What are words worth?

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...