“It’s spelled ‘Rossie’ not ‘Rosie’,” said my brother. He was talking about my recent post in which I mentioned that as a young boy, when I was sick, I spent time reading books, and one of the stories that stuck in my mind was “Our Miss Rosie.” The story was about a white lady who takes a pair of African-American…
“A perfect trailer house for Jupiter’s hideout!”, I thought to myself. I was walking on one of the trails in my town, pushing Nikhil’s adaptive wheelchair while Nikhil took in all the sights and pointed out things that caught his interest. We had come around a bend in the trail and the house trailer was jammed between a few truck…
The little-known story of the 19th-century spy Pandit Kinthup who was the first to ascertain that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were the same rivers.
There are many stereotypes of Americans, some positive and some negative. “Lack of cultural awareness” is one of the negative ones and to a certain extent, I have found that to be true in my experience. There were the occasional “did you have elephants and tigers in your neighborhood?” type questions when I was studying at Clemson. “How is it…
If you lived in Bangalore anytime between 1970 and 2010 and loved reading and purchasing books, you have probably been receiving forwards in various WhatsApp groups about the recent demise of Mr. T. S. Shanbhag. Mr. Shanbhag was the owner of Premier Bookshop on Church Street, Bangalore, and was an institution to himself. He, sadly, like many others in India,…
“Didn’t we study a poem called ‘On Killing a Tree?’”, asked my brother. “It was written by Gieve Patel,” he added. We had just started our daily WhatsApp call and I mentioned to him that I had spent the better part of the morning cutting down a tree. My wife had been asking me for the last three years to…
My introduction to the word “Geography” came via my third-grade textbook. It was passed on to me by my friend and neighbor Srikanth, who is a year older than me. I received it probably sometime in December after the end of my second grade and I remember poring over the black and white photographs of people and their dwellings in…
A few months ago, a family of cats took residence in our bookshelf. While the family itself is fairly reticent, a boisterous youngster emerges each day to entertain our son Nikhil with his various feline adventures before returning to the confines of the pages where he dwells when the books are put away. Entertaining Nikhil is a bit of a challenge. …
It’s 1982 and I’m at the bus terminus waiting for the bus to go home after school. The bus has not showed up, so I have to wait another hour for the next one. I have nothing to fear though, I have just checked out “If Only They Could Talk” by James Herriot from the library and I happily perch…
As another year ends, it is perhaps appropriate to reflect on the passage of time. This is also the second part of my blog on exploring stoic philosophy through songs, particularly Hindi songs. This blog focuses mainly on Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” (“De Brevitate Vitae”), a moral essay that he wrote around 49 AD. I’m relying on the…