Katha2025-03-09T12:38:21+05:30

How to give (or how to clear out your closet)

This then is the long view of life. I view interactions as transactions. My parents view interactions as relationships. Post office personnel get invited home for festivals; and the man at the transport office gets new nightwear because he complained that his joints were aching in Bengaluru’s cold weather. As for me, I have a lot of spare room in my storage closet these days.

Can you smell and taste through cyberspace?

The killer app, at least in the fields of wine, perfume, cheese, or anything that relies on olfactory and gustatory sensations, will have nothing to do with curing male baldness. The killer app for wine and perfume will be the ability to transport scent and taste through cyberspace. If you could click on a wine bottle that is displayed on your computer and smell the aroma of the wine it contains, all the wine descriptions that we struggle to come up with will be rendered useless in an instant.

Can wine be described well? for Mint Lounge

KRSMA Estates has invited me to a tasting of their wines next week, and frankly, I am a little nonplussed. Robert M. Parker, the influential American wine critic, once described a Haut-Brion as having “a sweet nose of creosote, asphalt…” and an array of berries. Having never tasted asphalt, and having no idea what a creosote is, this description is absolutely useless to me.

Are you listening to the Kodaikanal rap?

The old woman in Palani—down the hill from Kodaikanal-- was trying to recruit me to be a movie extra.  Muniamma looked like a rock star.  She was about 80, with weathered skin about the colour of a coffee bean.  She was clad in a soft white cotton sari sans blouse in the fashion of village women in Tamilnadu. Muniamma’s recruitment strategy was fool proof.

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