Essays

The Curious Case of Elfriede Maria Schmidt

Shahina KK

A 77-year-old German lady who’d made a Kochi hotel her home for the past eight years died last month. Her body has been lying unclaimed since. We went in search of her past and found four threads unspooling a lonely and wounded life

A Paean to the Paan

Pushpesh Pant

My father’s affair with paan introduced me early to the delicate temptations of the green leaf. And left me a lifelong lover and connoisseur, unmindful of mild stains on my reputation

To Catch an Assassin

K Muniyamma

This woman was promised the earth for helping the police nab Rajiv Gandhi’s killers. All she has got instead are death threats and the offer of a film role, complains K Muniyamma

The Angriest Eye

A Ranganayaki

Sexual assault cannot be explained away by geography, morality, emotionality, causality, and certainly not anodyne reportage that allows you to skim and move on, says A Ranganayaki, who knows

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

Ramya Swayamprakash

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

Atreyee Majumder

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

Dev Anand

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

Chandi Deitmer

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

Atreyee Majumder

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