My soft hands
Around me there is a frenzy of women getting dressed in glittery paraphernalia. The chatter is amusing and boisterous. We are all excited about yet another pre-wedding ritual. I reach out for my glass bangles. Red. To…
Pulling those strings
The year was 2008. It was a cold winter in the heart of London. I was spending a lonely weekend in my hostel room. When suddenly the contents of an email warmed the cockles of my heart.…
These walls will melt
“I would prefer to share the apartment with a woman— preferably an Indian or a Pakistani,” I wrote. I was sending an email to the Netherlands to request student accommodation. I was going to spend three weeks that summer at…
Thinking-vinking in another language
The year was 1975. St Joseph’s Convent, Bangalore. It was lunch time in the nursery school where I studied. I was all of four years old. Each teacher sat on the grass in the school lawns in…
Discovering the pinnacle of love
On one of my visits to Pondicherry, after my mandatory visit to the Aurobindo Ashram, I stepped into their book shop and brought a laminated poster. It was called ‘Radha’s prayer’. It was originally written by The…
The lost genre of letter writing
Somewhere in the late eighties, Doordarshan had telecast a fourteen-episode children’s serial called Kachchi Dhoop. It was Amol Palekar’s directorial venture which was loosely adapted from Louisa May Alcott’s book ‘Little Women‘. It was the story of…
Idhar khuda hai
I exit from the lift and look frantically for a place to sit. There is no seating arrangement in place. I refresh the NTES app on my phone. At least an hour more of waiting. I have…
Moving away from Eponyms
The Oxford English Dictionary defines an eponym as “a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named”. Medicine is full of diseases and syndromes named after people who described something. You…
All in a day’s work
Life as a pathologist is very interesting. You are trained to look out for the abnormal. Normal is boring. But there are times when you are caught on the wrong foot. Here are two incidents which taught…
The story of Kary Mullis and the invention of PCR
Some stories from science are fascinating. The story of Kary Mullis and his eureka moment which led to the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is one such story which I love reading about. For people…
