English and its Indian makeover

Introducing Hobson-Jobson and Hanklyn Janklyn Just yesterday I was having a heated discussion with my sons. We were talking about the new movie ‘Avatar’ which we had gone to see. Now when I tried explaining that the word Avatar is actually Sanskrit, they were vehement in the argument that it was a …

A Pack of Cards

Ramnath was a contented man; he had retired after a long career with the IAS, and it had been a no mean achievement surviving the bureaucratic minefields. He was back at his village in Pallavur – Palakkad, spending the remaining part of his life ruminating the past, reading religious texts and buil…

The Burlington House Cartoon

One among the uninitiated, that is, in the field of art & painting, like me, would but naturally, assume that I am talking about the stuff you see in magazines and newspapers. The cartoonists are very important in today’s society, they provide the irony laced with humor in a single frame, but t…

The International Indian

I must thank Shashi Tharoor for this. Not that I know him or anything. But like all of you, I know of him. Recently, thanks to the internet and the forward mail industry, I got a link from my wife to his speech at the TED forum. As I watched it, I must say I truly enjoyed it. Well, Tharoor is from …

The King's Railway

The 50 something man who sat in the lavishly appointed waiting in the brand new train station, looked tired and haggard, but not beaten. He had been struggling to see his dream through for the last decade. Much of his time was spent in conceiving this project and bringing it to fruition, and the wo…

Behind the Veil

Sometimes it is difficult to comprehend human nature. Like in this case that was recently reported from Iraq.It show how war brings out the worst in us, when people start to behave like animals and show their terrible sides. A man was suspected of something (!!); however the local police were not a…