Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Writing the City, edited by Stuti Khanna

Depicted as experienced This slim volume contains literary essays that artfully entwine the perfectly compatible strands of travel and personal memoir to good effect. A list of known names write about the cities they have situated their works in, the cities of their imagination versus the reality, the cities that strike a creative chord in…

Guest column: Trust, faith and the coronavirus

The gullible and the cunning, a dangerous cocktail There`s a 2008 song by the ironically named Killers that rather cryptically asks: are we human or are we dancer? I`d like to tweak those words and ask: are we gullible or are we cunning? Well, do look at the evidence I put before you. One idiot…

Feature: The Kdrama Fashion Reveals

Men in greatcoats and women in ruffles: Kdrama reveals So, let me plunge those of you who aren’t really too conversant with Korean dramas straight into the deep end. Be warned, this deep dive into the hallyu (wave, referring to the tsunami-strength popularity enjoyed by Kdramas) will involve some startling adjustments of your hitherto held…

Book review: Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

NOISE, A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman/Olivier Sibony/Cass R. Sunstein, HarperCollins Publishers. This is a very interesting study of bad judgement, which places its basic root cause, noise, under the microscope and examines it for its components, sources, influence. And then tells us how to dial down the noise for maximum positive impact…

Guest column: The grim and the whimsical

The grim and the whimsical exist side by side today To misquote Dickens, it certainly is the worst of times and not so much the best of times. The seemingly interminable banks of dark clouds haven’t drifted off yet, they continue to darken our skies and our lives. Anxiety levels are still peaking, optimism is…

Book review: Shadow City, A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran Khan

Shadow City, A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran N. Khan. Penguin Books. Taran Khan`s logic is beautiful in its simplicity: her way of getting to know a city is to walk the city. In this case, the chosen city is Kabul (not the best place to be walking about, you`d imagine) which she says `shimmered…

Book review: The White Umbrella By Brian Sewell

Travels with a donkey Some books are a delight to read and Brian Sewell’s novella The White Umbrella: The Englishman and the Donkey of Peshawar falls fair and square in this category. A quaint and charming yarn, it`s a good read in these trying times. The late Sewell, famous art critic/ columnist/ author/ media personality,…

Guest column: Seeking that elusive silver lining

Desperately seeking that silver lining Just yesterday, a Charlie Mackesy cartoon landed on my Instagram feed. It featured the now famous little boy, the horse and the dog. The boy was asking `What`s the best thing you’ve learned about storms?` and the horse answered, `That they end.` In better circumstances, that positive note would have…

Book review: The Private World of Georgette Heyer

THE PRIVATE WORLD OF GEORGETTE HEYER by Jane Aiken Hodge (Pan Books). Big, big fan. So I read anything and everything on this wonderful writer. Hodge chronicles Heyer`s writing `Black Moth` when she was just nineteen for her young brother who had taken ill; her ability to average two books a year for years, books…

Guest column: This is us

This is us The basic truth is, we are operating on a twin level of new normal now. And there is a sizeable population which believes that this new normal is perfectly alright, feeds off on the oftentimes toxic adrenaline released by this new normal, and has slowly integrated it into the mainstream. Covid-19 is…