A metaphor for the future Indian cities: sumptuous traffic jam

"Why aren’t there more flyovers built to bypass the traffic? But for the last 10 kilometers we have traversed four of them."

Reading Alberto Manguel on Homer at Landmark Books in Hyderabad, he thinks if there were a few of these stores a decade ago, perhaps, he would have never left

On the old Bombay highway, what happened to the distant views of the hillocks and the lakes? Then he was too small to go explore. Now everything has vanished under a carpet of concrete

Posters of godmen next to posters of movie stars – two pathways to getting at the same kind of solace

A novel he must find and read just for its resonant title: Thomas Hardy’s “Far From The Madding Crowd”

On the second day after arrival, on a jetlagged morning walk with his father, he hears the song of dueling temples

Subbu’s Bhaja Govindam heard distantly over the early morning calls of iterant vegetable sellers is like real filter coffee – how different than hearing it on headphones in an autumn American morning

There goes a Porsche dealer. But here come Jaguar, BMW, and Harley offering their shiny, and completely impractical, wares. Should they begin with the question: where to drive these toys?

Joy is scoring four Hero fountain pens for a dollar each. There was a time when these were the default writing instruments, filled with Chelpark Royal Blue ink

Many who he grew up with have left for that far country. Few lines from Shahid Ali’s “A Country Without a Post office”: One begins: “These words may never reach you.”/Another ends: “The skin dissolves in dew/ without your touch.”

The last yellow blossoms on the amalta tree. And four cabbage butterflies hovering like white memories from his childhood Novembers, which were spent chasing them through the schoolyard brambles

Date: Dec 1, 2010; Hyderabad India