Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Humour: Mona at a life-coaching session

Note: Mona was a flaky character I created in the pre-digital age and she used to appear in a lot of my DH Middles. A Costly Session I had never seen my friend Mona so excited. All that customary languor was gone, replaced by a…

Humour: That red elixir

That Red Elixir There is a lot I don’t know about wines. I will freely admit to that. However, there is one little thing that puzzles me no end: why for the love of…

Feature: Farewell Friend

Farewell Friend When they called to tell me he was gone, dead of a heart attack just twelve days after he turned 39, I was filled with rage. An all-consuming, white-hot rage that robbed me of words,that even robbed me of tears. I placed the receiver carefully back in its cradle and took down the…

Feature: My Greatest Achievement

My Greatest Achievement Recently, a magazine carried an article on role reversals and their hidden fallout. A working couple decide to have a baby and share parenting 60-40. That is, with the husband doing 60 per cent of the caring and nurturing, and the wife handling the rest. Within months of their baby mouthing her…

Feature: Senthamarai`s Love Life

Her name was, inappropriately enough, Senthamarai. With a wiry frame the colour of polished teak and a pinched look on an unremarkable face, she was more a hill-flower than a lotus, a thamarai. She was the maid I’d inherited along with the bungalow, when I relocated to the Nilgiri hills. Clean as a pin,…

Humour: Stagey couture, a Mona story

Stagey couture Mona turns out to be a theatre buff …of sorts! “It`s theatre fest time,“ I told my friend Mona. She is an avid and regular theatre-goer, our Mona. “Of course, darling,“ she drawled. “Where else would I be, if not at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall all week long? Why, I have got seven…

Humour: The write choice

The Write Choice The moment I gave notice of my impending relocation to the Nilgiri hills, people set my future agenda for me. `Oh, going to write a…

Humour: My secret garden

My Secret Garden Along with a manor house of slightly more than modest proportions, we `inherited` a garden when we moved to the…

Feature: On Residential Schools

A Child`s Choice Hostel’s not a bad word if the child decides so. I didn’t send my daughter off to hostel. She went. There is a subtle distinction, only it is lost on most people. And, as soon as she went away to school, my husband and I have been tried and sentenced on the…

Feature: Professor Julian Simon, profiled

“People are the solution, not the problem” Professor Julian Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland is an economist with a theory, a theory that has environmentalists and population control experts reacting with outrage. Directly contradicting the Malthusian hypothesis, Prof Simon claims that more people and more wealth correlates with more, and…