Musings of a battered septuagenarian
At its 73th birthday, Mr P calculates the decisions made and the roads not taken Born of excruciating pain and in a dark, dreary time sans light, still I outwitted, overpowered, defeated…
Consume carefully, please
How consumer culture goes deeper into our Psyche than we previously thought We buy and consume, therefore we are. We consume calories to live. We consume heat to survive. We consume water…
Dead Democracy
From Socrates till now, how the ‘flawed’ idea of Democracy baffles mankind Democracy, dear reader, has bid us farewell on its way to spend the rest of the eternity in perdition. We have…
Insane madness of lunacy
And why we need to go beyond labels, taboos and stereotypes Where is the thin blue line between sanity and insanity, between madness and creativity, between finding wonder in everyday life and…
We, the migratory animals
And the two options this world gives to those who move away from home Freedom, of any hue, colour, or creed wants sacrifice, nah, it does not want it, it demands sacrifice.…
Black, black Berlin
The sights, sounds and symphony of a Metropolis Berlin loves black. Berlin is black. It has beauty of a beast, vengeance of a teenager, faith of a child, zeal of a fanatic,…
Silly little miseries
And how we try to transcend loneliness, apathy and existence through others To the rational and pragmatic, misery, suffering and agony are something to be avoided at all cost. The meaning of…
Of Charlie Brown and Snoopy
Why never-ending disappointments should always fail to defeat us We all are Charlie Brown. We all bungle up our perfect moments, lose our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at becoming who we dreamed of becoming…
The doomed ones
How we dominate and doom each other in Ghulam Bagh How and why is the pen mightier than the sword? Can the raw, brutal force of those hell-bent to have their way…
The last regret
Trying to uncover the reason behind ‘Ending it All’ This column is about suicide and I won’t give a single statistic, Google them. Type Suicide in that all knowing, all observing, all…
Sad, somber tales of yore
Reading partition literature in times of a pandemic ‘Everything popular is wrong,’ in our land these words by Oscar Wilde haunt few ‘renegades’ who have been ‘led astray’ by forgotten, condemned, relegated…
The precarious new world of journalism
Delayed shrinking paychecks and massive layoffs have become the norm Amidst a global pandemic, the worst gets disastrous, the bad gets ugly and the already rotten goes to worms and maggots. Journalism…
Herculean tasks
A complete failure to deliver Many of us are staunch believers of Great Man Theory which suggests that the current of time is molded and swayed by mighty, larger than life men…
The necessity of lying
We lie; therefore, we exist the way we exist It is not hope that makes the world go around, folks. It is the lies that hold the absurd, beautiful, deceptive, alluring world…
Poverty in times of a global pandemic
How the Coronavirus affects lives of the disadvantaged and poor among us Lock down, quarantine, work from home, rising tally of those affected, and the world in a grip of fear and…
Laugh until it lasts
In times of a global pandemic, let us traverse the peaks and valleys of laughter You hear the jarring laughter roar through screens big and small. The anchor-cum-comedian-cum-intellectual-cum-clown-cum-psychoanalyst-cum-impossibly funny man has cracked,…
On love and betrayal
Eternally suspended between doubt and fear, how we betray our love To be or not to be, asked Hamlet. An absolutely apt question, it was. However, it was also his failure to…