You’ve Gotta Have Faith

A couple of good things have happened to me of late.
First, I got my passport today. By Speed Post. You know what an experience it was applying for it, what with it having expired, having been issued from a different state, and requiring a change of address to boot. I had been expecting a [...]

The Night Before Christmas Eve

… and in a gloomy, dense forest, alive with the sounds of crickets, bats and other creatures of the night, 10 city slickers sprawled around a sputtering fire on a sloping hillside enveloped by darkness and covered by a blanket of brilliant stars. There were three men - Teddy, Senthil, and Biju; and seven women [...]

Deutsch Lernen

So I gave up eight months of weekends to learn basic German. That was from January through August 2006, with a brief two-weekend break in the middle. The tragedy was that the exam for the second “semester” was scheduled for precisely the weekend we were leaving for Ladakh. Faced with a choice of Himalayas or [...]

Learning to Drive

When I was a teenager, I remember being fascinated by cars, bikes and driving in general. I got behind the wheel of the family car when I was 16, then found that I’d have to wait another two years for a licence of any sort. As close as possible to my 18th birthday, I learnt [...]

Weighty Matter

This weight thing is something I just don’t get. See, I’m one of those people that are born fat and spend their entire lives trying to change that. For very few, very short periods in my life, I have been what I considered to be slim; slim, mind you, never thin, because in my book, [...]