didn’t realise how much I needed to get physically connected to nature again until we had a very quick beach get away recently. For various reasons, it came at a time I needed it the most, and I just sank in the experience with much gratitude. I […]
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THIRTY8 is the eminent restaurant located on yes, you guessed it the 38th Floor of the Grand Hyatt in KL. It’s located right behind the KLCC Twin Towers, so a great place to ogle this engineering accomplishment, which I think is a big part of this hotels’ appeal. It has an extensive set dinner and […]
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Perhaps it is a logical irony that graduation speeches make more sense two decades into full fledged adulthood, than it did when one listened to it at the brink of one’s journey. As they say, the youth is wasted on the young. At the age of 21, second-hand information seemed too speculative and abstract. Anyone […]
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Zagreb was the first city we landed on in the Balkan area and we immediately warmed to it. It was a crazy hot 30 + degrees August, and we were anxious to extricate ourselves from neighbouring Budapest, which we found a little cold, emotionally. People smiled here, they were a little louder and I liked […]
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We came here on a whim one evening and kind of liked the cosy setting and simple food. Then we came again with my mother-in-law who is pretty much vegetarian and allergic to a whole host of food groups but managed to heartily tuck in all the different dishes. We concluded that this place was […]
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Looking for The Higher Self 