Author Archives: memoriesandsuch

In My Hands Today…

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Everything Is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

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A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a ‘blind’ old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive – a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down…

Poem: Ties that Bind

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Last week was the festival of Raksha Bandhan which celebrates the love between brothers and sisters. As usual, GG tied the sacred thread or Rakhi on BB’s right wrist. This year, he kept it for 24 hours whereas in previous years it would barely last a few hours or at the very least overnight. He has also promised GG that next year, she gets to choose the rakhi she wants (this year, he insisted on a very simple one, while GG wanted one which was slightly more grand than what BB chose)

This poem is inspired by the love I see between BB & GG every single day. They can’t go a day without seeing and speaking with each other and last year when they went for their camps and overseas learning journeys, you could actually see the other being antsy. I now wonder how they will go through the two years when BB will enlist for his national service in a couple of years time.

Ties that Bind

A sibling’s love is like that anchor
It’s a bond that lives on forever
They fight, they laugh, but they have each other’s back
It’s the world against them, to the very max

There are few relations as close and loving as the one twins share
It’s a bond even us parents can’t compare

On the special day for brothers and sisters
They reaffirm their love with the sacred thread
He promises to love and protect her always
She promises to love and be there for him all the days

They are true friends for life, truly entwined
Best friends and siblings in the ties that bind

In My Hands Today…

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Daughter of Fortune – Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

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Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.

As we follow her spirited heroine on a perilous journey north in the hold of a ship to the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco and northern California, we enter a world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. A society of single men and prostitutes among whom Eliza moves–with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien–California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean. Her search for the elusive Joaquín gradually turns into another kind of journey that transforms her over time, and what began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom.

2019 Week 33 Update

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This week was the usual week where nothing much happened. I am actually sort of pausing my job search from now till I am back from my long awaited India holiday at the end of the year because I don’t want to interview only to tell any potential hiring manager that I can’t start until the new year which will automatically put me out of the running. But if something comes my way (which I prefer in any case), then that’s a different story altogether.

Speaking about my trip, we’ve booked our tickets to India as well as the train tickets to the interiors from a major city in the south as well as our hotel accomodation there. I am also looking forward to meeting my maternal grandmother who is around 90 years old. I know that she does not have many years left, so I do want to meet her this year. The children are also excited to meet their only surviving great grand parent. We still have to buy our flight tickets from Mumbai to the southern city and back, which we will do soon.

In researching the places we will be visiting, I ended up watching train videos on YouTube and I found these so fascinating. I have been revisiting old journeys which we used to take when we were in school and seeing all the station names brought back so much memories. I now want to take the children with me to visit more cities in India.

Have a wonderful week folks and this week brings us to the end to the month of August!

2019 Secondary 4 Week 33 Update

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BB is in the midst of his prelims while GG’s starts next week. Both are stressed and I sometimes feel that GG is at breaking point. BB is the more chill twin between the two and I rarely see him stressed out. Which is also not a good thing, because some stress is good for you. I am worried about GG because she does not handle stress well and in times of immense stress, tends to blank out. I am hoping she copes with this stress and is able to bypass the blanking out she usually does.

I mistook the EAE result date to be last week, but it is actually next week and we are all stressed over it. In fact, I met some parents from BB’s school, all of whose children have applied for EAE (and a couple who are competing with BB for the same course) and all are praying hard that their children get into the course of their choice. Of course, at this point, it’s not if your child is not good enough for the course, but how good the other students are. Given that each course can only take in at the most 20% of its intake, there’s a limited number of seats available.

If either BB or GG or both don’t make it this time, then they just have to double up and work hard to ensure that they make the cut off point to the course and get in when the joint admission exercise happens after the O level results are declared in January.

That’s all this week! Have a great Sunday!