What are words worth?

Last year when I met a dear school mate after close to three decades, she remarked that just before she reached the café of our assignment, she encountered two instances that seemed to strongly resonate—in a prescient way—with our long association. “I was browsing the CD rack at the book store next door, and I spotted a collection of Tamil songs!” This was surprising why? Because this was a tiny store in the preppy part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I am one of the few Tamil-speaking friends. “And then a little while later my eye fell on this mathematics book, in the popular non-fiction section.” The reason for remarking on this? My father was a mathematics professor, and this was a subject she had always connected with me (although I have little to do with it and even less affinity for it!). “Everything seemed to be telling me I was going to meet you!” … We all get these earworm infestations from time to time, right? A song worms its way into our head and refuses to f...

Call it the market, call it the Hallmark effect, but there's no denying that every year around this time something gets into the air. No amount of cynicism--or realism--has been able to take away that sense of specialness brought on by images of snow-laden fir trees and green-and-red ribbons and gingerbread and rich plum cake. No matter that I live in a climate where there is neither snow nor fir tree and nicely laced eggnog is hard to come by. And no matter what my postcolonial consciousness knows about the constructed nature of history and the mediated nature of contemporary culture. Come December, the strains of The Nutcracker and Jim Reeves' Christmas carols courtesy YouTube mingle in my home with the evening telecasts of the Marghazhi kutcheris  from Chennai. It's been a few years since we pulled down our little artificial tree and the handmade ornaments made when the kids were in preschool and kindergarten, sit with it in the loft, packed away in tissue paper, al...

I woke this morning filled with a sense of un-rightness. My alarm had gone off, as it has been obsessively programmed to do, at 5:15 a.m., and, by some lapse of habit, I had hit the snooze button and fallen back to sleep, to awake at the distinctly un-virtuous hour of 7! The sun was already pretty high over the horizon, my husband had done the laundry (line-drying and all), my daughter had made the coffee (authentic South-Indian filter) and left for her practice session, and I…, well I had let a good part of the morning slip-slide away (soundtrack: S&;G song here )! And the un-rightness also stemmed from this persistent sense that I had “stuff to do”, and that time was running out. But when I think about it, I realize that it’s a sense that dogs me pretty much all the time. I suspect it is a burden that pretty much all professionals carry unless you are in one of those fields where it is literally impossible to carry your work home or in your head—such as a bricklayer or...

It is the morning after several nights in a row. Nine nights, to be precise. The gods are carefully divested of their crowns and garlands, their long black tresses tied back with wispy cotton threads, packed into recycled plastic bags and put away in the big black trunk that holds the history of inter-continental crossings and multiple house-movings. The living room reclaims its position as marginal to the life of the household--so maybe it is more correctly named the "(with)drawing room" (we don't really live there, do we?)--after having served these ten days as a site of communing with friends and family from a variety of circles, many of whom we see only once or twice a year. But there's a temporary void beneath the window where the steps stood, making space for the descent of the gods from the storage area off our terrace to the level of our everyday. It will take a couple of days before the mundane reasserts itself and the memory of green and blue-tinged bodie...

Sanjeevaiah Park, Secunderabad When I was in the ninth grade, I won the second prize in a short story writing competition. I fashioned my story in the realist style of R K Narayan combined with the cinematic sensibility of Shyam Benegal who had just punctured our urban development myth with the explosive Ankur , and its images of a persistent feudalism and class oppression. Perhaps it was telling that the first place went to a sweet, hopeful story about a lost-and-found pet and my own somewhat cynical narrative about a young woman and her alcoholic husband was an uncomfortable second. Or maybe the good nuns of St Ann's Convent thought I was writing a tad above my station--as a 14-year-old. My fiction unfolded on Independence Day--India's 17th--and its underlying point was that we were a long way from having achieved freedom for all. Granted, it was an unsophisticated, somewhat naive treatment of the kind of plot that is not uncommon in both commercial and literary fictio...