Why India’s Young Women Still Seek Shah Rukh

Thursday, May 5, 2022

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 

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Reliving the Pleasures and Perils of Offices

Thursday, April 28, 2022

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,

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From The Corner Office to Remaking Interior Spaces

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

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.

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Why Nandan Nilekani is Not on WhatsApp

Monday, March 28, 2022

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.

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Lessons From An Inspiring Founder

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

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,

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A Novelist and Podcaster Gleans Lessons From Failures

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

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,

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The Makings of a Musical Writer

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

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,

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Life Lessons From the Ever-buoyant and Ageless Shobhaa De

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

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.

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A Riveting Narrative About Hyper Education in the U.S.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

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.

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A Glimpse into the Travails of Modern Romance

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

If you’re curious about the culture of “romance” among millennials in London, Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts might offer some unnerving insights. Her protagonist, Nina George Dean, is a thirty-two year old on the hunt for a fairytale ending to her singledom.

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Re-reading a Gripping Thriller Set Inside a Research Laboratory

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

During the pandemic, I have taken not just to reading more intensely, but also to re-reading. After all, revisiting books that you remember for the pleasure they evoked, but whose exact contents have frayed like the super-soft pajamas you slip into despite family put downs,

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Harnessing Dreams to Boost Creativity

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Occasionally The Scientific American Mind magazine publishes riveting issues that centre around specific themes. I happened to read one at a friend’s place that was centred around the Science of Creativity (March 2017).

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Making A Case for Slow Reading

Thursday, August 5, 2021

I grew up, like many middle to upper-income children in our generation, in a very bookish household. Given how television had forayed into our lives only when we were in high school, reading was an activity that was pursued without the kind of self-consciousness and exoticism that is attached to pretty much anything these days.

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Journeying Through The History of Hunger

Thursday, July 29, 2021

It’s virtually impossible to live in a country like India and not dwell on hunger. For many millions, far more than we would like to acknowledge, the preposition on would hardly capture their experience.

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Lessons from the Self: Flaunting my Silvers – Part 1

Friday, February 5, 2021

I’m 53. Strange that such a straightforward fact, the only data point perhaps, over which I can claim to have some certainty, should feel, in the contemporary era like a guilt-ridden admission. As if one ought to be defensive for having inhabited the planet for five whole decades,

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Lessons from a Memoir: Sam Miller Explores Fatherhood, Friendship and Love

Thursday, January 28, 2021

While motherhood has often been the subject of social, psychological and cultural studies, fatherhood has received relatively scanter attention. Such diminution of the paternal role affects not only fathers, but also mothers, who are then assumed to be primary caregivers or at least expected to play a more central parenting function.

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Lessons in Leadership From Gandhi’s Life Inside Prisons

Sunday, November 17, 2019

In the historian Ramachandra Guha’s extraordinarily-researched, brilliant chronicle of Gandhi’s life, one gets a fascinating glimpse of his life inside prisons. After all, the nation’s leader often courted arrest for willfully defying unjust laws. For a man who was renowned for being frenetically active,

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Living in Gated Spaces: My Impetus for Writing No Trespassing

Thursday, October 3, 2019

I’ve lived in gated spaces for many years. Mostly inside apartment complexes, and more recently, inside a project with townhomes and villas. While none have been as elite or as exclusive as Fantasia, the fictional setting in No Trespassing has echoes of the places I’ve inhabited.

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Gleaning Lessons in Stillness from A Famed Travel Writer

Saturday, July 13, 2019

An Unusual Encounter at A Zen Monastery

Many years ago, Pico Iyer, who resides in Nara, Japan, had travelled to the San Gabriel Mountains in California. Ragged peaks loomed into view when he turned off spiraling freeways that spun in and around Los Angeles.

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When an MIT Philosophy Professor Has a Midlife Crisis

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

In the 1999 film, American Beauty, the protagonist Lester Burnham embarks on rather stereotypical responses to what one might term his midlife ennui. He trades his unexciting Toyota Camry for a zippier 1970 Pontiac Firebird,

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Creating from the Heart: 13th Century Sufi Poet, Rumi

Friday, November 16, 2018

Emotions and Creativity

Creativity, to begin with a cliché, is often considered an exercise in ‘thinking outside the box.’ The phrase, however hackneyed or tired-sounding, does urge one to shatter boundaries, a necessary step to usher newness or innovation in any sphere.

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The Story Behind Bangalore Calling

Saturday, October 13, 2018

As a cool twelve-year-old, I would have been the last to admit my father had a vernacular accent. Like most children of a generation born at the cusp of India’s independence, he had studied in a regional language (Tamil medium) school.

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