Known Turf

Blame it on the great Indian white skin fixation. Or, if you prefer, on a new body code that has corroded the flimsy wall between modeling a...

Try and imagine this. Take the names of eleven women you know. At the eleventh name, blink. That woman just disappeared from your life. Thi...

I’m ashamed. Deep down in my cynical writer’s heart, I didn’t believe he would actually do it. But he did. And I am ashamed because I’d hea...

Think about it. When was the last time you saw a romantic song where a couple dance — or even just circumambulate in a skippy, dreamy sort ...

As long as you go on calling things by false names, there’s a good chance people will go on buying the lie. We can go on pretending that eve...

Abhinavgupta Careful, Master! The mirror lies      all that is to our right      it shows to our left,      all that is to our left ...

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...