Love at First Sight
| 4 |   |
|
Tweet |  |
There was once a man and a reporter. There was a girl. The man fell in love with the girl. Both walked towards different sunsets and new dawns. Here is their story. - "The light's fading fast. Please hurry up," the cameraman told the reporter. - "What can I do? In Bombay nobody seems to be interested in politics." They had been to different colleges to get reactions on US president's forthcoming visit to the country. The idea was to gauge the mood of the youth towards the newfangled sense of friendship between the world's two large democracies. The cry of Indo-Russian friendship had given way to a bloody war to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction and pax Americana. To Mother India's ever-expanding billionaires list and an increasing number of homeless searching for titbits in the garbage dump near the lane where he....
To the One I Love
| 10 | |
|
Tweet | |
...time passes as quickly as a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall. - Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1282) - "What do I write this week?," I asked a friend. - "Why, don't you have any work?," she asked. - "Well, told you. Am in transition." - "Then write about transition," she said. The question I put to one of my good friends has plagued me ever since I started writing. I always knew that whatever I did later in life would have something to do with words. But what would it be about? Would it be newspaper articles, stories or novels? Or would it be everything? I really didn't know the answer at that time. When very young I used to write a short story a year for a popular children's monthly. Needless to say none ever got published. The....
Motilal & Sons
| 12 | |
|
Tweet | |
- "If you're so sleepy please wait outside my room!," Sharma remarked even as my eyes closed for the umpteenth time. - "No. It's not that. I often close my eyes when I'm thinking," I lied to buy my peace with him. I turned my gaze from Sharma just in time to see the lady at the table near the exit cast a stealthy glance at us. Summer is sleepwalking time in Delhi. As the day progresses the pleasant dry mornings make way for the languorous heat. Everyone from vehicles on roads to people to flies at fruit juice shops to birds in the sky move about in a half-awakened state. If only it were possible, most would just stop where they were and doze off to beat the season. It was on a day like this that I was in that government office. A....
Bedtime Stories
| 11 | |
|
Tweet | |
I don't know how the stories started. Like colours old memories fade from even most rugged surface. Maybe this was occasioned by Baba reading out from a book from his colleague and good friend Gosh uncle's house. As far as I remember, my father has always been a loner and so whatever few friends he made have been really close. I might have failed miserably when it comes to imbibing his best qualities, but his aloofness and love for tea I have inherited in good measure. Baba was born at a time when independence was still a good decade-and-a-half away. So like all impressionable young men of his generation he was inspired in particular by Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement. Gosh uncle's children when they grew up turned over some of their books to us. These ranged from school textbooks printed in United Kingdom to The....
Rains
| 7 | |
|
Tweet | |
Mumbai has become a city of eunuchsNine days ago Sadanand Nikam's daughter was stabbed 20 times by her lover on a street in Thane at 9.30 am. There were hundreds of passers-by, shopkeepers and several people gathered to stare at as the stabbing went on for five to seven minutes. No one came to stop her attacker. On Monday Sushma Nikam succumbed to her injuries.-Mumbai Mirror, Tuesday, July 03, 2007 Saturday's rain again wreaked havoc over Mumbai. It wasn't so bad this time. Several trains and flights were either delayed or cancelled. Low-lying areas were flooded with people having to wade through knee-deep water to reach their destinations. By afternoon there were traffic snarls on highways leading into the city. Some areas experienced extended 'precautionary' cuts. A few house collapses and deaths were reported from the slums in the suburbs. The heavy downpour accompanied by high tide in....
The Party
| 14 | |
|
Tweet | |
"Welcome sir. How're you?," and the keeper opens the door to Noah's Ark. Up a flight of wooden steps and in. It's past nine thirty and the evening has just begun. Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless Because the things you say and the things you do surround me While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words Dying to believe in what you heard I was staring straight into the shining sun - "Foster's for you sir?," asks Mangesh the cashier. - "Yes, the same." At the Ark on a Wednesday night in Bandra. It's getting crowded by the minute. Couples lost in drinks and kisses. Stags drowned in half pegs and beauty of shapely nymphets on the dance floor. Wishing they would walk away with one of them. East Indians - half Koli, half Portuguese - mostly make up....
Love Story
| 51 | |
|
Tweet | |
Once upon a time... For there is always a time for anything and everything... From germination to repetition to resurrection... In one such time there lived a crow in the mountains far, far away. There was nothing special about this crow except that he, like most romantics, had been badly hurt in love. And this had turned him into a thinker. Had he lived today - depending upon his city of residence - he would either have been a successful director with several sentimental hits about physically challenged maidens and drunkard lovers under his belt. Or he might have made a fortune on his first novel about chutney smells and mango orchards from a London publisher. But in that was an age of limited opportunity he would spend days and nights brooding the past and speculating the future. Analysing and reanalysing what went wrong. Now each gust....
Monsoon
| 4 | |
|
Tweet | |
It was like any other monsoon morning in Mumbai. The sky covered by a grey veil of clouds was in mourning. The gloom seemed to have descended from the heavens to the rushing multitude below. As often happens here, suddenly the clouds frowned and the mood became even more sombre. The breezeless, muggy day, drowned in the din of automobiles and hurrying steps, readied to destress itself. It started quietly. First a few drops licked the earth. Then they became more regular and brisk. Invigorated by the water's touch the atmosphere turned hurried. At the station the trains enjoying the feel of water on their metallic skins arrived and departed languorously. Inside the railway compartment a man and a woman stood at the exit. "... This happened in office last week," the man said. Both giggled. Water fell in slow motion on the world....
Mala
| 4 | |
|
Tweet | |
"Mala is dead," my reporter's voice crackled on the phone. The news left me stunned. I felt a sudden sense of loss overwhelm me. Not that she was supposed to mean anything more than a colleague. Yet she was someone I had grown to like. Perhaps she was already dead when several years back the man she loved the most, left her. Despite belonging to a well-known family in her city, she put up with a lot. Her hectic schedule at work, evening parties where she ended up meeting the same people, her boss's rasping laughter and his friends that she was often required to entertain. In her prime she would make heads turn. Men fawned over her while their women's opinion bordered on ambivalent... they adored her, yet they were also envious of her good looks. She had that rare ability to win over people in....
Bombay
| 7 | |
|
Tweet | |
Bombay. My first images of the city are from films that I saw at Delhi's Chanakya cinema with my parents. In the late 70s, of ABBA and BoneyM and an angry young Amitabh Bachchan, while Delhi was a quiet city Mumbai had something or the other happening all the time. Even while not living here I had seen it all. The sea, chowpattys or beaches, shanties, chawls and highrises, suburban railway, gangsters, Helen, Padma Khanna and Bindu's cabaret numbers (sight of whose gyrating waists and deep belly buttons would for reasons inexplicable excite even a five-year old) and of course the great Bollywood factory, whose images fed a fertile imagination. For a toddler those images were impressionable. Housing was so hard to get and expensive that it broke relationships. Pot-bellied millionaires kicked shoeshine boys around outside the Mahalaxmi racecourse. Newcomers had their only piece of belonging snatched on....
