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The Dutch Period Museum, Colombo

March 11, 2010

It is on Prince Street in Pettah, the marketplace in what was once the Fort area, and is no more princely, being daily overrun by plebeians for decades now. I had taken the hotel car, and we went slowly, slower than walking, seeing colored balloons, dress pieces for men at 200-rupees-each piled on the street [...]

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Sigiriya from the top and the bottom and from afar

March 5, 2010

For eight centuries before Kashyapa the activity in Sigiriya was monastic. Then for the next eight centuries, it was again a home for monks. After that it was abandoned and the bricks crumbled and the timber rotted and something that approached a pharaoh’s doing didn’t stay intact for as long except for the foundations, and [...]

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art and soul

February 25, 2010

The tree in the outdoor section of Dome Cafe is wild in detail, and wild on the whole. From its twisted trunk its limbs are further twisted on their own axis, and also in relation to one another. Such a tree—rapt in a dance that takes, perhaps, a few years for every move—they have bound [...]

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notions of immortality

February 17, 2010

The walls come down the hill like two aged arms of the young Fort Canning Centre. People were shooting the Canning Centre, and the two plain two-hundred year old cupolas built by the architect Coleman, and the greens between the walls—with small and large cameras. None came up to the two old walls to see [...]

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A Giant Theater

July 26, 2009

In such a vast panorama only a fifth—maybe tenth—of the land is filled with trees. The rest is taken by thigh-high, chest-high cones of the shrub. The shrubs in a given patch are all trimmed to the same height and, seen level, seeing the height they have climbed and the depths they’ve plunged, they are [...]

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up and down the bosphorus

July 4, 2009

At the pier everyone held back, knowing to be polite, but in the tension and the poise you could see that each wished everyone out of the way, and all suppressed (or didn’t have the strength for) the urge to push the rest to the edge and out. The woman behind me sneezed, and my [...]

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the view from Munzerabad club

June 9, 2009

Years ago, I often shuttled with my parents between Bangalore (and Mysore) and Mangalore, and crossed the coffee-belt midway. In all my memories I peer through the trees of the plantations from the rear window, always through mist or rain or the dark, looking for the fabled estate-mansions. I saw my first plantation-homes these last [...]

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Tokyo Diary

May 15, 2009

I walked thrice up and down the street to locate the memorial to William Adams, shipwrecked Englishman who taught the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu gunnery, geography, and mathematics, and whose life inspired James Clavell to write the bestseller Shogun (1975). The stone is crammed in less than five feet between two shops. The neighborhood went by [...]

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Gandhiji’s Sabarmathi Ashram

March 25, 2009

Once he had worn his clothes, and sandals, and spectacles, and after he’d gathered his stick, his packing was done. The march to Dandi was also his final departure from the Sabarmati Ashram. Almost nothing was left to leave behind, and his other possession, the love of millions of Indians, was not in his possession [...]