What are words worth?

Now that sounds like I am going into some deep philosophical ruminations on the meaning and consequences of that…what shall we call it… “quality”. But my intention here is somewhat more pedestrian. Personal. Born of this curiosity about something I experience (or some would prefer to say am “victim of”) time and again. Take the most recent case of attempted hoodwinking. I’ve been buying milk from the same person for several years now. For the past year the milk has been delivered by this young boy, maybe around 14 or 15, who comes whizzing in on his bicycle every morning and, once a month, he stops a little longer to give me the bill and collect the payment. Usually, I just take the bill, look at the amount, and pay him. I’ve never checked the bill or scrutinized it closely. This month, my daughter happened to receive the bill and she found that the numbers didn’t quite add up. It was clear that the total had been overwritten to make it a full one thousand over the actual sum. ...

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...

Okay, so I'm still a tourist here in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not UK). Or maybe we all are, or should be, at some level. If this means walking about with a sense of wonder, with a willingness to risk direct experience rather than busily building bubbles around ourselves, then it's a good way to be. It means never allowing the familiar to become boring; it means seeing things from new angles each time, allowing different shafts of light to illuminate a well-known object so that new angles, new curves, new hollows and depths, are revealed. The objects in my current environment are far from having acquired the familiarity of home. And I suspect I will leave at that point when they begin to settle into lines that are strange no longer. Practically every day, I run into things that delight, intrigue, and make me stop--sometimes to look more closely, or to ask questions about, or to simply watch and take it all in. The lunch hour on the margins of Harvard Yard on Shabbat eve ...

It's a weekend, and so the burden to think and write academically is off--or is it? Some might say the very act of writing is academic; it involves a three-step (at least) translation, from thought to word to type, mixed up with processes of selection, analysis and synthesis, creating or inviting meaning by placing certain sounds, pauses and images in specific order. No matter. Here I am, on a Sunday morning, looking out from my small rectangular windows on to a quiet Somerville street. Cars wait attentively in driveways, while cellphone-toting walkers are being energetic in activewear, and the stone-walled church at the end of the street waits for the faithful to break their weekend fast to seek prayer and peace. Now I hear the strains of the choir waft down my way: a pleasant opening to the day. I have cleaned up my small apartment, done my morning stretches, listened to the news on public television, had a granola cereal breakfast, and feel virtuously productive, having e...

I open the cupboard and stare into its messy fullness, wondering where to start. I reluctantly take out a bunch of papers and begin rifling through them. A keychain falls out, begging to make the transition to the other side of possession, where it can rest peacefully among other trash. It is asking me to be trashed. I pick it up, my hand makes the short arc to the bin and then stops. Wasn't this the key ring I used to carry my first dorm room key? All of thirty two years ago? I pull my hand back and open my palm to stare at it and the images come rushing back. "Maa, the milk is boiling over!" Have to stem the memories and pay attention to boring details such as scorched burners and spilt milk. Ten minutes later I'm back and the keychain, fortunately, gets thrown where it belongs. But I find a picture frame with some stars pasted on it. No picture, but that's no matter, I know what used to go there. My daughter's kindergarten photograph, after she made th...

Nothing sets off the fantasy of literary creation like a blank notebook. The fancier, the better. I have my own set of unrealised fantasies unwritten in the pages of a number of beautifully inspirational notebooks. Pages that are smooth, textured, handmade, machine-pressed, ruled, plain, white or coloured. I'm one of those who cannot pass by a Moleskine display without feeling an acquisitive twinge. Just as some people collect shoes and handbags, I collect notebooks. This weekend, I spent some time cleaning out my shelves and was amazed at the number that emerged, some entirely blank and others with a few pages used. In sum, they seemed to represent a whole lot of aspiration and very little work. The aesthetic of the bound empty pages seems to work in a particular way to drive my imagination--and so I spend a good few minutes looking at the inviting blankness, thinking of how they will look in a few months, filled with violet (or black, or blue) ink. I imagine that all those...

When I opened this blank page I intended to write something quite different. I had bounced between windows and chased hyperlinks trying to wrap my head around the issues of the day. Battling patriarchy and the right to take offense, corruption in politics and everyday life, parochialism in national awards, our dismal rating on the human development indicators, and so much else. How does one make sense of anything? Easier, so much easier, to burrow inside a chosen fictional world and take flight with one (not-too-intense) fantasy or another. But again, that's not what I am writing about. I wanted to wonder, instead, about the layered nature of our moments. For instance. I sit here at my laptop which sits on a large rosewood desk covered in kalamkari fabric which I know needs to be pulled off and washed; my mind is half directing my fingers on the keyboard but they seem to have a life of their own; the other half (quarter? tenth?) is taking in the constant sound of the television ...

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...

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...

It's close to midnight on the second full day of my winter vacation--or what is supposed to be one. I find that I am sitting here at my laptop catching up on email, listening to rough cuts of the upcoming shows on Bol Hyderabad (the campus community radio station of the University of Hyderabad), reading student work that needs to be commented upon, preparing for a series of workshops I have committed to... in short, it doesn't look like a promising beginning for a vacation! And I thought University life was going to be a picnic compared to the corporate or NGO sectors! Whatever happened to the life of quiet reflection peppered with the occasional ruminative lecture that academics are supposed to be privileged to have? When I switched jobs last year, I thought I was entering a space where there would be time for some amount of purposeless reading, for writing (things other than reports and promotional materials), and for stimulating intellectual debate (unlike the heated argum...

It's a quarter past five and I walk sleepily into the kitchen, my hand reaches for the medium-sized coffee filter and I not-so-precisely measure five heaping spoons of fresh grounds into it and with the other half of my brain pull out the milk to boil. I put away last night's clean and dry dishes as silently as possible, knowing the early morning stillness magnifies the sound of a tinkling spoon into something resembling cannon fire in the slumbering mind of the still-sleeping household. I watch the milk first slowly and then rapidly rise to a boil thinking of Kanthiamma, my maternal grandmother, tell me it's a good sign if the milk boils over. (Well it's done that several times over and I haven't noticed any unusual good luck coming my way.) I make my coffee and as I lift the tumbler to my lips I wonder whether it will be a "perfect coffee day". My friend Mahrookh visits my wandering mind at that moment, saying in her inimitable Tamil imitation "sari...

Mornings demand multitasking. For most of us, whether we work at home or elsewhere, it's a time when we are rushing to open the door to ten different service providers from the milkman to the newspaperwallah to the trash collector to the next-door neighbour asking for a cup of sugar, while the phone rings to give you the latest on whether the bandh will affect your organization or your child's school or not,  and the other phone, of the mobile variety, beeps insistently with messages ranging from bill alerts to not-to-miss sale alerts. Breathless already? Well that's the reality most of us whizz through every morning--we just don't stop long enough to make that list! When the morning is complicated by a television turned on and tuned into Oscar fever, things don't get helped much. The milk boils over while you are watching Jake Gyllenhall smile at Amy Adams or trying to not watch Aish and Abhishek sound trite and plastic. The toast burns in the toaster that doesn...

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...