I do not wish to seem fashionably blasé or anything and, crucially important as these issues are, abrogation of Article 370 with the Supreme Court putting its rubber seal of approval on it, and the Hitchcockian suspense surrounding the appointment of Chief Ministers to the three Hindi heartland states bagged by the BJP in the …
Author Archives: sureshsubrahmanyan
Splitting hairs over small beer
Absent friends, may they stay that way. Christopher Hitchens. I ran into an old friend the other day. Acquaintance might be a more accurate word as I had not met him for the best part of twenty-five years, so we had to pick up the pieces gingerly after the usual round of ‘Good God, surely …
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
There is a tendency amongst many of us hack writers to attribute any slick proverb to Shakespeare. The Bard of Avon came up with so many smart lines befitting any occasion, that one can be excused for giving him the credit for aphorisms he did not even write. My proverb of choice for this essay …
Anyone for Vanuatu or the Grenadines?
I recently spent an enjoyable holiday in Sri Lanka with my extended family. The weather was hot and humid but we were put up at a comfortable hotel in a seaside resort in Kosgoda. Seafood aplenty, washed down with lots of beer and generally lying about like beached whales under umbrellas and getting our quota …
How much is that doggie in the window?
Cast: Mohawk Mata as herself / Hero-none-the-wiser as himself / Joy Dehradun as himself and introducing Henry the Rottweiler as his dog self. This is a short one-act, off-key musical play about a feisty parliamentarian, her ex-boyfriend Joy Dehradun, a Rottweiler named Henry and Hero-none-the-wiser, a wealthy, off-shore industrialist (at least, he seems to spend …
Wild goose chase in Kuala Lumpur
My younger brother and I were kiddies between the ages of 5 and 9 when we spent a few years in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in Malaya, as it then was. The reason being that my father, who worked in a private commercial bank (later nationalised), was posted in that part of the world for …
Music is what music does. Online or offline.
Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna has recently held forth on the perils, as he sees it, of music lovers inexorably leaning towards consuming the art form through a plethora of streaming OTT channels and eschewing live performances. Sitting comfortably at home, one can order entertainment, à la carte, often through state-of-the-art sound systems. Not to mention …
Continue reading “Music is what music does. Online or offline.”
A bit of a chat
‘What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.’ Cool Hand Luke. (This story is being narrated by a retired government servant). I am experiencing a few issues conversing with people below the age of 40 these days. Which is a dead giveaway that I am above 40 years old. As to how many years above …
Who is this Russell Brand?
I don’t mind having a reputation as a serious and spiritual person. I think that would be a nice reputation to have. Russell Brand. During my slaving days in an advertising agency in the 70s in Calcutta, we were required to work closely with market research organisations. Some of these research companies were spawned by …
Down among the wines and spirits
I was fiddling with my mobile phone a couple of days ago, since most of us have nothing better to do these days, when I came across one of those short videos that had gone viral, as the expression is, rather like dengue or the Zika virus. The Instagram or Tik-Tok reel was about a …
Suresh's Corner 