I remember the morning after Mohammed Rafi’s death in 1980. It was my turn to read the news in the school assembly and I remember preparing instead a small tribute to the singer and ending with the lines, “Jab Kabhi Bhi Sunoge Geet Mere, Sang Sang Tum Bhi Gungunaoge.” I realised the meaning of these words sometime in […]
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Month: July 2011
The Bubble Gum Of Memories
Ofcourse, you remember The Wonder Years, the television series (1988-1993) that gently nudged us back into the 60s, to the years of the first moon landing, the Kennedy saga, the Vietnam war filtered through the adolescence of Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage). You remember because the series captured not just for America but for all of us the days of our innocence. This longing for the […]
Recipes For The Soul
I said I was going to do it before the season was over… so here I am, bearing the gift of my mother’s Green Mango Rice recipe. The mango carts are now covered with Neelams (pretty and sweet, yet harbouring those black beetles) that mark the end, so I just about made it. Amma’s […]
A Romance With Glass
It was love at first sight. A instant romance. There they were; suspended from a high ceiling, covering the atrium with a riot of colour. The incredibly alive forms and their inner light instantly took me in. I couldn’t stop glancing back to take one more eye full as I walked to the suite ahead to meet my doctor, […]
Molu And Tushka-Part 4
Uma Iyer has dreamt of Molu, a mischievous six-year-old for almost a decade now. She shares with the young readers of Unboxed Writers, ‘Meet Molu,’ a yet to be published first book of hopefully what would turn out to be a Molu and Tushka series. Agni, or ‘Molu’ as she is commonly referred to, is a six-year-old girl […]
Stories from Kashmir: The Laughing Child
Simi Chachi made the best lotus root saag, hakh, and rajmah in Srinagar. Her kahwa was redolent with cardamom and rich with thin almond slivers. She was popular all over Kashmir – not just for her saag or kahwa. she was most famous for her unique and rare hand-woven carpets. She weaved the most exquisite […]
Everyday..
Everyday, I die a little – for I haven’t told you everything Everyday, I cry a little – for the beauty of you breaks me Everyday, I battle with demons that haunt my unsleeping spaces And pray to unseen gods who pull the strings that make us dance Or lose the chance to say or […]
Tom Cowan: Moment Of Truth
Acclaimed cinematographer and film maker Thomas Michael Cowan is a man of truth. Of that moment when stiff pretences and masks are peeled off and the real person emerges. So he pays a sudden compliment. Caught off-guard, I react and he amusedly observes, “See? I get a smile!” It is a game he plays often with the film narratives he directs. […]
Hinglish! Isn’t it?
“Hello, it’s Diana this side.” This side of WHAT you may ask? “This side of the phone!” When my office boy decided to drive me insane with his efficient inefficiency, one of his tactics was to wait until I had finished giving him instructions at his desk and had walked into my own […]
Parent Hub: The Virtue called Patience
How does your morning start? Well mine goes something like this – chop, chop, chop, grind, grind, grind. I find myself racing with time to get to the finish line. To pack more things than time can do for me. And little do I realize that my son has been watching me in all my […]
A Random Number Called 27
It’s easy to be superstitious. It provides us with the comfortable closure that we often look for. It’s easy to ascribe grandiose significance to numbers and dates that would otherwise only be notches in the general randomness of the universe’s being. In chemistry, they call that natural sense of randomness; Entropy. And Entropy makes hard […]
Art Beat: Let Them Play
Kanchi, Chicklet, Son Pari, Parachute, Pitcher, Gol Chakker, Chunniwala, Mickey Mouse…wondering why we are rambling about these unrelated words? Well, these are just a few names out of the 40 odd games that children of Khirkee village – a semi-urban area of South Delhi – have invented as part of outdoor playing. Nothing unique about this, […]