Growing up in the 1980s, it was considered good parenting to get one’s child to read the newspaper or watch the news bulletin. Then the 90s were an exciting time when private news channels started to make their presence felt in India. It was such a difference from watching the news on Doordarshan. Doordarshan was …
When I was about twenty-two or thereabouts my cousin who had just become a teenager decided to sort of pay me a compliment. She claimed I would make a very good sidekick or in her words “You’ll make a good best friend of a leading star” I wonder if it was her wry way of …
If writing and publishing something on my blog was pictured as a beautiful fresh stream flowing through grassy hillocks and onto forests, then let us say I am right now picturing a drought! I can hardly write a new post. A flicker of an idea or two come; I write them down and work on …
Yesterday, I learned that the famous slogan of the Liverpool football team “You’ll never walk alone” was originally from a song. The song was composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (also famous for the musical Sound of Music) as part of their musical “Carousel”. It was later made into the more familiar version by …
The other day I came across this wonderful image of S. Irfan Habib‘s hideout (don’t miss the old Apple computer) A stack of books is always more attractive to see than neatly organized bookcases because they remind you of different worlds they allow you to visit and ponder over instead of neatly organized information. My …
A few days ago I came across this (👇🏽) lovely Amazon Writing Style Tips tweet. I found the linked Medium blog difficult to navigate to these exact posts because frankly, Medium is terrible and useless. So I decided to download the images here for my easy goto reference. Writing Style Guides In the same tweet …
Often when I talk about historical events with friends, I am asked how did I get to know all this stuff. I admit it can give one a smug feeling, but I do tell them the boring truth. I read history books and that is where I get this interesting stuff from. Books on history …
The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History Read
Distributed / Remote work is gaining acceptance because of the COVID-19 lockdown. That is great but there will be some unseen and possibly unpleasant issues cropping up. A lot of young Indians live in joint families or with parents until they graduate. If jobs are in a distributed environment they won’t need to change cities …
As a child, I remember Doordarshan would play a Spiderman episode once a week. Around the same time, local shops started selling Spiderman masks. No costume those days, but a lot of children had some weird drawing along their wrists with a bullpen, add to that the paper masks of Spiderman and imagination ran riot. …
As the COVID-19 outbreak puts a break to normal life, it leaves me with a lot of time to ponder. I am using some of it to learn a new skill, catch up on some tv shows or even do some fictional writing. For a while, I have a habit of listening to a podcast …