We were playing badminton, and I decided to pretend that I was Toshiro Mifune – not the shambling samurai of Yojimbo , or Sanjiro , or Seven...

I have a book, a huge, heavy tome, called Southern India: Its History, People, Commerce & Industrial Resources , published by The Forei...

Last night we went to a dinner hosted by our bank. In America, my bank never asked me to dinner, but it happens here among the private bank...

What’s the worst Indian advertising jingle? Vajradanti Vajradanti Vicco Vajradanti [a couple of lines about how its herbal ingredients giv...

When I first arrived here, I was somewhat mystified by a dish that I encountered at almost every dinner party: it was called a "baked ...

At 8:00 I looked out the window toward the gate. The sky was the palest grey. The long magenta streak of bougainvillea, high up in a eucal...

The New Indian Express has a photo gallery of Ganesh idols being immersed in the Bay of Bengal at Chennai on September 26, the end of the ...

Household bulletin: Lakshmi's sister had a baby boy and is okay. Her mother-in-law brought the money for the hospital, so Lakshmi retu...

I found this beautiful poem through Malville . It came from this page , which includes the original Spanish text: The Moon You can tak...

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day driving around in circles –- although that is difficult in Chennai, because there are so many cul-d...

Praveen Kumar has a step-by-step recipe for Vaangi bhath (eggplant rice), illustrated at every step with excellent photographs. I could f...

un regard oblique has posted a very beautiful, haunting mp3 song by the Russian Sirin Ensemble , as a response to Porale Ponnuthaye , which...

On Sunday morning the line which brings the Internet to me was cut -- or "cutted," as the voice on the other end of the phone sai...

I came downstairs to music blaring from a public loudspeaker – A. R. Rahman’s Vande Mataram . Today is Vinayaka Chaturthi, the festival of ...

I meant to write something for the blog today, but instead I painted a picture of my sister's chair. I've always admired my sis...

A web ring of illustrated blogs .

Every night for dinner we have one vegetable dish, one dal, roti (for me), rice (for Ramesh), and ‘buttermilk’ made with yoghurt. There’s a...

Another one from my files -- I knew that this clipping would come in handy some day: I looked for the website shown in this ad, and fou...

So many deaths of this kind these days. I was sorting through a stack of old papers and found this poem, one of the earliest that I wrote, ...

Dress Shop, C. P. Ramaswamy Road