Yes, it’s true. God moves in mysterious ways His wonders (blunders?) to perform. I’ve just quit HT after almost-four intense years, to take up a new assignment for the MEA as Director of a new India Cultural Centre in Bangkok. My new boss there will be our Ambassador to Thailand. So if you’re in Bangkok, do swing by the India Cultural Centre, will post coordinates after I join, which, Inshallah, is next month. Read more

Apropos of the ongoing legal review of homosexuality in India, here’s what three men of cloth have to say about “unnatural sex.” Read more

I’m in deep withdrawal for Kerala. Just two days this week in Thiruvananthapuram for a National Seminar on Indian Classical Dances hosted by the Kerala government.  But those two days were pure happiness because a) I was in South India, b) it was raining and ‘lastly but not leastly’ as we Indians like to say, I got to hang out at the ambalam (temple) of Sri Padmanabhaswamy in whose name Travancore was ruled by its former kings. Read more

This week my halo slipped a bit. I lost my temper with someone quite unnecessarily and snarled at them. I went back to say sorry and sincerely repented my little outburst. But then I thought of someone quite the opposite, who is actually celebrated for having his foot in his mouth. Here’s His picture, done in the 18th century Tanjore glass painting style. Read more

With all that talk about apsaras I’m pining to see some good dance and can’t find any this week in this wretched heat except for a ’sushi platter’ of a two-day dancefest, each day featuring ten-ten dancers in a big medley. You can’t really register anything in the whirl and I’m not going. 
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Have you ever met anybody called Draupadi? I have, just once, two decades ago. She was the fabulous cook-housekeeper to an IAS officer in the Rajasthan cadre, Mrs Kusum Prasad. I lived in Jaipur then and knew almost nobody in town until I met Kusumji. Read more

This time let’s bring on the dancing girls, such an old story but such fun to re-tell.

It’s so peculiar really how all those grumpy old men and their grumped-out patriarchal religions blame women for everything on earth and often treat them like serious lowlife…but also offer them as rewards in heaven. I mean, check out the apsaras, Asia’s sweet celestials. Read more

With Tamil Nadu possibly poised to be the decision-making state for who will rule India after the General Election, 2009, a strange case of North-South resonance comes back to haunt me from my recent trip to the Kaveri Delta… Read more

This week, I suddenly solved a big civilisational mystery. The Calcutta Boy Syndrome! It’s about why they have this imbibed-with-mother’s-milk love of rock’n'roll.

Mind, it’s been a while, quite a few years since I took my first baby steps on Southern Avenue in Calcutta…and like a baby gosling ‘imprints’ the first creature it sees as its mother, I imprinted Bengal. Read more

A beautiful, well-dressed young woman with four lustrous braids, to whose words two celestial birds in a tree listen attentively… That’s how the old Sanskrit verse makes an elegant mind-picture of the Vedas:

chatush kaparda yuvati supesha
kruta prateeka vayanani vaste
tasya suparna vrushana nishedaduhu

The four braids of course denote the four Vedas, personified as adorning an eternally fresh and bright young woman, whose highly attractive wisdom wings through the ages for all time. Read more