Frances looked at the little box in her hand. She wasn’t sure how she came to be holding it in her hand. Around her, boys hooted and kids shrieked. Teachers scurried about looking vaguely harried and wonderfully busy. At 5, life can seem strange. At 50, it doesn’t seem to change. But that she would […]
Just a slight drizzle outside. Unseasonal. But then nothing was part of the season anymore. I peered inside the darkened windows of the bookshop. My own reflection peered back at me. From the outside, Patel’s Books, seemed almost like the relic of a pub. It stood well back from the street, almost as if […]
It was the night the circus came to town. The days when cable TV as a word didn’t exist in our dictionary. Maharaja’s Circus, it was called. No malls. Cinemas, yes. But we would wait for the once-a-year show to reach our town. The night the circus came to town is one I would remember […]
The last few days of this year. A year that has been a shard of revolving dust, a whirlwind of chaos and mindless energy. As the year winds down, I can’t but think of the things that made me happy through the year. It’s difficult to do so. Our mind has a tendency to shut […]
Burma or Myanmar? A country that is democratic or authoritarian? Modern or traditional? Yangon or Rangoon? The contradictions of Burma are apparent from the time you land in Yangon’s international airport. It is winter and the city is wrapped in a slightly colder haze. The roads are wide swept and clean and the visions […]
Many years ago, now more than a decade, I spent a few months in the most obscure town you can imagine in China. Shuyang. Deep in Jiangsu Province in the northern part of China, it was my first stay abroad. Shuyang was a nondescript town. A village really. It was drab, colorless, and would […]
Ramanagara, off the Bangalore-Mysore highway, is now the new hotspot for birdwatchers, rock-climbers, and coffee crashers. This place is known for its silkworm rearing, and of course, THAT scene from THAT Hindi blockbuster, Sholay, but of late, its rocky terrain has attracted more trekkers and climbers than silkworm farmers. I have neither trekked nor climbed […]
I stay in one of Bangalore’s more recently developed ‘IT hubs.’ The area there is chaotic. The air an unfiltered hell of poison. The people speak to me in Hindi more often than not. Traffic is not the word you can use to describe a 1,000 vehicles trying to squeeze past each other in a […]
Today is the last day in Goa. I have watched a movie or two. Harold and Maude, a cult classic, and a Hayao Miyazaki movie called Howl’s Moving Castle that gave me a headache or two. True to nature, it’s hot again today. Not a cloud on the horizon. All that blue in the sky […]