Life is an ever-growing collection of unfulfilled desires; each alike Ghalib’s thousands, worth dying for: हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले   Last month I gratified an old longing - For three days I witnessed the annual festival of music in Chennai, The Margazhi Kutcheri. Utter solitude of the unit where I was posted after internship, more than three decades ago, had forced me to look for means to while away the idle hours. As I wrote sometime back, I discovered Kishori Amonkar in these fumbling efforts. Then, a young officer from Kerala often saw me sprawled on a lawn chair, reading, and listening to music, as he walked across the corridor facing my room. He suggested that I listen to Yesudas’s Carnatic albums, which he said were popular in Kerala. A few weeks later he brought me two cassettes of Yesudas’s music, seeing I had not heeded his advice. I liked the music: the fast pace and the fascinating drums.  India Today had launched Music Today then,...

  “To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.” ― Will Thomas, Some Danger Involved   He was the first and the most committed bibliophile I met. We were posted in the same hospital. He was not a doctor, but as is known in the military medical fraternity, a non-technical officer. Till then, I owned very few books – mostly fiction and a smattering of volumes on Indian philosophy. Latter were so obscure that I had not read more than a few pages of any. A succession of events about this time changed the world of my reading. We bought our first personal computer. Within a few months, internet too arrived home. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was tremendously popular then, especially among children. My kids learned of a new mode of buying books – an online bookshop. I ordered the book at indiaplaza.in. A colleague lent me Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything . I read the b...

  ‘It is natural for men to tell tales, and I suppose the short story was created in the night of time when the hunter, to beguile the leisure of his fellows when they had eaten and drunk their full, narrated by the cavern fire some fantastic incident he had heard of’. Thus speculates Somerset Maugham on the origin of short story in his eponymous essay. This was the story he wrote and he wrote a many. Maugham was immensely popular as a writer of short stories in the first half of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the turn of cold-shoulder – doubtlessly spurred by his huge commercial success – of the literary high-brows. His stories stand out by their bewitchingly singular simplicity, a plain, conversational prose that is effortless to read, and a plot that binds your attention from the first word to the last. Many of his tales are constructed around a quirky human behaviour, one that most men will find immoral. In a score of them he juxtaposes good and dishonourable in the...

  Of Sin and Virtue Belief in God and practice of religion are universal attributes of humans. To most, this faith offers a support to bear the vicissitudes of life with a semblance of fortitude. In a changing world, ways of which are beyond us, religion with its seemingly timeless teachings and rituals, provides one stable refuge to the anguished soul. Perhaps this is why, freedom to practice the religion of our choice, is an inalienable right, guaranteed by the constitutions of all secular states. In the early twentieth century, a brutal persecution of religion was unleashed in Mexico, in the form of a socialist revolution, by the president Plutarco Elias Calles. English novelist, Graham Greene, was commissioned by a publisher to write about this anti-clerical purge. He visited the provinces of Tabasco and Chiabas in Mexico, in the spring of 1938. His travel account was published as The Lawless Roads in UK and The Labyrinthine Ways in US. Journey also furnished Greene with...