Surely God Himself made Kerala. And this is not because we call Kerala ‘God’s own country’ but the place is really great to look at. More so when it rains. And boy does it rain! When god made Kerala, He had his kicks too. Can’t blame Him as any kind of mesmerising beauty gets boring after a while. So He decided to people it with a complicated lot. An agitated army of a really intelligent bunch frustrated on many fronts – political, economic, religious, sexual. I say this for I

The ‘it’ factor. This is what makes a superstar stand out from the rest of us. Repeated attempts by the learned ones haven’t resulted in its decoding – yet. If the at first theoretically postulated God Particle was found to actually exist, then some day the ‘it’ factor too will be revealed to inhabit probably the genes or will be attributed to a conditioning of an impressionable hypothalamus. Till then the attributes bandied about will be as flattering as it will be flummoxing, will be contradicting as it will be

The world knows Ani Choying Drolma as ‘the singing nun’. But Ani (honorific for ‘nun’) was at first an accidental nun. “I did not join the monastery out of any divine calling,” she says with all the nonchalance of an everyday fact. “My father used to abuse me physically and I joined the Nagi Gompa Monastery as it was the next best option to running away.” We were sitting in the airy living room of her comfortable, rufous-coloured multi-storey house in the tarred mesa on the predominantly Buddhist outskirts of