Someday I will go back to Iran. It will be summertime so the roses will be in full bloom, the air will be full of optimism, tinged with a trace of nostalgia, and the warm Tehran sun can quickly dry my tears to save my lush eye makeup, just in case. My life revolves around [...]
memoir
Searching the Ripples of my Mind for Childhood Memories “Do you remember the time in school when…” The place is Razi Elementary School in Iran. The time is in the early 1980s. The question is posed by a long lost childhood friend who found me by sheer accident on an otherwise ordinary Monday and has [...]
A picture. A few words in a book. A flashback. That is all it takes for our memories to be triggered from their dormant existence in the quiet corners of our mind. It can be nearly 30 years later and much may fade away in this life but some memories are pertinacious. No sooner had [...]
March 20th 2010 – The first day of spring and the Iranian new year more commonly known as Nowrūz (spelled at least half a dozen different ways in its tangled translation to modern English). The dawn of a new day, new season, and new beginnings. In a traditional Persian style, one of my cousins married [...]
Reading Anna Karenina has been so overwhelming and gratifying that I chose to walk away from it for a short while. I decided to take time to digest the scope, the breadth, the depth in this masterpiece of a novel. It is of course an overly ambitious task to ever digest it all. This is [...]
Japan has fascinated me since I was a child. My grandparents made a trip over to Tokyo in the 1970s and for years, they talked about it to everyone. That’s what people did back then. Or at least where I grew up. They would go on one trip to a “foreign” land and come home with [...]
When I saw Azar Nafisi‘s “Reading Lolita in Tehran” on the shelves in my beloved Maui, Hawaii, I distinctly heard it beckon me. The time has come to read this book. I was in paradise, as anyone who has ever set foot in Hawaii knows well. The warm perfect breeze combined with Mother Nature’s pristine beauty [...]
Truth be told, I do not closely follow any best sellers list; I do not make it a point of watching Oscar-nominated movies or popular TV shows. No, I follow my own heart when I choose my entertainment, and so should you. I do not have a particular strategy for choosing my next book either [...]
A memoir of growing up Iranian in America – that alone should give away the reason “Funny in Farsi” is one of my dear favorites. I love Firoozeh Dumas’s dry wit. I love her bold spirit. I love her courage to be self-deprecating and her defense of the Iranian culture conundrums. I admire how she [...]
I was in my Toastmasters meeting in the Piano conference room on a beautiful Wednesday morning in 2003 when I first heard about Lance Armstrong. Megan was up for giving her speech about courage and inspiration. A strong and determined woman. I was not the only one moved beyond words by her speech – her [...]
I remember Michael J. Fox as one of the earliest actors I watched him on television after I had first come in the US. He was witty, likable, and good looking. It was hard not to notice Michael J. Fox in the early 1990s with his rise to fame and stardom. It was also hard not [...]
Reading Travels in the perfect setting of Hawaii made it all the more memorable. This is perhaps the least popular work by the prolific Michael Crichton, and yet it served as my introduction to his work and writing. I also found it very fitting that my first reading of him was an autobiography, and with the life [...]
