This week's Poetry Thursday prompt is rivers. This is the last in a series of poems I wrote after my mother-in-law died. Ba on the Gan...

I've been making books lately, using a good new book-making book . These two have covers made of cut-down photographs by R . The photo...

India Without the Slogans - the back page essay in the latest Time magazine's Asia edition. A well-stated reaction to some of the hype...

Chennai is in the grip of a real estate frenzy. Last week I accompanied a friend who is looking for an apartment, to try to get an idea wha...

Kathakali dancer getting into costume, Madras, 1978

The Poetry Thursday prompt this week is for a humorous poem, or a poem which tells a joke. NOTE 1: The poem starts off with one of my favo...

The heat is so great now -- 105 or 106 F every day -- that whenever I open a drawer, hot air pours from it, like the breath of something liv...

I've been fooling around with Photoshop. I had a photograph of a bulldozer road roller which I had taken in Coonoor a couple of years ...

Some time back I wrote a post about a great TV ad from 1996, which I remembered very fondly. It urged people to drink milk. I had copied t...

When I hear the Tamil word for honey - then (rhymes with lane) – it feels very old, because it's a one-syllable word in a polysyllabic ...

from Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyakara's "Treasury" , translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls 199 Above the fledgling of the wild goos...

Links first: From the Washington Post : Finally, Our Chance To Savor India's Favored Fruit ... "This is mango's moment. For t...

After Lunch (Mahabalipuram) photograph by Ramesh Gandhi

You know those light brown spiders whose legs grow to about the circumference of a saucer, and who, because they like moisture, lurk in bath...

The New York Times has a piece that takes off from the infamous kisses which Richard Gere bestowed on the cheek of Shilpa Shetty on stage i...

Once again we went for coffee, and looked at the LUXURY ROOMS AVAILABLE sign that I had blogged about here . I pointed the sign out to R as...

Agni Nakshatram ("Fire Star"), an astrological period after which this blog was named, is traditionally the hottest period of the ...

Poetry Thursday inspired me again: In the Dream You bent over me smiling I in my white cotton dress (though really you were someone else). ...

I made this pen-and-wash painting of R's great-grandfather and two of his descendants, from the photograph I had posted below. I have i...

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-...