The highway became the set for a ‘Dream Girl’ song: save the noble-hearted, shiny-tessellated Hema Malini, vigorous gusts of translucent fog guffawed from many hidden directions enveloping my windscreen. What was earlier the billowy contour of a truck segued into a muddle of a silhouette; taillights snarled like the Joker’s lips. Vast swathes of cerulean fields that meandered open on both sides till the horizon were suddenly draped in curtains of shifting grey. I veered dangerously close to the divider and my tyres scraped the zebra-striped concrete; as if on

Many of the heritage marvels we have today were ostentatious self-indulgences, sandstone and marble diktats rooted in personal tragedies – and victories – and the ensuing emotional upheaval, vanities and carnal excesses. Though not strangely but indeed rarely the climate, specifically the sweltering summers of the arid plains, has played edict to not just architecture but as an impetus to construction itself. Babur, the marauding Mughal from Kabul, used to bivouac at the Arram Bagh in Agra; personally designed for pernoctation. The weather-harried Mughal was happiest at the subterranean hamams

A murder and a rape within the span of a week are not that random when the victims of both incidents are from the Northeast. Denying there is racial discrimination in Delhi would be a monolithic bluff like calling the Commonwealth Games a ‘grand success’. On the upside citing deep-rooted hatred, fear and insecurities as reasons would be a bigger bluff – with farther-reaching ramifications – like justifying the Yamuna landfill with a bus depot. There are no dearth of help centres, support groups, university departments and even a dedicated

Romance gets precedence over credence in populist writing. And travel writing is one big pleaser – aiming to pull, pique and prod. Many of the bubbles are what you ‘buy in’ to when you just pass through, fated to burst if you look around a little longer and engage deeper with the locals. So those – is there a TRP for travelogues? – of who throve on populating the Bhangarh Fort with bhoots should script for the Ramsays. Was that pen shaky when you took down those haunting tales? Or