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.
Gaining An Early Sense of the Fragility of Life
When Clare Arni was three years old, she moved with her family from Scotland to Peru. Her earliest memory in the South American country involves an earthquake,
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.
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.
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,
Janhavi Rao’s midlife pivot from Engineering to Medicine is extraordinary on many counts. Her journey can inspire anyone seeking to change their careers, or to embark on any strenuous adult learning project, especially when the odds seem stacked against you.
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,
Inside the House of Chanel at 31, Rue Cambon in Paris.
Inside the shop, where dazzling visions of Chanel-clothed selves are refracted from mirrors and videos played on a screen, the message is clear.
Unsurprisingly, The Plague, a 1947 novel about a mysterious epidemic that pummels a coastal city in Algeria, by the French writer, Albert Camus, has received a burst of new interest during the Covid pandemic.
Early Childhood in Devkali
The village of Devkali in Uttar Pradesh is located in the district of Shahjahanpur. Spanning an area of about 6.5 square kilometres, with a population of about 3035 people,
In On Photography, Susan Sontag observes that every photograph invites the viewer to penetrate its two-dimensional likeness to uncover the three-dimensional riches that gave rise to it. As Sontag puts it, the photograph seems to say,
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).
Neeraj Chopra Exhibits Awe-Inspiring Grit
Given the nation’s recent jubilation at Neeraj Chopra’s phenomenal javelin throw, I thought it might be interesting to resurrect the much-cited study on Grit by Angela Duckworth.
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.
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.
Elizabeth Weil, then a contributor to the New York Times Magazine who had won a slew of awards for her pieces, turned her deft writerly eye to a perilous terrain: her own marriage.
Anshu Gupta: Brought Up With a Social Conscience
Well before he was on his path to forging rural-urban interactions and the kind of straddling across socio-economic classes that the country desperately needs, Anshu Gupta,
The Covid crisis has ushered both voluntary and involuntary changes into our lives: relationships mediated by technology, the blurring of work and domestic tasks inside living spaces, a compressed, never-ending togetherness with roommates or family members,
An Indulgent and Mindful Parent
There would be few Indians, whether they have grown up in India or as part of the globally-dispersed diaspora, who would not have certain lines of his running inside their heads,
Ghachar Ghochar begins in a space that evokes an older city; a Bangalore, that was not yet tugged into the frenetic material spiraling engendered by the IT and outsourcing businesses. But the city outside has already morphed.
From Intellectual to Manual Work
Matthew Crawford was unafraid to chart a path that would seem “absurd” to the status-climbing, educated class. After garnering a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, and later on, a Doctorate in Political Philosophy from the academically-rigorous University of Chicago,
Matthieu Ricard has always fascinated me for embodying the kind of contradictions that we writers strive to imbue our characters with. So who is Ricard? To begin with, a brilliant student who abandoned a promising scientific career after garnering a doctorate in molecular biology in 1972,
As children growing up in Bangalore between the late sixties and mid-eighties, we encountered the Mahabharata and Ramayana in various forms. In tales narrated by parents and aunts, in Amar Chitra Katha comics,
In Through The Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik’s vivid essays about his time in New York, as a parent, he notes that it is impossible to map a city like New York. After all,
Laura Vanderkam studies the one resource that is most precious, most scarce, and rarely granted the attention it deserves, until is one is confronted by a large-scale crisis like the pandemic or by a terminal diagnosis: time.
From The Craftsman: Sennett Expands The Notion of Craftsmanship
Pandora, the Goddess of Invention, was, according to the Greeks, not merely the giver of gifts. Opening Pandora’s jar or box was often considered a jeopardous act,
Just when we thought that the all-rounder, Renaissance-types were no longer faddish, Tom Hanks, who hardly needs an introduction as an actor, director and producer, has cranked out an astonishing collection of short stories. And I use “cranked out” because I deliberately want to evoke the clackety-clacks,
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.
Nandini Murali: Numbed By Her Partner’s Sudden Passing
Nandini Murali needed to travel on work, for two days, from Madurai to Chennai. When she bid her doctor husband farewell, he waved her off with a customary list of to-dos,
After their recent interview with Oprah, Harry and Meghan Markle have created an expected and almost predictable flutter in the global media. The more fascinating question is why squabbles among the Royals should still occupy so much collective bandwidth,
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,
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,
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.
Driven largely by the success of Apple and also by its founder’s layered persona, “design thinking”, has spawned many corporate workshops, process changes and adopters. After all, if Steve Jobs, who was as obsessed with the appearance of things,
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,
I’ve been particularly fascinated by Japanese crime fiction. Partly, this has to do with the setting. After all, Japan always seems to embody certain particularities – the crafted precision of its Haiku poems and ikebana arrangements,
Usually the New Year compels resolutions. But 2021 might spark an urge to dismiss such rituals. And to break free from the persistent thrum of uncertainty that reverberates across banal decisions – Eat out today?
If one could choose the community to which one could belong, by birth, then I’d have chosen to be a Bengali. It’s not the language – which I don’t understand or speak – that fascinates me as much as a certain aura that surrounds the people,
Art as Therapy: de Botton Shines a Torch on Another Impenetrable Terrain
Alain de Botton, who describes himself as a philosopher of “everyday life,” lends his signature approach to themes as varied as Love,
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,
Those who are exhausted by the grim graphs that chart the pandemic’s climb (or retreat), might do well to re-engage with P.G Wodehouse. To watch, with quiet chuckles and the occasional, loud cackle,
It doesn’t take much to inhabit privilege in India. If, as a family, you own a house, a car, and your kids attend a somewhat decent private school, you are already materially distanced from the vast majority who throng our towns and cities.
The Library Book: Susan Orlean Recalls an Idyllic Time inside Libraries
Harry Peak was often characterized by his “very blond” hair. Growing up in Santa Fe, not too far from the giddying dazzle of Hollywood,
Dwelling in Books
Like most readers, I feel like only a part of me lives in the real world. An equal or sometimes larger, almost disembodied self dwells inside pages – some pored over in years past,
Gandhi’s Thrust Towards Compassion
On a recent morning walk with a friend, we were talking about how society obsesses with “success” and the necessary “competitiveness” one should cultivate to achieve it. On the other hand,
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,
The Way Home: Mark Boyle Chooses to Live Without Technology
To relinquish technology in 1845, when Thoreau set out to live in Walden, doesn’t seem nearly as impossible as the feat accomplished by Mark Boyle,
Alok Sinha: Records Memorable Experiences
Alok Sinha was only 30 years old, when he was part of a Tata Motors team that presented a business plan to Ratan Tata, the then Chairman. Tata’s critique spotlighted two key metrices: market share and net profitability.
Gandhi Encounters Raychandbhai During an Emotionally Fraught Period
The contemporary obsession with self-improvement traces back to ancient antecedents, as far back for instance, as an Egyptian genre called the ‘Sebayt’ or ‘teaching’ published around 2800 B.C.
Anshuman Bapna: Forges an Enviable Life-path
In early Feb 2020, who could have imagined a café conversation between Anshuman and me would soon acquire the otherworldly glow of an irretrievable past? At the hip Terra Bites in Koramangala,
Pema Chodron: Abiding With Fear
Few people, if any, can predict the exact contours of the world when we
emerge from the ravages of the Corona virus. But the sudden ceasing of sights
and sounds we were accustomed to – the hubbub at a café,
Somak Ghoshal: Discovering the Riches of English Literature As a Young Adult
The Mint Lounge has always been a favourite weekend read. Especially the book reviews that dissect the profusion of works spawned by Indian authors.
Aditya Sondhi: Fosters A Living Room Theatre Group
On a Saturday night in January, the wind has a biting snap to it. About twenty people, some with stoles wrapped around their necks, others sweater clad,
David Brooks: Embarking on a Personal Quest After a Divorce
In The Second Mountain, David Brooks, acknowledges with a beguiling honesty, that at the age of 52, he felt suddenly unmoored.
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,
Gitanjali Maini: Foraying from HR to the
Art World
Situated inside the heart of Bengaluru, gallery g (www.galleryg.com) seems to freeze time and halt the city’s perpetual busyness. Designed with an elegant sparseness – shafts of light on wooden floors,
David Whyte: An Encounter with a Stranger
David Whyte, a poet who engages with
American corporations to inspire creativity, once had a transformational
encounter with a stranger. Whyte was in his early twenties,
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.
Though Ravi Shankar was born in 1920, when India was still a British
colony, he led a fabulously avant-garde life, combining in his creative persona, elements of the East and West. It’s fascinating to examine fragments from the life of the intensely inventive global icon.
Alberto Manguel: Reading as a Conquest of Space and Time
Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, recalls the
time, as a four-year-old, when he was first able to decipher the signs on a
billboard.
Jayanth Narayanan, Owner of Mani’s Dum Biryani and Co-author of Secret Sauce and Startup your Restaurant, Constantly Reinvents Himself
Mahatma Gandhi dwelt as intensely on the foods he and his followers consumed (or consciously avoided) as on larger political or spiritual themes.
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.
In the concluding passage of his Acknowledgements, Adam Grant, Wharton Professor and author of Originals, thanks his three children for compelling him to unlearn many of the lessons that adults take for granted.
Henry David Thoreau: The Possession of an Unusual Sensibility
At an early age, Henry David Thoreau realised he was going to be different from other members of his family. There was inside him a sense of the simultaneity of time,
Tridip Suhrud: Injecting Movement Into His Life
With disarming modesty, Tridip Suhrud describes himself in four pithy words as a “scholar of modern Gujarat.” While he has been deeply engaged in scholarly practices,
Mekin Maheshwari: Quitting A High-Status Position to Pursue Meaning
On the Udhyam website, Karthik’s toothy smile radiates into the camera. A migrant from Tamil Nadu, whose wife and two kids reside in the ramshackle Ejipura slum,
Educated by Tara Westover
The year 2018 witnessed the release of two memoirs that corralled global readers into attentiveness. The first one was anticipated: Michelle Obama’s Becoming. The second book streaked into distracted lives like a lightning bolt,
It can be disconcerting to attempt changes at midlife even under the watchful scrutiny of just friends and family. After all, most of us would prefer some semblance of privacy and anonymity while fumbling into new terrains,
It was at Koramangala, that the two Bansal partners started the iconic Flipkart. Since then, known variously as the “Bandra of Bengaluru” or the startup hub, the locality has been reshaped by its chic pubs,
On the 150th birth anniversary of the Mahatma, I thought it fitting to learn about the nation’s founder, beyond the drab and mostly forgotten facts from uninspiring history textbooks. Coincidentally, towards the end of 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,
The movie, Bohemian Rhapsody, was recently drawing crowds at theatres across the globe. The UK band, Queen, received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 Grammys. The group, fronted by the confounding,
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.
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.
Brinda S. Narayan
