Badbye, infernal dark glasses

Courtesy the Delhi tragedy, Congressman HKL Bhagat slipped quietly away on Saturday Oct 29th. I’ve never had much use for that simple-minded exhortation not to speak ill of the dead, and in Bhagat’s case I have even less use for it. At one level, I’m glad my world is free of this creep; at another, [...]

Mother, gone

We were buying tickets at the Delhi Metro to go to the Red Fort for the sound-and-light show when I got a call from Bhopal: “Go home right now, there are blasts all over the city!” We returned our tickets and went home, to the accompaniment of Diwali firecrackers all around us. Half an hour [...]

Threat, renewed.

This started as a comment … I’m getting the sense that my post on GDP has set off some scrambling out there. I plan to followup to it when I get myself a longish time at a PC. Which is not just now on my swing through Rajasthan, unfortunately. But I will get to it. [...]

Untraceable depths

Excerpts (not always verbatim) from an exhibit at a museum I visited this morning. I have seen this exhibit before, but I think something like 25 years ago; and I think it was actually put on display some ten years before that. As may be obvious on reading it.
***
NEXT 80 YEARS AS SEEN BY “ELECTRONIC [...]

It’s the fatigue, stupid

My MidDay column, in print last Monday but I’ve had time only now to find it and link to it — here. Comments welcome.

Is this ten?

Train to Jaipur, and a blind vendor saunters through, selling cards, inflatable pillows, chains, locks, toys, you-name-it. What we do name is nailclippers, which we have foolishly forgotten to pack. He promptly reaches down to a specific spot in his array of wares and pulls out two or three for us to examine. How does [...]

The inefficiency boost

Voltage stabilizers, anyone? In rural or small-town India, but also often in large metropolises like Delhi, these relatively expensive devices are indispensible. If you operate a refrigerator, a computer, a stereo or other such electronic gadget, a stabilizer is an insurance policy against damage. You’d be a bozo not to use one.
So, given the huge [...]

Outlived its purpose

Here is the final shortlisted essay in the Citizens for Peace/Indian Express competition on the theme “A Secular Rethink.” Lakkan Naqvi, from Delhi, won second prize for this effort. Congratulations, Lakkan!
Note: Shashi Warrier’s first prize winner. Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta’s third prize winner. The three other shortlisted essays: Sultan & Rehmat Fazelbhoy, Paresh Kumar, Amit Gawde.
Note [...]

Monkey business, goat too

Mahashweta Devi, winner of the Jnanpith and Magsaysay Awards, is a feisty lady with a definite twinkle in her eye. A few years ago, several of us journalists — curiously, I was the lone male — made a trip with her through rural Maharashtra. Over breakfast on the steps of a rest house near Phaltan [...]

Sex ratio reaction

Harini wonders what to call it. Charu has more. The numbers they quote first got some attention in late 2003, when the then Health and Family Welfare Minister, Sushma Swaraj, released a booklet called “Missing”, put together by the UN Population Fund and her Ministry.
Last year, I wrote this article about the booklet and some [...]