August 31 is Vinayaka Chaturthi, the festival of Ganesh, aka Vinayaka, the elephant-headed god who is the son of Shiva and Parvati. # P...

Amenity Cell

Spurred on by Dinesh of Points of Departure , I decided I'd better try to identify the twittering birds I'd been told were called Se...

I went along with a friend who had some work at the High Court today. As we were walking along a hallway, I heard someone saying, “Shhhhh!....

Month-long annual holiday for elephants 200th anniversary of launch of Great Trigonometrical Survey The Ace of Clubs -- Thi...

We were playing badminton yesterday, when the garden was invaded by a flock of small, shrill, twittery birds which are called Seven Rishis. ...

Nothing systematic, because I don't know enough about it -- just a few links here and there: M. F. Husain and his current exhibition...

Bollywood's secular image In the past, Hindi films projected a world without communal or casteist tensions. But the recent spate of M...

I just looked out of the drawing-room window and saw six monkeys walking across the front courtyard -- three adult males and three juveniles...

It happened exactly a year ago: Mary came out to where we sat in cane chairs on the lawn. It was late afternoon, the light was about to fa...

In 1927, an American, Katherine Mayo, wrote a notorious book called Mother India . (There's an edited edition currently in print.) Ga...

Via Wood s Lot : Serving the Guest: A Sufi Cookbook & Art Gallery : A cookbook with essays and anecdotes on the historic and contempor...

Krishna's birthday, also called Janmashtami, Gokulashtami, or Krishna Jayanthi. Baby Krishna in the South Indian Tanjore style Kri...

I dreamed that Ramesh and I were walking on the road along Marina Beach and Ramesh told me that someone we knew had died of reverse osmosis....

"Bharat Mata", offset print, 1937, painting by P.S. Ramachandran Rao From a review of Popular Indian Art: Raja Ravi Varma and...

This is for the fortnightly topic at Ecotone: Writing About Place . Other pieces are linked from here . If the subject interests you, yo...

This picture is from a wall on Royapettah High Road, near Woodlands Theatre. The green mosque is flanked on the left by the Tamil god Mur...

There's a scathing, funny article on Indian (in this case Hindi) TV serials in yesterday's The Hindu newspaper. I've added the...

August 15 is Indian Independence Day. Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we will redeem our pledg...

The cycle rickshaw is parked while its driver sees a movie. It's the afternoon show.