Sheila Kumar - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Humour: Skirting the issue

Chasing fashion trends can be a fruitless activity sometimes, finds Sheila Kumar. If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t have believed it possible. As every woman in the country knows, ankle-length, gathered skirts have become the flavour of the season. Well, I’m not one to succumb to the trends of the moment usually but now…

Humour: English as we use her

Over the years, we’ve taken the Queen’s language and turned it into one effective hotchpotch, reports SHEILA KUMAR gleefully. There is a hoary chestnut of a tale that periodically does the round in India’s ad circles. A doughty veteran wanted the Indian branch of his advertising firm to retain a catchy slogan he had put…

Feature: A Chance Encounter

One balmy evening by the waterside, Sheila Kumar meets a young woman from another world altogether. Kerala’s backwaters sparkled before us, washed golden in the gloaming. The river was running swift here, at Valiyaparamaba to the far north of the state. Some distance ahead lay my destination, an island hemmed thickly in with palm groves….

Humour: It`s all in the name

It`s all in the name What’s in a name, asks someone who just cannot remember monikers. In anyone else it would have been advance notification of the onset of senility. In my family, in the greater clan, it just reaffirms the passage of a tradition we aren’t too thrilled about. The thing is, we aren’t…

Travel: Chausat Yogini temple in Jabalpur

It was the stuff of high adventure: stumbling on a small, mysterious but beautiful temple, the Chausat Yogini mandir, tucked into a fold of a hill up above the Narmada river. When you are far down in the swirling gorge of the mighty Narmada river you catch your first glimpse of it. More than a…

Humour: No more idlis!

No More Idlis Sometimes, when dreams come true, it can be more than you bargained for. When I am in the northern regions of the country, I dream of idlis. I dream of tucking into a heaped plate of…

Feature: The Woman On The Train

It was the long, slow train from Karnataka to Bihar. When we got on, dawn was still breaking, so the moment the attendant got our bedding, all of us made our beds and fell asleep. We were awoken by sibilant hissing. For a moment I wondered if a snake had crept into the A/C compartment. But no, it…

Feature: Are Herbal Cosmetics Really and Truly Natural?

Really and truly natural? Cosmetics that proclaim they are herbal and natural could well do with a closer look. Oh, I’m not throwing the baby out with the bath water, I’m not tarring all natural cosmetics with a brush of suspicion. I am myself an enthusiastic user of both botanical and chemical-based cosmetics. And one…

Humour: Chasing Kajol

Note: This was before Ajay Devgn dropped the `a` in his surname. Chasing Kajol It happened when I was living in the Nilgiris. I got a call from the local correspondent for a national daily. “Ajay Devgan and Kajol are setting up camp for a shoot in Ooty,” he said. I was working for Femina,…

Humour: Jungle Tales

Jungle Tales What people call a forest resort, SHEILA KUMAR calls home. And it’s not always roseate dawns and birdsong, she reports wryly. Okay, let me play fair. I started out mentioning roseate dawns and birdsong…I get both, in plenty. The twilight zones here are something Van Gogh and Gaugin would have loved: dramatic washes…