Clad in white kurta pajama, Gandhi caps and matching glasses, lest someone couldn’t tell they were identical twins, the septuagenarians grab their window seats. Trailing behind them, tired and annoyed, Ganesh takes the aisle seat – his aged plastic bag carefully placed to hide a speck of dried daal on his pant. “This!” The other […]Read Post ›
Finally the old man moves out of the way so the Mercedes can pass. He is rich in his taste of cars. Having educated himself in the more expensive cars, he spots well, waves his banner of Kaali at the windscreens, lays it beyond their hoods, and hopes they are Hindus. But it works even […]Read Post ›
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“The Shackle of Prejudice” published by kitaab.org. “As a child, I used to think that America and England were the same. Later I learnt that America was a bigger and more relaxed version of England. Then one day I found out that Americans were in fact prudes – like Indians! I had to unlearn that wearing […]Read Post ›
He had parked his car in the basement and was walking towards the lift when he found it, naked, in a municipal bin. He stared, felt it on his fingertips, and hurriedly hid it at the base of the bin and took the lift up to the terrace restaurant. Someone pressed his shoulder with affection. […]Read Post ›
A small big-city window lights up at an ungodly hour. Part-drunk, part-bronchitic Mohan turns on a bulb in his one-room flat, illuminating mine. Separated by a fifteen-foot kitchen-smoke-filled alley our metropolitan windows open into each other. On some nights, his 3 am schedule draws the ire of the windows surrounding mine and I lie […]Read Post ›
About the piece: For the most part it is about how some people are morally compelled to think that your business is their business. “If you are a woman in Southasia, chances are that you’ve been told how to be one. If you don’t have well-meaning relatives to tell you how, the media does the […]Read Post ›
“The car’s headlights worked in vain against the thickest fog the season had seen. Children of the pavements were cuddled all together in one corner, in a heap. The cars of the city’s rich zoomed past. I was not drunk enough, not as compared to the other nights, not like..” “One Cold Night” was published […]Read Post ›
“A lone bulb over Kisaan Ghar glows in hope of better times. The train leaves at 4am, when most of the village is still asleep. Chitti has packed her bindle- of a few clothes and a rich assortment of bindis. “Dwarfs don’t need bindis. In fact, they don’t even need a face”, her best friend […]Read Post ›
About the piece: This is a commentary on a ban that the Indian govt. placed on a pornographic cartoon strip. I make the argument that it was singled out because of its Indian-ness than for its pornography. “In May 2013, makers of the erotic comic strip came out with the Savita Bhabhi movie, where apart […]Read Post ›
