The Mumbai-Nagpur Duronto Express on 23rd June did not come even to the starting station until it was well over an hour late. Expectant passengers passed their time looking from the announcement screen to the digital clock hanging all along platform number 18. Bored of the wait, a group of three friends, well past their age of retirement, sat down and decided to play a game of Hearts. Only god knows why they were bent on playing a game of four when they were only three. Perhaps, it was some wisdom that a 24 year old cynic did not possess. It was definitely beyond his understanding. Continue reading
Being an Authorpreneur: why writing feels so much like starting up
People like Eric Schmidt scare the daylight out of me when they say we are, presently, producing as much content in 48 hours as we did from the beginning of time till 2003. Just take a minute and imagine: every single day we are producing as much text as there is in half the libraries of the world. What Schmidt is basically telling us is that we can be great writers, but if we can’t figure out a way to stand out in today’s crowded world of content, we are just hobbyists and little else. Continue reading
World Book Day in 23 Tweets
Shadowed Prayers
“Shoo, shoo, go away. Away, I said.”
The young dogs were the first to push their noses where they did not belong, but, unlike the people who came later, they were decent enough to heed the words of the lady, who was demanding her space. They heeded, because she had been good to them these past few days, feeding them when no one else had. They took care not to come too close, but they also knew that going away would mean no dinner. So, they paced.
How I met our Game of Thrones
“You have anything I can watch on Saturday?”
I stood leaning on the door of the piratemaster of our undergraduate hostel, scratching my left forearm under the elbow. The day was really sunny outside and if you were someone sitting inside the dimly lit room, high on the latest episode of Breaking Bad, one look at me would have gotten you cracking. With the rich, bright, sepia sunlight streaming in from behind me, I looked totally like a goodoldgone addict itching for more methamphetamine to shoot up my bloodstream — even mosquito bites on my forearm, from last few nights, had been scratched enough to look like puncture marks from overused needles.
Swings
“Looooook at meeeeeee.”
I tore myself away from page 136 of The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit to look at her. She had her head thrown back, laughing out into the sky that would have been moving so fast in front of her eyes that the clouds would have seemed to be coming alive and running around like little white rabbits let loose in a barn full of hay. She was taking that swing as high as it would go, kicking hard off the soft tonsured soil in the grass from where thousands of children had previously taken flight. As she launched herself again, she nodded at me asking me to join her on the swing — come, there’s enough space for both of us. Continue reading
Hi – 5, Naveen Babu
“Oye, you listening? We seem to have run out of rice. Could you get some from the street store?”
And thus started my Sunday morning. I had happily put on my headphones and searched for Byomkesh Bakshy OST, prepping for a nice two hours of writing, when I heard this coming straight out of the kitchen. The thing about noise-cancellation headphones is that they can save your ears from the perpetual droning of the marble cutter running all day in your neighbour’s backyard, but they haven’t yet been built to defend you against the deadly chore-calls of your mother. Continue reading
