Mummy*     Mummy was the pivot of my life when I was young. As I grew, she got relegated to periphery. I do not know how or when this process set in. I woke up to it only when her failing health forced me to pay her more attention.   But now I often wonder about it.   I   Mummy cooked the best food in the world. This was as obvious as the fact that day followed the night. Mummy was beautiful. My idea of beauty grew from her. That she was short and fat did not matter. This was how beautiful women were supposed to be. Mummy was intelligent. She could teach me all the subjects. Well, almost all. Mothers were not supposed to know maths. This was domain of fathers. She stitched trendy clothes. I flaunted these on every occasion. Mummy had read the best books. I listened entranced when she talked about Hindi poetry: Maithili Sharan Gupt’s Yashoda , Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s Yeh Kadam Ka Ped , Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Himalay , Tulsi and Meera’s verses. Sh...

‘It was so very awesome you called. The whole day I was like, this is getting too much. Give me a break someone! And then you rung. O my God! I was like, I’ll go crazy.’ I heard the voice cooing with delight over the phone. For months people have been holed up indoors, working from home, though for many this is a bigger hole than their office. Tempers are justifiably frayed. An unexpected call from a friend in the evening, after hours of drudgery, with a couple of more to go, is a sufficient reason for delight. Our Corona enforced proximity had emboldened me. The ‘awesomes’ and the ‘I was likes’ grated in my hearing, like a piece of eggshell in an omelette. ‘Don’t you think it is good to be clear in conversation? Won’t your friends appreciate if they hear concise words which have the beauty of clarity?’ My gratuitous advice rankled the young one. Now I received an unambiguous rejoinder. ‘Language is not important. Your thoughts are. These days people do not want to waste time...

Hi!   I started the blog, about a year back, to talk about books I had read. For past few weeks I was grazing new pastures. I beg your indulgence as I return to the old grounds in this post. I am aware that the digits on my hands are way too many to count the people who do afford time and patience to browse my words. And with my insistence to speak on books, I fear, I may lose even these (readers, not digits!). But there is an irrepressible urge lurking stubbornly in a cranny of my mind. This post may see it sated. And I may then find inspiration to think about other matters.   I bring to your notice two books of V.S. Naipaul, both allegedly travel books, but not really. These are on his craft. I liked them. These showed me new ways to understand the art of a writer. I will straight plunge into them. A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking & Feeling V.S. Naipaul Every sincere writing is foremost the result of author’s irrepressible urge to communicate to the world, so...

  The Sense and the Sound of Sentence   I have been in awe of printed word, for as long as I can remember. Even in childhood I was never away from it for long. In my school years, I mostly read Hindi. I read magazines, comics, and abridged, translated versions of English classics. English books were a luxury we could not afford freely. (Unlike today, books were expensive. Publishers like Penguin, Hachette, Harper Collins hadn’t come to India yet. Their books were imported and were exorbitantly priced. Only inexpensive foreign print media we saw were the Russian magazines like Sputnik and Russian novels of authors like Tolstoy and Gorky in translation. These were dirt-cheap. They were sleek. Magazines were printed on thick glossy papers with colourful pictures. I do not remember reading these. They made excellent covers for our school text books. Novels were bound elegantly in imitation leather with the title embossed in gold letters. Even a small town that we lived in th...