Shail’s Nest

“You’ve a lovely nose!” he said to me one day a good many years ago..
I wrinkled my nose and tried to look down it to see what was so good about it. Having never heard anything about my nose from anyone all of my twenty four years (for that had been my age during the [...]

Our movies (Indian) are chock full of hard hitting dialogues that have the front benchers and the balcony-sitters alike whistling, clapping or sometimes sagely nodding in agreement. That spells success for the story writer/ dialogue writer and the makers of the movie in general. Some of the oft repeated ones ever so popular with [...]

When my younger son was around 2 years of age, I decided to give him a hair cut and ended up with the Elikaranda (Rat- Gnawed) Look!
I watched him nervously as he sat there playing. Oh dear God! What had I done to the poor beloved thing’s mass of curly mop??!! It looked horrible. [...]

My brother and family have reached Trivandrum. Sis-in-law calls up, on reaching her home. They will be coming over in a couple of hours. I have one last batch of folded clothes to go into the wall closet. I open it to keep them and …..Aaaaaaaaaaaah! There is an ENORMOUS spider running on the closet [...]

What’s in a name?? Nothing perhaps. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet as the Bard would have it. So I remain I in spite of the many names I am known by. One of my friends recently remarked that I seemed to have as many as a thousand names. Maybe not [...]

Feb 28 2006
Home Sweet Home

Dear Diary,
You know that I have been away for 2-3 days to spend some quality time with my L&M who stays in a nearby city. It had been fun roaming around every evening on the mo-bike, window shopping, eating out and chattering nineteen to the dozen about everything under the [...]

We all have memories about our first school, some good some bad. Let me tell you about mine.
I started my schooling way back in 1964, (God, I am Ancient!!) in a little known village in Kollam district, where our ancestral home is located. It was the same year that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru passed away. [...]

Though I have been a homemaker and full-time parent for a pretty long time now, there must have been a time eons ago when I was a probably squalling baby, a definitely painfully shy kid, a certainly diffident recluse of a teenager and a finally happy-go-lucky collegian cautiously peeping out of her shell and daring [...]

“Where do I begin?
To tell the story of how great a love can be
The sweet love story that is older than the sea
The simple truth about the love he brings to me
Where do I start?…”
That is how it began, the song from the movie ‘Love Story.’ The year had been 1971. It wasn’t until [...]