All good words start with F
Don’t look shaken and shocked and mutter, ‘What has happened to this good man? He was never like this. He talks as if we don’t know the good words that start with F. Hmphf!’ You’re wrong. I never asked you to connect F with sentiments that the current government is jogging around in circles to...
Bright, beautiful, valuable, and always in style
Just take a short walk in and around psyches and you’ll discover that even simplicity gets a better acceptance if it adopts a unique style. However, there is always a certain price to be paid when people want to be perceived as ‘bright, beautiful, valuable, and always in style’. This is one tag that cannot...
Your decisions are in your hands
Yes, your decisions are quite literally in your hands in these times when the smartphone and smart apps are poised to drown the past dominance of gadgets like the laptops and desktops. I personally feel rather joyous to find someone stand right there in the middle of a thousand people, swipe out his smartphone, and...
STYLESELECT
You’re obviously intrigued by the title. I’ll let you know the secret of the title but only later on in this article. What matters more is to know how to walk in the world of image mysteries or walk out of a world of image drudgery. ‘How to walk in or walk out?’ asked Specky,...
Get ill and know who you are
It is possible that Aristotle and Plato have mentioned this in their discourses but I admit I haven’t read both these gentlemen. All I know is that if you want to see life in all its transparency, you just need to get sick. If you notice that your gums bleed when you brush or floss,...
The Pink City
If you open the window of your hotel room and do not get an overwhelming sense of walls or even avenues painted in pink, you’re probably not in Jaipur. This is one city that is meticulously divided into ‘six sectors by broad streets 34 m (111 ft) wide. The urban quarters are further divided by...
The alphabet on waves
When I told a friend that I know of a school on a boat in Varanasi, he laughed and replied, ‘Well, I know of teachers who hold classes under trees in the open air.’ Not that my friend was wrong, but the impression I got was that we tend to think literacy as some kind...
Best isn’t necessarily pricey
Well, let me admit here that I’ve been to a lot of countries and obviously I have nearly always stayed in hotels. So from Paris to Seoul, from Amsterdam to Bangkok, from London to Sydney, or from Barcelona to Kuala Lumpur… I’ve always sought the best hotel deal. And believe me the right research always...
Keeping fiscal vents open
I remember when my wife and I were looking for a house to rent in the late eighties, the only parameter we were firm about was a reasonable circulation of fresh air and lots of sunshine. The size of the house did not matter, nor did the number of stairs we might need to climb....
The sorcery of more
There surely is some mumbo-jumbo working in favour of the word ‘more’. The buyer of goods needs more discount, the reader of a newspaper needs more pages, the viewer of television needs more masala, the politician needs more scope to be safe… and so I’m not surprised to hear people in a store selling smartphones,...
Stop flirting and get back to cricket
The favourite refrain of the purists inside and outside the game has been: ‘Stop flirting and get back to cricket!’ Believe me, the refrain hasn’t always been particularly directed towards the introduction of technology… as, from the ‘Sharmila’ days of Pataudi to the ‘Anushka’ days of Virat, the refrain has also stepped out of the...
The lost traveller
There is hardly any romance in a wild goose chase in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t like to land in a strange city after dark and then go running from one place to another to find the right place to spend the night in. The traveller in me is generally lost when it...
