Stylish Spaces

They say you cannot judge a book by its cover or a person on the street by the way they dress and carry themselves - a refined, intellectual mind may not care for finesse in personal attire and fine clothes certainly do not make a gentleman or a lady as we found out in Julia Robert’s Pretty Woman - but you can always tell something about a person by the way they choose to live and arrange their personal space. You can tell a pretentious person by their lavish, chosen-for-show, must-haves in their homes –they try too hard to please others rather than pleasing their own senses and tastes.   A pragmatic, no nonsense person will have the essentials to live and nothing else, a fanciful person will have things that need a fanciful mind to comprehend,   a book lover will have books spilling out everywhere, used as doorstops and make-shift tables, an art lover will have art on their walls and then the subject of their choice of art is another giveaway – there is always something th...

In my opinion, every one could do with a little crazy in their lives - in fact its the crazy and slightly bizarre things we say and do sometimes that make our sensible moments sane and not dull, which otherwise they would totally be. When you are young and carefree, craziness is a coveted characteristic, its makes you popular, its makes you hip and you can easily get away acting mad as a march hare - no one would bat an eyelid -  but unfortunately not so if you are a day over 30, have a reasonably grownup job, are married or have kids - act crazy for the fun of it then and you are considered nutty as a fruitcake, sadly out of your tree and decidedly unhinged - people roll their eyes in sympathy and speak in hushed tones behind your back. You become the sad-one rather than so-the-one . And that is the dismal truth, once you  are grown-up in the eyes of the world, you are  expected to put your wild, wacky side safely in...

The primal urge of the human psych to perpetually seek and embrace the thrill of the unknown is what the adventure industry thrives on – countless colourful brochures promising scenes and sights never seen before, adrenalin rushing, danger hugging expeditions that promise to transform your outlook on life and heart-stopping experiences that eventually become thrilling anecdotes around dinner parties – but if it wasn’t for the predictability of familiar surroundings and routines that we can safely and snugly return to each time, every adventure we venture out on would lose its rosy glow. No matter how bored I am at home and itching to do something, anything exciting, I have learnt never to scoff at or underestimate the power of predictable routines and familiar surroundings. That is what keeps us sane, grounds us and recharges us. Ever been out shopping all day or had a long and tiring day at work, the comfort of coming home and sinking into your favourite chair, drinking tea just ho...

I read an article once that claimed that if you ask college graduates what they want to accomplish by the age of forty, most will reel off the things they want to have as opposed to what they want to be or hope to become as an individual. In other words most will choose style over substance in a flash – which is not surprising as we live in a world where style is everything and everywhere. Nothing has made me more aware of this than living in the UAE. What amuses and astounds me is that you cannot step out of your house here without coming across, within a space of five minutes, a Louis Vuitton bag swinging gently on some well-toned and tanned arm.   Appearances here count in a way like nowhere else - I have witnessed eco-warring, tree-hugging expats here driving flashy, high petrol gurgling, carbon emitting 4x4s because that’s how its done here, no one in their right mind consciously abandons style for any substance, period. But who says you can’t have it all? Why can we...

Einstein, I know was thinking of astrophysics and heavenly bodies when he proposed the theory of relativity, but over the years I have learnt (sometimes the hard way) that every feeling we foster, every emotion we nurture and every thought we harbour is all relative to the time and space of that moment. Years, months, weeks, days, sometimes even minutes down the lane, we will not feel the same way about the same thing. We all live in this fluid, transient world of feelings, thoughts and emotions – and that is what makes it so interesting, because, if our every outlook is relative, there is no right or wrong - only different perceptions at different places and moments in time. And this is true even of people we consider on the other side of the fence – they are not wrong, their perceptions are simply different from ours – and theirs are based on relative to what they encounter. So if we gently skew Einstein’s theory of relativity (sorry puritan physicists!) and apply its essence ...