've been trying to paint a watercolour from a photo I took in Calcutta, of a broken brick wall with a pipal tree growing on top of and t...

When my mother-in-law, who was called Ba ('mother'), died, I wrote a series of poems about it. I've posted two of them earlier:...

Someone whom we knew died yesterday night. He was elderly, had been ailing in mind and body for some time, and died quietly in his sleep; s...

Yesterday: so much wind that crows were blown all over the sky - while down below we played badminton like fools, chasing the shuttle aroun...

A really interesting Dutch site: I Travel in Your Head ´Ik reis in jouw hoofd´ - I travel in your head - visual correspondent in Morocco ...

Here's another Tamil poem from the Sangam Period (100 BC - AD 250), from A. K. Ramanujan’s Poems of Love and War : What Her Girl Friend...

We watched the DVD of a recent Hindi film, Main Hoon Na . (The English title, which is close enough, is “I’m Here Now.”) The film was adve...

Thanks to Anand, who sent me the link for Seminar magazine. Its April 2004 issue was devoted to Changing Chennai . (I've met half of ...

In India, magicians look like this: P. C. Sorcar Jr. , an eighth-generation magician, son of P. C. Sorcar Jadugar ('magician...

I’ve been walking in the garden and picking things up from the ground. The weather is lovely: breezy and not too warm – the best weather t...

A good piece by Suketu Mehta in the New York Times Magazine, about why a large chunk of the world loves Bollywood movies: Bollywood Confide...

The cheap clay parrot that I bought almost 20 years ago on a footpath in Delhi, I think, broke yesterday. Its head had an inquiring tilt th...

I guess I'm back. It's easy not to be back, but it's hard to quit, too. I value too much being forced to pay attention, to wri...

... I just wanted to clear the decks before November 1, the beginning of National Novel-Writing Month . (I tried it last year, got a third ...

I have poked my head up just for a moment, a hibernating animal disturbed by a dream, to mention a few things that have occurred since my la...

I just don't seem to have much time to come out and play here. I'm going to take some time off. Thanks very much for coming. If y...

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...