My mother loves to tell this story about a two-year-old Madison: I was playing in another room and suddenly became very quiet. She was understandably suspicious - a quiet two-year old is rarely a good sign. "Madison?" she asked, "What are you doing in there?" To which I promptly shouted in reply, "I'm being-haved, Mom!" She loves the story as a sign of my early scholastic brilliance - the fact that I had been told to "behave" so many times that I had conjugated the verb to "b

Ask anyone who's ever travelled to India and they will undoubtably tell you the same thing - that this is the land of unapologetic contrasts. In no place is the stark disparity between the beauty and the ugliness of life more evident than it is in this country. The very rich and very poor live side-by-side - the slum just streets away from some of the biggest mansions in Gokulam. The starving homeless walk, begging, along the wide, flower-lined lanes. There are gorgeous, lush

A really unfortunate and yucky incident happened to me the other day. The kind of yucky that persistently runs around in your brain, over and over again, until you're forced to spew it out on paper (or screen), even if you should be attending to more pressing matters, like packing for the 3 month trip to India you're leaving for... in 3 days. And so I'm gonna share my yucky story with you. I had gone into a store to buy myself some late afternoon chocolate (not an uncommon oc