I really don’t have much to do in my Himachal village these days, other than watch things sliding down the slopes- roads, houses, trees, mountain sides, cars and the occasional unwary tourist from Kotkapura. It’s all getting a bit monotonous, but the upside is that it gives me plenty of time to reflect on our […]

It has not been a particularly good fortnight for people of my vintage, brought up to regard the moon- that “silver deity of secret night”, as the poetess Lady Mary Montagu put it- as an object of mystery and romance cloaked in an impenetrable celestial halo. It has been the staple of Hindi films of

The sun was setting over neatly combed, green tea estates that covered the mountain slopes. Tall, interspersed silver oak trees stood guard. Clouds hung at eye level, every so often gliding onto the roads we traversed. When it did, our driver slowed the vehicle and turned on the fog lights. They lit the moisture. Everything

Now that the rains have mercifully abated in Himachal, the various Whatsapp groups have offered their anodyne prayers for the state, donations have been made to the CM’s Relief Fund to assuage consciences, and bureaucrats have made the right noises to cover up their silence when  the environment was being raped over the years, it

These are challenging times for government pensioners, of which horde I am one. One suspects that the government resents the fact that we now live much longer, notwithstanding the tender care dished out by the CGHS. Pensions, or at least parts of them, are denied to us on the grounds that we have not submitted

The run up to the 2024 elections has begun. Motivated pre-poll surveys are popping up everywhere and confuse us on a daily basis, the Opposition has formed the I.N.D.I.A alliance whose future looks as precarious as that of the country it is named after, the BJP’s own 38 party alliance (not including the ED, CBI

Some readers may find this blog a bit on the morbid side, but hold your final verdict till you come to the end of it: you may finally feel that it is in fact uplifting, poignant and even heart-warming. Though it deals with death, or, to be more precise, dying. Last week an online friend