Column: The Good Life: for Mint Lounge
Gratitude
An attempt at being funny. I had the hardest thing trying to come up with a quote. I know that someone made a quote, which went something like...."dah dah dah...about" Was it grateful about? Happy about? Complain about? Trying searching for that. I googled Bernard Shaw, always reliably curmudgeon. Unsuccessful. Anyway, here it is. Opinion CommentConnect: facebook twitter Google Plus Radio: Classic FM Feed: rss I must try harder to be grateful for what I do not have Shoba Narayan May 6, 2014 Updated: May 6, 2014 17:57:00 You know what the problem with you is?” said my therapist in [...]
A female chef’s secret recipe for success for Quartz
A female chef’s secret recipe for success I was thrilled to meet this chef. She is casual and confident but underneath you can sense her resolve. It appeared in Quartz here. Carme Ruscellada i Serra looks like the seven-star Michelin chef that she is. I met her recently at her restaurant in Barcelona, Moments, to discuss Catalan cuisine, the Mediterranean diet, and why there are so few women chefs as successful as she. Like many of them, she downplays the role of gender in the high-temperature, high-testosterone world of restaurant kitchens. Running a 70-staff kitchen, according to Ruscellada, is not [...]
Nagging
The best way to make advice stick? Nag incessantly Shoba Narayan April 22, 2014 Updated: April 22, 2014 18:18:00 One of the perks of being a parent is that you get to offer advice to your children. One of the problems of being a parent is that you forget how little advice you took from your own parents. This inherent paradox is being played out in countless living rooms and dens in this, one of the peak seasons for parenting advice. In many parts of the world, students are applying to go to colleges abroad. The prospect of losing their [...]
Cricket Widow
Opinion The only option for a cricket widow is to play the game Shoba Narayan April 13, 2014 Updated: April 13, 2014 16:57:00 I am a cricket widow. I didn’t think I would be one. Indeed, in the early throes of marital harmony, I thought that my husband and I would do every activity together. He would watch my soap operas and I would watch sport. That ended within a month and now neither of us is clear as to who crushed the spousal camaraderie that had been the cornerstone of our marriage – or at least our vision of [...]
Queen the movie, Lean In
I hope Queen the movie triumphs in the box office, because it is a rare Bollywood film with the heroine as the lead. Also produced and written by Kangana Ranaut. LOUNGE|BUSINESS OF LIFE|INDULGE FIRST PUBLISHED: SAT, APR 12 2014. 12 07 AM ISTHOME» LEISURE» THE GOOD LIFE The line joining Sheryl Sandberg and Rani Every study about glass ceilings and Harvard Business School dropouts shows that women have a long way to go in the workspace Shoba Narayan Mail Me The line joining Sheryl Sandberg and Rani (From left) Rani’s character is about determination and Sheryl Sandberg’s book has [...]
About Indian Wine for Mint Lounge
Wine clubs are proliferating all over India. The time is ripe for local producers to capture and grow this interest. An informal club I belong to served some nice white wines recently: an aromatic white from Château de Fontenille and a 2008 Aussières Blanc Chardonnay from Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite). The members of this club travel frequently and bring back wines. They do give Indian wines a try but prefer to pay two-three times more for wines of guaranteed quality. They are the market.
Maternal Mortality Rates
Maternal mortality interests me because it seems preventable and is a problem that is at a confluence of medicine, society and culture. I recommend (highly) the latest State of the World's mothers report. If giving birth is natural, why do so many mothers die? Shoba Narayan April 1, 2014 Updated: April 1, 2014 17:43:00 A small item in the news caught my eye. It is something I track, and something I worry about. The technical term for it is “maternal mortality”: dying while giving birth. Tribesmen in Pakistan and villagers in Darfur have expressed concern over rising maternal mortality rates [...]
Reinventing Carnatic Music
How do you make classical music relevant to a global audience? Should you even try? Today’s audience for Carnatic music ranges from Cleveland in the US to Chennai, and these are the hard-core ones. How can you expand its reach? Is it by removing the bhakti-rasa or devotional tone that some believe to be its core? Is it by changing the concert format, as some are doing? Or is it by developing a smartphone app?
VSCO
My latest app download. I love it Check out the photos here.
Lessons from Malaysia Airlines crash. For Quartz
LESSON FROM MALAYSIAN AIRLINES My rant about how large Planet Earth is; and about the hubris of our species. Sometimes, humans have no clue. Wrote it last night. Out today. The pleasure of web-zines is their immediacy. Reads better in QZ.com here Superstition about travel may be gone—but our respect of it shouldn’t By Shoba Narayan 11 hours ago Shoba Narayan is a writer in Bangalore. She is the author of "Return to India" and "Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes." We truly only know a small portion of our planet. AP Photo/Andy Wong Mortality is not something we associate [...]