What are words worth?

The past week has been one of anger, hopelessness, disgust, anxiety, and more anger. Those of us (and that's many of us) who have been following the events (and non-events) in the aftermath of the rape in Delhi probably have gone through all these emotions and many more along the same continuum. There are commentaries, questions and observations across media, from the strident campaigns on Times Now and CNN-IBN to the columns in The Hindu and on Kafila . Women and young men in Delhi and elsewhere talk about this over coffee and express their outrage on twitter and facebook. A lethargic and slow acting government stoked the anger by not responding soon enough or with enough conviction and determination. Shutting down metro stations and issuing media advisories about "restrained" coverage. Is restraint possible in such situations? Restraint in action perhaps but certainly not in expression of outrage. And then we all carry our fears and hopes into the night and wonder w...

Before one decides to become a parent, I think one should stop and read a set of caveats--sort of like a "Buyer Beware" checklist. When it comes to starting a family, most people articulate it in terms of "having a baby" rather than "becoming a parent". The first brings with it images of a gurgling infant, blowing bubbles and sleeping quietly in a crib attired in frilly clothing, combined with the sense of touch-tender skin and baby-powder smells, all against a soft-focus backdrop in mysteriously appropriate pastel shades. The second--and most of us rarely pause to consider this before we jump into the decision--brings to mind sleepless nights, smelly diapers and a mound of washing,  school choices and adolescent trauma, with career and social life lurking somewhere in the distant background. No soft focus here. The lights are either harsh or throw cold, dark shadows. Don't get me wrong. I've (clearing of throat here) loved the experience, despi...

I'm just back from a gastronomic experience--I threw the challenge of "vegetarian" at my Korean hosts and they came up trumps! In fact, it would have been a vegan delight--I only wish I had a better memory for the names of all the dishes they served. "Authentic Korean" to tell you the truth, aroused a little trepidation. I set out expecting to have nothing more than some tofu and greens and maybe some rice (after verifying that it was not cooked in a meat broth) with the inevitable khimchi of which I am told there are hundreds of varieties. They ushered the few vegetarians in the group to a table at the end of the long room, where we sat crosslegged and were served in the customary style by long-skirted Korean hostesses. After a generous pot of rice wine (which must be vigorously stirred before it is ladled out into earthen bowls) that apparently is more potent than it looks or tastes. The jolly group of Slavs to our left got jollier as the evening wore o...

We've all experienced the feeling. You're at a point when you think there is just no hope for us Indians; there is just too much poverty, too big a social and economic gap between sections of society, and just too little political commitment to set things right. There are too many cars on the road, too little public transport, too many potholes on the roads and too few spaces that allow safe transit for pedestrians. The lines are too long, people push too hard. Competition everywhere, from the classroom to the ticket counter at the railway station. The big picture is just too hard to take. And so we retreat to our little islands, in front of our television screens and computer monitors, into the even tinier interfaces of our mobile devices, playing games and being social in new and different ways. Pull back, long shot, no getting away from it, we still need to negotiate the big bad world and all the people in it. So we set out each morning convinced that we're going to e...

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai...

Ever since I got back from a Manthan lecture and discussion led by Arun Shourie I’ve been wondering about the nature of participation in such events: they are meant to make us think, open up lines of discussion and explore ideas in a way that they are laid bare, making visible the spaces and interconnections between them and the attitudes they lie/build upon. Mr Shourie, who, I must confess, was one of the heroes of my early journalistic dreams. His front pagers in the Indian Express of the immediate post-Emergency era fuelled my own ambitions and made me feel really proud to be part of a tribe that seemingly was out to catapult the country into a new era of honesty, transparency and fair and clean governance. I was much younger then and could be forgiven for my simple and uncomplicated faith in the power of the press. Much water has passed under the many bridges that make up our fragile polity and I have revised my ideas somewhat, although I try to keep my ideals burnis...

It's one of those things that looms in your mind as you approach the city. If you've grown up reading Cold War spy novels it figures larger than life, mystery on either side and danger in the middle. You recall stories of people building tunnels and finding ways across No Man's Land hiding in improbable ways. And then you see the ghost of a wall on a bright summer day, nothing more than a double row of dark bricks that make a discontinuous line along the middle of a wide Linden-lined avenue. Achala and I go hunting for Checkpoint Charlie, deciding to walk the 5 miles there instead of taking the faster-but-to-our-tourist-minds-more-complicated subway route. Despite faithfully following a map, we fail to make a couple of turns and end up a couple of miles off, and too tired to retrace our steps. We meet a couple who respond to our English with a Nordic smile and point to their watches to indicate it would take us an hour at least to get there. So we leave it for another da...

We had just been let off by the taxi at the corner of the block in the Prezelauer district of Berlin where my friend Elfriede lives. Dragging our 20-kilo loads along, my daughter and I trudge along the street toward her house. I have my eyes on the sidewalk and almost bump into a tree trunk—and look up to find it’s not. In the roughly carved recesses of what was once a tree, are bookshelves, the books inside protected by curved glass that could be opened with a push. No locks and no latches. The books look well thumbed and put there by caring hands, not just discarded after a quick read. Later, Elfriede explains it to us. People in the neighbourhood drop off books they have read and would like to share.   Others pick them up, or just leaf through them while sitting at the café next door, sometimes leaving another book in exchange.   Charming idea. A lovely woman I meet at dinner later in the week tells me that if she finishes a book while she’s...

I tuned into NPR's Fresh Air this morning (do you 'tune in' on the internet?) and looked to the list of stories on the right panel to find one I had not listened to earlier--an interview with Maurice Sendak on the occasion of the publication of Bumble Ardy. It was a great interview, conducted graciously as always by Terry Gross of Fresh Air. The interview itself made me think about a variety of things....the artistic imagination, the world of the child, death, relationships, fear and the whole host of things we all deal with as human beings. After listening to the interview, I went back to the home page and noticed something I had missed earlier--a special Fresh Air show dedicated to Sendak, on his death, just yesterday (May 8). The show features excerpts from several interviews with the children's author and illustrator, and reminiscences by other writers and journalists. From then on it was a short journey to discover the several other tributes paid in newspapers ac...

When you visit a place that has occupied your imagination in different ways, your experience is continually overlaid by the made-up pictures that you hold in your head, and you can't get away from a feeling of second sight. Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Garden introduced me to Colombo through an evocative and heart-breaking story, its events and people set in a lovingly described landscape that took me through the streets of the city and the roads of the countryside in ways my physical travels will perhaps never surpass. So my all-too-brief visit to this city was spent looking around the corner for places I had already been to in the novel. Other stories of course have also contributed to my imagined geography in less pleasant ways: news reports of the 26 years of conflict, the Channel 4 documentary that gave the term Killing Fields a different temporal and spatial setting, the UNHRC petition against Sri Lanka, Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and so much else. And then of c...

There's a half read book in the seat pocket in my car: Andra Levy's "Long Song". There's a volume by Tehmina Aman gathering dust next to the bed. And there's a third, dust-jacket-covered, few-times-opened copy of Philip Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" on my desk. All this quite apart from the many bought-and-waiting-to-be-read books on the shelves, pushed further back each time I go to the bookstore and emerge defeated, two more under my arm. I'm sure many of us have experienced this space between stories, the hiatus between books. You finish one, are overwhelmed by the craft of the writer and the sweep of the story, and wallow in the imagination of a brilliant writer, wondering if it will be surpassed, and knowing full well it will. There are many others awaiting your attention but you feel reluctant to break this spell, to enter into yet another world that has been painstakingly built for your occupation. Weeks go by and you...