Come April and I am awash with phone calls from friends and colleagues about how they fared in the annual performance appraisals. Certain lesions of the past rendered unmentionable on this blog due to reasons of propriety, have bestowed the…
Author: umashankar
I am just a watcher then. Sometimes I watch life, sometimes I watch death; many times I watch in between...
The Vegetable Rice Chef
Himesh is fussy about the order in which ingredients should be put into vegetable rice. Butter, followed by equal amount of mustard oil, cumin seeds, chopped chillies and onions, crushed ginger and garlic, minced mint and coriander leaves, a handful…
The Ark of Nostalgia
“I'm your phantom dance partner. I'm your shadow. I'm not anything more.” ~Haruki Murakami As if working for a bank weren’t traumatic enough, I am working for a subsidiary bank undergoing absorption in its parent. It is highly hypocritical of someone…
The Siege of the Bog
It happened when I was eight or nine. What refreshed the memory this past month was the hurried confession of a rookie Australian batsman to his captain, as he scrambled for the loo, “When you need to go to the…
Thus Spake My Father
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…
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…
One Grain Amongst the Storm 