Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Feature: Meeting Padmavathi Rao

Living the dream Bengaluru-based Padmavathi Rao is turning in a series of sensitive performances. Sheila Kumar | Padmavati Rao is on a roll right now.  Even as her acclaimed Kitchen Poems show is readying for repeat renditions, she garnered a fair amount of both interest and attention as the luminously tragic Nancy Biswas, wife to…

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Feature: Diamonds in the south

  The diamond jubilation of South India I am at this high-end wedding (is there really any other kind?) in a temple town near Kochi. It’s a sea of silks, classic Kanjeevarams interspersed with heavily embellished saris. Everyone’s family heirlooms seem to be out on display and this being gold country, the glare of the…

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Travel: Edinburgh Diary

LAST PAGE Edinburgh Diary Brexit does not seem to have affected the tourist inflow and Edinburgh is close to being uncomfortably full. SHEILA KUMAR PHOTOGRAPH BY KASHIF MASOOD Fringing the fest The atmosphere on the Royal Mile is electric. It’s the eve of the 69th edition of the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe, one of the…

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Humour: Joust the two of us!

I’ll begin with a confession: I don’t have a hearth. In fact, I’m not too sure   what exactly a hearth is. In my mind, it`s something that carries warmth and   fuzziness at times, and a touch of Roop tera   mastana at other times… or am I confusing   it with a blazing…

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Feature: Unlikely Friendships

You two are friends? Really? Go on, admit it. Somewhere in your list of ‘closer than this’ friends, in the ‘inner circle’ or on its fringe, is this person who is really, really, really not like you, not one bit.  You don’t share the same tastes; you are on different pages when it comes to…

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Feature: Where has nuance gone?

Where has nuance gone? t`s a bad time to be a whiter shade of pale. Or lavender, mauve, mint, teal, chartreuse…. Actually, it`s a bad time to be subtle. To fall back on irony and expect the listener/viewer/observer to get just what you mean. This was brought home sharply vis-à-vis a recent post I shared on…

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Feature: Gargoyles galore!

It’s the good old fear-and-fascination trope. The grotesque gargoyle has come a long way from its plumbing origins to startle people everywhere. These phantasmagorical creatures are something of an obsession with me. Wherever and whenever I come across them, I pull out my camera and get into action. I spend ages closely observing them, walking…

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Feature: Dev Lahiri on Educational Reform

`Schools today are not about education, they are about certification`  Highly intelligent. Quicksilver character. Maverick. Impassioned. Born educationist. All these words fit Devapriya Lahiri , former Headmaster of Lawrence School, Lovedale as well as  Welhams Boys, Dehradun, to a T. It has been an eventful, even chequered career for the educationist who has recently written…

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Feature: In The New Year….

Make it a happy 2016 ! If the passing of time is inexorable, it is also slightly ridiculous. Ridiculous because before we know it, the year has shut shop, another year is about to dawn on us, and there we are, pretty much where we were last December. As the saying goes, plus ça change,…

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Feature: How Relevant Are You?

How relevant are you? We don’t analyse it much, but it’s astonishing what we do to stay relevant. Relevant to who? Why, to our kith and kin, our friends and neighbours, the people we work for, the people we work with, the people who work for us, indeed, to the section of the whole wide…

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