What are words worth?

Last month my young friend Chintan forwarded a short news item from a Kolkata newspaper, announcing the demise of one of the city's (and indeed the country's) most respected literary figures, Professor P Lal. There had been no mention of this in any of the other papers, and a couple of my friends in the publishing industry had not heard the news either. Today, a little over a month later, The Hindu's Literary Review carries a full page tribute, combining perspectives from Shashi Deshpande, Keki Daruwalla and Gopikrishnan Kottoor.  All three writers have similar recollections of Prof Lal, all three mention his generosity of spirit and his dedication to the art and craft of literary publishing. I've been thinking of writing something on this blog ever since Chintan sent me the news. Prof Lal helped me realise a long standing dream of having my own work published. He helped me get beyond the sense that my wish was a mere indulgence. After many months (years?) of ditheri...

If we count the milestones in our life by the years we pass, then last Sunday was, I guess, a marker of sorts. Two score and ten, a score short of Milton's defined life span for man. But why should one birthday, even if it is the beginning or end of a decade, be particularly noteworthy? That's one of those unnecessary questions, I guess, but having turned the half-century mark (and please note how it seems more significant once you attach the "c" word to it!) I suppose I must be granted the luxury of wondering. Phone calls, emails, the occasional actual paper-card that comes in the snail mail, handshakes at work and hugs at home (and sometimes vice versa), frantic messages the day after saying "OMG I forgot!" and (the best part) presents you said were not really important but were happy to unwrap anyway. Did I forget the sugar highs and the blind eye to blood glucose levels? What about the arthritic knee that is beginning to makes its presence felt every t...

If you haven't read Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar's thought provoking and hugely successful book, The Art of Choosing , then I would highly recommend it (if you're into non-fiction trendspotting books), Of course I speak only from the experience of having read a good review in nothing less than the New York Times and having watched a TED Talk. But the review, combined with an interview of the charming woman, made the book sound very promising...and soon enough, it seems to reached the front display in Indian bookstores as well. But this was not what I was looking for as I browsed my way through a Landmark store this afternoon. I was in search of the perfect gift for a friend who is currently into Indian writing in English.  No dearth of books in this genre, you would think, rightly, in fact a plethora of choices. What used to be a short dusty shelf of books by a handful of authors has now grown to an entire section in the bookstore, with women writers domin...

One of the advantages of being driven is that I have more time to read. Now, having earlier been torn between giving up control of the wheel and having a little more time to think, stare out the window and actually see what is going on instead of being disturbed by the aggressive hoardings that have colonised our skyline,  I find that the time gained has its uses. Significantly, I am catching up on my reading. This serves two purposes. One, instead of getting tense and irritable over what seems to me like reckless driving, I distract myself with a book or newspaper. Two, I am able to read uninterruptedly, and the time I have at my disposal is increasing by the day, as the Hyderabad traffic reaches new levels of congestion. I've taken to leaving a couple of books in the car--just in case--apart from carrying one in my bag. The one I carry in my bag is the more serious, long-haul book, while those left in the car tend to be the "dip into" variety or non-fiction that can b...

CP: outer circle Okay this is not the worst view, but take a careful look at the flooring and the scaffolding in the background. Tiles being replaced, pillars being rebuilt, roofing being refurbished...and this is the least of it. Most of CP is much worse. Drive on the roads, and more often than not you find yourself in a bottleneck because of construction on either side. Walk, and it's worse, you might fall into one of the several ditches (in Connaught Place you have to step over several, sometimes walking over precariously placed planks to cross a wide one). Three months to go and nowhere near complete. The news of the day is that the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi will witness a spectacular display of fireworks costing the exchequer some Rs 40 crore. A show up in the sky might distract some from the unfinished work on the roads! Having just returned from a trip to Delhi, I am left with a sense of disenchantment and deep worry. Is this the face we are to present to the worl...

The rapid proliferation of Western brand names on Indian streets is nothing new; it's been happening since the beginning of the "LPG" era (thanks to my mass comm students who taught me that acronym for liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation). Coca Cola, Pepsi, Levi's, etc. And more recently, Chevrolet, Volkswagen, and other such motorables. But this morning as I was driving to work I saw one that threw me just a little bit--the iconic motorcycle company, Harley-Davidson, has a showroom in (where else?) Banjara Hills! While one might say that the VW Beetle is as much a style and attitude product as the HD, the latter belongs to a culture that somehow feels a bit out of place in the rarefied corporate environs of main street Banjara Hills. Okay, accepted, the motorbikes perhaps got very bad rap based on mythologies created by Hollywood, of biker gangs and Hells Angels being the primary HD clientele, but that too is an image that is hard to wipe out of the imaginatio...

I’m just back from a wedding in the city of mandapams and katcheris, and of marriages made as a result of discussions over good strong decoction kaapi. I’m also just back from one of those weddings, this one of course not decided by the exchange of yellow and red dotted jadakams (horoscopes) but by the meeting of two young minds that had grown up together. The wedding is incidental to this post, however, which bears upon matters much more trivial. But the wedding provided the context, the backdrop, against which my determination to not be lured by the promoters of “youngistan” was sorely tested. You see, I’ve entered the “grey zone” in the past year or so, having decided not to give in to increasingly strident voices in advertising that urge one to “stay young” and buy into the cult of youth, that treats ageing as a pathology to be aggressively tackled and stayed at any cost. The cult of youth comes with a huge price tag, hung innocuously on off-the-shelf goods like anti-wrinkle c...

How does one measure the usefulness of anything? Does it lie in its quantum of influence--spatially, numerically, intellectually, materially? Does it lie in its ability to survive over time? Or (as some in this age would have it) in the number of mentions it generates on social media? An idea that was born just over 21 years ago is now in the process of being put to rest. Not quite given up on as an idea, but in its material form, designated "unsustainable". Teacher Plus was mooted in the second half of 1988, and given shape to in the first half of 1989, in the offices of Orient Longman Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad. The ELT team in the publishing house, of whom Lakshmi Rameshwar Rao (Buchamma), Usha Aroor and Rema Gnanadickam were a part, originated the idea of a professional magazine for school teachers that would serve as a forum for the sharing of teaching ideas and experiences, and perhaps motivate teachers to play a catalyzing role in reforming classroom practice. I was recru...

Such comfort one can take from striking items off a long list of to-dos. It gives you a keen sense of satisfaction, the feeling that you have been productive, that things have been accomplished, that you can get on with life having set it in some sort of order.... So on my refrigerator is a magnet-backed notepad and on my desk is a colorful post-it pad, and next to my telephone is a set of one-side used paper caught into a pad with a giant butterfly clip. And the assortment of pens to go along with these bits of stationery must be seen to be believed. Pencils ranging in length from an inch to 8, ballpoint pens in varying degrees of dryness, gel pens with their refills missing and caps thrown away, markers that don't mark, crayons waxed over with disuse, fountain pens that have stopped flowing many moons ago...so you get the picture! But let's set the tools aside for a moment and focus on the lists themselves. Long lists and short lists, today's must-dos and weekly goals, an...

I’ve just finished my second Ian McEwan book in a row, and my fifth overall. I’m sure this happens with many of us, that we find ourselves caught up with a writer we enjoy and whose work engages us in a deep, intimate way, and we are loath to leave. We immerse ourselves in book after book and just do not want to part company. The book I just finished is “Black Dogs” and the one just before was “Enduring Love”. For anyone who has read Ian McEwan, you would sense a certain comforting sameness across his writing—not a boring, tedious sameness, but a common thread of deeply felt humanity (and perhaps many writers have this) that is at once despairing and hopeful. There’s a recognition of a core of evil and ugliness that runs through all individuals, and it is in overcoming this or confronting it with the goodness that also runs through us that a story emerges. It’s also the specificity with which large-scale events affect each one of us, and changes our lives, forever. Take, for instan...

Thursday evening, 6 p.m. The work day is over for many of us, at least those for whom it who began in the morning. The bell rings. A slightly built man is at the door, two thick plastic folders under his arm and a cloth bag over his shoulder. "Census madam," he says, a bit hesitantly (because, I discover later, he expects to be chewed over by the irate inhabitants of this colony, as he has been warned). I invite him inside and ask if he wants a glass of water, seeing as it is really really hot, 42 degrees and no rain. "Later, madam. First, I need to ask some questions." He sits down on a chair in the fan-less verandah, refusing to come inside where there is a bit more air and the whiff of breeze from a cooler. A. Ramesh, the forty-ish schoolteacher who has come to do "census duty" asks me diligently about my antecedents, qualifications, and occupation, and then moves on to the head of the household and others. His hesitant manner slips a bit as he tells me...

On the old Bombay Highway, the road that snakes through Mehdipatnam and Rethi Bowli and whizzees past the shiny new DLF complex to lead to the University of Hyderabad after crossing a beautiful bougainvillea lined stretch, is a tiny cafe called "Time to Time", Held up in a traffic jam I find myself watching lives unfold outside its colourful signboard. A couple walks by, slowly, the girl with a college bag slung over one shoulder and the boy carrying a backpack, dawdling their way to college, perhaps, carrying excuses in their pockets. Another woman stands at the adjoining bus shelter carrying a shopping bag, next to her is an older man, greying and a tiredness visible in his sloping shoulders. He turns to her and takes the bag from her in an almost proprietary manner. She looks at him and smiles. The most poignant love stories are not the ones that are enacted on desert sands silhouetted against burning skies, or amidst warring families and blood feuds. They happen in prosai...

As we turned the corner off a little lane off another lane off a road everyone knows as "the East Maredpally Main Road", my friend Havovi remarked, "We think we know the city but we probably know less than five percent of it!" Most likely, much less, given the fact that is is growing both inward and outward every day. We arrived a few minutes later at the "Dalith Women's Home", an old age shelter for destitute women, run by Kamalamma, who retired from the Indian Railways and put her superannuation benefits into this project. The Home offers a space for women who find themselves without caregivers or support, some single and destitute, some abandoned by their families, and others who simply have no place to go. There are around 30 people living in this rather ramshackle semi-detached building which is itself on the edges of an area that has been forgotten by city developers. An old railway track runs just by it, providing a huge source of entertainmen...

A green-flagged gateway marks the entry to Paigah Tombs, a group of forgotten graves that lie in an oasis-like bubble off a major vehicular artery on the southeastern fringes of Hyderabad. Then, stepping through a veritable hole in the wall of untidy urban sprawl, we walk into space waiting to be discovered by the occasional tourist who draws her travel maps from memories left behind by others, now so easily archived on the world wide web. The intricacies of the delicate stuccoed walls shading and protecting the numerous sarcophagi are not immediately apparent, curtained as they are by several mango and neem trees that populate this irregular quadrangle, bounded by a mosque (with its own reflecting pool) on the west (predictably), an older, brown walled building (sheltering the oldest graves) on the south, and a dilapidated complex on the north that has been turned into dwellings for the caretaker family. The shaded pathway directs you inside, across marble steps where you leave your f...

Walking down the lanes of the old city of Hyderabad can be either a nightmare or an adventure, and of course one of the many variants and mixtures in between. If you live or work in Lad Bazaar or Patthergatti of course, it's no more than routine. A group of uncomplaining (actually, enthusiastic) students from the MA-Communication program at the University of Hyderabad agreed to join me on a walk through the old city, giving up a precious Sunday of sleeping in. The Heritage Walk conducted by Andhra Pradesh Tourism invites one to discover history in the routine, by unpacking for the unfamiliar walker, the layers of history that lie beneath the grimy walls of these crowded, dilapidated, yet vibrant marketplaces. Beginning at Charminar, the 16th century monument that has come to symbolise the city's heritage, the walk takes you through the lane known variously as "Lad Bazaar" (the market place of indulgence) or Chudi Bazaar (bangle market). The early morning commencement...

Having assigned the ten students in my feature writing class a short assignment, in which they were to write the first instalment of a column to be called "The personal is political", I could not stop my pen from picking itself up and joining them in the furious scratching on paper. This is what emerged.... Sitting in the classroom, the fan whirrs above my head, casting a rapidly rippling shadow over the lined book-page (does a moving object "cast" a shadow?), making my words seem like they are emerging from under the waters of a flowing river. How is the act of writing, this movement of thought from mind to page, a political act? What is the exercise and expression of power that it implies? Is the political resident inherently in the symbols we create, consciously and otherwise (for one might argue that there can be no true unconscious, everything one does is the sum of deliberations over time)? The fact that I use one turn of phrase rather than another--is that po...