After Tranquebar, the next seashore town I want to visit on Tamil Nadu’s picturesque southeast Coromandel Coast is Pulicat. This is a quaint 17th-century Dutch fishing village 60 km from Chennai. I like the name. It sounds Walt Disneyish. Making me imagine a wicked and witty cartoon cat character from Marvel comic books as the coastal town’s mascot. What attracted me to Pulicat is its lighthouse. I am fascinated by lighthouses. If I get the opportunity to climb one, I grab it. This lighthouse,… Continue

I wish I didn’t know you, but I do.

Referring to whom you once were and who you have become.

For you to have morphed into an enigma, a quandary, I find more

than puzzling, has left me somewhat at a loss as I attempt

to categorize and catalog you,

after you have been who you

once were.





Although, you do remind me of someone I once knew… Have we

met in another lifetime, perhaps, realizing there are other parallel

universes

and… Continue

Does anybody remember Phanstom Sweet Cigarettes? In the 70s, it was mainly for a Phantom cigarette, anybody? a boy to strut around with one of these ciggies in the mouth. Like Amitabh Bachchan and his half-chewed beedi in ‘Deewar’. They weren’t tobacco-stuffed cigarettes, of course. Just white candy sticks made of chalky sugar with a red tip that looked like the real thing. They were sickly sweet. But popular. As far as my pocket money could stretch, I was a Phantom cigarette addict. Not… Continue

On my mother’s loft in her home that is currently under lock and key (she’s been staying with me all through Covid) is the frame of a racer cycle I had in the 1980s. It’s a Marco Polo bike. Of Dutch origin, I think, or English. Light as a feather. And fitted with accessories that back in the day were unavailable for love or money but could be got through the beg-borrow-steal practice. I was training to enter racing at the state and national levels. That didn’t happen. But the cycle remains with… Continue