Known Turf

I'd recently done a brief review of: ‘I want to Live’ – The Story of Madhubala  (by Khatija Akbar). I've been a lifelong fan of the ...

The simple thing is to set fire to them. But that isn’t a good option, especially for plastics. Perhaps that was when someone came up with a...

I still remember with absolute clarity the day mom asked us: What makes shadows? In my mind, shadows were associated with darkness — with c...

Say, the PWD engineer decided he wasn’t going to attend this enormous cost-cutting party. Say, he fined the contractor or blacklisted the f...

Friend requests come from religious hardliners and right-wing chest-thumpers. Also from leftists, libertarians, atheists, humanists. Last w...

There was no road leading to this village. We’d walked over an hour when I spotted, in the middle of this dusty, rocky, lonely terrain, a wa...

Blackmail is all about fear and shame. It means that someone can make you do something you don’t want to do because you are ashamed of the c...

Nearly all male actors have joyfully gotten into drag at some point in their careers, while all female actors long to play something meaty a...

It took me a while to realise that I wasn’t really dreaming; I was just remembering sketchy details my mind had collected from the newspaper...

Kirekegaard has said somewhere that often people treat difficult life questions like naughty schoolboys — they copy the answers from a book ...

What angers me is the fact that Madhya Pradesh has been considering a nuclear plant in Chutka for over two decades but not with the blessin...

Multiplexes have changed my generation forever and I’m not talking about hundred-rupee popcorn. I’m talking about what we see and hear. Ten...

I was asked to do piece on urban women's lives in modern India, and how that has changed over a generation, for the Italian version of ...

I've just started writing a column for DNA. The first piece is about a tree. There’s a gulmohur tree outside my window, along with a bun...

A piece I did for Femina a few months ago, on women's inheritance rights in India. Read on. A room, a field, a place of her own. On...

" I don't like the jargon "sex workers". We are all sex workers these days, unless we are celibate, as we are all encour...

Everyone who likes to talk about the public distribution system, foodgrains subsidy, tribal unrest etc, should look at the way crime unfolds...

Those are the words in which this reviewer describes my last book . Am very flattered. Actually, I'm halfway over the moon. And I promis...

Guns : Two groups allegedly affiliated to the Maulana and his opponents openly clashed on the Deoband campus to sounds of booming gunshots...

There are things one knows about the world. That is can be ugly, for instance. And beautiful. Most things are a little of both, and most peo...