Sheila Kumar - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

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. All photos by Sheila Kumar and subject to copyright. 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…

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…

Book review: A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Delivering on some promises So, there are two ways to read Barack Obama`s eagerly awaited memoir. One as a political text, detailing the journey of the 44th president of the United States, from Harvard Law School grad to Chicago lawyer to Illinois senator thrice, to POTUS twice. An account of what he wanted to do…

Book review: Prelude to a Riot by Annie Zaidi

PRELUDE TO A RIOT by Annie Zaidi, Aleph Books. Zaidi throws out a taut line which the reader grasps, holds on to, and never lets go till the last page is turned. The book is an elegy — in prose — to communal hatred, to the damage wrought by communal hatred. This…

Book review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury Publications. If you have read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the author`s first — astonishing — book, then you will crack open the pages of Piranesi with much anticipation. And you will read of a House (the capital H is necessary for a place of this magnitude) made largely up…