As I look back at the life of my departed father, I realise how he had been a part of the transitional era that stood with a foot in the mysteries of the yore and the other into the increasingly…
Author: umashankar
I am just a watcher then. Sometimes I watch life, sometimes I watch death; many times I watch in between...
A Passing Shower —A Review
My student life ended abruptly, or shall I say, comic-apocalyptically, with the postmodernist classic by Joseph Heller, Catch-22. It happened when I wrote a chapter for my doctoral thesis that would soon be abandoned, on the anti-war anti-novel with an…
The Springtime Wind —A Translation
Basanti Hawa, or the 'Springtime Wind', was the first Hindi poem I fell in love with, early in my childhood. It is written by Kedarnath Agarwal, a much-awarded doyen of Hindi Literature. The poem captures the freshness, fullness and the…
Train to Nada Land
Dear friend and patrons, by the time you read this post, I’d be rocking away to my old hometown in a still older train panting over the ancient tracks laid down by the British looking to save the Indians from…
Why Did the Chicken Write a Blog?
ARNAB GOSWAMI: Can you tell this, on this channel, right in front of all of us: why can’t the chicken write a blog? The nation wants to know. RAHUL GANDHI: The chicken has written the biggest blog since Independence and…
The Cleaver of Oblivion
The Milky Way is white and frigid with the fever of oblivion; A billion suns will be battered by the cleaver of oblivion. Remember not the love songs lost nor the updraughts of passion; Drowned in a moat of disdain,…
The Orb of Hereafter
About a week shy of the onset of the New Year, I presumptuously augmented the copyright notice at my blog to 2017. Don’t mistake me, I have long stopped caring about the trolls looking forward to plagiarizing my mumbling —anyone…
Malice of Zinfandel
Silver grey on temple peaks is the fern of the New Year. The sun has grown wrinkles at the turn of the New Year. Candlelit stilettos turned sherry red in a nightclub, Istanbul is freshly dug cavern of the New…
Goodbye, Cynthia Jobin
I cannot say Cynthia Jobin was lonely when I met her, surrounded as she was by a swarm of friends, eagerly awaiting the next instalment of priceless poetry on her blog, 'Littleoldladywho.net'. I also cannot say I met Cynthia Jobin…
A Few Black Sheep and a Black Hole
If I was never really proud to be a banker, these are certainly not the times to have a change of heart when the entire species is steeped in disgrace around these tracts of the planet. In the apocalyptic times…
Bombastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
All right, that is a shameless rip off from the latest opus of J. K. Rowling, also churned into a movie by Warner Bros. But isn’t this the joy of being a nobody on the Internet, that you can pilfer…
Surgical Slights, etc.
I’ve been trying to wiggle a lot this past month. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, till my face is blue in the corner one-seater as apoplectic debaters fume and combust the television over the carnage of nineteen soldiers in Uri by Pak…
One Grain Amongst the Storm 