Willys meant cops. So when the jeep stopped outside her house the new bride peered outside the window a lot anxious. The big burly with twirled moustache and rolled up shirt sleeves sat with one leg out on the footboard so he could jump out even before the vehicle came to a complete stop and take off after the criminal – at least that was the image enforced in her mind by the movies. A muscled man with neatly parted hair and curled up sleeves sat at the driver’s seat,
Day 3 Jhansi – Nagpur: 594 km Distances and midway points Jhansi – Lalitpur – Sagar: 202 km Sagar – Narsinghpur – Seoni: 265 km Seoni – Nagpur: 127 km (From the diary of my Delhi to Kerala motorcycle ride, December 2019. The third day was the coldest and the longest leg of the six-day run along the most wintry, desolate stretches. ‘I left a foggy Jhansi where the Betwa flowed in clouds early morning. By the time I reached Narsinghpur, my whole body was juddering and my boots dripping
Advanced age hinders accepting more than it hampers understanding. The resistance fuelled by conditioning than sound sense or fair play. My folks know there’s a contagion in the air and that it’s a mean one – after all, the chief minister of the state can’t be lying everyday on the dot at 6PM. But why would it come in the way of life as they know it they refuse to understand. Or maybe just quick to forget. Like the people in hinterland Chhattisgarh who keep lolloping across their erstwhile backyards
(At home during the Corona lockdown, I decide to do some spring cleaning and come upon a bunch of albums where termites are having a ball. These happen to be of my folks from their years when they were younger than I am and dapper than I ever will be. As I show them the cleaned photographs, some make them visibly excited while some a little poignant, memories flooding of people close to them who have passed on. This article is also a note to myself that nothing remains –
Belgian monk Francis Acharya decided to come to India after he met Gandhi in London. So impressed was he by the Mahatma’s espousal of the tenets of Hinduism that he wanted to work for the ‘encounter between Hinduism and Christianity.’ After several unsuccessful applications for visa he finally approached Vijayalakshmi Pandit who was the Indian High Commissioner in England at that time. The visa was finally granted after Jawaharlal Nehru sought a personal guarantee from Acharya that he wouldn’t proselytise. Acharya then travelled across the country before setting up his
Everyone thanked the sand mafia. They said it was their tireless digging up of the riverbed which enhanced its water-holding capacity which in turn enabled additional water from the dams to flow on without incident. Thank you marauders of the earth! They were joking, alright. These jokes, these badly articulated relief sighs, came wrapped in uneasy icons: shit-colour heads that smiled or winked unconvincingly. I too laughed for two reasons. One was from remembering a recidivist friend from my teenage years. Between bails the only work he’d engage in was
