Column: The Good Life: for Mint Lounge
Elders fighting
My friends Anuja Master Bose and Sujata Kelkar gave me ideas for this piece. Thank you both. Why do elderly couples argue so much? Because they can Shoba Narayan Aug 21, 2013 Save this article I was sitting at a restaurant in Florida when this thought occurred to me: old people fight all the time. All around me were senior citizens who were lunching with each other, lured by the all-you-can-eat buffet. Elderly couples sat across the table from each other with matching white hair and salad plates. As I went around the buffet section, I could hear them talk [...]
Spam
Why am I suddenly getting so much spam comments?
Arts funding: we don’t value our arts enough: for Mint Lounge
Like most journalists, I get lots of requests for meetings from people who have ideas to parlay, products to push, locations to publicize, and so on. Like most journalists, I am also prickly about such meetings because I don't want to be played, as it were. The assumption is: hey, I know you have an agenda, but I'll be damned if I am going to be your tool in pushing this agenda. So you go in defensive and doubt everything. So it was with the IFA. Before I went in, I said, let me write a column about funding for [...]
Tagore and Return to India
A Tagore quote prompted this piece. The quote is included in the piece published in The National here and pasted below. The National Conversation After a return to India, life has become more interrupted Shoba Narayan Aug 14, 2013 Ever since my family and I moved back to India after nearly 20 years in the US, people often ask me what it is like to be back in my native country. My answer is always the same. As the movie title says, "It's Complicated." If I could describe the difference between my life in New York City and my life [...]
Gita Govindam
Amazing love-poem by Jayadeva. One of the finest Sanskrit works. I am studying this. [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/104687562" params="" width=" 100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]
Memory Improvement
Memory improvement is an obsession of mine. Here is my latest exercise/attempt to improve it. The National Conversation When I turned to the internet to improve my poor memory Shoba Narayan Jul 26, 2013 "Thanks to your mother, I am drinking hot water these days," I told the visiting boy. "Like her, I too believe that the hot water will melt the fat globules in my body and I will become slim, indeed svelte." I was chuffing with pride at adding one more trick to my arsenal of "how to lose weight without doing exercise", when my daughter spoke up. [...]
Goyard, Rimowa and Tumi
I finally got it right: connecting the global with the local. One of the few pieces I am happy with even after publication. Usually I go back and say– nah, wish I had said this instead of this; or wish I had said this better. via Goyard, Rimowa and Tumi.
Goyard, Rimowa and Tumi: defined by your trunk: for Mint Lounge
I finally got it right: connecting the global with the local. One of the few pieces I am happy with even after publication. Usually I go back and say-- nah, wish I had said this instead of this; or wish I had said this better. Goyard, Rimowa, Tumi: defined by your trunk About giant tiffin-carriers, hold-alls, Goyard trunks and vintage European brands Shoba Narayan First Published: Sat, Aug 03 2013. 12 08 AM IST What your Rimowa (left) and Tumi say about you. I bought my first Tumi carry-on for the same reason that I bought branded objects in my [...]
Booksoarus
Thank you, Lavanya Shanbogue, for the plug. Interview here.
Adam Grant
I read Adam Grant's essay in the New York Times last week. I had this knee-jerk reaction that was largely negative. I knew that I wouldn't be able to find the studies that countered Prof Grant's thesis. But I found that I just couldn't let it go. Some of my closest friends graduated from the Wharton School And so I know what it means to say that Prof Grant is the youngest tenured and the most popular professor. I admire him but I think he is wrong. Here is an essay that I wrote about his essay. The National Conversation [...]