How difficult is it to have a bloody printout of the ticket, or at least the damn boarding pass, before leaving for the airport? Apparently, very difficult. You reach when the pilot is already revving up the engines and the line outside the terminal is long enough to test your faith in civilisation. Naturally, you…
There was always that man outside the school gate with a huge round ghada, or some equally large clay vessel, full of jal jeera. Beside it was his most important piece of marketing equipment: a long wooden stick with a tiny cup fixed at one end and a bunch of ghungroos at the other. Every…
There was a time when somebody did not reply and that was the end of the available evidence. The landline rang, nobody picked up, you tried later. A letter took four days, sometimes seven, and for most of that period you had no idea whether it was sitting in a post office, travelling somewhere or…
God either intentionally skipped a few critical switches while designing men, or installed them somewhere in the brain and forgot to tell us how to activate them. I have increasingly begun to suspect that the switches are actually there, but buried under cricket scores, car registration numbers, old school incidents, forgotten passwords and useless information…
There was a time when the Indian bathroom had no design ambition whatsoever. It existed to get you clean and did not pretend to be anything more. There were no vitrified tiles, no Italian marble and certainly no Kohler or Jaguar mixer waiting to give you water at exactly the temperature you fancied. The floor…
There was a time when Indian households had a remarkably economical vocabulary for disaster. The scooter refused to start, सत्यानाश. The pressure cooker gasket gave way, सत्यानाश. The child came home with 41 in mathematics, depending on the parent, either सत्यानाश or a more personalised नालायक. Nobody said shit. At least not in the homes…
Long before air conditioners became affordable and began appearing on every second wall, Indian homes had developed their own elaborate systems for surviving summer. Heavy curtains were soaked in water and hung over doors and windows, hoping that whatever breeze entered the house would pick up some coolness on the way. Roofs and terraces were…
The Indian middle class has never been comfortable with unused space. If a corner remained empty for too long, somebody would eventually decide it could be put to better use. The loft acquired trunks, the top of the Godrej almirah acquired suitcases, the space below it became home to shoes, and then someone had the…
Nothing Ever Retired in an Indian Home There was a time when retirement did not exist. At least not for household objects. Nothing was ever thrown away. It was merely transferred to another department. Whisky bottles of every conceivable vintage rarely made it to the recycling bin. Their labels were painstakingly stripped off after a…
Every few years, someone in the family would look at the old Godrej almirah and say that it had to go. It had become too ugly, too dented and too completely out of place in a house that had otherwise moved on. The almirah, of course, never reacted. It had heard this threat many times…
