Longish essays on the people and world around
posts related to books
This is the first post in a series of brief cooking notes that I started writing for a friend, who was at a loss at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. He had lost his mother, his ailing dad was 92, his maid had stopped coming, no food of any kind was available, and he had not clue about cooking.
Reading recipes or watching cooking videos has been a hobby for long, even if I had no intention of making that dish. Continue reading “CFO 001: Rasam or the essence of the spices”
Only very few of my friends know, or now remember, that my career, so to speak, started with a stint working for Late Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer.
Before I joined the Reserve Bank of India, I nursed for long the idea of doing my Ph.D. in Environmental Economics. With that in mind, I had been reading up on the environment, and environmental economics, apart meeting people connected with environmental issues. Continue reading “Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer: My first boss”
Opened in 1901, the Victoria Students Hostel in Triplicane, Chennai, is an Indo-Saracenic structure designed in the style of residences at Oxford and Cambridge by Henry Irwin, Consulting Architect for the Madras Presidency. It was built in memory of Pundi Runganadha Mudaliar, Professor of Mathematics at Presidency College, who had died at the age of 45. The hostel housed students of Presidency College, and nearby colleges including the College of Engineering. Continue reading “Srinivasa Ramanujan: A Life in Infinity”
This is the second in my series on forgotten musicians. It is on the life and music of Lakshmi Shankar, who was married to Rajendra Shankar, one of the Shankar brothers. Continue reading “Forgotten Musicians: Lakshmi Shankar”
I read in today’s (4 April 2020) Mint, the financial newspaper (unfortunately behind a paywall, so not giving the link), what different authors are reading during the current corona lockdown. That inspired me to make my own list. My region might not lift the lockdown so soon given that the government is going in for a phased exit. I have, therefore, a modified list. Continue reading “Reading in times of Covid-19”
This article was first published in Business Standard on 16 March 2013. It is a comment on the controversy around the lullaby in the film Life of Pi. It was alleged that the lullaby was plagiarised from a 200-years old lullaby in Malayalam, composed by Irayimman Thampi in 1813 on the occasion of the birth of his nephew, Swati Tirunal, already anointed the ruler of Travancore. The original lullaby continues to be very popular even today in the State of Kerala, India, where Malayalam is spoken. Continue reading “A Case of Two Lullabies”
Against the background of two recent biographies, of V.K. Krishna Menon by Jairam Ramesh (A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon, Penguin, 2019) and of V.P. Menon by Narayani Basu, I wrote an article in OPEN magazine titled “A Tale of Two Menons”. See here. An earlier version is below: Continue reading “A Tale of Two Menons”