When polity develops accountability and corporatedom grows a heart it becomes Twenty20. This is practical Utopia: organisation, skilled manpower, resource and vision meet people. Being first of its kind, everything is not honky-dory; then at every turn there is a new learning. Posing a threat to established norms, hierarchical bureaucracy and lucrative red-tapism, obstacles are aplenty. But addressing each and surmounting them are exercises in cohesion; when people come together to ascertain their rights, democracy flowers and its roots go deeper. What was at worst dismissed as a philanthropist’s dream
Jump / AIIMS “On the bright side, the ride to the mortuary will be considerably shorter,” she said as she stood with one hand on her plump hips. She looked at her husband and even though she didn’t detect any mirth she laughed as she breathed hard. “We are going to die woman and you cannot be quiet for a full minute?” He asked gruffly, succeeding with some effort to suppress a smile that crept into his lips. He had always marvelled at his wife’s funny sense even though he
Aligned in glistening beads of sweat along an open oven the men pause briefly to look up at people like me – those from a halcyon world. They are on the basement floor of a twin-storey ramshackle lit up by fire from gigantic wood-fired furnaces with little passageways that opened at ground level for ventilation. They seemed amused, some almost smiled, at my effort – I was bending over and peering hard at their world. It was also the freshly baked bread – the waft of which was driving me
‘It was my first outing with Airbnb.’ Any write-up that begins on a note like this you know where it is headed – yes, spiralling down. So before I proceed and make my case (the host had, while I was writing the Facebook post, threatened to give me such a terrible review which would make Airbnb tremble seeing my requisition for future stays – probably just like the crazy who totalled a pad which made Airbnb start with host insurance), I will stake a disclaimer: I had read ‘The Airbnb
Photographs taken to bring tourists. And photographs taken by tourists themselves. Some minor details are always missing between these two. In my case it was a long line of big-boned women clad in ghaghra, choli and odhni or the veil, balancing earthen water pots on arcing hips tracing a colourful line like the Madhubani-painted Bihar Sampark Kranti Express pootling along the platform. I saw this in some tourism literature while attending the Jaipur Literature Festival and was instantly enamoured – equally by the women as by the setting. Coy heads
Much has been written about muses and understandably so – they are salacious tales and scandalous to boot. The recorder always faithfully documents the gratitude the artistic and literary worlds owe to these little Lolitas who, by dint of their tenderness and tautness, aided the ageing masters in their Elysian pursuits. What might have started as a fugacious fuck culminated in a lot more – usually great works and sometimes children. Nothing great about the pick-up lines though which were insipid at best: ‘I am Picasso. We will do great
As children, our parents kept me and my sisters away from adultery and blaspheme by shifting to English. So we might all be sitting around and talking about the annual day celebrations of our village school in Koko, rural Nigeria, in Malayalam. Suddenly, they would go ‘Mrs Gloria caught Miss Pereira and Mr Okay in a tight embrace in an empty staffroom,’ in English. Or, how Umma, Fr John’s sister ‘was rumoured to have slept with half the congregation.’ We pretended these little loaded nuggets went over our heads so
Alice Delices is a rare place. Besides freshly baked bread, here you find people actually talking to each other, looking at books and photographs, debating the identity of artists on the wall posters next to that of Picasso and kids rolling the good old dice. We sat on the backless benches fashioned from wood, facing each other, croissants and black coffee in front of us. James, who is running the French bakery in Alice’s absence, is hotfooting about taking orders and serving the capacity guests. He has a permanent beatific
Je ne sais quoi For all their famous hatred, the French sometimes do come to the rescue of English, the language. The word above might sound like an endearment in Mandarin but it means a wonderful ‘quality that cannot be described or named easily.’ Which means those four little words can mean everything from the reason behind the Trojan War to what Mastercard – and The Language itself – simply passes off as ‘priceless.’ I thought of this word, though I couldn’t recollect it correctly, when I met Mohana and
Take it easy, he said It all started with a valium prescription following a workout accident: I couldn’t straighten up after I put the barbell down but had to crawl on all fours and finally clamber up a chair clutching with every movable limb. That’s how the ambulance found me – sprawled like a chilling octopus. Since I didn’t scream at his random poking, the good doctor ruled out a misaligned spine, rotated innominate and a pelvic upslip. “You just take it easy,” he said giving me the valium. The
