Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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Feature: AIDS and the Army

‘We are fighting to contain AIDS in the Army’ “The ideal I’m working towards is a zero-AIDS situation. As of now, I know that sounds like moonshine. However, to achieve something, you have to aim for the moon.” Lt General D Raghunath, Director General Armed Forces Medical Services, is not much given to mouthing moonshine….

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Feature: Prasad Bidapa, profiled

                                    The Style Maker Speaks             Mention fashion and the mind immediately conjures up the name of Prasad Bidapa. An informal chat with the man who lives, dreams, eats and thinks fashion. It’s…

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Feature: Siachen`s meter keeps on ticking

Siachen’s meter keeps on ticking   It’s another cold grey day. The weather has packed up for over 20 days now, and it doesn’t seem as if the weak sun will break through today. His fibreglass hut (FGH) is comfortingly warm and he doesn’t want to get out of his heavy-duty sleeping bag. But get…

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Feature: Letter To A Father

Letter to a Father  The morning post brought little Kelly a letter from her father stationed in an obscure hamlet in the Kashmir valley. As I watched her jump up and down with glee,  shrieking “Dadda`s letter, Dadda’s letter,“ I remembered with a sudden pang that that was how I used to react when I…

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Feature: Mani Ratnam, profiled

The friendly neighbourhood storyteller A fat golden orb shoots up from behind some riverside reeds. The first piercing notes of a mellifluous flute rises, in tandem with the sun. Then, there follows a series of images…click, click, click, each one breathtaking in visual simplicity, a collage tracing the life and times of a village belle. …

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Feature: Passionate Friendships

A passion called friendship Of late, ‘passionate friendships’ have been much in the news thanks to Pandit Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, a  couple who have had reams of newsprint devoted to their mutual devotion. I read it all, the unending speculation about the exact nature of their relationship, the curious probing into the intimate lives…

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