Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Feature: Shailaja Padindala, profiled

Shailaja Padindala, founder of Mustache Under My Nose Ring, speaks on non-binary dressing and her new, dark comedy on queer expression in a heteronormative world. “The beauty of some women lies in their unacknowledged mustache,” Padindala tells me earneslty. Sitting across me at a table in the canteen of the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in…

Book review: Sikkim by Andrew Duff

SIKKIM: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom by Andrew Duff. Random House India Books. 2015 release. Duff tells the sad and sorry tale of this beautiful little mountainous habitat, the name of which ironically enough, translates to `happy home.`It is indeed, the stuff of a political potboiler but alas, a true story. This account begins with…

Book review: The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT by Hilary Mantel, HarperCollins Publisher. In the first of her Tudor trilogy, Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel introduced us to Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith`s son. Through Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and now, The Mirror & the Light, the reader watches Cromwell`s dizzying rise as he becomes Master Secretary, then…

Guest column: The kindness of strangers

The kindness of strangers Sometimes, when times are bad, we are comforted immeasurably by the kindness of strangers…. To begin, a quote from the Dalai Lama. “ When we face some tragic situation, it reveals the deeper human values of compassion. Usually people don’t think about these deeper human values but when they see their…

Book review: The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

The Bookseller`s Tale Shaun Bythell, a Scotsman of slightly curmudgeonly nature and a deep and abiding love of books, buys a bookstore in Wigtown and sets about making it arguably the most popular bookshop on the Scottish isle. In between trips hither and thither to look at book collections and buy as he sees…

Book review: Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively

This is a book less about gardening methods, types of plants and the like, and more about literary characters and their gardens, imagined as well as real. Get out there and dig, weed, prune, plant, when stuck with whatever was being written, advises the author who apparently is very adept at both writing as well…

Guest column: In the end, who will we be?

In the end, who will we be? Even as the old normal returns, will we do a recalibration of our old selves? So, now is a good…

Book review: This Land Is Our Land by Suketu Mehta

Meanwhile, migrants elsewhere….. Suketu Mehta`s THIS LAND IS OUR LAND is the intelligent combination of the personal, where Mehta talks of many members of his clan migrating to the US, and the professional, where he traces the troubled route of people braving some almost insurmountable odds to make a happy place for themselves in a…

Feature: Walking a virtual Camino

Doing a virtual pilgrimage One of the few highlights of this long lockdown period (and I was in lockdown mode from 16 March 2020) was a virtual Camino I went on, for 36 + 3 days, starting early April. The invite came from our Camino leader Amy Gigi Alexander, she who has walked more than…

Book review: How I Became A Tree by Sumana Roy

So enjoyed what I term the Matryoshka Tree book, Sumana Roy`s HOW I BECAME A TREE (Aleph Books). The book, which focuses on tree-love, aims for that intersection between the spot a tree stands in and the spot a human stands in, and reveals the Matryoshka effect as it segues from tree story to tree…