The Libertine

What right do you have to take away my right to bring women – people I have known as friends, family, lovers, teachers, a country and maybe even as God – to life on my canvas, with my vision as the brush and my blood and sweat for paint?

On the couch with the cat

I was walking behind my father on a narrow ledge when a movement behind my right shoulder caught my eye. I turned sharply and regretted it as my eyes met a pair of predatory pupils.

Of Men, Gods and God-men

Bloodshot eyes peering past swirling clouds of potent smoke and matted dread locks, a flash of vermilion streaking through ash smeared limbs, scraggy beards and sinewy limbs crashing into the cold currents at the break of dawn – these are the vignettes that mark the Maha Kumbh Mela, one of the greatest shows on earth.

It’s a little like love

After his sensational T20 debut against Pakistan, Bhuvaneshwar Kumar set tongues wagging in the commentary box.

Guarding the streets of an Uncivil Society

The streets are burning with indignation and hurt. Yet another brutal rape screams through the night and you would have thought, so what?

What's the point of it?

So where are you off to this winter? Is it going to be a sunny beach resort or a chalet on the lip of snow-white mountain? Or are you going to a national park to look up Mr. Stripes and check on his health? In case you’re still wondering, here, let me help…

Bear with us, please...

Land of the tiger? Yeah ok… Land of the tiger too, but is the Royal Bengal Tiger our largest, most imposing predator? Well, not really… That crown sits not on the head of the tiger.

Maharashtra up for grabs

It is difficult to think of Maharashtra politics without Balasaheb Thackeray who dominated power politics in the state for four decades despite his failure to seize it comprehensively on his own strength.

Bravehearts Against The Apocalypse

While the country celebrated the hanging of a villain who murdered innocents, I had mixed feelings about the news of Kasab’s execution. It seemed like it was the right path, the only path in fact, and yet one wondered if there could have been a path more right than this. I don’t have the answer yet and so I leave you with my thoughts from the day when Ajmal Amir Kasab was still a gun-toting specter haunting the streets of Mumbai... a story from four years ago that celebrates and remembers those who stared down death so that many could hang on to life through those four fateful days... Until i find my feelings and the answers.

And Buddha Cried

An eden in my backyard

The dragonfly flapped its transparent iridescent wings with a slow deliberate jerk, like the early swivel of a chopper’s rotator blades before taking off while I zoomed in carefully. Its dark head and bulbous eyes grew bigger and closer in the view finder. As the focus rim turned, the image grew clearer

Faith in the fallen

What price will you pay for a sliver of hope when in the throes of despair? When you are all alone on an island of doom, separated from the life you lived and loved, by an ocean of anguish and disease, what would you give for a community that embraces you and voices that say "you’re not alone, we understand”?

The colour of passion

"Cricket needs the West Indies to do well!", screamed the papers at the start of the 2012 T20 World Cup in Sri Lanka. It was as if the fortunes of the game were tied to the success of the cricketers from the Caribbean.

On a wing and a prayer

My friend, the struggling illusionist, has this story he bandies around to impress the ladies, and as a prelude to his tricks – magic tricks, as he likes to call them.

Here be monks too

Ox-strong, with an uneasy machismo that sits on the shoulders like a tenacious bull-rider that buck as he might, he can’t shrug off, and bristling with an insecure aggression that drags our hero to his tragi-comic fate – now that’s a Hemmingway hero, if ever there was one.