My friend, the redoubtable and irascible Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar, has never taken a backward step when calling a spade a shovel, irrespective of the consequences. In the present instance, the spade (or shovel) is represented by one Pawan Khera, one of the Congress Party’s many spokespersons, who recently hove into Aiyar’s cross-hairs. While speaking …
Author Archives: sureshsubrahmanyan
Snappy answers to stupid questions
Those of you who are just out of university, engineering college or one of the many management institutes that dot our country, you must be working hard to bone up on a variety of subjects in preparation for your forthcoming written tests and viva voce that you will be confronted with. Suited, booted corporate executives …
Cricket. Who gives a toss?
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. George Bernard Shaw. I don’t write much about cricket these days. This is a one-off. There are several sound reasons for my growing disaffection. For starters I have gone clean off the game. I don’t watch it like I used to. There is just …
TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN
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 …
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 …
Suresh's Corner 