Just a minute

A Minute Passed
Monty Python
Hesitantly, reluctantly, Helen slipped out of a sling, tight-waisted waspy and stood naked in the moonlight before me. Somewhere a clock chimed three. An owl hooted in the nearby copse. No wind stirred the casement window. She stood in the pale, translucent light on the Persian carpet. A minute passed. Then another. [...]

The tip, 30 years on

Carl: Yo Ben, could ya come over here a sec? Me’n’Bob think we’re onto something big.
Ben: Yeah? What’s up, dudes?
Carl: Yeah well, it’s like this. Know that seedy joint the Dems always use for their meetings, it’s called Watergate? Well, we think the Republicans are bugging the place. Why, we don’t know yet, but we [...]

Lines #7

More and more, again and again, of those lines.
***
Look again and again, look a thousand times over,
This is a thing worth looking at, my lover,
Let there be claps, let there be claps,
Let there be claps, let there be claps.
Yes sir yes, there are likely to be more hearts here,
This place is resplendent with a hundred [...]

Connection to the shooting

My article for rediff.com, on the IISc attack, here. Comments welcome.

Pushed into G5

Immediately after the 2001 quake in Kutch, I spent a week working in a small village called Toraniya. A year later, in January 2002, I went back there, and elsewhere in Kutch, to get a sense of how people were coping.
This article for Remembrance Week is from my notes from that second trip.
***
A year later, [...]

Pandi melam

The November-December 2005 issue of Biblio carries my review of Between the Earth and the Sky: The Penguin Book of Forest Writings, edited by Savyasaachi. Here it is. Comments, as always, welcome.
(I quoted the first excerpt below in this space last month, here, while I was wading through the book).
***
On page 48, feeling drained, [...]

Hands so warm

My monthly column for India Together, this one on undertrials, is here. Your comments welcome.

The other end

Last week, Bombay airport Customs officials detained a man who had a “large quantity of currency in his stomach”. The news told us about the tantalizing prospect that “further investigations rest on the contents of his excreta.”
Well, so much for that tantalizing prospect. Today’s Hindustan Times reports on the happenings in this case over the [...]

For what it is

Just got done writing two different articles on the IISc tragedy, and I’m left numbed, though with a splitting headache. Because I’ve been wondering yet once more about what’s possibly the world’s most overused word these days.
There are contenders for that crown — “WMD”, “globalization”, “Bush” come to mind. But the one I’m thinking of [...]

IISc

Thinking of you and your colleagues, Abi.