September kicked in with yet another spurt of torrential rains in coastal Kerala, where I have been holed up for the last over 14 months, working from home; I’m not complaining. In Bombay, I would have probably made myself a cup of coffee, some noodles, and stared out the window…

The year is 2006. Five teenagers, from diverse backgrounds, have come together to form an alternative rock band in Bhopal. The city is small, so news about a show, once publicised, would reach everyone, including those one wouldn’t desire — the parents and the beloved relatives. For parents, the only…

The pandemic has thrown open an innocuous window, which, in parts, lay comfortably shut for some time in my remote village of Thottakkad in Kottayam, Kerala. While I have been stationed here for a year now, my perception of it being ‘remote’ has, certainly, changed. They say, necessity is the…

Being the youngest in my family of four, I was the gofer, who everybody would turn to, for everything — from getting provisions from the nearby convenience store to directing guests from a busy roundabout, some 500 meters away from home. It was in 1995, that I was introduced to…

The year was 1996. My father, Mathai, a central government employee, had been given a computer; fully ‘equipped’ with a screen, a windows-95 CPU, keyboard, and even a Mouse! And suddenly, I, a nobody in my middle-class society, was a celebrity among my friends. …

I happened to overhear a conversation between my mother, Esmeralda and, our neighbour, Sheila Aunty, and it was pure genius. “Sheila, you know, Sarika is expecting her third child…” “Baba re, I cannot imagine raising another pig”. Sums up my existence — Oink! Oink! There is a global pandemic; of…