JOST A MON

In the centre of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her be...

Umm Bano is a magician of power and dispenser of supernatural justice on behalf of the Queen of Vijayanagara. That empire, true to its nam...

On the table the appetisers were waiting: eggs stuffed with mushrooms and mayonnaise, red and black caviar canapés, beetroot and prune sal...

The other day, the boy and his amma and I watched Dear Zindagi . He has been a fan of Alia Bhatt since he saw her in Student of the Year ....

A few years of working in Delhi after graduating from IISc, I took up a job in Chicago. Once there, I began to reach out to old friends wh...

Green blonde: Hello darling! How was the weekend? Blue blonde: Oh, well, we went drinking on Friday, and I was so hungover on Saturday. ...

I came across a reference to Muhi al-Din Lari in Ziauddin Sardar's magisterial Mecca: The Sacred City . Lari was supposed to be a hu...

Don walked back into the living room and announced that dinner was ready. A full course Chinese dinner, family style, prepared by Don's...

Scarcely a month after my remarks on reading more than one book by the same author, I find myself in the midst of not one, not two, but t...

I stood marvelling for a long time in front of a blackboard on which all the delicious fare one could order was listed in chalk. I was bewi...

It appears that J P Vaswani is still going strong, nearly a century after he was born. While he is known for his spiritual teachings, at o...

How easy it is to fall into habit. A few years ago I decided to read every novel under 200 pages at my local library. Now, automatically, ...

From the Economist's Prospero blog : If these songs are a fascinating historical record of a changing city, they are also important ...

The dish of the day was a splendid roast guinea fowl cooked in sea-salt, with a chickpea purée. Lola ordered it without thinking twice. Ingr...

The headmaster saw the boy in the corridor between classes. "Where are you going?" he said. "To the toilet, sir," s...

I was on jury duty a while ago. Two weeks of my life spent on my civic responsibility. Most of the time was spent waiting to be selected f...

Continuing the round-up of 2016 : three more non-fiction titles that were well worth my time. Elizabeth Pisani is a multitalented wom...

Before the Hussars even got to Waterloo, one of their chiefs, the 2nd Earl of Uxbridge, put down riots in London by hungry people protesti...

I didn't go to Reading, not this year, at least. Poor pun, that... What a strange, troubling year this has been. Besides worrisome...

The latest headmaster is a bit of an eccentric. In the boy's class one day he announced that he hated Spanish women. (It is not clear...