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Essays

Listening to a Silent Audience

A life on stage is absolutely magical, especially when you sense the power to hold your audience captive

A la Carré

It’s not always that a spy thriller is the inspiration for a piece of literary fiction

Truth Is My Religion

In India, says former forest officer Rajendra Pratap Balwan, who was victimised for trying to save the Aravali forests, you are a rebel if you go by the book

The Final Frontier

If 30 years of foreign policy could be rewound, Pakistan’s ‘jihad factory’ would not exist, says Alice Albinia

Silence, Please

The story of an artist who has lived most of his life in deafness but still can’t afford to listen.

Vertical Limit

Pune teenager Krushnaa Patil climbed Mt Everest recently and spent half an hour on top of the world. But strangely, it wasn’t quite the whoohoo moment she thought it would be. Her Everest moment had come a little before the summit...

Spice of Life

He loved the quiet life in Kerala: the settled job, the quaint club with a pool full of frogs, perhaps even the growing paunch. Now, he explains the physics of arranged marriages to Yanks. Besides selling spices, that is

A Muse I Have No Use for

He suffers from amusia and can’t tell the difference between the national anthem and Beethoven’s Fifth

Rhyme and Treason

In these times when success is determined by numbers, poetry is a marginal mode of communication. Perhaps what the poet should look for is the intensity of his readership, not its size

In Memory of Mayawati

If an etching of her presence on the template of history is what she wanted, that’s all she’ll have got at the end. Here’s how we’ll remember her

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