I came across this photograph yesterday (click for a larger view). The elderly man in the centre, wearing a white turban, is R's great-...

We discovered another coffee place today -- Coffee World on LB Road, next to the flyover, in Adyar. It is pleasant, but its gigantic window...

Photograph by Ramesh Gandhi We recently came back from spending a week in Hyderabad. We hardly got out, but did manage to see Golconda Fort...

under the fire star was four years old yesterday. Appropriately, I missed it.... Just to mention a couple of other blogs I've encounter...

Abida Parveen , a Sufi singer from Pakistan, has a big, powerful voice. Because of this voice, and the passion with which she sings, and al...

I recently finished reading Vinod Joseph's first novel, Hitchhiker , published by Books for Change, Bangalore. Its protagonist is Ebene...

I was looking for a transliteration of an Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and found it; but then I found this also, and it was amazingly beaut...

The sand under our feet - me and my friend P - as we walked toward the shore temple. Fishing boats drawn up on the beach. One or two tradi...

I was feeling aimless, discontented. I was babbling. I said, "I need a designer. I need a personal trainer. I need a guru. I need ...

[my remarks] "out of proportion blow kiya hai " Hema Malini said this, trying damage control after saying that North Indians who h...

Here's something different: an MGR fan-blog . MGR, an extremely popular filmstar and then politician, died on Christmas Eve, 1987. I f...

We flew from Chennai to Coimbatore. Most of Tamil Nadu is red and flat; then giant rocks or very small mountains rise suddenly from the pla...

burnblue.com sketchbook : From November 15, 2004 to June 8, 2005 I travelled through many countries, read 34 books, got sick 3 times, got ro...

My brother-in-law sent us an email, purporting to have been written by a doctor in Mumbai - one of those emails which gets forwarded from on...

It’s All Soul’s Day today – for Roman Catholics, at least; not for my cook, Mary, who’s evangelical. I drove past the Quibble Island Cemete...

Getting ready for NaNoWriMo , I have gleaned a couple of references to free programs / gizmos for writers. There are lots more, which you c...

A terrific thunderstorm last night. I saw a bright flash, as if a light bulb had exploded, and glass flying and clinking on the floor. A w...

I’ve been so down about the image-less state of this blog – and by extension, the fragility and futility of the world, etc. etc., that I was...

Back in March I wrote about how we had applied a medicinal poultice to the crowns of our three coconut trees, because insects were spoiling...