Features - Comfortably Numb

Feature: Lift That Chin Up! Shore up Your Self-esteem!

Chin up and stay happy! The key to maintaining healthy self-esteem is the ability to distinguish between a basic sense of one’s worth and one’s reactions to external forces. YOU ARE SPECIAL. Be aware that you have many good things going for you. It doesn’t take much to bring an already fragile sense of self…

Feature: A Temple for Troubled Minds

Faith Fatale The Chottanikkara temple, near Kochi in Kerala, is a place that attracts the mentally disturbed, who seek solace here when all else fails. I’m standing with scores of people facing the closed doors of the Shiva shrine, awaiting darshan. Suddenly, without warning, it starts. A handful of women begin moaning. It is an…

Feature: Indian Men and the Fifty:Fifty Syndrome

Fifty-fifty Indian men are an odd mix of the deeply conservative and the half-hearted liberal. The saas-bahu serials, with their painted women who deliver painfully long sermons on emancipation, continue to draw eyeballs. Metroplex films dealing with prickly issues such as wife swapping, living together and love in the times of intolerance, draw their own…

Feature: Tamil Cinema, That Vicious Circle

The vicious circle When it comes to Chennai city, is it art imitating life or the other way around, asks Sheila Kumar. Reel to real The other day, someone close to me was accosted on a dimly-lit lane off Greams Road. The road was deserted, and the young woman was returning home when a motorcyclist…

Feature: When Jethro Tull Rocked Bangalore

Rock and roll will never die For days before the show hit town, there were groups of people going around Bangalore with a beatific ‘It’s-a-miracle -no-less’ look on their faces. The group gathered others like them, who gathered others like them and then, a few thousands in strength, they shuffled…

Feature: Ageing Gracefully

Grace while greying Ageing is not all bad news because the years also bestow certain attributes. Praise it or blame it on the times we live in. Ageing can be retarded, arrested, prevented in many ways, ranging from top-draw and extremely expensive lotions and potions, Botox and fillers, myriad surgical interventions, and the like. And…

Feature: Those Little White Lies

Little white lies! Men and women tell lies to each other, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly. There’s a reason behind the pile of untruths. No one wants to tell lies, we promise you that. Sometimes, it is to cover up an error, at other times, to spare someone from getting hurt. What we are dealing…

Travel: Train rides I have gone on

JOURNEYS Ticket to ride A recent news item said that all the short-haul trains, the Shatabdis, Deccan Queen, the Brindaban Express , were running almost always full, while flights were going near empty. Oil prices apart, this didn’t surprise me one bit. The thing is, I still remember the days when train travel was…

Feature: Hair Attack!

Hair Attack! Your hair really is you. So what happens if it is wild and unruly, with a mind of its own? Sheila Kumar takes you through her tress trauma. I watch Madonna with a fixed intensity. I have been doing so for years now. You may think I’m a die-hard fan of the…

Book review: Paresh Maity`s Kerala Book

A radiant light An already lush landscape comes alive under the artistic gaze. Sometimes, one just has to deal in clichés to arrive at the inescapable truth. Here the cliché is a landscape artist taking a trip to the ultimate Eden. Art aficionados worldwide rejoiced at the result of a similar trip Maity made some…