A friend invited us to spend an evening at the club. We sat in the wood-panelled bar, under the carved names of victorious sportsmen, begin...

S. Muthiah has written a piece on Chennai's Thousand Lights Mosque . I've driven by it so many times without ever visiting it, or k...

I'm missing Calcutta, which seems a semi-magical place to me. We have often visited it in the cool season, which is beginning now. I w...

Need some Indian names for characters in your novel? Here are two sites with Sanskrit-based Indian names and their meanings: Indian Baby Na...

This came to me as one of those emails that bounces around the Web. I've condensed it a bit. It describes four episodes from movies by...

An old man patches gunny sacks damaged by the rains in Koyambedu vegetable market - New Indian Express photo by P. Jawahar Readin...

Last night we pulled up at an intersection, and I took a look at my favourite barber shop . One customer and the barber stood inside, filli...

Firecracker sellers in Bhopal -- PTI Photo The woman shown on the two boxes of fireworks at the bottom of this picture is filmstar Aishw...

Time Magazine's Asia Edition has a cover story on Bollywood: Queen of Bollywood , with Aishwarya Rai on the cover. And a nice apprecia...

Divali (or Deepavali, as it's called in the South) is on Friday - the biggest holiday of the year, and I haven't done one thing abou...

I decided to take the plunge and participate in this year's NaNoWriMo . Let's see... I'm prepping for it by reading (don't ...

Via Follow Me Here , a hilarious piece from The Missouri Review : Dear Mr. G.W. Bush, We would like to thank you for the submission of yo...

It rained through the night, thunder growling romantically in the distance. This morning there was only a drizzle, which is dying away now,...

Under the fire star is six months old today.

This is my contribution to the Ecotone group-blogging topic, Place names : Living in an ex-colony, I've discovered, means that place-...

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is being beatified at the Vatican on Sunday. She died in 1997, at the age of 87. There's a bizarre article a...

I went into the garden and pulled an ajwain plant from a bed it wanted to overwhelm - my hands were scented with it, it was lovely. Out...

The plumber is wild-eyed and intense. He's short, skinny, with sharp features, jutting cheekbones. He wears a filthy shirt and a lungi...

Priests performing Varuna Japam to invoke the Rain God, by standing inside concrete tubs filled with water. New Indian Express photo by ...

I was thinking about an evening we spent at the Yacht Club. The club had fallen on hard times. It had been pushed out of a bigger, better,...