Excerpt-1 By The River Pampa I stood

Daughter Dearest

Nevertheless, Mathen prayed for a little daughter whom he would treasure as the apple of his eye. His house would then reverberate with the sound of the bells on her tiny gold anklets and the ripples of her laughter. He would carry her on his shoulders and walk through the luxuriant green paddy fields where dark skinned workers toiled from dawn to dusk, singing as they toiled:

Ponnumpurackale Thampurane , thai
Ponnu manasulla Thampurane , thai….
(The Master of The Gold House, thai
With a heart made of gold, thai….)
Ponnumpurackale pennungale, thai
Ponnin niramulla pennungale thai….
(The Ladies of The Gold House, thai
With their colour of pure gold, thai…)

The singing would stop abruptly and the dark skinned workers would turn around to marvel at the fair daughter of the Master, as she rode piggyback on his back.
These dreams of Mathen seemed to have come true with the birth of Annamma on a bright, sunny morning.
It was summertime. The jasmines were in bloom in the garden and their fragrance hung in the air around the Gold House like an invisible cloak. Birds sang merrily in the garden.
- Geeta Abraham Jose (By the River Pampa I Stood)

When you open the book....

......you are greeted by the following quote:


"You cannot step twice into the same river
for the waters are continually moving on"

- Hereclitus


Food for thought....

Hey, what's this book about?

There is an ethnic Christian community with a two millennium old heritage in the southernmost part of India, where nature has endowed the land and the people with an abundance of grace and beauty. The land is popularly known as "God's Own Country". The people belonging to this particular community are known as Syrian Christians or Nasranis.

The story is set in "God's Own Country" and the backdrop is a typical Syrian Christian family - its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, its secrets......The story spans over a century taking the family from the zenith of glory to imminent decay.

The plot is a purely fabricated one but the backdrop, lifestyle etc are original and give an insight into the life of a typical family in Kerala.

More details to follow....

By The River Pampa I Stood

To all my online friends,

You will be glad to hear that my debut novel

"By The River Pampa I Stood"

is being launched by Srishti Publishers in Delhi
on 9 Dec 2006. There will be a book reading session
at Oxford Bookstores in Delhi on the same day
and later on in Bangalore and Chennai.
The book will hit the bookshelves in Indian bookstores
in the second week of December as a gift
at Christmas for book lovers.

Hope you will buy it, read it, enjoy it
and post your comments.

Geeta Abraham Jose

Never Stop Dreaming

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
Never stop dreaming.
Not everyone can see his dreams come true in the same way.
Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
The world's greatest lie: At a certain point in out lives we lose control of what's happening to us and our lives become controlled by fate.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything because it's all written there.
If you can concentrate on the present, you'll be a happy man…the secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better…Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.
Everything has been written by the same hand.
All things are one.
Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the language of the world.
Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him.
Wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.
You've got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense.
There is only one way to learn. It's through action.
Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World and it will one day return there.
This natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise.
The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect.
No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.
Most people see the world as a threatening place, and because they do, the world turns out indeed to be a threatening place.
When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.
No one fails to suffer the consequences of everything under the sun.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
Without love, dreams would have no meaning.
Love is the pure language of the world...A language without words…the one true language of the universe. It requires no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time.
Love is the force that transforms and improves the soul of the world.
No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
A philosophy of life: I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure.
- Quotes from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Scarlett's musings

All her life she had heard sneers hurled at the Yankees because their pretensions to gentility were based on wealth, not breeding. But at this moment, heresy though it was, she could not help thinking the Yankees were right on this one matter, even if wrong in all others. It took money to be a lady. ... She shrugged in irritation. Perhaps these people were right and she was wrong but, just the same, these proud fools weren't looking forward as she was doing, straining every nerve, risking even honor and good name to get back what they had lost. It was beneath the dignity of many of them to indulge in a scramble for money. The times were rude and hard. They called for rude and hard struggle if one was to conquer them. Scarlett knew that family tradition would forcibly restrain many of these people from such a struggle -- with the making of money admittedly its aim. They all thought that obvious money-making and even talk of money were vulgar in the extreme. ... But she was going to be poor all her life. She wasn't going to sit down and patiently wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could. Her father had started as a poor immigrant boy and had won the broad acres of Tara. What he had done, his daughter could do. She wasn't like these people who had gambled everything on a Cause that was gone and were content to be proud of having lost that Cause, because it was worth any sacrifice. They drew their courage from the past. She was drawing hers from the future.
-Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind)

All men are equal

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?...
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

-William Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice)