When I started hearing a buzz about Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh from reader friends, I ordered my copy but allowed it to inhabit the clumsily stacked pile of “To-be-Read.” As an unabashed practitioner of
It’s been a while since I have formally inhabited an office. Though there are times, as a writer, when one constructs a make-do office, by heading out to a café or a library, to escape the ennui or annoyances of home: the doorbell,
Ganesh Nair, also known as Rajesh among close circles, accomplished a feat that many midlifers might contemplate but are hesitant to pull off: vaulting from a reputed senior leadership position into the choppy terrain of a novitiate in a completely unrelated field.
Let’s start with a scene that might be familiar to many parents. Your teenage son returns after a decisive exam. His performance on this might determine the course of his future. You hear him stomp into the dining room.
An Urban Anthropologist Dwells Among Taxi Drivers
Tarini Bedi, author of Mumbai Taximen, starts out, as many of us do when traveling through Mumbai, feeling carsick inside a kaalipeeli.
I can’t sing. I can’t carry a tune, not even of a nursery rhyme or of any other ditty. For those of us who speak quite easily, it’s rather astonishing that the brain/body circuits that produce music are aggravatingly absent.
Psst, folks, here’s the lowdown: the brainiest and most reflective minds are not sniffing the stuff. Some, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, might even be involved in cooking the meth, but they’re barricading their own smarts and wits from Instagram likes or LinkedIn notifications.
Most of us struggle to find an ikigai – the Japanese term for work that melds passion and skills with what the world needs and more critically, is willing to pay for. Raja Ganapathy belongs to the fortunate minority who can claim to have lived a passionate life,
Gandhi, himself, might balk at being called a “brand.” After all, the leader was very explicit about embodying the kind of life that rose above the allure and corruptions of commerce. Despite belonging to the bania community,
In Get Rich or Lie Trying, the author Symeon Brown dwells on the manner in which the “influencer” economy is goading many young adults (and perhaps older ones too) to resort to any means to grow their followers.
Like many others who are physically distanced from the war, I have been wrestling with my own scant knowledge about Ukraine. And belonging to a cohort that prefers to glean information from old-fashioned newspapers, books and experts,
In certain literary circles, it’s cool to breathlessly declare: “I love Murakami.” What you really mean, as a reader, is that you love the Japanese author’s surreal, dark, sort-of noir novels. Maybe you’ve read just one,
I always knew my own mother-in-law was uncommon. Uncommonly progressive, tolerant and kind; a gentle, mindful presence who stayed remarkably non-judgmental during the humdrum bickering that most couples engage in. So reading The Mother-In-Law by Veena Venugopal,
Sudhir Kakar has penned works that travel through the specific contours of the Indian psyche, burrowing not only into academic sources and formal accounts, but also into the country’s myths, folktales, songs and superstitions. Kakar,
I remember, as a school child in India, contending with ‘keds’ – shoes fashioned from thin white canvas with rubbery green soles – often pockmarked with holes from stubbing against stones or thorns. While we scampered around as best we could in these,
Elizabeth Day was divorced by 36. Moreover, she ‘failed’ to have the children she once wanted. She failed a driving test. She’s had a litany of failures – big and small, significant and trivial – that most of us are likely to have racked up,
The Fat. So? podcast starts with a cheery dare, as if inviting bullies and the Body-size Police, to arrest or punish the feisty voices that declare: “I’m fat and I love getting compliments about the way I look.
As a writer, I have often dipped into the works of Amit Chaudhuri, as a masterclass in craft. His novels, stories and essays shimmer with images, the sort that Gustave Flaubert managed to evoke in Madame Bovary: with words that are supple,
I don’t remember when I first read a story by Alice Munro. I don’t remember which year it was, or even where I was, while reading it – at our apartment in Domlur, inside the British Council Library,
Given that, every morning, I confront the silvered-streaked intimations of mortality sprouting from my head, I am increasingly curious about people who seem to embody positive aging. Folks, who despite their advancing years, are as high-spirited and sprightly as the youngest generations.
Rethinking Growth for Its Own Sake
Do we really need more evidence than the discernible changes in weather patterns, the wildfires, the untimely rains, heatwaves and floods to realize that climate change is upon us?
Paul Fernandes is the kind of person who sees riches everywhere: in dry, crackling leaves, in shrunken seeds, or in any other kind of wilted tree dropping that most of us would sweep aside. On one of the walls in his aPaulogy Gallery on Pottery Road (https://apaulogy.com/),
The makeup of Indian millennials – their belief systems, their aspirations and anxieties – should, as Vivan Marwaha observes in What Millennials Want, matter not just to Indian watchers and policy makers, but also to global decision makers.
A Bohemian Childhood
Anjali Patel Mehta, the founder of Verandah, a resort and lounge wear brand, did not envisage her future in fashion.
After all, she was climbing the rungs in Investment Banking,
Though I have spent most of the last three decades of my adult life in Bengaluru, India, I have been part-enthralled and part-appalled by the well-known storming of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by Indian American contestants.
A Childhood Inside Theatres
Shernaz Patel grew up inside the stir of auditoriums, imbibing the rhythms and murmurs of a workplace fitted out with lights and satiny curtains. Her parents, Ruby and Burjor Patel,
Arvind Saraf: Journeys from Surat to IIT, Kanpur
The probability of meeting someone like Arvind Saraf is staggeringly low. To give you an idea of how rarefied such encounters are, let me linger momentarily on the statistics.
Alan Rosling Becomes a Founder Before Embarking on His Book
In the White Mughals, the writer William Dalrymple depicts the rather tempestuous love affair between a British dignitary and a Mughal noblewoman.
During the pandemic, many of us have been compelled to alter our exercise routines. Earlier, I used to swim and walk. In the last few months, I’ve been forced, like many others, to just walk.
One of the offshoots of months of relative confinement has been the discovery, for me at least, of new forms of entertainment. Besides Web Series, it has been diverting to stumble on riveting podcasts, especially those that imbue the audio tales with a gritty,
Often it takes an outsider’s captivation to shine a distinct light on a phenomenon that is unfolding around us in a seemingly slow and hence almost unnoticeable manner. Michiel Baas, an urban anthropologist who is currently engaged with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
When driving out of Mumbai’s international airport, many upper-income Indians and foreign visitors may prefer to avert their gaze and look elsewhere. Anywhere else but at the sight that greets them at the Annawadi slum,
For a particular writing project, I needed to understand how small towns in India were getting transformed by the forces of late modernity and conspicuous materialism. While Bollywood was both plying and shattering conventional notions in movies like Bareilly ki Barfi and Masaan,
Jyotsna (Jo) Pattabhiraman: Develops Resilience to Sudden Changes
The mythical “Fountain of Youth” has often served as the object of quest stories. After all, can any treasure chest be more appealing to mortal beings than everlasting youth and the longest-possible,
Brinda S. Narayan
