On a cold winter evening in Pune during the 1990s, I watched Ustad Zakir Hussain and Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma create musical magic at the Sawai Gandharva Festival. The next morning, an unexpected encounter with the maestro at Pune airport left me with a memory that has outlived the performance itself—a quiet tribute to one of India's greatest musicians.
Music and Memory Some memories stay with you. A few of them get hazy due to the inexorable march of time and age. Then there are some, that stay with one in all the original clarity. This is about one of mine that stayed. It is a summertime, 45 years ago, when our father took […]
We have spent centuries measuring time with astonishing precision. Then a three-year-old looked at a clock and quietly dismantled everything I thought I knew about reading it.
A quiet Saturday on a tenth-floor balcony turns into an unexpected meditation on life. Watching sheep, goats and shepherds move through a small cemetery, ordinary scenes begin to mirror ambition, leadership, failure and mortality. What starts as idle observation slowly becomes a reflection on the strange theatre of the human condition.
Words and the family of punctuations. Words. Nothing has been more double‑edged. Be careful: they can soothe or wound. They can seem cute and, sometimes, truly are. When they come together, right or wrong, they can inspire revolutions “Let them…
The Indian peninsula witnesses a collective dance of joy each year as the oppressive summer heat recedes and ocean winds usher in the clouds. This is a seasonal shift that shapes the year ahead for hundreds of millions, and its spectacular journey begins on a single, blessed strip of land: the southwestern tip of India, […]
Now I know how to stop time. Yes, you heard me right, stop time. Time is a strange thing. Those who have it don’t know what to do with it, and those who are short of it never have enough.…
A sport is much more than those fleeting hours of action on the field; it leaves an enduring imprint on the society around it. It is never really about the results, the final scores, or the titles won and lost.…