Jaali in Mughal architecture – poetry in stone
Life is a poetic super-imposition of patterns and as Chuck Palahniuk puts it, ‘there are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns’. The sonnet of jaalis, as I choose to put it, is all too obvious in the known and relatively unknown architectural...
Rip Van Winkle calls himself Z1Pro
‘Rip Van Winkle in 2019?’ exclaimed a friend, ‘but isn’t he a character in a story published in America in 1819?’ Yes, we all know how Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains only to wake up two decades later. The American Revolution was over by then and he is obviously unfamiliar with...
Social media influencers and conservation
Conservation and fundoo tourists do not really go together. This is because the forests and the wildlife there, including the tiger, can do without their habitat getting overwhelmed by ecstatic shouts, irreverent whistles, and camera flashes that are anyway not doing much except creating layers of disgust in the heart of nature. Forests are places...
Lets Talk Tigers
‘We are seeds as well as parasites to the earth. We can either give or take, depending on our perception of growth,’ wrote Zephyr McIntyre and whenever we talk of the environment, the eco-system, wildlife, conservation, or even tigers, what matters more than anything else is perception. I have always believed that starting from the...
Life is cool in Delhi, Mr Modi
Newspaper reports live in their own world of make-belief but once in a while they tend to hit upon some conclusion that stays steady from one decade to another, from one generation to the other… and one such conclusion that most renowned editors have never divorced is that the top leadership in the country has...
The Pokhran Explosions
Pokhran 1998 wasn’t just about a series of underground nuclear explosions to impress the world or to frighten and quieten our neighbours, but to work as a viable deterrent to outside powers as in the past 2500 years it has invariably been foreign invaders in the sub-continent not once but many times. What happened 20...
Yoga, fragrances, and relationships
Yoga is more than the relationship between businesses and politics though our news agencies would deny this vehemently. I insist that yoga, relationships, and fragrances go together. By the way, when they are moving ahead as one, they last longer than any Eau de Parfum or Eau de Toilette if I may add. No limits...
The day BoVo impressed my wife
It was evening and almost time to go to the cinema to watch Padmavat. Specky, my wife, asked, ‘Is there any way we can listen to some sort of a synopsis of this movie? I mean, we hardly have enough time to sit and read reviews.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘Google on the mobile...
The Gionee strategy
During the launch of Gionee M7 Power, David Chang, Global Sales Director, Gionee India mentioned that their growth as a brand had three primary features: Ensuring patronage from new users Attracting those who yearned for smarter devices Adding on to superior quality and seamless experience Sitting there, I thought this was a fair strategy as...
The advance of inkjets into the future
No, inkjets don’t have AI yet, nor are they a threat to humanity. But if you thought they were a spent force, you are far from the truth. They have just got better and are poised to make life easier for students as well as professionals. I remember I had ditched my inkjet for a...
Here is something only YOU can create
If you were asked to choose between freedom and balance, I’m sure most will go for the former. Freedom is such an enticing word. It makes you feel you can write just about anything on any of the social media platforms, say anything to your elders, make any excuse to skip or shirk work, copy...
What happens when you drop your smartphone?
Dropping a smartphone can mean more than having to go out and buy a new device. Besides increasing the worry lines on the brows of a user, it is incidents like this that made the innovators of technology sit up and get to work. So now we have smartphones that claim to be sturdier, slimmer,...
