If your temple or your mosque or your church was attacked by terrorists, your family was hurt by an act of hate, would you pick up a gun to avenge yourself? Or atleast carry a burden of hate against THEM forever? What if we killed a perceived enemy and realised, a gun shot or a […]
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Month: January 2015
The Long Road Home
The only part that can be appropriately labelled as ‘excruciating’ in a 3.5 week vacation home (India), is perhaps the 20+ hours spent cooped up in an air-plane or counting crows during layovers. An 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, wandering aimlessly through the occluded corridors of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport before boarding the next […]
Bhopal: Exploring the Enchanting Ruins-2
A pea-shaped face peeked from behind a set of rusted iron doors at the Taj Mahal palace as I firmly rapped the heavy door-knocker against its metal backrest. “I wish to look around”, I said determinedly in response to the quizzical expression that stared back at me. The possessor of the tiny, question-marked face – Abhinav, a […]
Bhopal: Exploring The Enchanting Ruins-1
The city of Bhopal is like a mysterious old bard. In a tattered gunny bag swung over one of his atrophied shoulders, he hides a treasure trove of rare gems plucked right out of history books. It takes effusive flattery, gentle persuasion and an unrelenting perseverance to get him to allow a peek into his […]
Haku Shah:The Man Who Lives Gandhi
The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), housed in the stately Manikyavelu Mansion on Palace Road distils the restful stillness of another time when unstructured life was not a luxury. To every visitor who walks in, the NGMA offers a communion with old trees, a reflection in the mirror pool, sunshine dappled silence and it […]
Milind Nayak: Starting Afresh
In June last year, artist Milind Nayak was admitted to a hospital and till some time ago was going through dialysis.The new year he thought was a good time to leave behind the pain and start afresh. He then set about sifting through the last 15 years of his artistic and personal journey and chose 122 works that […]
Kamala Das: The Inviolable ‘I’
“The last breath/Exhaled/Is the last poem/Released. Then/The curtain falls…” But before the curtain fell, Kamala Das or Kamala Surayya or Madhavikutty exhausted many lives, lived free and in confinement..by choice and wrote compulsively and passionately till the desire to live and write both burnt itself out. And the clamorous din following her last breath that sifted her life and poetry? It […]
All Shades Of White
Dilip Kumar was known as the Man in White, as he always wore perfectly crisp whites laundered by a trusted man who has been with his family for decades.Raj Kapoor’s passion for the colour white was legendary. The story goes that as an impressionable teenager, he saw the wife of Balraj Sahni dressed in a […]
A New Age Love Letter
To my dear henpecked husband, No I don’t intend to insult you, unlike our society ever ready with many tags that aim to degrade you, to question your testosterone levels and to reinforce its archaic, misogynistic beliefs on you so as to snuff out the slightest glimmer of hope for change. To me the word […]
The Painted Word
In his first book, The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed spun a stunning story, thinly veiled as fiction, of the hapless Valley and its hapless residents. Here, he tells us a tender love story. The serious young man with fine features and a talent for papier mache art, naqashi, is Faiz, a Sunni. The girl is the […]
The Golden Warmth Of Lohri
My memories of celebrating Lohri in Patiala are a bit hazy. But yes, winter was the season when beeji, my grandmother would painstakingly chop sarson ka saag and then cook it in a haandi on a mud angeethi. The prepared saag always topped with a dollop of homemade butter never ever saw the inside of […]
Olaf Van Cleef: A Legacy Of Beauty
Towards the end of the 19th century, Estelle Arpels, the daughter of a dealer in precious stones met Alfred Van Cleef, the son of a stone-cutter and what followed was a great love story and a jewellery design legacy unlike any other. Van Cleef & Arpels is today not just a French brand with a global recall […]