So this little holiday is over, I’m back at called to fish. Hope you enjoyed my holiday hehehe!

I got home today after a week’s holiday in Sharjah. Although I have exams at school starting Monday, I didn’t use my books much while I was there. I learnt a lot about managing a house, cooking, doing dishes and being a woman. I was taught by God also about sin and living a careful, prayerful life in Jesus. I’m lacking there right now in many respects, but I’m learning. Those whom the Lord loves, he reproves and disciplines- as he did me this week, and he loves me a lot.

I watched 4 movies, all in Hindi – Vivah, Rehguzar, Apna Sapna Money Money and Dhoom: 2. Vivah was my favourite of these 4, it showed decency and love and peace with two families who wed a daughter and a son respectively, through an arranged system. It is good when movies have positive morals and encourage the youth (or even old people, depending upon what audience is targetted). Selling sex just because it sells is shallow and corrupting… sin is crouching at the door, but we must master it. I am considering giving up on watching a few types of movies.

I didn’t shop too much, I was very happy not to bring back bags full of junk. I already have too much stuff that needs to be chucked out or given away. But I bought drawing books and stickers, and chocolate- that sounds artistic, doesn’t it? I’m hoping to get started on some of my artistic ambitions soon. And I need to work very seriously on a layout and plan for my magazine… if God willing I hope to release it before the summer of 2007.

Cricket World Cup coming up in just a few months, my cousin tells me. Big deal… lol.

I need to read my Bible a lot more. I am looking for a good reading plan. As of now I am considering reading the Bible backwards… from Revelation to Genesis? I wonder if that would work. The Bible is such a great book, so much love and so much God all through it. Always blows me away. The New Testament is a lot deeper than it seems at first reading. I’ve been seeing that every day since I became christian, 413 days ago.

I cooked lunch again today the same dal and the same rice, but it was edible again.
praise the Lord!
I made more than I made yesterday, and no leftovers YAY!
I can’t believe I have been here for nearly 6 days already, it is nearly time to go back home.

November 19 & 20.. and a bit of 21

Dad and bhaiyya went out for work in Dubai, so I stayed home and did some housework and slept and stuff. It was nice to have all that alone time. I called mum both evenings and yesterday bhaiyya and I went out for a walk and we bought some milk and chips and yogurt, and we ate ice cream. It was fun. We tried to take photos but couldn’t get any good ones. Today some guys are over to clean up the ceiling which was mucked up from the broken window and muck which came in before we got here. It’s mostly done already, I like the way they spread plastic sheet all over the floor and put tape over the door frames so that nothing else gets mucked up. Very nice.

Dad is in Ajman right now, and when he comes back we will have lunch (I guess) and then bhaiyya and Dad will go to Dubai again. What will I do today? Maybe I will study, God willing.

I just cooked my first lunch today! Yay! Dal and rice, very simple, but still edible and I dont know about anyone else but I liked eating it! lol. I took photos but this internet connection gives me a really bad time putting up photos, so I will update this whole diary with photos once I get back to India, Lord willing. I cooked lunch! YAY!

I just sent two men off to work. Doesn’t that sound cool? Lol. My dad and my brother had work today in Dubai, so they dressed up in their formal suits and ties, and I wore a plain black kameez with a plain white salwaar- traditional Indian clothes, you could say black shirt white pants – and so we all looked like we were in some kinda dress code. Colour code actually. So the two men cooked lunch and taught me how to make black masoor dal, and rice, and I washed dishes and learnt from them.

It was the cutest thing ever, to watch two men in formal suits cooking lunch. Making dal and rice turns out is pretty simple to make. Just soak it in water for a while, then put it in a cooker with clean water and salt and garam masala and dhania and whatever else u wanna put in, if anything; let it cook for about half an hour and it’s done. Yay!

Anyway while lunch was cooking, I was in the kitchen doing the dishes. Dad and Bhaiyya were sitting in the drawing room discussing their work. I felt really happy in the kitchen. At home I guess I take mum for granted cos she does the kitchen work, but here I felt like a real woman. Not to say that women only do kitchen work. Before the feminists eat me up. It was just a really cool feeling to be a woman doing kitchen work while two men sat outside and discussed office work. I felt all grown up, I tell you.

When lunch was ready I set the table and helped the guys serve the rice and dal and yogurt and water. It was a very yummy meal. They had to leave after lunch, so I saw them off and cleared the table and put the leftovers in smaller bowls for the fridge, and the used dishes in the sink. I can’t tell you how excited I am about all this okay I really feel grown up lol. I’ve seen mum do all this so many times but I’ve always been the little kid, part of the “being served” end. And today I was totally at the “serving” end. I LOVED it!!

After Dad and Bhaiyya left I had two thoughts.

1- Being alone in the kitchen doing kitchen work by myself made me feel really close to God. I felt like I was doing something useful and talking to God while doing it, it felt GREAT. I could get used to this.

2- I can’t wait to get married. I wanna be a stay-at-home wife/mom. I don’t mind working in fact I want to work but my work hours will have to leave me good time for my housework, best if I’m working at home. I’m excited… there’s so much good stuff about housework!! Vacuuming, doing dishes, learning to cook… Prayer…!

Even this morning I was playing with my toy camel and asking Bhaiyya to play with me with my toys, and asking him to tell me a story (he told me a story about a king and a queen who got bitten by a mosquito and then they got sick and died… lol) and I didn’t wanna be called a woman. I liked being a girl. Always up until now I have only ever wanted to be called a girl, I didn’t wanna be a woman. Right now I really feel like a woman.

(But I don’t wanna grow up too much… this much is fine for now. hehe)

Hmmmm I don’t have much to write about yesterday. It was a good day. I tidied my room in the morning and made sure there was place for Bhaiyya to put his stuff when he came, then he came and put his stuff (lol) and we rested for a while. We had pizza for lunch, it was yummy. They have this really cool red dip they serve with cheesy bread it’s the best dip I’ve ever had. Best non-cheesy dip that is. And they have this amazing desert which is like bread with chocolate filled in the middle, we still have some of that in the fridge. Ok after lunch and after some rest we went down to the city centre and bought some stuff for the house. Salt and spices, and chips and chewing gum. Yum yum. Then we went to watch a movie called Rehguzar, which is about an Indian who goes to Dubai to become a big man and he falls in love with a girl and he works really hard and becomes really big in no time but then he has an enemy who gets him chucked into jail and a friend who buys him a lottery ticket. Lots of mini-storylines within this big story and none of them fully developed into anything interesting, so I guess I will have to agree with Bhaiyya’s review of it: vaahiyaad picture. Lol. It had potential but it just sortof collapsed into itself, watchable but in the end it leaves you saying “huh? What was that?” lol.

After the movie we went to a restaurant called Kamat for dinner. It’s a vegetarian restaurant and they had an adorable table mat which was given to my brother, it had little word games and kiddie puzzles on it. Dad and I got red adult mats, Bhaiyya got a blue kiddie mat. So I asked him if I could switch with him, and he said YES so I took out a pencil and started solving the puzzles I was going to take that mat home but I dropped some food on it. So before we left, Dad asked them to give me a fresh mat to take home, so I have a fresh one. YAY! Lol it’s a really cute/fun one.

Dad had south indian food but Bhaiyya and I shared chinese. Yummy.

Then we came home and moved a bed into the study for Bhaiyya to sleep in, and I read 1 Timothy (which really convicted me on a lot of things I was like wow…) and then at midnight I rang up my friend whose 19^th birthday it is, on the 19^th of November. Which is today. So I wished her a happy birthday and sent her off to bed and went to sleep myself. and then went into dreamland and forgot all my dreams. And that was Day 3

Vivah is a hindi movie which is centred on marriage and not on child abuse. There is a scene where the girl and guy meet for the first time, and they are given time to talk to each other before they decide to marry. So the guy’s sister-in-law says to them, “good luck!” And the sister-in-law’s 5 year old son says “good luck? Do they have an exam?” and everybody laughs. So cute. Not.

Word association with 5 year old kids should make them think of stuff like “mummy” and “play” and “dinner” and “God”, not exams… 5 year olds aren’t meant to have exams!! But they do in India. And this exam-mentality in the country leads who knows how many students to commit suicide every year. Is a piece of paper worth more than a life? A piece of paper which presumes to explain the mental ability of a person, or a person’s aptitude for a particular area of study. Which is created and judged by another human being, or worse, a computer system.

Stop stressing about exams. At the end of your life your pieces of paper die with you. If you have a dream that involves lots of studying, go for it sure but if you don’t make it, there is something better planned for you already, don’t give that up for stubbornness or other people’s expectations. Your life is worth a LOT to God. He made your life and he is the only one who has a right to give you it or take it away.

There is a movie called Rehguzar which I kinda want to watch. In the trailer, one line struck me. A guy yells at his junior, “do you know the difference between you and me!” and the junior answers “yeah when we die you will be buried in a 20 rupees coffin, and I will be buried in one worth 10 rupees.” That was an interesting way to say it. That line makes me curious about this movie and this character. I like filmi dialogues. Anyone seen Bluffmaster? What lines, yaar!

Also want to watch Kabul Express, the trailer is hilarious. At the end of the trailer, this van which has 2 Indians, an Afghan, an American and a Pakistani in it- just stops. And they all have a shocked look, and the American says “what…” and one of the Indians points ahead and says… “…Osama bin Laden…”

LOL. I wanna watch that movie.

Ok its evening and I watched Rehguzar with dad and bhaiyya, it was so weird. It started out nice and the “main” concept (if there was one…) wasn’t terrible but it was really confused and they tried to stuff too many ideas into one movie. Some lines were way too dramatic but some were okay like the coffin line. Coffin line was best out of context actually, in the trailer. A bit dramatic in the movie. Oh well.

Will write about Day 3 soon, Lord willing. Have to study today!

Day 2 was a lot less eventful than Day 1. Still, a lot of fun.

I woke up around 8,30 and went down bought some milk and bread and chips for breakfast. Then I spent a while tidying up my room. I made room for my brother to keep his stuff when he comes, and unpacked my suitcases into my shelves. It’s nice to see my stuff organised here I love the look of this place. Then Dad and I got online and had a long chat with our relatives in Sydney, one of my cousins has just finished university there and her brother is doing a lot of the subjects which I’m doing at university. He is 6 months older than I am and Aussie universities start 6 months before Indian ones, so he is exactly 1 semester ahead of me and it’s kinda cool how it totally matches with our ages hehe.

In the evening we went to the City Centre and Dad got passport size photos taken for his visa renewal, he has gone to Ajman today for that. We had dinner at McDonald’s (India McD’s is wayyyyyy better than UAE’s lol) and after that we went to watch a hindi movie called Vivah, which means marriage. It was a beautiful movie!!! Crossing all limits of decency. Not a single indecent dress, song or scene in the movie; and what a beautiful way to spend the time between engagement and marriage. So so decent I was really inspired, lol. It just looked beautiful. If the actors worshipped God it would have been perfect. Still the heart behind this movie was just really sweet and decent and … oh I liked it so much. I love the way they all stayed so proper the whole time and still in love. And the guy and the girl lived in different cities and really missed each other the whole time while they were engaged… awww. And they inspired each other in their work and sometimes visited each other. I could go on.

Just before the movie, Dad and I bought a magnifying glass, a roll of orange tape, and a desktop clock+calender. The tape is big and orange I can’t wait to use it!

We came home after the movie and slept.

Thanks everybody for visiting and commenting at Mum’s blog. Isn’t she sweet?

Isn’t it creepy to be a woman in the UAE?

Hmmm, no. I love being a woman in the UAE. It’s nicer than being a woman in the UK and it’s nicer than being a woman in New Delhi. I don’t know what it’s like to be an ARAB woman in the UAE, but being an Indian girl in Sharjah, a tourist not a student, it’s great. This place is extremely child-safe and child-friendly. If it wasn’t for the lack of naturalness and high salt content in the air and all the sand and weird economic conditions, this might be the ideal place to bring up one’s kids (my current most highly recommended place to bring up kids is Cyprus…). While driving around the city you cant help noticing how the giant advertisement boards are missing pictures of naked or half naked women. You can’t help noticing how pleasant it is to see real men and women who are pretty, no doubt, and made up; but clothed, decent, and with good taglines for ads (letting the focus be on the content of the product/service rather than sex). I really miss that in India. It’s not as bad in India as it is in some parts of the world (yet), but it’s just so beautiful in the UAE. It makes you look at women like real women people.

I have a lot of respect for women in the UAE. Part of it comes from the social restrictions placed on them, which they deal with really well and that takes strength, and part of it comes from the values they learn and grow into, and don’t rebel against “just because the liberated west tells them to”. This is a controversial subject and I don’t wanna fight with anyone on my diary, so I’ll just keep these thoughts to myself. Lol.

One thing I really wanna say though is, you don’t have to be anorexic to be beautiful. UAE women are evidence of that. And to everyone who thinks that women here are weak because they don’t “stand up for themselves”, or whatever, that looks to me like a really big mistake and a complete inability to see the metal that it would take to hold on to your roots and stay in your own limits of beauty and social liberty, and be strong enough to resist the wave of physical/sexual beauty that has swept and captured so many other countries. To keep yourself from being influenced by a temptation to “be like them” takes strength. To calmly face all the uninformed accusations against you takes strength. To put all useless talk aside and look after yourself or your job or your family whatever the case is for you… that takes strength.

I realise that I don’t even know any women here, and maybe they actually do feel oppressed or whatever. If this is true, it would not be my lack of knowledge but their lack of Jesus. I can’t think of any environment more conducive for the growth of a woman than this place. I would love it if New Delhi learnt some lessons from Sharjah about how to treat its women. But if you have different priorities… it’s just Jesus that is missing. From here or from Delhi or anywhere else. Lord Jesus, come. Sigh.

What an exciting day. I woke up at 6 am and was nervous, my flight was scheduled for departure at 10,30 am and Dad had already told me that we were leaving for the airport at 7,30 am. I wrote my 3^rd post about Sharjah while I was still in Delhi, then went upstairs to get ready to leave… checked a million times whether I’d packed everything, and ended up leaving my mp3 player (christian music) at home. No worries. I have my bible, and my laptop has my music

We left for the airport at about 8,30. Mum was really stressed cos she thought we were late, but Dad already knew the flight was delayed and didn’t tell us. He told me only when we got to the airport, he is a funny guy. Lol. We got into the plane at about 11 am, and took off around 12,30. I slept for this hour and a half, Dad on the other hand was awake and probably very bored. Oops. Anyway, I woke up for take-off and prayed a lot not to crash, I am very nervous in airplanes and I’m very nervous when people I know are in airplanes. I have always been scared of travelling by air. But taking off was amazing. It brought me so close to God. I felt so aware of God holding this airplane and carrying it to where it had to go. And I started by praying “please don’t let us die” and ended with the Lord’s prayer. It felt great to pray the Lord’s prayer, it took my mind off everything else and went back to the Lord only. I wanna only ever look at him. Sigh!

I slept for about half an hour after take-off then I woke up, there were 3 hours left of being in the air before we could land. I decided to watch a movie, because while Dad was choosing his movie I saw the option of “Don” on his screen. I doubted that it was the new one, and I was right, it was the old Don, starring Amitabh Bachchan. I heard excellent reviews about it so I switched it on. I watched it till we had to return our headsets to the stewardess, which means I missed out like the last 20 minutes which was the climax, but that’s alright. The movie was ok, not “great” or anything, but at least it had a good story and the ending was a happy ending where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses and stuff. From what I’ve heard. I didn’t see it.

We landed in Dubai at 4 pm which was 2 hours late but ok still. The weather here is AMAZING. It’s like warm and light breeze and stuff, mmmm almost my favourite type of weather. While we were at Passport control, the guy checking our passports entered Dad’s name into his computer, and then stopped with a concerned look. There is a guy with a name similar to Dad’s name, who is blocked or blacklisted or something. So Dad explained “yeah I have this problem everytime, there is another guy with a similar name.” So the guy grins and a minute later he looks up and says “it’s you” then he lifts up his head and says in a low voice “police..!” and I started laughing and he was also laughing and Dad grinned politely. So the guy cleared our passports and let us go. Dad thought it was kinda stupid, but I thought it was a really nice, friendly way to welcome us into the country. It would be nice if more passport checking people tried to crack jokes. As long as it didn’t make them slack in their work of course. Anyway that made me think, silly things are my favourite thing to laugh at. Good, clever jokes are funny, but silly things always make me laugh harder. And that is the difference between my parents’ senses of humour. Dad makes the silliest jokes and I don’t laugh harder at anybody’s jokes than his. Mum on the other hand is extremely witty, especially because she has great command over hindi and her home dialect, and when she is talking in those languages her jokes are extremely well made. My sister doesn’t make silly or funny jokes, but her laugh is contagious. I love my family!

Ok so while we drove from Dubai to Sharjah, I noticed lots of things on the way, most of which I have forgotten now. One thing I remember is that there was a building under construction and I was thinking “God holds the lives of all these men who work here, whether they work on the 50^th floor or on the ground floor… he sends them safely home each evening.” And I remembered Psalm 127, which says “unless the LORD builds the house, the labourers labour in vain.” That made me realise, this whole cemented city and group of cities built on desert, the Lord has made it possible. Contrary to how people believe that Man has made it possible to live such good lives in the desert. Man has laboured, but it would have been in vain if the Lord had not made it possible.

Speaking of building houses and labour, Dad and I realised that living in a Sharjah house is like living in a fridge… it’s really important to keep the fridge working. While we were in Delhi, a window broke in the house, and lots of dust and humidity and stuff came in and beat the building’s airconditioning, and the wooden doors expanded and got jammed. So 2 hours late to get home, and it took over 3 more hours to get the doors off (carpenters came and yes they took the doors off and made them smaller) and the house was a mess. Dad had been away for 2 months and in this time (who knows when or how the window broke) the place filled up with dust and muck and broken glass and now a broken door. Lol. I was just wondering in amazement and how intricately God plans everything. So Dad and I got to “rest” on the first day, very tiring day of rest too. Dad’s friend came over after the door was fixed and the broken glass cleaned up, and he took us out for dinner with his family. His wife and his son were there, with the wife’s brother. So we had dinner at a really nice vegetarian restaurant and got home by… was it 10,30? 11? I don’t remember. And then we slept.

Mum wrote her first blog posts yesterday, I like the look of her blog and I am glad she is blogging. Thank you guys who visited and left comments for her. I really love my mum.