At the behest of an insistent friend many summers back, think back to an era when that petty tyrant Indira Gandhi and that pee-drinker Morarji Desai were leaders of our former nation, we read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale although we can’t remember a whit now. Our interest in Maugham was rekindled this week by […]
We know that India cannot have a free government. But she can have the next best thing: a firm and impartial despotism. – Our favorite essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay (in a letter to the Scottish philosopher James Mill in 1833, a year before Macaulay arrived in Madras) Source: New Yorker P.76, May 31, 2010
I suspect, that you have taken it into your head, in most cases, that the matter is all, and the manner little or nothing. If you have, undeceive yourself, and be convinced that, in everything, the manner is full as important as the matter. If you speak the sense of an angel, in bad words […]
I am happy, at peace. – Tamil film star Vijay after delivering another crappy film, i.e. Sura. Source: Sify
It was very warm, but the smell was not strong. In size it was like a big ball of gulab jamun, but with none of the softness. In fact, it was as hard as a rock. Load a musket with it and you could have shot a rhino. I returned the ball to the cup […]
I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one’s arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of […]