Author Archives: sureshsubrahmanyan

The city of Calcutta (a moniker I greatly prefer to Kolkata) recently went pink. We know that the present ruling dispensation’s favourite colour is blue. However, needs must. When a cricket crazy city like Calcutta decides to host the first ever day / night Test Match in India at the storied Eden Gardens, to be […]

‘I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well.’ – Bertie Wooster / P.G. Wodehouse. The world can broadly be divided into two discrete […]

                                          ‘It’s not cricket’ – Anon. In India, cricket is all-pervasive. Kipling’s ‘flannelled fools’ are to be seen day in and day out on our television screens. Though, apart from being attired in pure whites, you will also find them in blues, yellows, greens and a variety of rainbow hues, depending on the variant […]

Will the things we wrote today, sound as good tomorrow? Elton John I don’t know what it is, something in the air perhaps, some non-malignant bug that seems to affect (in a nice way) most people I know. In case you’re wondering what this incoherent babbling is all about, I am referring to the hobby […]

‘….full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Are you the squeamish type? Then you should read no further. People close to me are beginning to click their tongues admonishingly over elements of smut creeping into some of my blogs. The fault, dear reader, does not lie with me. Not guilty. Ergo, I […]

I was born into an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family, and nowhere are the hallmarks of orthodoxy more strictly observed than in our religious festivals. The plethora of rituals almost every month kept me in a constant daze, but the culinary feast that followed each auspicious day, was mouth-watering.  Deepavali, or the festival of lights (and […]

Aiden Markram and Mitchell Marsh, names that don’t lightly trip off the tongue, but two promising cricket internationals representing South Africa and Australia respectively, simultaneously hogged the sporting headlines recently. Incredibly, for almost identical reasons. Each of them decided to take out their frustrations over their own poor performances, by punching their fists on hard […]

Today’s generation may find it strange, almost incomprehensible, that when I was growing up during the ’50s and ’60s, avenues for entertainment were severely restricted. International cricket matches and other sports were unavailable on television. Come to think of it, television itself was going through birth pangs. We were big on live commentary on the […]

               Ever since I retired from active service, precluding my having to take a tedious drive to some drudge of an office in unendurable traffic conditions, leaving me scarcely fit to be of any constructive use once I arrived at my place of work, and the same torturous routine repeated all the way back […]