Essays
Diary of a Newly Thin Person
Sohini Chattopadhyay
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?
Diary of a Large Girl
In a politically correct world, there is small, average and large. Large is a figment of the mind more than anything else. It can be used to judge you only as much as you judge yourself
Diary of a Thin Girl
The American medical establishment was unnerved by her body measurements and threatened ‘tough decisions’ if she didn’t reform herself. Casting directors find her ideal to play domestic-abuse victim. But cabbies carry her luggage to the door. Always.
My Friend Guru
Upon a chance meeting, a first-time hero and an assistant director made a lofty promise to each other. That promise culminated in a noir-styled movie, Baazi, in 1951. Its inimitable hero, Dev Anand, remembers his troubled and only true friend Guru Dutt
Tips of the Trade
Along with balancing gooey cheese burgers and bottles of beer, a waitress often has to deal with formidable high school rivals and persistent pick-up calls
Of Scrubs and Girls
Still new to the West, Atreyee Majumder wonders what it is that so affects her when a maid bends under her chair at home in India to scrub out a speck of dust, while a janitor in uniform evokes no feeling at all
Adil Hossain versus AMU
When Mohammad Adil Hossain was banned from campus on charges of ‘internet activism’, he promptly took his university to court, and argued his own case. After a harrowing ten-month legal battle, he is back on campus
My Grand Uncle Sálim
The grand old bird man of India had no problem eating chicken, or any fowl for that matter. And even when he was well into his eighties, he would take a rifle into his garden to shoot crows. Rauf Ali introduces his grand uncle Sálim Ali the way he knew him, a man who was completely deaf in one ear, yet mortified by snorers
Kalari and I
Tired of the silk and jewellery of Bharatanatyam, Gitanjali Kolanad discovered the martial art Kalaripayat in her thirties, a little late in life. Yet, once in the pit, soaked in sweat, she found herself absorbed by it. And years later, when a man groped her, she had the retributive satisfaction of landing a blow at a perfect marma point
To Catch a Flying Snake
Intrigued by the question of how a limbless, rope-like animal can ‘fly’, Dr Jake Socha films snakes in mid-air motion for his lab. Sometimes, it all goes well; at others, it takes, a ball-point pen to rescue his staffers from fierce snakes
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