Trying to do a better job of drawing faces -- from photographs, in my new gray-white paged sketchbook: (late) Kishore Kumar, one of the grea...

I am honored that the literary/arts blog/ezine Qarrtsiluni has accepted my poem Lost at Sea for its latest issue, Water. There is a recor...

Photo by R. Ragu The Admiralty House, one of Chennai's few remaining fine old buildings, is being demolished. From The Hindu : CHENNAI:...

Goodness gracious, it's my blog's birthday again. The fifth. Happy blogday to me. And thank you, those who still come around and ...

Jillu Madrasi told me about this YouTube video, about a man who has invented a better way to climb a coconut tree. Wonderfully simple, eff...

April is National Poetry Month, and every year Knopf sends me a poem a day during April. (Though it's a bit late, they'll send you ...

I just finished reading an article in the March 3 New Yorker, “Numbers Guy – Are our Brains Wired for Math,” about the work of Stanislas Deh...

I was wondering what to make for lunch today, and I had a sudden craving for one of my father's favorite foods: bread and gravy. He gre...

One of the stems cut down by the coconut tree man. Destined to replace this one , which broke away from its sheath.

Today the ingredients of the poultice were assembled: turmeric, moth balls, rock salt, Sam's Fortified Neem Powder. The tree man superv...

Our cook, Mary, is the in-charge for our three coconut trees. She tells the gardener when to cut the ripe coconuts down, and monitors their...

The very clever website of the city of Khaufpur -- a city which does not exist. Khaufpur is the setting for a novel which was reviewed in ...

I was looking for a picture of a bridegroom riding a horse, in the north Indian wedding style (what R calls a horse being ridden by a donkey...

I saw it on Wide Island , who/which in turn found it on Registan.net , a blog about Central Asia: a news item in the Paktribune on 19 Janu...

From an article by Louis Menand, on diaries, in the December New Yorker : ... If it doesn't contain a lot of dross, it's not a diary...

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...