Blog

Are You a Madrasi? [An Excerpt from the memoir by John Baptist Crasta, Eaten by the Japanese. This scene takes place in Rabaul, New Britain, in a Japanese POW camp.] I had an attack of malaria in the first week of July 1943. I could not get even a drop of hot water. There on…

Here it goes, the Top Ten plus a few songs of the Master (that mind-blowing genius called Bob Dylan) that have most moved me, or that I can sing along with, or that make me laugh. Because it’s so hard to choose only ten, I may add a few more, as part of a shortlist…

While the world’s richest country suffers the excruciating luxury of debating whether four blood clots in a million vaccinated people are four blood clots too many, countries in the Third, Fourth, and possibly Ninth Worlds (to call a spade a spade and assign them their actual value in the minds of the rulers of the…

A life worth less than $20? Black lives and a child’s tranquility and innocence worth less than $5? A broken shoulder worth less than $13.88? Americans, despite being the richest people on earth, are also its poorest, precisely because they attach so much value to property that it brings out brutal excesses from their law…

I joined the State Bank of India or SBI as a probationary officer in October 1975, my disservice beginning in Hyderabad for ten days of lavish food and accommodation, brain nuggets, wisdom, and sass from such bigwigs as the Chairman, R.K. Talwar, and a Deputy Managing Director in whose perfectly polished shoes you could see…

In 2010, after a bad experiences with a “regular” publisher, I was seduced by the promise of total freedom and instant publication on Amazon (and a handful of its competitors), possibly allowing me to write and publish much, much more. Much has changed since those early days. While Jeff Bezos’s net worth has shot up…

So how did that terrified and frail boy in the top right corner get to publishing this ballsy, boisterous, establishment-defying novel (see image on the bottom) 30 years later? In a way, I never knew childhood at all, except for a few memories when I was 5, and a few summer holidays, and some games…

Such a day or two or three or four, days stretched to breaking point! The agonizingly protracted election of Biden to the presidency of the United States, and the ecstatic booting out of Donald Trump, is going to take all of 73 days (maybe 74, to pick up his hairpiece and his MAGA hat, which…