“Sometime in the first half of 2009, on a Delhi-Guwahati flight, I read an article in the in-flight magazine about handmade paper being made somewhere in Rajasthan,” says M. C. Bora, a retired Chief General Manager of Coal India Limited, about his initial foray into the paper-making industry. In rhino
I opened my eyes And looked up at the rain, And it dripped in my head And flowed into my brain. ---Rain, Shel Silverstein The season of dreams in my country is drawing to a close. Eyes pregnant with expectation are trained skywards, scanning the heavens for a sign that
As a line from this book goes, “It’s the mother of all swears---mother swear!” And it is surely the mother of all entrepreneurial beginnings. Two friends---an enterprising M.B.A. hopeful and a not-quite-an-engineer---dream up a company worth a million dollars on a paper napkin in a dark Bangalore
Packing up my flat the night before my final flight home, I took stock of the physical remainders of my time living in India. I lost a lot of good shoes in the Mumbai mold wars; almost all my clothes were utilitarian at best. My toiletries were now mostly preventative
Once the universe had started expanding and the laws of physics came into existence in their present form, it was a only matter of time (approximately 200 million years) before slightly denser regions of nearly uniformly distributed matter gravitationally attracted nearby matter, thereby forming stars, galaxies, gas clouds, and other
A few years ago, I read a book by Shashi Tharoor called Bookless in Baghdad. It’s a collection of literary columns, articles, and reviews by Tharoor and one of the essays is practically an excoriation of R. K. Narayan. Okay, so I go a little far in describing it
It is 10 a.m. on a summer morning in Delhi. It is also a Sunday. Most people are indoors, trying to seek respite from the heat. But in Daryaganj, near Jama Masjid, there is a steady flow of people on the street. There are students, couples, foreigners, and even
It is lunch hour in Electronics City, Bangalore, and the place is literally swamped with customers. There is hardly any room to stand, let alone to have a peaceful meal and relax. Patrons have spilled over onto the adjacent street, much to the delight of the neighbouring cigarettewalla, where horns
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, lived a little princess. And when she would grow up to be a young lady with all the finesse and charm that a lady is expected to have, she would be in danger. And then she would whimper and suffer
Writers Jai Undurti and Jasraman Grewal view Hyderabad as a city in argument with itself. They got together a few years ago to create the Hyderabad Graphic Novel project, in order to capture images and moments from the great city; to tell unique stories that could only take place in