Little GTO

Like I suppose every red-blooded male did, I loved anything with wheels when I was a child. I still have a small, now rusting, collection of toy cars that I push around the floor from time to time. My wife suspects I have regressed into childhood; that is, if she can assume I grew out [...]

Kashmir Here, Kashmir There

This essay I wrote was the runner up in the Outlook/Picador nonfiction competition in 2002.
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Kashmir Here, Kashmir There
Nobody knew where the place was. The best answer I got was at a little convenience store, where I bought a paper and asked my question. The man looked puzzled, then pointed vaguely across the road. “Think [...]

Thou weedy fly-bitten minnow

Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears! Or, as the case may be, your mouse-clicking, stewed-prune-like fingers. And I shall direct you, thou bootless clapper-clawed moldwarp, thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins, to the Shakespearan Insulter.
Peace, ye fat guts!

Ghastly display

My short review for Time Out Mumbai of Iftikhar Gilani’s My Days in Prison (Penguin India, 2005).
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Maybe it’s not right to pick out one phrase from an entire book; maybe you think it does not even best capture Iftikhar Gilani’s experience. But it works for me. In four words, it speaks of everything perverse and [...]

Being Indian

Rajni Bakshi, U Mukhopadyay, Dilip Raote and I will form a panel that will discuss Pavan Varma’s book, Being Indian: The truth about why the 21st Century will be India’s. Nehru Centre, Worli, Monday May 30 2005, 5 pm (tea at 430 pm).
Be there or be elsewhere.

A stunner

The Times of India’s sports page carries a stunning shot of the woman who beat Amelie Mauresmo at the French Open, Ana Ivanovic. I can’t find that picture on the web, but
here’s another one of her that gives you an idea. If this woman’s tennis is anything like her looks – and if she beat [...]

Brown like my heritage

Thoughtful Vikrum Sequeira has this about opinions he has run into, here in India, about the British Raj. He mentions Jerry Rao’s recent In Praise of Thomas Macaulay, a piece of writing not calculated to endear Rao to “leftist dimwits” nor “nativist fanatics” (both his phrases). After all, Macaulay is arguably the British colonial figure [...]

Uncle Rat, Dirty Girl

Spent the evening yesterday in Khotachiwadi, the little warren of narrow lanes and lovely old houses and rusting motorbikes in South Bombay’s Girgaum area. The Khotachiwadi festival is on this weekend, and though I never lived there, I have some ancestral roots there. So I went. And I urge you to go too, especially if [...]

Blinking in the distance

One evening some days ago, a small band of us went for a long walk on a beach south of Bombay. As I mentioned in this essay, we could actually see the buildings of downtown Bombay from this beach, distant in the haze but discernible. It had taken over 3 hours through over 100 km [...]

Gwen, Gwen, gone

Gwen Stefani, I learn from this morning’s Times of India, has a “fashion line” and it’s “not like the rest”. Why not like the rest? Because it includes “cameras, underwear, stationery and baby clothes.”
Ah, got that. (Did you?) You see, all the other fashion lines, they include cows and trees, nailclippers and dictionaries, possibly even [...]