All the media everywhere seem to be trumpeting the rise of India. And it is something to experience. The poor seem to be as poor as before...

A lovely poem by Charles Simic, from the New Yorker: To Boredom I'm the child of your rainy Sundays. I watched time crawl Over the ceili...

Indians are obsessed with getting into the Guiness Book of World Records. They do the most absurd things to achieve this, and they succed. ...

a Hindi/Urdu word for beautiful girl ( hasina ) rhymes with that for perspiration ( pasina ). Songwriters never used to take advantage of t...

Saw Rajat Kapoor's film Mixed Doubles on TV last night. I cracked up over this Hinglish line: Get out ho jao ! I was driving in Adyar t...

photograph by Ramesh Gandhi

Things have changed so much in the last ten years that I feel like a Neanderthal sometimes, explaining to wide-eyed young things about impor...

The New York Times has an amusing (true) article about Indian traffic: Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants There's an accompanying sli...

Excellent NYT piece: Ghosts That Haunt Pakistan

The New York Times has an article on what it calls a neti pot - what you use to irrigate your nose. It's certainly not called a neti p...

William Dalrymple, travel writer, historian and sharp observer of South Asia, has written an excellent piece on Benazir Bhutto for the Guard...

I just read a terrific article by a woman who studied bharatanatyam at Kalakshetra in the seventies -- as I did: Sleeping With Movie Stars ...

This is hilarious -- it's a TV ad for the new Indian Cricket League, for the Chennai team. It's a spoof on the superpowers of Tamil...

Last night I went into the kitchen. As I turned on the light a big bandicoot came out from under a counter and appeared to be charging at m...

Eating/admiring cape gooseberries ('geuzbrees'). Orange/green/yellow gleaming spheres enclosed in veined onionskin paper. Sweet-sou...

There's an unbelievable op-ed piece in the NYT today: Pakistan's Collapse Our Problem . It seems to me to be delusional in the ext...

I just learned from Blogocentricity that Sawariya (a new Hindi movie, which has had poorish reviews) means 'Are you dying?' in coll...

Hindi is riddled with pair-words (there's probably a more technical word for them). I learned a new one last night, because there's...