I am back from Ashara in India and like everyone else, trying to settle back into the routines we abandoned two weeks ago. I didn’t get any time to write while in India at all, so if I put any thoughts down it will have to be a retrospective, though I did manage to catch the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on the plane and found it thoroughly enchanting and relevant 🙂 Highly recommended for any westerners journeying to the subcontinent!

I’d like to say, though, that even more so than previous trips, a very large number of my readers came up to me personally and told me that they read this blog. I am always surprised and genuinely grateful when people do that – I suppose given my picture on the blog header, I am pretty easy to recognize, but still it means a lot to me that you, the reader, find what I say interesting enough to not only read me regularly but also to actually go out of your way to express your approval to me personally. To everyone I met, from the bhai from Kuwait after waaz, to the bhen from Canada and her fiancee from New York with whom I shared a rickshaw, to the bhai from Minneapolis I met at the baggage claim at Newark, and all the other people in between, a genuine thank you and shukran. It’s probably not good for my ego to be receiving this encouragement, but it is good for my writing to know I have a real audience and not a theoretical one. alhamdolillah.

It’s also good for me to be reminded that people do read, so that I actually write more often. So stay tuned 🙂