Who Will Marry Me Now?
Violence, justice, and a lot of talk of violence and justice. In the one year since the December 16 Delhi gang rape, young women across India have been thinking hard about their precipitous lives. But how precipitous are they, really? A Rashomon report on a Kurosawa year. Image Credit: MS Gopal __ Arvind remembered...
Decoding The Harappan Diet: What Did Our Ancestors Eat?
The only kind of food writing I enjoy doing is the vaguely sociological kind. Here is my first venture into the definitely archaeological variety. One day in 2010, Arunima Kashyap discovered a garlic clove. A 4,400-year-old garlic clove. Kashyap, then 34, and her colleagues had been digging for two months by then. Sometimes, they...
The Pot that Broke Below a Hundred Other Pots
Towards the middle of Aaraam Thampuran, a 1997 movie with Malayali actor Mohanlal in the lead, the hostile villagers are steadily awakened to the true ‘noble’ roots of the bad man who has bought the big house. The villagers – and the audience – are given broad hints that he isn’t just the goonda from Bombay they thought...
The Ladies Finger
In college my friends and I ran a weekly paper called the Enthu Pataki. It was an addictive collaboration and I don’t think I ever had so much fun in journalism since. Straight out of college some of us hoped to run a version of Enthu Pataki for realz. We had meetings, lists, plans but...
An Offal Love
When we were children living in Palakkad,” my friend said, “my mother used to drive to Coimbatore to buy English vegetables like cabbage.” This is one of many grudging responses I heard when I evangelised about my fantastic culinary experience in Coimbatore. Two weeks before setting out from Bangalore, I’d have been among the...
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....
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...
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,...
