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The Heart of Starkness: Naga Diaries 4

The emotional issue of the state and also the region, was ticking next to us in the vehicles we used, in the trains we traveled, and hotel rooms we shared. Amlan was actually both an Indian and the Naga. Conflicted, tinder box and unpredictable

The Trapdoor Opens: Naga Diaries 3

Mao's father was a GaoN bura. The villagers were often rounded up, forced to sit in an open space. His father himself had been kidnapped. Then the icing on the cake, 'Resentment against the Indian government is in our blood.'

Infections and Infectiousness: Naga Diaries 2

The liberalism that was part and parcel of the tribal value system, where a child was the most revered thing, was also fraying. Sex among youngsters is not considered a moral issue

A Sculptor of Parachutes: Naga Diary 1

True or otherwise, this story is a metaphor for all the issues that coalesce into what the Naga situation is. Nationalism. Right over land. Guerilla warfare. Army repression. Fight against colonialism.

Invisible Immigrations, Furtive Bleedings

Unfortunately, the ghetto is moving into the city. The city is bleeding into the ghetto...Destinies are converging constantly and very swiftly in the globalised and globalizing world.

A Drunken RSS Man in Jassema

The feelings slowly churning in his head, the various ideas randomly laid out on the table, all coalesced into a look of deep pain. His eyes were speckled in fierce glints of pain and alarm. It was as if he was actually living with the situation of his me

Arabs, Jains, Mammon and Osama

There were two kinds of immigrants who washed up on the west coast of the sub continent.

A Moses on his Harley Davidson

In an act of symbolic irony, in September, precisely three months before communal riots erupted on December 6th 1992 in Bombay, the Dawood gang or D company as it was called, had accomplished its last secular killing.

The Instinct to Upgrade

The political empowerment of the backwards in these two states (Uttar Pardesh and Bihar) could not directly confront the social backwardness. These two states have the most feudal and caste ridden societies, but the political clout of the backwards have n

Cardamom Cloud over Coffee

Indians have so many divisions, and one of the divisions between North and South India is the preference in beverages. Tea is the preferred drink in the North of India, while South Indians love coffee.

Do riot children smell fear in parent’s sweat?

And yet, they go back to their insular neighbourhoods. Will the school triumph over the whispered prejudices of their neighbourhoods?

The Open Circle

All religions subsist on some kind of faith, and a set of rituals. The more well-defined these rituals, as well as the rubric of do’s and don’ts, the more tightly bound will be the religion.

’Dangerous like my English teacher’

Surekha’s home, which was half arborium. Three years ago that house was an unkempt one. She managed to keep it exactly like that three years thence.The house had a personality, a confident casual rakishness that hated grooming. A reflection of its o

’Our Shiv Sena’

Is it a case of the Stockholm syndrome working late? As a young wife and mother she was a victim, ever fearful, of the terror of the Shiv Sena in Bombay. And the real fear of physical attacks. Thirty years later, she called the Sena “ours.”

The Soldier who Annexed 3 States for 3 Daughters

A veteran of both the 1965 and the 1971 wars against Pakistan, retired Hawaldaar Ramaiah was a fat man with a handle bar moustache that his wife trimmed in the night while he was asleep.

Destinies, dynasties, and upstart pickpockets

We had stepped into another zone of assault; another variation of the mini theatre where Indian regional identities, destinies and politics clashed...

The Moor in the Idol Junkyard

It was as if Bhubhaneswar was one vast battlefield strewn with mutilated beauty in stone. And all responsibility for this senseless act of violence and vandalism is Kaala Pahaad. The legend of Kaala Pahaad is the medieval missing link that connected the A

Sense and Sensibility

At Delhi's Pragati Maidan, a lady asked me whether I could depict Krishna and Radha in forms and actions other than what I had ever done. I said yes. And she said to depict Krishna bowling to Radha, while Radha was batting. Bhaskar was blushing...

An Iranian Exile in Sambhalpur

The VHP issue had taken a more serious turn, filling Sister Miriam Morris, the Christian nun who headed St Joseph, with panic.What had happened was really macabre. One of the children attending the medical camp was given a tonic, which was past its expiry

Manto Strikes

The smoke had reached an alarming proportion, and the whole chawl would be up in a minute, since chawls have a habit of being burnt down before one can say “damn your blouse.”

The Covered Trucks

PART II - We left Vapi the next morning, March 3. We started out towards Nasik, back into Maharashtra. Nasik was a four hour ride through rugged low lying bald hills, taking the full blast of the March sun’s fury blazing away...

Intimacies Remapped

Part one of a series on my travel through a major part of India during the Gujarat riots ... my journey away from the blood and gore of riots to questioning my role, and the roles of others like me, in an India seemingly fast polarising along communal lin

South Asia’s Ride On The Video Tiger

Satellite television is another tiger that South Asia is firmly riding; getting off perhaps is not too much of an immediate concern. Regulation, benchmarking, calibrating debates with nationalistic undercurrents, codes of conduct will evolve.

Book: Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found

A sensational debut, and simply mandatory reading for those who salaam Bombay.

Sharded Past

When guests go
And I return to me
I’ll cure the hangover

Wannabe Haikus

Please oh please hurl
Bricks at institutions,
Else children will grow up
Thinking bricks only make walls.

Shiners versus Whiners; it’s Economics, Stupid

After all the hype and hoopla about India Shining, the results are a clear indicator that the BJP-led coalition misread public perception completely.

Politics of the Leg and the Peg

To an Englishman, bars do not dance, period. But, dancing bars, as people from Mumbai understand it, do rock. To those who live in this metropolis, bars where young girls and women dance, are characteristic of their city.

A Strip of Road, a Bulb of Light, a Bucketful of Water

We are getting reported in the US as “women are moving up in India” even in the notoriously backward and casteist cowbelt. This might be seen as good omen, the external push to internal determination for aspirants of mud and thatch paradises.

Farzana and Me

Yours is the impotency of the minority, mine, the infertility of the majority.

Teaching journalism

Once I asked if any in the class wanted to become foreign correspondents. Almost the whole class chorused, but of course, muffled by the loftiness of their stated agreement. Then I asked them if they liked Henry Kissinger, and virtually none of them had h

Widows of Banares

The tradition of widows gathering, sometimes willingly, other times unwillingly, is based o the Hindu belief that those who die in Kashi, or Banares will go to heaven.

The Kal Aaj Aur Kal of Secularism

There is a generation growing distant from religion, and yet engagingly indulgent of it. Not so much as a pathway to salvation as much as a familiar lane of the past.

Dhirubhai Ambani: The Heathcliffe of Indian business

In the death of Ambani, Indian sensibility might have changed course from ...

Buddha of Rumtek

Black sun, briefly breached

An Insight Into the Way Shiv Sena Functions

This political sex appeal of Thackerey is the reason that Shiv Sena shakhaas have sprung up in Haryana and Punjab

An Indian salute for President Musharraf

On January 12, President Musharraf exhibited the moral courage of the man with character who has been called by destiny to the antechamber of history.

A Father’s Letter To Daughter: A short story

whichever clan rules the earth, I shall always be the outsider

Meditations of Busybee

can Mumbai have Rudi Guiliani for Mayor?

A Sensory Report of the Agra Summit From Bombay (Part I and II)

Maybe peace is destined only for Midnight’s Children. Give or take a generation.

Another War Dispatch From the Front

Kitchens and countries

Tehelka Tapes: Modernising Media Morality

the triumph of the reporter over the editor

Portraits of Three Women

Bitch goddess of the self

Yet Another South Asian Story

The rapist was convicted for seven years... the victim to solitary confinement for life

Three Bombay Poems

Street death has a peculiar habit ...

Is the Language of New Fiction Androgynous?

Does literature too have sex?

Chowking the North South Divide

too much of memory and desire might be choking the human story of Kashmir...

SA Media’s Bout of Measles

South African cricket, and indeed world sports, will get over Cronje

Its only because I am a Muslim

his religious identity cannot be again a motive for prosecution

Pssst...This is Rest of South Asia speaking

for every Indian dollar-billionaire, there are at least a hundred million paupers

Harish Nambiar

• Articles on Chowk: 50
• First article: May 1, 2000
• Latest article: Apr 9, 2006
• Times read on Chowk: 357234