From my earliest childhood days, when my younger sibling and I were in boarding school in Bangalore, going home for summer and winter holidays meant catching the overnight Madras Mail from Bangalore Cantonment Station, arriving at the crack of dawn in Madras Central, spending the day with our uncle and aunt, and then taking the …
Author Archives: sureshsubrahmanyan
Remembering Lotika, Pamela, Melville and Chakrapani
Caveat: The contents of this article may go clean over the heads of those under the age of 65, but that is no excuse for your not wanting to read the piece. Shakespeare went over my head every time I tried to plough through one of those interminable soliloquies by Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, Mark …
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Testing times at hospitals
A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. Groucho Marx. Hospitals have become nicer places these days. An assertion that will be hotly disputed by many and, I daresay, with good reason. Everything is relative and it all depends on how you compare the hospitals of today with those of yesteryear. Much …
Deconstructing the Applause
I have just returned from Chennai, having partaken heartily of the food of love, namely music; in common parlance, the December music season. Not just any old music, but the unfiltered, unadulterated pure offering provided by the doughty purveyors of Carnatic music, one of south India’s many gifts to the world of arts and culture. …
Like, So and the Double Negative
I am not quite sure when people started opening their sentences with the words ‘like’ or ‘so.’ I rather suspect this unfortunate habit is of a recent vintage, and largely confined to the younger set, by which I probably mean those around the age of 40 or younger. Applying the irrefutable logic of numbers, you …
Books in the running brooks
I was at the Bangalore Lit Fest last week. Ever since I moved from Calcutta to Bangalore some years ago, I have been meaning to attend the BLF, to accord the festival its popular acronym. However, something or the other arrived to militate against my putting in an appearance. I reckoned that I was …
The many hues of a taxi driver
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot / And a big yellow taxi took away my old man. Joni Mitchell. No one hails a taxi anymore. Shades of coming out of a cinema or concert hall, standing on the edge of a pavement and waving your hand frantically yelling ‘Taxi’ as another one …
Power breakfast with Fred the Fly
An allegory It has been widely rumoured that the two chief honchos who carry the enormous burden of running one of our country’s most important and prosperous states, let us dub them Number 1 and Number 2, have had differences to iron out and scores to settle. As a common citizen, I am not privy …
Am I boring you?
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I quite enjoy picking up a conversation with complete strangers. This could happen just about anywhere. Mind you, not every stranger you broach is likely to return the compliment, but you press on regardless. If your target, if that is the word I want, is reticent you …
Death of the Encyclopaedia Salesman
‘The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.’ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. A few decades ago, if you paid a visit to a home with a modicum of house pride, you would unfailingly have found in their bookshelves or ornate glass cupboards, an entire line of leather-bound volumes …
Suresh's Corner 