Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Feature: Still in Seoul

Happily drowning in the hallyu Where I fess up about coming late in the day to Kdramas but becoming an addicted consumer soon enough. Maybe I need to check myself into a de-addiction clinic, like now. A Kdrama de-addiction clinic. The hallyu wave crept up on me so slowly, so stealthily, I didn’t realise I’d…

Guest column: The 10 Percent Solution

The ten percent solution I wish to state at the outset that I`m not an employee of the Mari Kondo Foundation, and not in that legendary Sorter`s pay, either. But yes, I am making a case for letting go all that we gather and hold like, forever. Let`s face it, we are a species of…

Book review: The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. HarperCollins Books. As someone who has liked everything Divakaruni has written, in varying degrees though, I found this account of Rani Jindan Kaur, the last queen of Punjab, favourite wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh the Lion of Punjab, mother to the last king of Punjab the hapless…

Travel: Ramalingeshwara temple complex in Avani

Legends of Avani The plan to reclaim life from the pandemic calls for taking road trips to places of interest not too far from the city I reside in, Bangalore, and the Avani temple complex, 30 kms ahead of Kolar town, fits the bill beautifully. Soaked in antiquity, as the guidebooks would say, the Ramalingeshwara…

Guest column: A Tale of Four Cities

A tale of four cities A quartet of places that showcases the best of human resilience. Drubovnik. Plitvice. Budapest. Prague. Places I visited a few months before the pandemic swept over the world and effectively locked us down. While I was rubber-necking as hard as any other tourist, taking in the stunning sights and tucking…

Book review: Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. HarperCollins UK. 2007 release. Taking up two disparate strands, that of rearing newborn twins and of spending a year in the Eternal City, Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer-prize winning author of All The Light We Cannot See, gives us a most charming travelogue-memoir. He`s funny about his boys: The boys…

Photo Feature: My Tree of Life

This is a pictorial ode to my copper pod tree. Actually, they are two trees, inches away from each other`s roots. Twins, perhaps. They grow leaning into each other and after a length of bare trunk, become one lush green canopy, providing shade, shelter, succour, and sustenance to the various creatures who live in the…

Guest column: Alas, Colour Still Matters

Alas, colour still matters This is the unabridged version. When people are storming the citadels of democracy, when strongmen are making new rules and breaking old ones with impunity, when thousands of famers are out protesting in the cold but their protests seem to fall on obdurately deaf ears, is it reprehensible of me to…

Book review: Destination Wedding by Diksha Basu

This is more a brief take than review. There`s nothing as delightful as light-done-right, a dictum I`ve tried to follow when writing both `No Strings Attached` and `Our Start-up Affair.` Diksha Basu`s DESTINATION WEDDING (Bloomsbury Books) gets that light-done-right down pat. The story sends up the Big Fat Indian Wedding in the most gentle manner…

Book review: The Secret Life of Debbie G by Vibha Batra and Kalyani Ganapathy

Savage retribution So, the trope is a time-tested and popular one: young adult (16yo, in this case) finds herself once too often at the receiving end of bullying/sneering/scoffing from the self-appointed elite set, and decides to turn avenger, get her back on them in a manner calculated to hit and hurt, hard. This well- written…