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Red Fort revisited: In the footsteps of the last emperor
Heritage plays a temporal trick – it can make history feel within reach. I walked up the pathway leading to Lahori Gate, entrance to Red Fort, where friends waited. On my right was the eyesore barbican...
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Bahraich, international border
There is not much difference when you look at Bahraich from half a kilometre in the sky and from street level. It is a tumbleweed cluster of shanty dwellings, lean-to shops, road-facing sculleries,...
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Good food diaries – second day, third helping
It’s like your first dinner with a date – you take a while to gather gusto. Except for the food on the way you know little else. You look around and take in the décor with intensity, inspect the...
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Pushkar – Mela in the air
They are all Meeras Fairground Throbbing notes twanged out from a three-string kamaicha. Wood-ringed fingers tapped on a ghara. A sadhu with the longest dreadlocks sat like the sachem he was...
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Hitch hike
There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying. Why don’t you dance?, Raymond Carver. For most part of the wedding ceremony, the bride was missing from the...
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Selfie culture to the rescue
The last time I came to Jharkhand was when ‘selfie’ was, forget the culture it is today, nowhere in the lexicon-horizon even. It was seven years ago to make a film for a livelihood program funded by...
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Boondock saints
A tribal woman, heavily pregnant, leaned against the iron gate sliding it open and walked into the health centre. Her gait was strained as she had broken water. Too weak to press the electric bell she...
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Munnar
From the balcony It must have been the same view that held the Muthuvan gaze two centuries ago. The tree line, the undulating hills and the Western Ghats segued into the argent skies through a thick...
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Skateboard to school
All of a sudden the father of the two guys we were dealing with stood up, left the hall and came back with a rifle in his hands. Ulrike Reinhard, a soi-disant futurist and social entrepreneur, was...
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Like the President
Toll plazas judder me. I have never passed through any without my mind wrought, eyes blazing, head giddy and generally feeling violated. True, there have been happy occasions where I gave a lift to an...
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Finding Charlie
Hanging welter covered peeling plaster. The veneer on the butt of an air rifle reflected light, hockey trophies and team memorabilia; a discoloured snood probably worn by Charlie’s wife on their...
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Sunrise in Almora
Traveling together is a benchmark of compatibility. I know at least five dating couples who decided to move in together as they found they were still pining for each other at the end of each trip....
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A feeling called Fort Kochi
We sat atop a red oxide stairway that led from the reading hall to the pool area with its mauve sun deck chairs. Rain fell at soft angles on the water surface creating little pimply ripples like...
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Talking buffaloes and spying goats
A flurry of ringing at the door. Nobody has been in such a hurry to feed me ever since I left home. It was Vishnu. A baldpate Vishnu. And I was ready to fist a rando. I didn’t know what to ask first:...
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A flurry of inactivity: Pondicherry
The sea is shimmery, it must be Pondicherry If languor is your hearth then Pondicherry is home. Clocks in this union territory are known to miss a few ticks now and then and make different times of the...
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Magic tricks: House hunting hacks
Like most things statutory the question too didn’t accomplish much. Aap kya karte ho? What do you do? Asked the agent whom I found on a real estate portal. Even if you say you undertake contract...
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Wading the piracy high sea
Sometimes a bit sticky but eventually rewarding, I have this habit of entering strange places through less-used accesses. Looking around for one in Nehru Place, away from the hawker-choked pathways, I...
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The bawdy shop
The buzz you feel about a place is a collective one – it comes from within the heads of those around. Including your own. The shop had buzz. Talking buzz, loitering buzz, peeing buzz, wide-eyed, quiet,...
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Muttmoiselle
Bitch is a life. Posthumous glory is easy – you don’t really work on it. It is something like Hugh Hefner’s last marriage to Playboy Playmate Crystal Harris, 26, when he was 86 – the world knows you...
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Small bubble, big trouble
Gushing waters froth stories. When set amidst lush landscapes, the viridian violence can give rise to some very haunting ones. Sarojini Omanakuttan remembers a few with moist eyes, though not exactly a...
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