Worms Away

Join me, won’t you? I’m paying tribute to the prowess of heroic Indians who bring recognition to the country. Indians who perform record breaking feats that earn them, not piffling Olympic medals, but something more precious by far.
Mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.
So hail Milind Deshmukh, who walked his way to a record [...]

Sand in the Eyes

Great todo in the lobby of my building one morning some weeks ago: one of the residents had slapped Joga, our rather frail old watchman. Now in the past, this very resident has insisted that we call him “Captain” and not “Mister”; in the book in which we keep the minutes of our meetings, he [...]

Thousand At One Blow

For some years in the late 1980s, I did karate with a small group in Austin. The way we did it was perfect for someone like me. We were never more than five or six at any time. We’d meet three times a week in the attic of a crumbling community centre and simply practice. [...]

Never Be This Young Again

This thing called nostalgia. A week ago in Hyderabad, I had an afternoon free. Coughed my way through intense traffic and over Chandrababu Naidu’s innumerable flyovers to a little haven I once called home. Twenty-three years ago I called it that, over half my life ago. Took me that long to come home, this home.
Walked [...]

The Nose and the Toes

There’s something just slightly bizarre about it. The other day, we walked into a building at one end of the suburb of Chembur, signed four different cheques, and walked out half an hour later with a tiny human being. Just like that.
OK, it wasn’t “just like that”. The process has been grinding away for nearly [...]

Triple Hymn of the Republic

“You know, the one with the triple door,” I hear her saying.
I’m in trouble. Not six months into my stay in the US, still a green grad student getting used to American accents and ways, here’s this woman saying something I can’t understand at all. She has called to ask me out to dinner: big [...]