The Man Behind The Book
Jamal Mecklai.
The man who surfs India's foreign exchange markets by day while writing a pig into immortality by night.
- Managing Director – Mecklai Financial, India’s leading FX risk management consultancy
- Columnist – in every financial (and other) paper in the country, including the Economic Times, Business Standard (Market Maniac) and, currently, Financial Express
- Debut Novelist – LOVE JOY AND SILLINESS, available on Amazon worldwide
- Global Traveller – Born in Bombay, bred in Houston (Rice University) and buttered in NEW YORK; wandered peripatetically across America – California, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Fort Worth and multiple points in between; to Mexico to Ireland to Turkey to London and Paris, even the Trans-Siberian Railway and, of course, always returns to Goa
Financial Express Columnist
Debut Author
Goa
Feni
There Are No Buts In Love
Love Joy And Silliness
Now On Amazon
Jamal Mecklai
MD, Mecklai Financial
Financial Express Columnist
Debut Author
Goa
Feni
There Are No Buts In Love
Love Joy And Silliness
Now On Amazon
Jamal Mecklai
MD, Mecklai Financial
The Professional
India's Foremost
Currency Mind
Currency Mind
For decades, Jamal Mecklai has been the voice India turns to when the rupee moves. His columns in the Business Standard (Market Maniac) and now the Financial Express have shaped how an entire generation of Indian businesses thinks about risk, currency, and the global economy. He built Mecklai Financial from the ground up into the country's most respected forex risk consultancy.
The Storyteller
The Man Who Wrote
a World Into Being
a World Into Being
Between the rupee forecasts and the market columns, Jamal has always been a storyteller. His debut novel, Love Joy and Silliness, didn't arrive by accident — it arrived as the inevitable expression of a man who has always known that love, joy, and silliness are is all there is, and seriousness is akin to a pox on living.
Cast of Characters
A World of Unforgettable Characters
There is Lola Flores, the Pig Queen of the Tango; and Galina, the throaty-voiced researcher in Leningrad. In church one Easter Sunday in Goa, he meets Nishisha, a beauty consultant, who invites him to the Easter Parade in New York, where he meets Patty Pig, a poet, who invites him out to the California desert.
Back in Goa, he rescues Senor Lagarto, a tourist sunburning on the beach, who invites him to Mexico in search of “the greatest margarita in the world”; in Mexico City, he meets Guadalupe, Senor Lagarto’s sister, a very special and wonderfully elegant piglady.
After a magical twist of airline fate, he arrives in New Orleans, where he runs into Zack and Pearlie who take him to the zydeco festival in Abbeville. And, of course, there is EunicePig back in Goa who “knows Shri Vindaloo better than he knows himself”.
The Pope makes a kind of appearance and the Imperfect Master plays a very joyous role in resolving a tricky issue. And with two small Mexican piggies adding their recipe of pure joy, it all ends up in a grand wedding in an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas.
After a magical twist of airline fate, he arrives in New Orleans, where he runs into Zack and Pearlie who take him to the zydeco festival in Abbeville. And, of course, there is EunicePig back in Goa who “knows Shri Vindaloo better than he knows himself”.
The Pope makes a kind of appearance and the Imperfect Master plays a very joyous role in resolving a tricky issue. And with two small Mexican piggies adding their recipe of pure joy, it all ends up in a grand wedding in an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas.
“
”
Love and joy are what everybody desires. And the truth is that love and joy simply reflect our spirituality, and, of course, represent out natural state. The story shows that all it takes to bring these desires to fruition is silliness, the most undervalued of all attributes."
A few numbers from a life well-lived
8
Chapters of Shri Vindaloo
Eight adventures across six countries. Each one a world in itself.
5
Animated Pilot Videos
Five chapters brought to life — narrated in Jamal's own voice. Already online.
∞
Only Love
“There are no buts in love.” The only rule Shri Vindaloo ever needed. The only one Jamal does too.
The Book
His Debut Novel.
Love Joy
and Silliness.
A globe-trotting, warmly written, deeply witty novel set across eight chapters and six countries. From the tango clubs of Goa to the overnight train to Leningrad. From the Easter Parade in New York to a zydeco festival in the Louisiana bayou. A love story that is also a philosophy, and a philosophy that is also a love story.
"It's never too early to dance." — Shri Vindaloo, to a pedicab driver, before 8am on a Sunday morning in Goa.
Buy on Amazon
"The brain is like a toothbrush."
The Place That Never Lets Go
Forty Years of Goa. Not One Wasted.
Jamal has been going to Goa for over forty years and, while he has never lived there, a delighted susegade flows through his veins.
Prawn curry rice and caju feni are the sacraments that keep him in constant joyous touch with the Main Pig in the sky.
Why He Wrote This Book
The Character
Who Was Always There
Love Joy and Silliness did not arrive in a flash of inspiration. It arrived as the inevitable expression of a man who had been living with Shri Vindaloo for a very long time — in the warmth of his Goa mornings, in the way he approaches a market crisis with the same calm as a glass of feni, in the philosophy of joy he has quietly practiced for decades while writing sharp columns about the Indian rupee.
The book is whimsical and sophisticated. It is set in Goa and Leningrad, New York and Mexico City, the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas. It is about love — the kind that dances, the kind that crosses borders, and the kind that laughs at itself the whole way through. And it is, quietly, about the most underrated of all virtues: joy.
Jamal Mecklai is in these pages. Not literally — he is not a pig, he will assure you — but in the warmth, the wit, the complete refusal to treat life as a problem to be solved rather than an adventure to be danced through. He wrote Shri Vindaloo because someone had to. And it turned out, all along, it had to be him.
"He invites you to step into his world, have a glass of feni, and always remember that it is never too early to dance."
Read the World
of Shri Vindaloo.
Love Joy and Silliness — available now on Amazon India and worldwide.