Flux of Time

No, this is not about cricket, although cricket is a constant presence. Some days I could be watching it, some days not. But it is there. Like music, like the smell of jasmine or ‘agarbathi’ in the bylanes of Bangalore. Or even the loud ‘soppu’ cry of the vegetable vendor pushing his cart in my city. My mind goes back to a winter’s morning in the city. I remember waking up at 5 am to watch a test match between India and Australia. Must have been early 2000s. I had set the volume on the TV really low. There is a certain guilty pleasure in switching on the TV really early in the morning and listening to the commentary at a really low volume. It is intimate and conspiratorial, almost like the commentator is talking exclusively to you. I don’t remember much of that winter morning except that it was an Ind-Aus test series. But what I distinctly remember is the lunch hour of that test match, by which time my parents were up. And I remember drinking my mom’s trademark strong coffee. The...

Witty, smart, charming, affectionate, sad, all these come easy on social media. Try that in real life and it is a different ball game altogether. I thought about this as I asked (on Facebook) someone I know to be brave as he had just lost a young son. How easily I said it. Not that I did not mean it. I meant it from the bottom of my heart. And yet, Facebook had made it easy for me to say it, somehow. That's how it is on social media. Log in: FB reminds you it is a friend's birthday. You wish her. Someone else has announced it's her anniversary. You wish her as well. And then someone is grieving. You say sorry. Someone's unwell. You wish them a s peedy recovery. Someone's posted holiday pictures. You like them. Someone's cooked a fantastic meal. You like the pictures. Someone's being extremely witty. Like the post. You mean well, and do all this. You feel you have made someone's day, effortlessly. It is really easy to pull all this off on social media. ...

Happiness. Often used as a substitute for success. Both highly intangible words. Both can't be contained in a single definition. And yet, we are conditioned all our lives to believe that it is something we 'achieve' if we do certain things. As kids, we make our parents happy and ourselves happy if we do things that are supposed to be 'right'. So, we complete our engineering or medical degrees (what else can poor South Indian children dream of? shudder shudder if they think of something like the arts, especially boys!) and we will be happy? We go off to the US, do our MSes, and think we and our parents and our families have been wrapped in one big happy bubble! Then we marry. If that partner fits the standards set by our closest set of relatives and friends, we are doubly lucky. Soon enough, we start a family. And the cycle continues. A car, an apartment, then two, our quest for material symbols of success is one long relentless one. We parade our achievements on so...

The end of 2014 must go down as one of the worst months ever, at least for me, personally. How do you come to terms with the freakish manner in which a young cricketer who was just about starting his international career had to say goodbye to the world? How do you even begin to internalise the death of a couple of hostages at Sydney? A mother of three children, what wrong did she do? Or the death of the manager of Lindt Cafe - how does that make sense? December 2014, what have you done to us? What made you take the lives of over hundred innocent schoolchildren in Peshawar, all mercilessly gunned down? What about their families? What do the parents have to look forward to? December is indeed the cruellest month. You took away a former colleague of mine, an honest man who worked hard, who was also a very good friend to me ten years ago. I think of his wife, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What will life be like for them from now on? How do they deal with their loved one's abse...

That's my travel piece in today's City Express, New Indian Express. The link here: http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/Rolling-Back-the-Clock-in-the-Land-of-the-Hoysalas/2014/12/11/article2564981.ece

(This post has been published in unboxedwriters.com. Here:  http://unboxedwriters.com/2014/11/not-worth-losing-a-life-over/  )  This piece has also since been published in The New Indian Express L osing a wicket is a far far better thing to strive for. No batsman would say that under normal circumstances, but given Phil Hughes' death, he would certainly say that.  The sight of a fast bowler tearing into a batsman has been one of cricket's most romanticized images, especially in the pre-helmet era. It was a test to the batsman's technique and mental make-up to duck a bouncer or take one on and dispatch it to the fence. Some of the most celebrated tales in cricket come from anecdotes where batsmen have withstood or batted on in spite of a broken nose or a jaw, samurai-like. It is also very macho, I guess, for both players and spectators to witness such episodes involving sweat, and blood, in some cases. Almost all modern-day sports are civilized and evolved ver...

Nuts! Several years ago, my brother and I took out our handy cam and went around the city capturing the essence of Bangalore on our recorder. It was on one such occasion that we went to the kadlekai parishe or the groundnut fair in Gandhi Bazaar. This was over a decade ago. That was my first brush with the parishe , but I have been there many times later. So, when this year's parishe came along, I decided to make a small trip. Much like most of our festivals, this fair is also rooted in an agrarian past. Typically, our festivals are about changing seasons, harvests, fertility. All rooted in the land we till. And yet, we have lost our roots with that lifestyle. Our festivals today are gaudy affairs, display of gold, silver and riches. And excessive gift-giving with no respect whatsoever for our bond with the soil and forces of nature. I'm digressing, so, back to the kadlekai parishe . There's a fascinating legend that describes how this festival came about. A ...