Last year, I got thoroughly irritated with a friend of over 50 years. He is a very forceful character, a perfect example of the Tamil proverb in which the protagonist says his rabbits always have three legs. He is also an excellent sportsman and represented his college and university at tennis,

Last month I attended an understated but classy event in Chennai which, even though my name suggests it, is not my home, or even my ‘hometown’ as the government would describe it. For me Chennai is the place which always serves as a reminder that there are more elegant ways of

Those who read autobiographies will be familiar with what I am about to say, namely, that there are two types of these: the reflective ones and the one-damn-thing-after-another ones. The former are the best; the latter the worst. I mean, after all, you read an autobiography for

A  few days ago, a friend who is otherwise quite a decent fellow, announced that he doesn’t read fiction. His remark reminded me of an incident 40 years ago. A girl friend who thought I was frittering away my life tried to force heavyweights like Prem Chand, Tagore, Bankimchand ­Chattopadhyay, Sartre,

Earlier this month, I needed to get a new passport-sized photograph. My wife said my hair was in a bad shape and would I please get a haircut. After 37 years of marriage I knew it was futile to argue and went looking for a saloon. It

From 2004 to 2011, I worked as a consultant to the history cell of the Reserve Bank of India. Once, in 2006, an assignment involved travelling to almost all the cities where the RBI had an office. It somehow happened that at each of these places, as a member of the

Recently, there was a message circulating on WhatsApp, complete with scanned copies, of a letter that a bureaucrat had written to a subordinate, asking him to return, of all things, a matchbox which the latter had borrowed. It seems in the absence of the matchbox, the mosquito