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Every night I use my dream time to learn something new, to discover something in my daly life that i am overlooking. Dreaming is a powerful tool for self-growth and knowledge.

You can dream about whatever you’d like.
Dream incubation is a technique used for inducing the dream you want.
For 1000s of years people have used their dreams for self-discovery, healing, and transformation.
My friend Thomas from Dream Labs teaches us 3 steps to create our dreams.
Try this tonight!

To learn more visit: dreamlabs.io

~Or~
Twitter: @dream_labs
Tumblr: http://dream-guide.tumblr.com/
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/dreamlabs/
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/DreamLabsIO

In this video Kiki meets lucid dream experts – the Dream Team – authors of the book
“A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming”.
The experts say – nightmares are great opportunities for healing, transformation, and self-discovery.
I have learned a lot from these guys and now feel my dream time is for growth and wellness.
Get the book, learn lucid dreaming, check out the Dream Team’s channel:
www.dreamlabs.io
To learn more visit: dreamlabs.io

Oct 2nd, 2009
Girls School

Call me unconventional.
I loved school.
Especially Catholic School.
The More House School for Girls.
Girls only.
Plenty of girls.
Being girls.
Bright, brilliant, clever, ever-so-often naughty girls.

The More House School was uniform-free.
A style forum for 11 year olds just down the road from Beauchamp Place and around the corner from Harrods .

The curriculum included Latin, French, Spanish, history, maths, confession, ballroom dancing, fencing and Shakespeare.

In our Shakespeare theatricals girls played all the roles.
Rosalind, Viola, Julia and Portia were juiciest.
Roles that only boys had played we now  played; women disguised as men to teach justice, illuminate, and set the world right.
Disguise, doubled-up identities, corsets and capes.
We were intellectual superheroes.

Wondergirls.

In Girls School, we painted on swirly moustaches, swaggered with sabres and dropped our capes over puddles. 
We waltzed in petticoats, held séances in cloakrooms and cribbed cheat sheets in several languages.
We donned pirate gear and orchestrated elaborate treasure hunts up then down back and front staircases.
We wore our costume-shop dresses home with Biba platform shoes, hand-crocheted cloche hats and Gary Glitter nail lacquer.
Winter week-ends we hung out at Conran's or the Tate and summers we swam in the Serpentine.

What’s not to like?

At Moore House, our curriculum did not include petty, catty infighting over boys and popularity.
We were born-free.
Lived free.

A recent treasure hunt lead me to modern pirate's booty.
I started out reading Frances Cole Jones' The Wow Factor and soon discovered Brain Barter.

Brain Barter is like going back to Girls School.
Girls School with goblets of wine and platters of Brie.
Girls School relocated to fairy-lit Saks Fifth Avenue.

Girls School where we don’t have to draw on a moustache to be the smartest person in the room.
And then rub it off to be the sexiest.

Now aren't we clever girls!

Aug 25th, 2009
I Love My India

I want go London
I want go America

sing the chorus-kids while high stepping across a mountaintop in the Shah Rukh starrer Pardes.

But their sentiments change as they reach the refrain

I love my India
I love my India
Ye mera India

The closest I ever got to hunky Shak Rukh was the backseat of an auto-rickshaw.

Hot stuff. Auto-rickshaw, collage by Barry Silver.

The backseat’s where the driver curates a poster gallery of filmi celebrities.
The stars are usually presented in pairs, so the passenger may find herself seated between pretty Preity ZInta and three-thumbed Hrithik Roshan.

Third-wheeling in a three-wheeler, I am happiest squeezed between he-man Shah Rukh Kahn and green-eyed goddess Aishwarya Rai.

Shah Rukh and Ash, East Sixth Street, NYC.

I love Shah Rukh.
Love him because he remains a phenomenon even unto his own self.
In Filmfare interviews, he beautifully boasts

There is only one Shah Rukh.
There will only ever be one Shah Rukh.
Shah Rukh is not worried about upstarts and pretty boys.

Nor should he be.

No, Shah Rukh and every other Kahn should only worry about flying  into Newark.

I love my India.

But I also love books about other people’s India.
I have a long  list.
Here’s a start.

A Bend in the River
V.S. Naipaul
This is my favorite author and this is an awesome novel, held (by those qualified to make such claims) to be one of the greats and to have revolutionized the form. The story is set in Africa among an Indian community of merchants during the collapse of colonialism and the violent yet fragile rise of self-rule.
Naipaul grew up in Trinidad of Indian parentage. His first novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, depicts the varied cultures, challenges and hardships of the island, his family and childhood. It is a great work, fat to bursting where A Bend in the River is lean and pointed.

White Mughals
William Dalrymple
This is a non-fiction work by a wonderful historian. It is the history of 18th century Brits in India. It reads as great fiction: entertaining, sensual, shocking, and suspenseful.  The only reason to put down the book is to refill the hookah.

A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
At 1400 pages, and with each chapter introduced by a sonnet, this book is not a casual encounter but a serious commitment. It also requires carpal tunnel syndrome-free wrists. As several families and generations cross paths, the novel reveals the diversity and multiplicity of a single nation. At the heart of it: a widow seeks to marry her daughter to a suitable boy.

Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
This Pulitzer Prize collection of short stories precedes the author’s celebrated novel, and now film, The Namesake. These stories are stunning and nuanced, each one far superior to the disappointing Namesake. This is a diverse collection of Indians abroad and Indians in India.

The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
A novel woven from remarkable histories of Burma, India and Malay. A shifting of powers, peoples and precious resources from colonialism through World War II. An unbelievable tale based in world history and that of the author’s family.

Being Indian
P.K. Varma
This non-fiction treatise on India explains the culture better than I ever could and I’ve been trying since I first traveled there in 1995. Written by an Indian diplomat who is current president of the Nehru Centre, Varma’s volume is part think-tank/part tough love.

Maximum City
Suketu Mehta
In this non-fiction book, Mehta leads the reader inside contemporary Mumbai’s purgatory of corruption, gangsterism, dance halls, Bollywood power cliques and religious extremism. Fun, thrilling, and exhausting. Read this and save on airfare; it’s just like being there.

A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales of India
A.K. Ramanujan
Collected oral folk tales of India gathered by the celebrated folklorist. These tales tap the subconscious dreams and fantasies of a people and their culture; a dark and honeyed sap. Here are worlds where fools are wiser than kings and unspeakable suffering may or may not transform and transcend. Haunting and unforgettable.

Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi
A novel by the screenwriter inspired by his youth and teen years in suburbia and moving on up to pretty and punk London. Witty and hip.

Kiki and rickshaw professional Bharat. His name means India.