I’m suspicious of people who don’t like dogs, but I trust a dog when it doesn’t like a person. Bill Murray. In case you are wondering if I woke up rather late and decided to pen my impressions on the late Frederick Forsyth’s 50-year-old novel The Dogs of War, his hugely successful effort after his …
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Colour my world
I have no idea why, but my stray thoughts turned to colours this week. This is what happens when you commit yourself to writing at least one blog a week. You post your piece on a Sunday and put your feet up, telling yourself like Little Jack Horner, ‘What a good boy am I!’ Feeling …
No Bumrah, no matter. Siraj is here.
It is Day 5 of the 5th and final Test between England and India being played at the Oval in London, and I am writing this piece a few hours prior to the start of play. By the time I have finished tapping the last keys on my desktop, the game will be over. To …
Fortune’s Fool
I recall my very first job interview in Calcutta with a well-known British company. For reasons not entirely clear at the time, it was called a managing agency house. Some of these companies had peculiarly English names like Bird & Co., Williamson Magor, MacNeill & Magor (the Magors spread themselves about), J. Thomas, Octavius …
My Back Pages
Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now – Bob Dylan. I am not the only one who is complaining that there is no more space in my home to keep books. The bookshelves are bursting at the seams and I have gone and ordered two more books, one …
Getting an earful
The handicap of deafness is not in the ear; it is in the mind. Actress and activist Marlee Matlin, who was deaf from early childhood. Over the past few months, I am being warned and mildly admonished by my better half that I am probably suffering from incipient deafness; ‘Deaf as a doorpost’ being a …
Caravaggio comes to India
During the past few weeks, there has been much excitement in Bangalore around an art exhibition featuring just the one single canvas. This lone canvas was by the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Not to be confused with the other painter and sculptor Michelangelo who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and sculpted …
The law’s position on ‘I love you.’
‘If that’s what the law supposes, then the law is a ass’ – Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Here is some good news for those roadside Romeos, those mobile lounge lizards who lean casually on their two-wheelers just outside the girls’ college gates, smoking their cheap fags while waiting for the girls to …
When words fail you
Many moons ago, when my parents were based in the Far East, my father would subscribe to the local English newspaper, as it might have been The Straits Times in Singapore or The New Straits Times in Malaya, as it then was. We happened to live in both these countries over a seven-year period during …
You don’t mess with Kaa
Somewhere on the outskirts of the city of Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh, a man died of snake bite, if the headline in one of the inside pages of my newspaper is anything to go by. This is not exactly news of earth-shattering importance in a hot and humid country like ours, where the genus serpentes …
Suresh's Corner 