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What are these ad makers thinking?

Microsoft tells you in all earnestness – It’s a great time to be a family. Watch this and tell me what you make of it… Here is a simple test for these copywriters – before you wrap up your work and get...

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Chennai’s Margazhi Season

Come December and Chennai begins to hum with the start of the kutcheri (classical music concert) season, referred to in the city simply as the “Season.” It’s one of the largest music festivals in the...

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Word of the year

I am a big one for lists – I love making to-do lists (but necessarily the doing!) but rarely set goals. All along, I have been taking work as it comes without making ambitious and aggressive plans. No...

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Tamilnadu’s cradle babies

Remember Baby Falak? In a country where babies, especially girls are abandoned and killed every day, the story of the bruised and battered two-year-old girl is not really new or particularly shocking....

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A library – again

My earliest memories of a library are of Murugan lending library in the neighbourhood of Adayar in Chennai where I grew up. This was my most eagerly awaited trip of the week, where I used to go with my...

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Happy 25, Penguin India!

Penguin India turns 25 this year and to celebrate this, they have a range of quirky merchandise based on popular Penguin titles – so there are mugs (The Great Indian Mug, A Suitable Mug), bags (ditto),...

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Tell me a story

Long time no blog. For now, here is a longish story I wrote for The National on oral storytelling traditions in India. I had great fun researching for and writing this story. To watch Jeeva Raghunath...

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In sickness and in health

Barbara had been diagnosed as depressive and was under treatment for the condition for several years before she discovered that she was bipolar. She signed up on a networking website and rigorously...

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Celebrating pure and absolute nonsense

This year marks the bicentenary of the man who gave us the delightful image of the owl and the pussycat who sailed away together, married in the land of the bong tree and ate quince with runcible...

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Bollywood romances the rains

With the arrival of the rains, the scorching temperatures of summer in most of India have abated. The dry, parched browns of the cities are slowly turning a lush green. The Mumbai monsoon rains are...

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Brands from a childhood in Chennai

Adman Santosh Desai has this interesting little piece in Outlook about his the malted drinks of his childhood days – Horlicks and Bournvita. He says, rightly, that drinking Horlicks was an awful...

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Chills and thrills

My story in The Hindu on marking 60 years of The Mousetrap, celebrating good crime writing and lamenting about all that gore in modern day crime fiction. I’ve already ranted at the Scandinavians once...

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A moveable commune

Shakespeare and Company is a bookstore in Paris where one feels like being in one’s own apartment, just exactly how founder George Whitman wanted it to be, says Charukesi Ramadurai George Whitman liked...

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Battle of the beverages

It is early evening, still a couple of hours to go before the sun sets. In a roadside stall, a blackened pan sits on a single stove, a brown sludgy mixture of milk, tea, and sugar brewing in it since...

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This time, it’s personal

Enough and more has been said and written about the Delhi gangrape and the reactions of the nation to that horrific crime. I shed tears, along with many women I know, the day she died. I went for a...

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(N)oh, to be young again!

No, it’s not fun to be young now. I was browsing through television channels idly at my hotel and came across a programme telling people what not to wear. This young girl of 21 – 22, pretty but plump....

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Firangi filmi bloggers

Beth Watkins calls herself the Foreign Minister of Shashi Pradesh and has taken an oath to share with the world any Shashiliciousness she may come across. This blogger from Illinois is a Shashi Kapoor...

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Controversy Calling

My thoughts on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale – some of the reasons it just didn’t work for me – appeared in Tehekla.com on February 18, 2013. Read it online here… *** Although the word is on everyone’s...

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Clothing for dignity

Anshu Gupta’s journey began in 1992 after a 6-year-old girl in New Delhi told him that she hugged dead bodies through the night to keep her warm. The girl’s father, Habib, and her blind mother, Amina...

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The story of a rape

No, this is not about the infamous Delhi gang-rape that had the nation outraged (and where is all that outrage now?) just a couple of months ago. This is about the recent Steubenville rape of a 16 year...

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