One Grain Amongst the Storm

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 is now running away from debate. If it allows me to post a comment, there […]

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 with an ounce of gumption would rather honk his or her own larynx. Perhaps my […]

As the nightfall of blogging closes in on me, I am more inclined to exhaling in private than gasping online, more willing to navigate through the bushes and backwaters than honking in the perpetual crescendo of the world wide web. The Internet of Things has taken over, but I am the prodigal come home to […]

  The evening is long with shadows of the afternoon chopped and spent at the edges of green black leaves of pubescent jackfruit trees. With the cicadas I pause and creek. With the cicadas I smile and shrink. A blackbird took flight sideways in the ballooning miles of dirt, White blood dripped from the petiole […]

It’s been a while since the nightingales sang in the darkness, fidgeting on boughs swaying in the night-wind. It’s been a while since the fingers splattered on the keyboard like an impromptu rain. There is this dike thin as rice paper, holding back rivulets of waste and repentance that I dare not let loose on […]

Like a pony fettered to a carousel, I’ve been travelling miles after circular miles and yet not have moved a millimetre from the pole I am suspended. I am not in charge of this motion, nor do I control this stasis. I cannot even choose the music or the riders that cling to my back […]

As a student of Logic in my younger years, the first two examples of absolutely positive and negative statements I stumbled upon were, (1)   Man is mortal. (2)   No man is perfect. So utterly true are these sentences and so often repeated that they stand eroded of all meaning and gravity, and at times I […]

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible.” ~Vladimir Nabakov My dear readers, we have been together these past years. I have known the unwavering love of some of you who have stood by me through the thick […]

I can smell the diction Taliban just beyond my window. I can hear the rat-a-tat of their words, its robotic monotony, flapping like dodo. Peeking out the pane, I see skyscrapers raised on cacophony of flakes and wafers; buzz and fuzz of tones, grating of sandpapers. Melody died, fell afoul of the tone deaf tribe, […]

It was a sultry summer morning when I first met Sam twenty five years ago. My roommate was groveling for an omelet, sprawled in his bed. He had been missing his turn at cooking breakfast for the fourth day in a row. ‘I swear I’ll take over tomorrow.’ I hate the promise of tomorrows. Ask […]

I was young when my family pulled out of a city to the backwaters of the country. Of the many heartbreaks I weathered, the loss of my small book club was the most debilitating. The civilisation I was uprooted from seemed oceans away. Children of the jungle had heard neither of Enid nor Blyton; Tintin […]