On fits and misses
A fit is far better than fighting to fit because the latter is nothing better than a tight fit that isn’t a fit at all and is simply a miss. It is only in the fitness of things that I must tell you about my fits with fit and because fitting in is what dominates...
FARE. FEAR. REAF. FERA.
Let us play a game. Take a few random alphabets and rearrange them into a word that makes sense… then make another one… and another one… I generally find that anagrams make me less fearful of even the most fearsome words. I chose A-E-F-R and one of the words that I made, was FEAR. Now...
Boiled eggs and other tales
Do I remember nursery rhymes from my past? Of course I do. I remember them all… and I also remember all the other tales that I link them up with. I remember the time we had the story of the fox that couldn’t reach up to the grapes and walked away calling them ‘sour grapes’....
Pipi
Fathers, mothers and grandparents generally qualify as the most popular role-models. Husbands and wives too can be sitting in this chair for each other but after all, they are never doing anything without each other’s nudges, are they? So because everything done by spouses has a sort of equal participation, there never is that special...
Outrage
The year was 1985 and I had been married for a few months. We had gone to Jhansi, my hometown and decided to spend a day in Khajuraho. We boarded the early morning bus from the railway station. I didn’t know that it would be this bus journey that I would remember and not the...
The reluctant role-model: Video Blog
I’m no role model It isn’t easy to write on a person who you are living with… or call him or her your role-model. This is because you are then stepping on the intimacy patterns of that relationship. But I finally did decide to communicate through a short video. The text that you see below,...
It’s time to talk of a speck of time
I’ve always thought of time as something that pulsates with life… an entity that you can, if you really wish to, touch, poke, and tickle… the funny thing is that time camouflages itself as a left-brained creature every time I dive into the abstraction surrounding reality. This happened again a few nights back when I...
Names never die
‘Prem,’ he said, by way of introducing himself. I smiled. It isn’t every day that you bump into a 20-something who has a name that makes you smile first and then look at the person. This Prem, by the way, is an ace mountaineer, has climbed the Mount Everest and a number of other peaks...
My heart is all my own
Specky asked me, ‘How far would you go to get closer to someone you love?’ I looked at her with smiling eyes and replied, ‘As close as my truth would allow me to.’ I explained to her later that I wouldn’t ever promise to get stars or the moon for her and anyway, even without...
Passion, Pain, and Possibility
The year was 1994. Specky, my wife, came in and said, ‘I’ve won the scholarship.’ That’s it. Nothing more. But I didn’t need any more information. I knew exactly what she meant. She had just been awarded the Commonwealth Scholarship to go and get her DPhil from the UK. So this is how I got...
There is a child in me
There is a child in me. Yes, this is true… even literally, because after all it is the sperm and an ova that finally come together to create a new life. This is what I told Specky when I asked her what she thought she would want to gift a child. ‘A child?’ she asked,...
Doing what is right
I am 5 feet and 4 inches tall. Specky is 4 feet and 11 inches tall. My son Pushkin is 5 feet and 7 inches tall. My son is much stronger than I am and loves rowing and kayaking. My son is fond of rowing in the Thames. My son plays games like basketball. My...
