Skip to main content

Posts

Enchante, Mumbai!

  It has been roughly nine years since we landed in the city of dreams - the two of us with a one big suitcase each and one kid half-the size of a case. We walked into an empty apartment on the twelfth floor of a building on a hot June afternoon, physically exhausted, yet high in spirits (Age had not withered us then). Strangely, I seem to remember how the first day in Mumbai unfolded with a lot of detail - insignificant things like the first dress I wore in Mumbai, first road-side sandwich , the first shopping experience in the very Mumbai-sh "DMart", the first person I heard speaking in Tamil in a rather foreign place, the first maid I employed(who promptly quit on me), and of course, the first meal that we ordered (in a non-Swiggy era). Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Pulitzer winning collection "Interpreter of Maladies",  insinuates through one of her characters, who reminisces about his first day in America with a new wife - about how bizarre it is that the mundane first...
Recent posts

The Tamil Singularity - Ponniyin Selvan!

I wonder why I took so many years to get to this epic. Reflecting back, I think it would have been a hither-imposed fear to read complicated Tamil or the thither- proclaimed flair for everything English, books and royalty included. It just took the first 100 pages of this Kalki’s magnum opus to make me comprehend the irrationality of both the above self and external imposters. I realized how easy it is to read Kalki or how much I’m in love with my Tamil roots, literature and royalty included! If there was anything real about an organic change, it is what Ponniyin Selvan did to me, and I could not but write about it. And, the good news is that, I’m not the only one Ponniyin Selvan has done this to or will do this to.  I see the people of Tamilnadu in a new incandescent light, and with a bit of narcissism that I come from the same territory. I’ve always preferred the dusky complexion, but now, I’ve come to love the dark-skinned Tamil women who adorn their wardrobes with ostentati...

The Lady's Personal Lady

Its been more than a year since I last recollected my ramblings together. The reason I'd like to scapegoat for the dormancy is the rather insipid weather around the year at Delhi, that caused my grey cells to mature a trifle too fast, rendering me what common-sensical people would commonly call  'worldly wise'! A characteristic consequence of the afore-mentioned attribute is a distinct lack of inspiration in worldly affairs! Maybe I had a blogger's block! Or simply stated, maybe I was busy (read as lazy)! Whatever deadlock it was, the semaphore that resuscitated me was the Indian house maid, an Indian lady's personal lady! (The astute ready most assuredly would know where I pinched that phrase from, it's good old Wodehouse!)  The average Indian lady (working or otherwise) rarely manages the household without a maid. Some ladies are loosely dependent on them, requiring them just for 'trivia' like the sporadic sweep or the ' pocha '! Some have...

Meenakshi Pattinam

For all those who didn't know and were not astute enough to guess, I grew up in the 'Temple City' of Madurai. Raised amidst the temples in the temples city, I once believed that there is no world outside this city and its Gods (and its eternally reigning Goddess). That was when I had barely seen ten winters (For the astute reader: this is a Classical English style of declaring your age, notwithstanding the fact that Madurai does not have a marked winter). As I continued to see more winters, I could not help but accrue a different set of perceptions about the place. Honestly, the city (or pattinam as it is called in Tamil) did not morph much, but I metamorphosed. If you pick a few random Maduraites who live or live not in Madurai now, (but have spent atleast a couple of years in the place in a bygone era) and inquire for any three spotlights of the city,  and compute the statistical modes of the answers, you are likely to get - Meenakshi Amman temple , Malligai (Jasmine ...

A Train to India

         I was born in an Independent India, so the astute reader can decipher that I am not too old. I was born in an India whose economy was still Nehruvian. Now, my dear astute reader can  deduce that I am neither too young. I was born in an India when Indian Airlines was the only airline operator covering the "major cities" of this country and when the Indian Railways covered the length and breadth of this land through one of the largest rail networks of the world. Now, a couple of decades later, Indian Airlines might not be the only airline operator in the country (thankfully), but Indian Railways is statistically the fourth largest rail network in the world, which my dear astute reader, has many implications and explications.            This post is not about the analyzing the track records of  the politics and economics of the Indian rail, it's more about cherishing a few romant...

The Truth is Out There..

This is not the Truth about Life, the Universe and Everything . Neither is this truth about the extraterrestrial 'X files' that is out there. Nor is it the Truth about some layman's doleful life that, when dared, gets intriguing.  This is probably the truth about the Indian State and one of its Estates. This is about how we as a state, are capable of manipulating the truth about what transpired beneath the tables, and between the cables, as well as the The Source could create the all-fooling Matrix. And this is also about how a sect of people called themselves the fearless media, go to the limits of the Source to extricate the Truth. The question is - Is their quest for the Truth ethically and philanthropically justified ? Consider the recent furore over the breaking news that seems to break every other minute in the assorted news channels. The anti-corruption wave that has swept the country and the consequent actions/reactions/inaction by the state has brought many camou...

Queen of Sciences?

Yes, it is Mathematics. I am pretty sure that to the astute reader of this blog, this mathematically  knotty question of 'What is' the 'queen of sciences' is a no-brainer. How about 'whosaidit'. That's Gauss . That wasn't bumpy either. And now field this - Why did this great German mathematician call it the 'Queen' but not the 'King' of Sciences? Or why not 'Father' of Sciences? Well, am aware of many such conflicting phrases and sobriquets that extol one gender against the other(you don't have to spin-doctor against me), but not all of them have the same grounds of explanation. So what is the  plausible elucidation to the original question in specific reference to the context of Sciences? I do not know the correct answer. And I cannot possibly find out from Gauss either. Maybe he liked women in a good sense.Maybe not. Whatever it is, this peek into the transcript of a letter that he once wrote to a prominent French female  ...