Column: The Good Life: for Mint Lounge
Collaborative Consumption
The wisdom of collaborative consumption Shoba Narayan Jan 9, 2011 European cities such as London have come up with bike-sharing programmes subsidised by advertisements. BLOOMBERG next previous Go to photo 0 Have you ever opened your wardrobe and discovered it is full of clothes but you have nothing to wear? Economists have a term for this. They call it depreciating value of assets and there are several methods, "straight-line" and complicated, to calculate the depreciation of vehicles or electronic goods. The psychological reason behind depreciating value has to do with the old biblical injunction against coveting. We all [...]
Mother in law
The problem with the mother-in-law Shoba Narayan Jan 8, 2011 Two women who love the same man is hardly the recipe for a friendship. I speak not of extramarital affairs or bigamy, but of the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. In India, where I live, this misunderstood, maligned "saas-bahu" relationship dominates the collective psyche. It is the stuff of television soap operas and is as much an emotional cliché as the stepmother is in the West. Men have it easy in this respect. Their relationship with their in-laws is somehow not as fraught as a woman's. Sure, some men [...]
Why do Arabic rhythms sound so sweet to Indian ears? for The National Abu Dhabi
Why do Arabic rhythms sound so sweet to Indian ears? Shoba Narayan Jan 18, 2011 A cousin of mine in Kuwait tells me that Bollywood music is de riguer at her parties these days. Apparently, her Arab friends love it. Coincidently, I reveal, there seems to be a reverse musical migration taking place, with Arab music increasingly influencing Bollywood's music composers. Take Ya Ali, the hit song from the Hindi film Gangster. It has Turkish, Arabic and Afghan versions. The Hindi tune was plainly lifted from these originals. Another Hindi song called, Kaho na kaho, is a straight copy of Amr [...]
Starbucks Compromise
Compromise may prove to be key for Starbucks in India Shoba Narayan Jan 23, 2011 next previous I have to admit that when I heard Starbucks was coming to India, my heart sank. It's not that I don't like their coffee. I do. I think calling sizes "venti" and "grande" in the English-speaking US is pretentious, but it has turned out to be a successful marketing move. I like Starbucks' stores — the smell of coffee, the deep armchairs and the spiky-haired waiters. While living in New York, I pretty much wrote all my feature articles settled on the purple leather [...]
Matchmaking Tiffin
My Life: Indian matchmaking takes a tiffin or two Shoba Narayan Jan 29, 2011 My husband, Ram, and I met over tiffin and tea one rainy afternoon in November 1991. We had an Indian arranged marriage, and as was the custom our horoscopes were matched, our families met and deemed each other compatible, and finally my parents invited him (and his parents) home to have tiffin and tea, and oh, by the way, to meet me. Tiffin, in this case, consisted of sojji and bajji, which are to Indians what scones and finger sandwiches are to the English. Sojji [...]
Succession Wipro
When succession becomes a major family concern Shoba Narayan Jan 30, 2011 "Save for the public sector and multinationals, India is full of family businesses," says Professor K Ramachandran of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. In India, the Tatas, Godrejs, and Mahindras are large business families whose progeny run the conglomerates. While this looms large in the public consciousness, it does not seem to have impacted their earnings in any significant way. Wipro is an anomaly, mostly because it operates in the IT environment where professionally run firms are the norm. The software giant's founder, Azim Premji, has [...]
Growth and Green
Striking a balance in India between growth and green Shoba Narayan Feb 6, 2011 next previous After 20 years in the US, my husband and I decided to uproot our family five years ago and move back to India, the country of our birth. It was a decision fraught with confusion and conflict, mostly because America's pleasures were very tangible whereas everything that we were moving back for was intangible and immeasurable. How to quantify the value of having our children grow up yards from their grandparents? What we were giving up, on the other hand, was easy to [...]
Urgent need to preserve baby girls
An urgent need to preserve and value baby girls in India Shoba Narayan (Writer) Apr 16, 2011 "Would you kill a child? Would you kill your grandchild? I have seen women do this and, believe me, it is not difficult. Give the newborn milk laced with pesticides or poisonous herbs. The infant will suck the milk greedily and die within an hour." The speaker was my uncle. The place was Salem district in interior Tamil Nadu. What he was talking about was the fairly routine practice of female infanticide practised in the nearby villages. This was more than 10 years [...]
How not to forget
Is my problem genetics or just modern life? I forget Shoba Narayan Dec 7, 2010 Tom Cruise has been in and out of the UAE recently, filming the Mission Impossible sequel. I have a message for him. Tom, if you're reading this, why not get one of those scientist guys on set to design, not a gizmo that self-destructs, but one that self-reflects. Allow me to explain. I misplaced my library cards last week and have been turning my home upside down searching for them. As I scramble through bed linen, clean out closets and scurry behind shelves in [...]
For The National Abu Dhabi on Chennai
For The National Travel pages here and pasted below Chennai is at the art of the matter Shoba Narayan Jan 22, 2011 next previous Why Chennai? To get a taste of south Indian culture; because this city of 7.6 million people, on India's Coromandel coast has preserved its essential character more so than cosmopolitan Bangalore or politically volatile Hyderabad; because it is my hometown, a city that I love. In Chennai, you get a real sense of place, time and history that is lacking in many other Indian metros (save Kolkata). If you are an archaeology buff, the nearby temple [...]