The Bangalore Queer Film Festival
A decade ago my friend Nithin tried to make me watch cinema. He had this way of saying, “You must have seen it” with confidence. If you mumbled no, he’d follow up with “you must watch it, you will love it.” He was entirely in denial, like an alcoholic’s lover. I hadn’t watched anything and...
Closing the Universe
My TBIP column. This time on Midnight’s Children. Moderating a panel on sports writing in January clearly fired some neurons I didn’t know I had. *** On the 6th of May, 1954, a young doctor took a train from London to Oxford and ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He had trained for...
The Rape Kit
This winter it was hard to think through the fog around the Delhi rape case. I made an attempt here in my monthly column and another when I gave a long talk at the Mahindra United World College in Pune. Writing and speaking both helped clarify my ideas in different ways. *** 1. Words make our world....
Missed Call
I have a short story called Missed Call in this new anthology. It begins this way: Last night, two squabbling cats leaped on my son’s chest. They bounced out of the corridor and landed in the dark on Vijay who was sleeping with his head in the room and the rest of his body in...
The Gentle Reader
My new story in Pratlipi magazine begins thus: Bangalore Four years ago Sabbah had written eleven short stories about different generations of a family in Madurai. At the time of submission to publishers, she had loved most of the stories. When ten of the stories were picked and arranged into a book called How To Eat...
What I Learnt By Watching 50 Tamil Short Films in One Weekend
Perhaps the best movie weekend ever. And the wonderful TBIP people let me write about it. *** 1. No one can eat just one. Two filmmaker friends recently told me they’re addicted to the Facebook page Short Film Factory run by Chennai-based assistant director Charles Rishar, and warned me that soon (hollow laugh) I’d be...
Eat, Drink, Shoot, Cycle
Writing this column was a blast because it allowed me to make all kinds of connections between foodie movies, revolution movies, high school movies. And it allowed me to rage a little about the letdown that was Ustad Hotel. *** Should any movie take its own McGuffins seriously? If it does, you could end...
Poolside Display
For five of the six years I’ve lived in Delhi I’ve had a pre-paid phone connection, in the same way a musician friend refused to buy curtains for years. We were going to leave soon, we told ourselves, so why commit? We were perennially leaving, perennially staying, like Nora Ephron’s wallflower at the orgy. This...
Break up, Make up
Shortly after the whole city and half the country shut down twice is perhaps not the best time to urge people to be grateful. But if you are reading this, it’s probable is that you do have tons of reasons for gratitude, certainly three: you are literate, not facing sniper fire and have...
Sari, Wrong Number
Is Delhi a different city if you are in a sari? Auto drivers insist they clean their autos before I step in, policemen give directions with a white-gloved benevolence, elderly people address me in long, idiomatic Hindi sentences that they would not otherwise presume to unleash on me. In other cities I’ve been in, the...
Read Me in Malayalam
My piece on Malayali nurses (an early outtake from my upcoming book) was in the very pretty Outlook Onam special issue. Buy it here and sing hosannas to the superb translator Pramod.
Goat Days
In his award-winning novel Goat Days, Malayalam literature’s young star Benyamin tells the story of a young man who, like lakhs of other Malayalis in the 1990s, goes to the Gulf. Najib is barely making a living as a sand-diver in his village when he scrapes together a visa for Saudi Arabia. At Riyadh airport,...
