Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Feature: We Who Watched Swades

We the viewers I WATCHED Ashutosh Gowariker’s ode to social service, “Swades” with a sinking heart. Oh, I liked the film, flawed though it was. In what is getting to be a Gowariker trait, it was a simple story told at its own pace. The humour was so gentle that it appeared positively fragile at…

Feature: Whither Next, Neo?

Whither next, Neo? We seem to be a nation of Neos, all battling an ancient Matrix. But do we know just what we are doing, asks SHEILA KUMAR. The UK-based theatre person Mahabano Kotwal put it best when she recently said: India is opening her legs even as she closes her mind. We are living in confused…

Feature: It Takes a Village

It takes a village An education camp held in a remote hamlet of Uttarakhand dispelled some long-held notions about people and about education. In India, the dispensation outlining a Rs. 40,000-crore programme for primary education was concomitant with the United Nations urging governments around the world to spend around six to eight billion US$ (Rs….

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…