The Power Of Prayer
When we reached the Ashram, Lord Krishna had already been put to bed for His siesta. The temple would reopen at 4 pm, the Ashramites told us.
Tryst With The Titan
Celebrated author Amos Oz says that you cannot write unless the subject is given to you by the Governor who rules the universe. So the days when his output is insignificant, he does not feel guilty. His duty, he says, is to open the shop every day. Whether there’ll be any footfall on a given day is not in his hands.
An Evening At Kovalam
From Trivandrum railway station it took us a 30-minute auto-ride to reach Kovalam beach. We had a room reserved in a PWD guest-house with a view of the cobalt blue sea-water and the Light House beach.
A Ride Down Memory Lane
I’m a railway enthusiast. My favourite haunt for train-spotting was a relative’s house by the railway track where, whenever we visited them, I would scamper away to the roof and wait for a train to rumble past. Not surprisingly, all my life I preferred a train journey to any other. I travelled extensively to meet my favourite writers in far-away places, and during the journeys many interesting things happened. Let merecount a few such incidents.
Dehra-Ache in Seven Beats
Reading Secrets (2011) by Ruskin Bond brings to mind Nocturne (2010) by Kazuo Ishiguro. The similarity in their choice of the locale from where the stories take off strikes one as an afterthought. Kazuo situates all his five stories in hotels in an unnamed Italian city. The pick of hotels and houses in Dehradun as the backdrop of all the seven stories of Bond is appositely reflected in the cover design that depicts a spectral-looking palace, apparently depeopled, as if housing a mine of painful secrets.
Shadows of Life
One early morning in Gangtok, out on the breakfast terrace doubling up as a sun-bathing spot in a hotel, I was privy to a strangely uplifting sight. High up in the sea-blue sky, there’s something like a long, curved steel blade of a sword luminous like a brilliant cut diamond. It disappeared after a few minutes. On enquiry I came to know it’s the cone of the Kachenjunga.
An Evening With Namita Gokhale
The world’s largest free literary festival JLF was still five years away when I met writer Namita Golchale for the first time. In a letter dated 15 January 2001, in response to my note which I had courier ed a week earlier, she wrote: “I would be happy to meet you during your visit to Delhi. Please give me a call upon your arrival and we will fix up a mutually convenient time.”
Letter From Manoj Das
On an August morning in 2001, my phone rang. As I said “Hello”, a professorial voice came on the line “Swapan babu speaking”? “Yes please!” “I’m Manoj Das here, speaking from Sri Aurobindo Ashram opposite Kenilworth Hotel, Kolkata. Your letter addressed to my Pondicherry home has been redirected. I’ll be hem for a few more …
That Was Haunted Retiring Room
In Snow, a novel by Nobel prizing-winning author Orhan Pamuk, there’s this central character named Ka, a poet and a journalist, who unerringly senses when a poem dawns on him. Like the birth of a child, it may be not only at odd hours but at odd places too, and it has to be attended to. So wherever he is at that moment, he somehow makes a little room for himself, and scratches away on a piece of paper non-stop until the natural birth of the poem is complete.
Street symphony
After the imposition of the lockdown following the second wave of COVID-19, the streets of the towns now swarm with vendors selling all sorts of daily needs, particularly in the morning, as people have mostly gone indoors, stepping out only when it’s absolutely necessary.