Thrissur Pooram and jumbo love
Will he? Won’t he? Festivals remain popular and stay relevant when they don’t try too hard to reinvent themselves as something else, say, a youthquake. Nothing much has changed in the over two centuries of the Thrissur Pooram: a throbbing, vibrant face-off between two ancient temples, Thiruvambadi and Paramekkavu, in addition to eight smaller ones. […]
The shaap shooters
The GPS assured that we had arrived: in place of the curving, lengthening arrow mark, there was the sprogged onion. The famous toddy shop was supposed to be on our left side. Instead of – as I imagined it to be – lit up like Merryland, parking attendants struggling hard to find space for customers […]
Delhi to Agra via NH2
#instatravel #motorcycling #heritage #dhaba #nh2 #royalenfield #incredibleindia #travelogram And finally The city gives up. Hauz Khas, where I stay, conurbates into more highrises and flyovers, reverberating underpasses and fringe residential areas before thinning out into open mandis – wholesale marketplaces. As I passed by these throbbing centres of humanity, big boned jolies laides were making […]
Maximum selfie city
Vanity thy name is not woman anymore. It is man. A study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction puts the percentages of men and women exhibiting ‘selfitis’ – the condition of excessive selfie-taking – at around 60 and 40 respectively. One of the authors, Mark D. Griffiths, PhD, informs ‘From a […]
Twenty20: The journey so far
When polity develops accountability and corporatedom grows a heart it becomes Twenty20. This is practical Utopia: organisation, skilled manpower, resource and vision meet people. Being first of its kind, everything is not honky-dory; then at every turn there is a new learning. Posing a threat to established norms, hierarchical bureaucracy and lucrative red-tapism, obstacles are […]
Call time
Jump / AIIMS “On the bright side, the ride to the mortuary will be considerably shorter,” she said as she stood with one hand on her plump hips. She looked at her husband and even though she didn’t detect any mirth she laughed as she breathed hard. “We are going to die woman and you […]
Dharavi – Into an open netherworld
Aligned in glistening beads of sweat along an open oven the men pause briefly to look up at people like me – those from a halcyon world. They are on the basement floor of a twin-storey ramshackle lit up by fire from gigantic wood-fired furnaces with little passageways that opened at ground level for ventilation. […]
The problem with Airbnb
‘It was my first outing with Airbnb.’ Any write-up that begins on a note like this you know where it is headed – yes, spiralling down. So before I proceed and make my case (the host had, while I was writing the Facebook post, threatened to give me such a terrible review which would make […]
The wayback machines of Rajasthan
Photographs taken to bring tourists. And photographs taken by tourists themselves. Some minor details are always missing between these two. In my case it was a long line of big-boned women clad in ghaghra, choli and odhni or the veil, balancing earthen water pots on arcing hips tracing a colourful line like the Madhubani-painted Bihar […]