Essays
The Par Avion Friends
Mary Verghese
It was 1968 when they became pen friends. Marriage, kids, Clinton, photos of brothers in bell bottoms, they discussed everything, sitting continents apart. They are closest friends, but with no real desire to meet.
About Science and Sex
Tired of the same old stuff about love and loss, migrants and displacement? Delve into Ian McEwan’s Solar and encounter the discomforts of making science interesting.
The White Woman’s Burden
When she goes out with her Indian husband, she’s taken to be a foreign prostitute. When they holiday in Goa, they’re busted for drugs. Yet neighbours line up to meet her, coolly ignoring her husband. The curiosity of what it means to be a white woman married to a brown man.
Bicycle Chief
Cycling 10 hours a day, travelling across 13 countries, from Ireland to India, he realised that everyday irritants like the traffic and the weather colonise too much of our time. Life, after all, comes with bumps and all, and we should enjoy the ride. Wobbly or not.
Neither Salaam, Nor Bombay
He ran away from home to Bombay and landed the lead in Mira Nair’s Academy award-nominated Salaam Bombay! But after years of looking for another role, any role, he’s back home in Bangalore driving an auto.
Who Moved My Town
What happens when you live the early part of your life in a ‘small town’, move out as you grow up, and eventually return, only to find that the small town has moved on?
Three Minutes and Fame
The gramophone era in India made stars of gaanewalis who would otherwise be heard only at mehfils. Experience the ethos of the time, and find out how vinyl records, with their three-minute format, came to change social norms in the 20th century.
Being Charlie Chaplin
It was on a stolen trip to the cinema that he met his hero, Charlie Chaplin. And a chance encounter that got him the Cherry Blossom ad. So many years, so many gigs, yet he still isn’t done being Chaplin.
One Hundred Years of Akira Kurosawa
Shakespeare, Tolstoy or American crime fiction, Akira Kurosawa fashioned them into his own unique brand of cinema. On his centenary, Open remembers the man whose films launched a thousand remakes.
A Desire for Celibacy
She doesn’t live the life of a cloistered nun, but renunciation of sex was key to the spiritual journey she embarked upon in her late teens.
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