Ration the potions with notions of nation
Ruckus. Babble. Chaos. Irreverence. Arrogance. Protest. Bullying. Questions. All this and more happens every time the nation starts defining any concept… it could be anything stretching from nationalism to terrorism. All that one never really sees are solutions, answers, a convergence of ideas, and an acceptance of dissent. All that is never there are people...
What if… monarchy returns with a bang
Voltaire wrote: ‘I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.’ I am not sure if he was actually talking about monarchy or something else… but isn’t it funny that even in political parties in a democracy one sees the rats obeying the lion? In...
What if… all smart gadgets were banned
‘What will happen if all smart gadgets were banned?’ I asked Specky, my wife. ‘Hmmm… interesting,’ she began, ‘we’ll navigate correctly without the GPS guiding us through all the wrong routes.’ This made us smile. She then mentioned that listening to the music of nature just might become a reality then… I said, ‘You are...
What if… we ceased to stay amazed
Amazing! This is one word that says all it ever needs to say without needing even an exclamation mark. You see we are living in times when from dawn to dusk everything is amazing to someone or the other. Not that I have any objection to everything being amazing… but I sometimes get this distinct...
Navigating through a poet’s mind
This is Nitin Soni, the curly poet, who has just published his first poetry book ‘The Broken Boat’ allowing me to explore the way his mind sees and perceives life. In times when people are writing novels and short-stories, you have published poetry… There are a lot of people who talk about writing, about art...
Experience the freedom
No, this post is neither about the slogan decibels at JNU nor about the misplaced sense of patriotism by goons. This one is simply an attempt to talk about the way ‘make in India’ is being milked. Does this ring a bell? ‘Make in India’, I guess is all about the policy music used to...
Truly alive
I guess an adventure is when you do something that you have never done… so yes, by this definition even writing a poem for someone who has no idea of metres, syllables, and rhymes is as intense an adventure as is driving the F1 car in an international driving circuit for someone who generally drives...
Between now or never
Between now or never – Review of DANGLE by Sutapa Basu Thrillers, I had written in some earlier post, are not just about guns and grenades, but about the impact of the battles of minds. The mind creates a thriller if it really wants to… and this is what Sutapa Basu has done in...
That’s how stories happen
I tried rubbing the edge of my study table, whispering, ‘Appear, my lovely story. Appear!’ It didn’t. I tried this with the walls in my home, with trees in the park, and once even slyly tried rubbing the end of the shawl of a woman I didn’t know at all. Nothing happened. No story appeared...
You aren’t going to fade away – 5
Malala Yousafzai has been quoted as saying: ‘Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.’ I agree with her because I think it is a pen that has anyway impacted our lives in more than one way. The pen exists as a Noun in the dictionary that...
Conversations with virtual reality
Conversations with what is real and what is unreal has a sibling now… the universe of virtual reality. Even Zuckerberg wrote in March 2014 that the day isn’t far when ‘we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people’. Geoff Mulgan declares that ‘as the...
You aren’t going to fade away – 3
When Douglas McArthur mentioned that ‘old soldiers never die; they just fade away’ he did not really mean they intended to retreat from our memory because he was the one who had also said: ‘We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction’. This is as true now as it probably was in...
