HOLI goes way beyond the legends linked to it
If legends make a festival interesting, it is a contemporary interpretation of festivities that makes it so hard to forget! Holi is one festival that goes way beyond the legends linked to it and has formed its own identity. I remember when I was in school I was mortally afraid of colours and so during...
HOLI has more than one legend linked to it
Ask anyone from India about Holi and the answer will be, ‘Colours. More colours. Wet colours. Dry colours.’ There will be the other elements that form the festival revealing slowly only later, after the enthusiastic orgasmic intonation of colours is over and done with. So yes, there is more to Holi than just colours. There...
The Da Vinci of Death
There is variation, colour, and uniqueness in death that indoor pollution brings with it. Things that you have fallen in love with and think you cannot live without can sometimes enter your life to take it… and this isn’t a hyperbole. Look at perfumes, hair sprays, furniture polish, glues, air fresheners, moth repellents, wood preservatives...
The A to Zoo of Budget 2015
One of the most popular statements in TV debates after the announcement of the budget meandered through visits to the zoo and museums becoming more attractive. Let me begin with the pre-budget zoo first. On the social media we must indeed be appearing like a zoo with exotic voices wanting a 200% tax on karela...
Imagination is Dangerous and Combustible
‘That’s incorrect,’ said an editor and I had to remind him of the reason why David Davidar had to be fired in 2010. In every relationship there will be two people imagining different outcomes and it is the friction between two wonderfully abstract thoughts that invariably results in a conflagration that tickles reporters and lay...
Flog the micro-blogger
Yeah! The easiest thing to do on the social media and even the offline world is to flog the micro-blogger. It is so easy to say, ‘These 140 character creators are good for nothing dolts.’ People who tweet know that there is more truth carried in their precision than even a 1000 word edit in...
Where shadows are swallowed by the sky
Imagine a black & white world where each shadow struts like it is the only shadow in the world and refuses to be one with any other. There is a great shadow animosity reigning all over. Then there is another world where the sky is dark enough to make the shadows disappear into each other...
Come over here and taste me
Anthologies are like our own Goa beaches with scantily clad tourists walking lazily across your vision, the sudden delight of a shore fisherman having caught a reasonably large fish, gulls swooping in for its quota of sea food, chatter, pitter-patter, and the sun forcing itself in even through the thatched roof of the shack you’re...
The internet of things
We are at the threshold of a world where ‘the emergence of countless objects, animals and even people with uniquely identifiable, embedded devices wirelessly connected to the internet’ is turning the corner. No, this isn’t as fearsome as some sci-fi writers have imagined it all to be. This real fiction shows no signs of accelerating...
Push harder. Pull harder. Churn richness.
There is this great human manthan going on all around all the time. And I don’t mean the feeling one gets when walking in the crowded corridors of CP in Delhi… nor do I necessarily mean the sort of pushes and pulls during election time in India. We know that business isn’t the only world...
The creativity of intolerance
Intolerance is no longer a bumbling oaf or a brainless goon. Yet it continues to be both an oaf and a goon, although it now goes about calling itself creative. Well, there is freedom of speech in our country, and so we see these oafish goons adopting the newest tricks in the closet of vandalism...
The truth serum: Review of ‘A hundred lives for you’
If you’ve ever played that game of plucking out petals from a flower while saying ‘She loves me’ and ‘She loves me not’, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the first few pages of this book made me say ‘I’ll read it’ and ‘I’ll read it not’… and yet, I read on....
