Recent Posts
Rara Avis, Black Swans, and Hornbills
For Indian birders, hornbills are the rara avis. Or maybe not, depending on where you live. If you live in the Northeast or the Western Ghats, you will see hornbills. Sitting in Bangalore, it is rare. The term rara avis is linked to the Black Swan. The expression comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal, 'Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno [A rare bird on this earth, like nothing so much as a black swan]. I interviewed Dr. Aparajita Datta about hornbills for the Bird Podcast. Listen to it here.
Growing up Karanth: book review: for Hindustan Times
Why do we read a biography? Often, because we want to get to know greatness. We are drawn to charismatic compelling figures and we want to know the ‘real person’ behind the public persona. By this measure, Growing up Karanth delivers in full measure. It takes us inside the life and mind of the Karanth family. It shows us how they lived, the kinds of food they ate, the animals they kept, and the connections they fostered.
Tabasco’s Temptation/Fresh magazine
I wrote about the allure of Tabasco for Fresh magazine. It is a personal essay with a long narrative arc.
Using Twitter/ Nieman Storyboard
For a writer, being successful on Twitter, accumulating followers, is a particular skill that has more to do with showmanship than writing. Provocative, controversial and funny content attracts followers. Can you do that? Writing click-bait type tweets that offer headline-like copy helps. Can you do that? Keeping a steady cadence of content is key. You have to keep putting stuff out there. Some folks tweet four times a day. Can you do that? It involves being comfortable with what skeptics call “oversharing,” and stopping the censor in your head that says “nobody cares about your every inane thought.” Can you stop that censor? Read my take on how journalists use Twitter.
About Rajat Parr/Sommelier India
The unbridled pleasure of orange wine If you ask wine writers or sommeliers to pick a wine that goes well with Indian food, you get a few-- somewhat trite, tried and, one must add, tired-- answers. “Pick a beer,” is what many will say. The logic is that spicy Indian food will overpower delicate wines. Most sommeliers will choose white wines over red. If they choose red, it would be medium-bodied slightly spicy wines over others. Ask wine directors at fancy Indian restaurants in Europe and the UK and their responses will have a thread but also reflect their [...]
Emojis/Hindustan Times
This was a fun piece to write. Inspired by a man I know who uses emojis in a cute, funny way. The one covering the face with the hand for instance. There are all these facial exercises going around. Maybe we just imitate emojis? Or better yet, meet in person and actually emote.
Old Favourites for Condenast Traveler
Finding a tai chi teacher
I have come to China from my home in Bangalore, India, to find a tai chi teacher. My pursuit of tai chi has been punctuated by such cultural challenges. When I informed my conservative Indian family that I was interested in tai chi, they were appalled. Why was their Indian child, heir to an ancient and proud traditionyogaleaning toward an alien discipline? "I told you that sending her to America was a bad idea," said my uncle, who made me do the downward dog every day as a child. He was right. It was as a young woman abroad in America that I'd found myself bumping up against China's culture: a Chinese roommate, an apprenticeship with an acupuncturist while awaiting my green card, Bette Bao Lord's novels. Yoga is like my mother; I take it for granted. It is so much a part of me that I am tired of it. I want some distance. Tai chi offers this distance while still being based on the Eastern principles familiar to me.
Singapore fling
Staid, chaste, strict, small—Singapore has heard it all. But this island-nation of 4.2 million people has one thing going for it (many things, actually, but we'll get to that later): Singapore is a sure fling. Changi Airport's superefficient staff get you out in thirty minutes or less. Half an hour later, you're in the city center and the island is yours to savor. Singapore is clean, manageable, and safe; you can drink the water and get around easily; and people don't pester you if you're a woman traveling alone. Best of all, it is small enough (about the size of Chicago) to sample in a day or two. Which is precisely my intent. Having lived in Singapore for two years, I have returned wanting to revel in it as a tourist—to see it all and do it all within forty-eight hours. But what might once have been a leisurely pursuit is shaping up to be a herculean undertaking.
My Life as a Geisha
I have come to Japan to learn about allure. I’ve been married for seventeen years, and while my marriage isn’t falling apart, it is fraying at the edges: a victim of minutiae like leaky taps, lost airline tickets, and PTA meetings. Nowadays when I ask my husband a fairly innocuous question such as, “Does this green dress suit me?” he gets this deer-in-the-headlights expression. I want Ram to look at me without fear and with adoration. So I have come to Japan to learn about feminine allure from its acknowledged masters: the geisha. Geisha were created to pamper men—but they were also the freest women in old Japan, and masters of the arts of calligraphy, flower arranging, music, dance, and drama. Here, a present-day geisha in Gion, one of Kyoto’s historic quarters.
Mumbai Meri Jaan
I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Like millions of others who arrive each day in this island-city by car, plane, bus, or boat, I too have my Bombay dream. I am comely, buxom even (thanks to Wonderbra), and I can giggle and jiggle with the best of them. Age is an issueI am forty-twobut there's nothing a nip and tuck won't fix. So I am going to Bombay to become a movie star. Why not? Every country in the world, if it is lucky, has a city that allows people to create such gauzy fantasies unfettered by the grim shackles of reality. It would be wrong to say that these cities offer their citizens "the space to dream," for most such placesRio, Tokyo, Cairo, and New Yorkare insanely crowded. Still, they thrive and inspire, catalyze personal transformations and fuel creativity, not through wide-open spaces but through vibrant congestion. It's nothing if not a city of contrasts. It's ancient and modern, dirt poor and filthy rich
Goa Grows Up
Once a hippie haven where even India's tightly chaperoned teens could turn on, tune in, and drop out, Goa has lately gone upscale. Living in a trading port for the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Europeans meant that Goans were forced to interact with the outside world far earlier than the average Indian. This has made them friendly but not overly curious about foreigners. Unlike in the rest of India, white people don’t get stared at here, even in the most rural settings. Trance music and tranquil beaches nudge type A personalities into subdued sublimity. The heat and, yes, the hashish encourage a languid pace of life and a state of mind that Goans call sussegado, political cartoonist Miranda told me. “It means a life of leisure—and it is vanishing.”
Scuba diving Lakshadweep
I don't want to write about this place. Few people know of it; fewer still visit. Perhaps that's the way it should be. In this rapidly shrinking world, there ought to be somewhere that remains remote, even obscure; set apart in space and time; offering the promise of mystery, the romance of discovery. Lakshadweep—the name comes out in a sigh. In Sanskrit, it means One Hundred Thousand Islands, although in fact there are just twenty-seven, ten of which are inhabited. Speckled across the Arabian Sea off the Malabar Coast of India, this archipelago of atolls, coral reefs, and islands was—before El Niño—the largest living ecosystem on the planet. Many maps, even Indian ones, don't note it. Yet for a dedicated group of travelers who seek the world's most far-flung spots, this is as close as it gets to paradise
Lessons from my mother
The thought occurred as I eyed a stunning Persian carpet in a downtown Manhattan shop. The Mogul-inspired piece looked terrific but cost thousands more than I was prepared to pay. The slight smile on the manager's mustachioed face suggested that he was willing to bargain. But where and how to begin? Middle age brings with it many challenges: a home, the pleasure and pain of furnishing one, and the sobering realization that you can actually learn something from your mother. For me, middle age was mostly about sticker shock—at the cost of the curtains, sofas, fabrics, and bric-a-brac that it takes to convert a classic six into a cozy home. When a year passed without my buying a single item of furniture, I called my mother in desperation.
Chasing the Mekong River
Cambodia is like a lotus bud concealing an onion—serene on the surface but eliciting tears as you peel back the layers. The awesome scale and spectacle of the Angkor temples contrast sharply with the ghostly photos and skulls of civilians murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The endless peace of a Buddhist monastery gives way to the raucous din of cyclos and tuk–tuks. I am in Cambodia to meet a monk and to travel the Mekong. Being Hindu, I believe in the power of a monk's blessing, and Cambodian monks are way up there in the spiritual hierarchy. So I, like the betrayed people of this ravaged land, line up to get blessed before setting out on my quest. The magnificent sunsets over the Mekong do nothing to diminish the ugly pallor of poverty. It is a young country but an old civilization that reached its zenith in the twelfth century, when the Hindu god–kings (devarajas) built massive stone temples while embracing Buddhism, now the predominant religion.
Wild at Heart
Bangalore is home. I didn't always live here—until two years ago I lived in New York. But now this is the city where my kids go to school, where I hail auto rickshaws for bone-rattling yet perversely exciting rides to work and meetings, where I prowl pubs and malls in search of stories and sales, and where I go to Namdharis Fresh supermarket to buy organic grapes, too-hard bagels, and much-too-soft cream cheese in an attempt to replicate the Sunday morning brunches at my Upper West Side apartment. Come April and May, Bangalore all but closes down: Schools shutter and the city empties out. Earlier this year, I resolved to spend the holiday taking my kids around the region—it was time they got to know their home state. Plotting the itinerary proved half the battle. Karnataka advertises itself as "One State, Many Worlds"—not as catchy as Kerala's "God's Own Country" but probably more accurate.
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