Speaking Volumes: Riotous Writers
(Published in the Business Standard, June 18, 2013) Remember the old joke about the Soviet Union? Two friends, an American and a Russian, are engaged in competitive bragging. “My […]
Author Archives: Nila
Speaking Volumes: Bookshoppery
(I’d written most of this column when I sent an idle tweet out, asking people to name their favourite bookshops. The response went on for the next two days: below […]
Speaking Volumes: The View From The Stars
(Published in the Business Standard, June 11, 2013) Light years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a band of aliens have left home in their spaceships, hoping […]
Speaking Volumes: Tanvir’s Petromax Theatre
(Published in the Business Standard, June 5, 2013) Though I know that Habib Tanvir’s plays, from Agra Bazaar to Charandas Chor and Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, were often performed inside […]
Speaking Volumes: In Defense of Food
(Published in the Business Standard, May 28, 2013) The crumb of the bread was dark and soft, the irregular pattern of the grain signalling that it had been hand-kneaded, not […]
Dan Brown’s Wikiprose
Inferno, Dan Brown, Bantam Press, Rs 750, 461 pages From the first sentence of Chapter One—“The memories materialized slowly… like bubbles surfacing from the darkness of a bottomless well”—to the […]
Speaking Volumes: The contested ground of Anandamath
(Published in the Business Standard, May 14, 2013) If it were not for the refusal of Shafique-ur-Rehman Barq, BSP member of Parliament, to join in with the singing of […]
Speaking Volumes: The unchaste page
(Published in the Business Standard, May 7, 2013) The reading was at a sedate mela; literature was tucked in sideways, between the food stalls and the sellers of heavy machinery. […]
The Babu, the Akhond and me
… are finally in the same place. Kitabkhana began in early 2003, back when people called the Internet the “information superhighway”. (The past is so much more glamorous than […]
Speaking Volumes: A is for Apple: what college won’t teach you
(Published in the Business Standard, April 30, 2013) Back in my day, which was of course when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Delhi University suffered from a serious case of […]
