Holi Mesquite Drum

Taking your eyes off the road while driving in Delhi is a dangerous thing, but if you did take the chance and looked around a bit, the odds are you would see a mesquite tree somewhere close by. (For those of us not from Delhi, mesquite trees are the ones with the twisted branches and long thorns. For those of us from Mumbai, trees are tall wooden things with green leaves.)

Small, common Walter

I grew up in a time when the CD hadn’t been invented yet. We listened to music by playing cassettes on portable little 2-in-1s with tinny little speakers. And because of the finite nature of pocket money, a lot of the tapes weren’t even ‘original’; they were recorded off a friend who had the original album and a double-deck cassette player. With tinny little speakers.

The Cheque Is In The Mail

These days a very prominent magazine, which we don’t subscribe to, is sending us a tree. This would be fine, since we like trees, but for the awkward fact that they’re sending it in installments – one mailer at a time.

The story began a year ago, with the arrival of the First Fat Envelope. It was an invitation to win multiple lakhs of rupees in a sweepstake for which we had already been preferentially shortlisted! What luck!

Arctic Survival

If a market researcher were to suddenly spring out of the shrubbery and ask me to name a creature that really has life figured out, I will name the bear. Not only are bears fat and hairy and equipped with four-inch claws, which makes them almost completely immune from Delhi’s eve teasers, they also have the good sense to hibernate all the way through winter.

The Next Ten Years

Happy new year, and welcome to a new decade.

The 'Noughties' are over, and the race is on to invent the catchiest buzzword to describe the next ten years. I'm predicting they'll be called the 'Twenteens'.

When it catches on, and all the smart people are talking about the Twenteens, remember you read it here first.

The Herbal Feast

Even for those of us not currently getting married, the Wedding Season is upon us. With pressed suit and shining shoes, several evenings are being devoted every week to seeing off sundry relatives and acquaintances into the jaws of matrimony. And, apart from the traffic jams caused by multiple baraats and multitudes of guests flitting from sangeet to reception, it’s a happy time in Delhi.

Hobbies for the Horizontally Inclined

It isn’t easy being a nature lover. People expect so much more from you. If you haven’t hugged a couple of trees before breakfast and knocked off a poacher or two by mid-afternoon, people think you aren’t doing the job right.