'Criti....que not Criti....cize'

9:02 AM Bangalore airport Two people, post typing their out-of-office automated replies, sit looking at the crowds passing by. Bangalore airport doesn't seem empty. Neither at this hour, nor when we had reached around 2 hours earlier.  Brother called to enquire why may have his most trusted G-Pay given up. G-Pay seemed to have reached its limit when they tried settling some hospital bills...just like the life that had decided it had reached its limit some 3 hours earlier. Try debit card then, said the husband.  Strange, isn't it? The person who peeped into the phone screen over a video call to ask how our recent trip had been, while sitting on a sofa now rests in a mortuary, waiting for those people to bypass the screen and reach her, one last time. Guess the very last time... There is no alternative here, like in the case of G-Pay. Ammamma, ini ormakal maathram .  From school, straight into the house. The walk gains momentum as soon as she enters the house. T...

Today, I got to know that a school friend of mine had lost her husband. To death. Do people lose to death? Or do they win it as a bonus for having lived a life?  A friend's message that was seen two hours later paused the world for me in between the race against time to attend meetings, complete a set of tasks and take time out to breathe in the cold November air.  Where was she? What must she be doing right now? What about her young son? Does he know his father had left? These and a number of other questions kept reverberating in the back of my mind even as I adjusted the switch below the mouse to get on with the day's tasks even as my friend's world had probably paused, kilometres away. Funny, isn't it--I didn't have even her number on my phone till evening-- and we have been friends for more than a decade. The heart feels the way it does. The first memory that flashed in front of my eyes was the day when both of us were walking home post school hours and he had a...

Communication, not literary elegance, should matter in the Field, says the Founder Editor of People's Archive of Rural India (PARI). "Questions before the start of a session, anyone?" Silence. "But you were asking me questions outside the hall." Laughs. Stares. Some hands shot up after a moment's thought. Doubts met with crisp answers. More laughs. Intense thinking.  This was just the precursor to what was to ensue throughout the 1.5-hour special lecture titled 'Thinking on your feet, reporting on the move-Field reporting in rural India' , by P Sainath, at Azim Premji University, on 28 September 2022. Asim Siddiqui, Faculty member, Azim Premji University, introduced the speaker The questions were from students who have been out on the Field as part of their Field immersion routines at Azim Premji University.  P Sainath, at his honest best, presented fact after fact for the audience to compile and examine by taking a backseat, in a room that did not d...

How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia by Shreevatsa Nevatia My rating: 4 of 5 stars Publisher: Penguin Random House India ISBN: 9386815885, 9789386815880 No. of pages: 256 I remember reading about the book back when it released in 2017. Since then, it's been at the back of my mind. For some or the other reason, I could not lay my hands on a copy of it. And now in 2021 at a book fair, the moment I saw it, I knew I had to pick it up.  4 years later, when I finally completed reading it last night, I knew that the universe was conspiring for the right moment for me to have it. The complexities of one's mind and the daily battles one is a part of has been described to the tee. Four years back, it may have been a little difficult, considering the phase of life I was in. But today, I can say I had a ringside view of being bipolar in India.  Having known someone who has been a part of the ups and downs of being bipolar, and having had first hand experiences, it...

A tradition started 12 years ago. At the cusp of adulthood, but while in school (class 12, to be precise); when romance novels were Where Rainbows End, Dear John, Message in a Bottle and  P.S. I Love You ; when promises were made and felt rather deeply by the heart (not that they aren't now) -- Karwa Chauth was taken up with a whimsical approach. Karwa Chauth -- a day of fasting (without consuming even a drop of water post the sargi)  usually undertaken by Indian married women every year post Dussehra and before Diwali (that's how I always remember it) -- assumed more importance thanks to Bollywood with its smattering of Karwa Chauth in many of the movies I grew up watching. Also, I found the north Indian rituals and festivals amusing as a South Indian (Keralite). For someone who witnessed wedding rituals lasting for not more than two minutes back home, the Big Fat Indian Wedding, popularised by Bollywood and stories by north Indian friends alike, fascinated me no end.  W...

A cousin from Amrika  landed home today. While I waited for him eagerly, the moment when we finally met approached sometime around 8.30 pm on a Saturday. With a flight to catch the next day, he was somewhat racing against time. And tada, he walked in. While 3 years didn't make much of a difference when we finally met, I was secretly glad that he had let his unibrow grow, uninhibited. Guess that's the thing with people you grow up with. The camaraderie is something that you can't define. Tidbits from the conversation: S: What you upto these days? D: I am freelancing. S: Tried Upwork? D: Did create a profile. Yet to work on the details. No one seems to be interested in giving me a job in Bangalore. S: Engineers don't know how to write. They need people to put to words what they 'think' and want to convey. There's a lot of scope for technical writing. D: Yeah, like one of those teams who told to explain the step-by-step process of explaining to a 70-year-old pe...

Em and The Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto My rating: 5 of 5 stars On a train journey from Kerala to Mumbai, I lay down on the top berth and silently put down my kindle and closed my eyes for some time. The definitions of normal, abnormal, sane, insane, mad crisscrossed in my mind and I mourned the loss of the so-called ‘mad’ people from the world. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to put them into boxes created by our own definitions of normal, desirable and perfect to survive? Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the accompanying phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ suddenly seemed hollow. Fittest? By what means? Thanks to Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, a book I was looking forward to read from a long time now, my mind kept asking me questions to which all I did was to close my eyes and listen. Living with a patient of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and some other medical conditions has been expansively described. It makes you laugh at times, shed a tear or two at others. But it teaches yo...