📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Author Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar on Bollywood’s penchant for floral metaphors
I think it happened somewhere outdoors, perhaps on a walk, with friends, when we passed by a tree that someone identified as kachnar. Mountain ebony. Immediately someone from the group said, “Kachchi kali kachnar ki todi nahi jaati.” You don’t snap the bud of mountain-ebony flower. Soon, someone proffered a rejoinder as well, “Ek baar hui jo dosti todi nahi jaati.” Friendship, once forged, is not broken.
How a writer in small-town India finds his way to literature
For the last two years of school life, the idea of summer holidays evaporated. There were tuition classes for Physics, Chemistry, and for Maths (PCM). Extreme competitiveness, cultivated desperately by parents, fearfully by self, and tactfully by tutors, ensured that the schedule was unrelenting. The sun had its hydrogen and helium, I had my Hercules bicycle, and we jostled every day on Muzaffarnagar’s hot streets. Inside a designated room in the tutors’ houses, 10, 20, 30 students congregated. Air conditioning was still a big-city concept. Desert coolers led to a scramble for the draft-facing seats, and this, too, only when the classes were outside the 2-5 pm power cut. If the moaning grew loud, or if a quip was made about the tutors making enough to have a generator installed, a stern speech would inevitably remind us of what success demanded — stoicism and sharpness. We were all individually and completely responsible for an enormity that overwhelmed everything: the future, our future. The present was to be burnt in its service.
‘Even when the material was terrible, he (Irrfan) was the best thing in that film’
Homi Adajania: Okay, let’s talk about Irrfan the performer. I think he had a gift which is inexplicable. I remember asking him once, ‘Why are you so shit when you do ads? You’re just rubbish at them.’ He said, ‘Homi, it’s because I don’t believe who this character is.’ Even when it came to films, he would say, ‘It’ll take me a day or two to catch the soul of the character but once I’ve caught it, there is no way I can give you a false beat, because then I know exactly what the character will not do.’ I think that’s what also made him so unpredictable, because he didn’t have a pattern to it. There wasn’t a system to it, or a method. It was something that just flowed within him once he caught that character. When we were working on Angrezi Medium, he had not worked for about a year and we had a very unfiltered relationship that was extremely honest … one second … very difficult … *pauses, overwhelmed* He loved the fact that I had absolutely no reservations in talking to him the way I did; he was surrounded by people who would not do that with him. And he was always searching for a truth … it’s too difficult …
Designer Sanjay Garg on growing up in Rajasthan and the juice of childhood memories
When I think of summer, my visual memories are all about luscious fruits and colourful home-made drinks. We would gather as a family in the evening, when the sun had exhausted all its fury, and savour aam ras that had been lovingly pulped by the women of the household. This was pure indulgence and a sensory experience but there were other summer staples. Like the kairi panna, made from squashed raw mangoes and spices, a mix that nobody else could quite recreate. Our elders told us it was the best way to refresh and rehydrate ourselves and beat the dry heat of Rajasthan, where I grew up. It was a mix of tartness and fullness, much like life itself. Then there was the buttermilk or chaach and the pickled white onion, which we were told would protect us from the heat wave. The women prepared everything by hand and perhaps that’s the reason why their flavours can never be recreated.
Tide-pooling for starters
I’ve lived in coastal cities (Chennai and Mumbai) for 20 years, vacation often in Goa and have always loved the beach. But until I was sent Sejal Mehta’s sparkling gem of a book, Superpowers on the Shore (Penguin, 2022) to review, I had no idea of what I had been missing right under my nose all this time — the vast intertidal zone that was exposed when the tides retreated. So, on this trip to Goa I decided to make amends and walk hawk-eyed among the rock pools shimmering in the retreating tide and see what treasures lay in wait to be discovered.
Laila Tyabji on summer and the ever-giving six yards
Summer, after a few wonky starts, is finally here. To cheery optimists, it means mangoes and glorious golden cascades of amaltas, to the gloomy, it spells heat, sweat and dust, water shortages and rising electricity bills.
The six stages of summer love
Every single summer, when the days themselves became incandescent from the heat, when the laburnum bent under the weight of its sunshine lanterns, when litchis and peaches burst into lusciousness — those were the days that I invariably fell in love. Crazy-making, heat-fuelled, summer love.
We know what they are reading this summer
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is not a new book, but I read it very recently at my daughter Ketaki’s recommendation. How does the devastating grief of death affect those who survive? Does death of a loved one create an emotional void or also affect the survivor physiologically? I became aware of the meaning of intense grief as I dealt with my mother’s passing and watched my father trying to cope for four years after my mother’s death, when he declared it was time for him to follow her. Didion’s personal account is moving, eloquent, stunning and pierces straight through your heart.
📣 For more lifestyle news, follow us on Instagram | Twitter | Facebook and don’t miss out on the latest updates!
