Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: A Handbook for My Lover by Rosalyn D`Mello

This is more a brief take than review. A Handbook For My Lover by Rosalyn D`Mello Excerpt: You are my joy and my suffering; my jury, executioner and judge. you insist on pushing me to the edge of the cliff, even nudging me on occasion. You make me falter with my speech. I feel the…

Travel: Scotland`s Lochs

SCOTLAND Water world Scotland’s lochs offer some of the most beautiful bounties of nature I am standing at the edge of Loch Ness. It is a dark and stormy afternoon; the huge mass of glowering thundercloud gathered above echoes the slate colour of the roiling waters. It is fascinating weather in which to gaze upon…

Book review: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This is more a brief take than review. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. HarperCollins. Anthony Doerr is a celebrated writer who has written other very moving stories but All The Light We Cannot See (2014) stands one level above all of them. This story, of a few lives tightly intertwined in the days of…

Book review: River of My Blood by Selina Hossain and Dangle by Sutapa Basu

Here are a couple of books that deal with the human condition, in times of the war without and the war within themselves. The jury may still be out regarding the real winners of the conflict but there can be no doubting the intensity of and the passion involved in the struggle, in both cases….

Book review: My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises by Fredrik Backman

A funny-wise tale ‘Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero.’ If that line isn’t enough to reel you in, ‘My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises’ has plenty of quirky characters and whimsical fairy tales which work just as well, in this book by Fredrik Backman. The story is of Elsa, a ‘different’ seven-year-old, a Gryffindor…

Humour: Joust the two of us!

I’ll begin with a confession: I don’t have a hearth. In fact, I’m not too sure what exactly a hearth is. In my mind, it`s something that carries warmth and fuzziness at times, and a touch of Roop tera mastana at other times… or am I confusing it with a blazing…

Photo Feature: Scotland

The Highlands All photos by Sheila Kumar. All images are subject to copyright. Scotland`s national flower, the thistle. `Braveheart` William Wallace, and no, he looks like nothing like a certain Mel Gibson….

Photo Feature: The Lake District

The Lake District All photos by Sheila Kumar. All images are subject to copyright. The view from the train window. A Turner…

Book review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J K Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

As the breathless blurbs go: he’s back! After 19 years! And so are Ron and Hermione! And Hagrid, Snape, Cedric Diggory and Dumbledore, (don’t ask), Moaning Myrtle and oh, quite a few of the Hogwarts lot we have come to know and like. It’s a new adventure, it contains all the requisite dangers, and…

Feature: Unlikely Friendships

You two are friends? Really? Go on, admit it. Somewhere in your list of ‘closer than this’ friends, in the ‘inner circle’ or on its fringe, is this person who is really, really, really not like you, not one bit. You don’t share the same tastes; you are on different pages when it comes to…