What are words worth?

Driving in any large city these days is fraught--with frustration due to delays in driving, with potholed and beaten up roads, with the sight of exclusions of all kinds and the spectacle of development gone crazy. In Hyderabad, driving west is particularly fraught. That's where the city is bursting forward...with promise for some and pressure for others. Of course there is promise that often creates pressure even for those who ostensibly benefit from it--the building of new roads, the breaking of small mountains to make way for traffic helps us get to work somewhat faster and sets up expectations of increased efficiency and the submission of even more time to the growth machine. Maybe all this sounds like so much we hear all the time. What do we do once we (or some larger force we have unwittingly set in motion) are on a certain path? How do we stop to take stock when stopping implies we might have to see, understand, and take into account the real meaning of this high-speed jou...

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...

Travelling back from the new city to the not-so-new-yet-not-quite-branded-old at the hour when some buildings glitter and others take on a cold, dank hue, I am offered unaccustomed views into the life of this predatory, leaching, leaking metropolis that my daytime commute obscures. If that is a sentence too full of qualifiers, well, sorry, that’s the nature of urban habitation these days. Or perhaps habitation anywhere on this planet. Night has its unexpectedly revealing ways. It wakes you, when you least expect to be woken, and presents you with fears that you never knew existed. It can nudge you with a seductive brush into confusing dreams with reality. And it can render transparent the sheen (and the dust) that the day layers over the lives of others. So it is that one evening, late out of work and wishing to beat the roadway traffic I am persuaded by a kindly colleague to take the train that passes for rapid transit. It takes the back route that ploughs through the underb...

This morning I set off on my usual morning walk, at the quiet and beautifully cloudy hour of 6 a.m. and took my usual route, along a street I have walked on many times before, at different times of the day. Listening to one of my favourite podcast series, I must have had a silly smile on my face as I walked past a tight group of three dogs sitting (in what seemed to be a peaceable manner) in just off the road in a space that would have normally counted as a sidewalk. Quite mindful of the proverbial advice to let sleeping dogs lie I made sure to give them a wide berth as I walked past, thinking to myself that the large white female in the middle looked like she was happily pregnant. All of a sudden, the female dog began barking loudly and rushed at me, and before I knew what was happening, she clamped her jaw on my shin even as one of her two companions ran ahead barking and lunging at me from the front. I managed to shake her off and walk away quickly and fortunately they hung back, c...

I don't often go out late at night. And it's been years since I walked on Tank Bund, our local promenade, at any time of day or night. So last night, thanks to a couple of feisty and committed young women, I did both. Hyderabad's Midnight March, called to reinforce the demands for safer public spaces and a change in societal attitudes toward gender and gender-based violence, was by any account a huge success. There were feminists old, young, and in-between, of all genders; mothers with young children in tow and fathers with toddlers on their shoulders; people speaking, singing and shouting slogans in Hindi, Telugu and English; those who fit the misused label of middle class, and many who might not. Things were organized without being restrictively disciplined, there was space for conversation and silence, and above all, there was energy. I ran into many old friends and caught sight of many more recent acquaintances, including a number of young people who had passed throu...

After months of wanting to get out there on a Sunday morning and scrounge around the street bazaar for more books to stuff into my already bursting-at-the-margins shelves, we finally made it! Three regulars and one newcomer from our three-month old Book Club met on a Sunday morning, bright and early (well...tennish) near St George's Grammar School (remember those grey school tunics?) and set off to stare at the books on the footpath. The first few displays we came across, just past the Taj Mahal hotel (we could already smell the dosas we had promised ourselves), were not very inspiring, despite snazzy titles and lurid pictures of women in sixties' hairdos on the cover. One title in particular caught my eye: "The curse of the singles table: A true story of 1001 nights without sex" by Suzanne Schlossberg. Intriguing, that, and perhaps nothing like Sheherezade's tales spanning a similar period! Gouri was the first to spot something she liked, and before we knew it...

Walking down the middle circle of Connaught Place, New Delhi, one does not expect to run into celebrities--it's sort of the back alley to the corporate world, lined with rear entrances to offices and the occasional restaurant kitchen that serves the capital's circular centre. We were on our way to the bus stop after a long day's work, in a rush to reach Jantar Mantar before the 5:45 bus to RK Puram. Approaching us was this tall, slim, black-clad figure...walking barefoot, and instantly recognizable behind his dark glasses. Like the starry-eyed twenty-somethings we were, we stopped him and instantly whipped out any paper we had and demanded an autograph. He stopped, smiled pleasantly, and wished us in his soft Hindustani, and signed. While we stood there gawking and overcome that we had had an exclusive encounter with the country's most celebrated artist in this unlikeliest of places, and away from gheraoing crowds. I have no idea where that signed notepad went--perha...

This morning my friend and colleague Sushma texted me to say she would be coming in late to the office. Given that we all deal with such things as children's exams, admissions, dropping them off some place and picking them up at another, I did not think much of it, and did not ask why. But when she did come in, with a somewhat harassed expression, we just had to sit down and listen to why. The corridor outside her house, a green space of potted plants and a bird's nest, a sort of oasis in her urban high-rise, had been totally trashed by rampaging monkeys! Thinking the abundant greenery housed more than just pretty leaves, a gang of four hefty monkeys tore through the vines, pulled down cables that interfered with their search, and finally broke some pots in anger, not having found any fruit or other comestibles. When they finally ran away, Sushma and her husband were faced with a disaster coloured in terracotta and spotted green--bits of broken pots, scattered mud, leaves an...

The trees along the road, overlooking people's compound walls, peeping over the crumbling walls of historic sites, and of course, the view from my balcony...all have together given me some great moments the past few weeks. And so the Haiku emerges, distracting me, of course, from the traffic, but also bringing a smile to my lips as I navigate the rushing hours of the day.  The very amateurish photos are grabbed by me as I rush through the day.  Please read this as a work in progress...as new images and words come together, they will find their way here. And I must mention the debt of gratitude I owe my friend Sadhana, whose enthusiasm for the wonders of nature is infectious!  26/3 Quotidian joys: the purple jacaranda against the blue sky 27/3 Copper pods burst into flame, blazing a bold yellow along the highway 30/3 Silver oaks witness Traffic’s mad, rude rowdy rush To distant nowheres 1/4 The rain trees' branches  spread their generous arms like waiting grandf...

Anyone who has driven in Hyderabad, or has been a participant of some kind in what passes for traffic here, will empathise with the daily frustrations of dealing with bad road etiquette, the total absence of lane consciousness, the aggressiveness of large and small vehicles, and the absolute belief that one's schedule and need to reach a destination supersedes every other person's.  Until recently, I was able to block out the madness by losing myself in a book, safe in the back seat, while my driver battled the daily cruelties of the city's streets. About a month ago, my driver decided to move to greener pastures (and possibly, a more interesting route to navigate each day) so I was back behind the steering wheel and had to leave my set of unread novels in the back, so I could concentrate on the road ahead (not that I had at any point planned to bring my reading to rest on the dashboard). I face a fairly long drive each morning. Twenty six kilometers each way, through the...