Gobind Sharma runs a dhaba in Gurgaon. But when the clock strikes four, he becomes a master chess player

Photojournalist Dhruva N Chaudhuri recounts the delight his father took in his practised eccentricity

Siddhartha Deb on how the city refined his ‘inbuilt shit detector’ and made him a more honest writer

Censorship by any other name. Slap a defamation suit and leave it to our tardy legal system to ensure the offending material never gets out. B-school guru Arindam Chaudhuri is the latest practitioner of the art

As a pleasantly plump, accommodating teenager lost all her disfiguring weight, this is what she saw in the mirror: a preening, arrogant stranger. Does your body then shape your personality?

A sport that few take seriously also has some serious contestants

Sneaking wrappers in without his knowledge, missing him desperately during pregnancy because he wouldn’t take a flight, the carbon guilt of owning a Scooty, and other survival tales of an environmentalist’s wife

Sat Paul Sahni’s first book of photographs was published this year, three months after his death. A Godrej almirah full of slides still remains, as do despatches from four wars

That’s the right time to send it to the editor, says the bestseller man who writes in complete silence and pure isolation

The records of India’s first and only Linguistic Survey, conducted by the British Raj over 1914-29, are now up on the net, thanks to an impatient history professor