Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.
2005 has been the year when, by becoming the first man to reach 600 Test wickets, Shane Warne further consolidated his claims to being regarded as the greatest bowler in the history of the game. And October has been the month in which two other leg-spinners briefly shifted him from the headlines. First, an unknown sixteen-year-old [...]
The state of Karnataka is made up of three sections, each previously part of another political regime. There is ‘Old Mysore’, the districts in the south which once belonged to the princely state of that name. There is the ‘Hyderabad-Karnatak’, the collective name for the arid northern districts (Bijapur, Raichur, Gulbarga, etc.) that once formed part [...]
A British band had come to town, and my eleven-year-old daughter wanted to go hear them sing. I was resistant to the idea. That should have been the end of the matter—it would have when I was growing up—but nowadays the rhetoric of rights has permeated even the process of child-rearing. So we argued, back and [...]
When Dom Moraes died earlier this year, most obituaries justly focused on the quality of his verse. With his fellow Mumbaikar Nissim Ezekiel, he made Indo-Anglian poetry respectable. He was a Goan Christian, Ezekiel a Bene Israel; both could only have been products of what—despite the endeavours of Bal Thackeray and his followers—remains a stubbornly cosmopolitan [...]
Among the most curious of the ‘culture shocks’ I have received was while flipping through the pages of the Islamabad telephone directory. I was in the Pakistani capital for an academic seminar; but had arrived a day earlier than scheduled. This was back before the days of email, so I could not inform my host (the [...]
Writers in Kannada have won seven Jnanpith awards, a record equalled only by one other language, Hindi. But then there are many more speakers of Hindi. And of the seven Kannada awardees three did not even grow up speaking that language. Thus D. R. Bendre’s mother tongue was Marathi. Masti Venkateswara Iyengar’s first language was Tamil. [...]
My favourite cricketing story, patriots will be pained to hear, has a Pakistani playing the lead role. Not against India, though, but against the West Indies. On a hot day in Bridgetown many years ago, Hanif Mohammad was battling to save a Test match. Among those watching him keep out the likes of Roy Gilchrist and [...]
Writers in Kannada have won seven Jnanpith awards, a record equalled only by one other language, Hindi. But then there are many more speakers of Hindi. And of the seven Kannada awardees three did not even grow up speaking that language. Thus D. R. Bendre’s mother tongue was Marathi. Masti Venkateswara Iyengar’s first language was Tamil. [...]
My old home town, Dehra Dun, occupies a special place in the history of Indian ornithology. It was here that Salim Ali spent five years with his wife, Tehmina. While living in Dehra Dun he revised and refined his first and most famous work, The Book of Indian Birds. The Valley has a dazzlingly diverse collection [...]
Those who believe that climate determines social behaviour should take a closer look at the American state of Wisconsin. This is cold in winter and cold in summer. In December, the snow lies high upon the ground; in May, the wind from the lakes cynically neutralizes the rays of the mid-morning sun. Yet despite its deeply [...]