Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Travel: Chamba, Himachal Pradesh

Riverine rhapsody Chamba sits pretty besides a rushing Ravi and is quite one of Himachal`s prettiest spots. It is the river that captures one`s attention, arrests one`s eye, holds one totally in thrall. A swathe of icy blue touched with silver, it rushes with an audible roar past Chamba on its way to…

Book excerpt from Two by Gulzar

And somewhere in Gulzar`s re-visitation of the trauma of Partition, a novella titled Two, is this throwaway line: Before Pakistan took shape on the map, it started taking shape in the minds of the people. This was true of both Hindus and Muslims. The untouchables had been similarly alienated centuries ago. In one masterstroke the…

Travel: My journeys, my words

Interview with Wandertrails Conversations Sheila Kumar – My journeys, my words March 23, 2018 Narayana Menon K A lover of words and wanderlust, Sheila Kumar’s adventures can give anyone the inspiration to not just travel around this wonderful world, but also to pen down delightful stories about it. An independent writer and manuscript editor, as well…

Feature: Millennials and money

Nothing more, nothing less As the earlier generation watches, the millennials streamline their spending pattern, readying to join the economical mainstream. I’ve had a millennial in my life for some years now but it took me a while to mark the clear-cut differences in our spending pattern. I was chatting with our cook, my…

Book review: Still Me by Jojo Moyes

A romance at its heart For those readers who didn’t know that the film Me Before You was originally a book – it was. It did well, as did the movie version of the story, with the author Jojo Moyes also writing the screenplay. Still Me is the third book in the series that followed….

Book review: Different Class by Joanne Harris

Different Class, Joanne Harris. Doubleday Books This is the third in the author`s psychological thrillers but it is a standalone story, and that`s how I read it. Harris had me at Chocolat, years and years ago and though I`ve not always loved her other books in the same way, they always made for an engrossing…

Book review: Scene 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza

On the people who lurked at the edges of the Hindi film industry. Ali Amjad. Harish Rai. Alimullah Khan. Peter the cook who is actually Ramnath. Writers, directors, cooks-turned-scriptwriters — the cast of this novel is made up of eternal hopefuls who land up in the Bombay of the 1970s to live out…

Humour: Fashion sure is an enigma!

From the ramps to the roads I remember my first fashion faux pas like it was yesterday. I was working at the country’s leading women’s magazine. I went up to the editor and asked if I could do a ‘slightly different’ fashion piece. What about, she asked. Why, I said breezily, how fashion is…

Book review: Becoming A Mountain by Stephen Alter

Becoming a Mountain Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime By Stephen Alter (Aleph Publications) Mountains, says Alter, have been endowed through history with nobility, wisdom, omniscience, as well as described as fearsome, treacherous, demonic. Of course, all this is but the expression of human sensibilities towards the natural world. The…

Book review: Gut by Giulia Enders

This is more a brief take than a review of the book. Gut by microbiologist Giulia Enders (Speaking Tiger Books) turned out to be not a run of the mill pick but a very informative read. The style is most reader-friendly, almost light and chatty but the gravitas of the contents is unmissable. The presentation…