Known Turf

There was a poet who said once your talk is the talk of flowers. He said it in Urdu of course, so perhaps this is not what he meant. To ta...

A set of five poems inspired by newspaper headlines in recent times. Five Newspaper Reports Re-written for Greater Clarity 1.   A...

Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if we collectively gave up on dust. What if we just let the city sink under the dust for a whole mont...

A couple of decades ago, however, someone high up in the municipal corporation of Mumbai must have decided to try something new. Interlaced...

Just a few days ago, I was having a cup of coffee with a friend and like all good Indians, we discussed politics. Lots of breast-beating (m...

Women of all religions should worry. A majority government can change laws so that women no longer inherit land, widows no longer remarry,...

I had shared some thoughts on the debate around Triple Talaaq and Uniform Civil Code with the newspaper Sakaal Times:  - Women are not pa...

I have a fantasy about cities of the future. I’ll be walking on air. Well, almost. I’ll be high up, fifty feet above street level, using my...

Worse, every car sitting out on the road is a thief of opportunity. There could have been a fruit cart sitting there instead and it would b...

There's a photograph I love to think of. A moustachioed farmer, dressed in a white shirt and a dhoti, is running down the highway wit...

I've written a few poems around the theme of the body over the years. Some of them have been published by Anti-Serious, a literary jour...

I wrote this about sexual consent in the context of colleagues, with a few helpful tips for people (men in particular) who are attracted t...

मायावती के जुड़ी एक बात है जो मुझे थोड़ा परेशान करती है, उनके पुतले के हाथ में टंगा वो लेडीज पर्स. जहां इतने नेताओं के पुतले बनते हैं तो...

Gulab , a novella I wrote that was published two years ago by Harper Collins India, has been lucky enough to find a Tamil publisher in Anan...

हिंदी में अब ज़रा और आत्म-विश्वास के साथ लिखने लगी हूँ।  कविता या नाटक लिखने में कभी कोई ख़ास हिचक नहीं हुई मगर, हाँ, गद्द्य लिखते हिचकिचाती ...

I've started a new column for The Hindu focused on the road. Here's the first: There’s a phrase in Hindustani, ‘paidal-haal’....

Wrestling is a sport I've gotten interested in and have been following for over a year now. I wrote two longer essays around wrestlers,...

Last year (summer of 2016), I had the good fortune of travelling abroad the Deccan Odyssey, a train that travels around Maharashtra to sit...

Today (Dec 6) is my grandpa's death anniversary. This year also marks his birth centenary. Ali Jawad Zaidi was born on March 10, 191...

There are several things the nation wants to know and is wondering if the Prime Minister is going to tell us any time soon. I thought I...