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When I had just started my career in Bombay, I left my own home and lived in the house of a small family of four including two toddlers. The man worked as a sweeper somewhere and the lady was a housewife. It was a tiny two-bedroom independent company-owned house in which they had given me…

When working in Saudi Arabia, as you may well imagine, I had no dearth of Pakistani and Bangladeshi colleagues. Given our history, there was a constant undercurrent of hostility between Indians and Pakistanis. We had to be careful because of strict office rules, so this animosity took the form of passive aggressive behavior, non-cooperation with…

How to give birth to a male child When I was a very young kid, I was the darling of many of our area’s would-be mothers. (Awwww). Not because I was something special but because they all wanted to give birth to boys! They would ply me with cuddles and candy and sweets and generally…

My very first ambition in life was to join the army, an ardent wish that stayed with me till late into my teens. I was therefore thrilled when, after the 1971 war, my family decided to visit Dera Baba Nanak, a border town in Punjab. We were living in Delhi then. An ‘uncle’, a close…

My wife and I are often mocked for preferring to eat food with cutlery most of the time, rather than our hands. Just as we get criticized for preferring bottled water. Or for not being able to sit cross-legged on the floor to eat. Somehow people think we are trying to show off our non-resident…

Dedicated to my beloved late mother-in-law and father-in-law My wife and her siblings were kids when their dad passed away immediately after his open-heart surgery at Mayo Hospital in Minnesota. He was 42. His surgeon was Dr Walton Lillehei, one of the topmost heart specialists in the world at the time. My beloved late mom-in-law,…

I am sure all of us have memories of things that we did when we were younger, things that we wouldn’t even dare to think of doing today, things that make our stomach churn or our knees go wobbly. Decades back, my younger brother, his wife and me and my wife travelled by train from…

My commentary published in American Kahani U.S. Midterm Elections as Seen From India: I’m Acutely Worried About the Future of America I have always been a bit cynical of the American media pompously proclaiming every U.S. election as nation-transforming or even world-changing. I must grudgingly concede though, that the claim is not entirely untrue, even…

Movie-going is now a very expensive weekend outing for a family (of say, four members), costing somewhere between 1500 to 2000 rupees, including the popcorn and stuff. There used to be a lower stall in cinema halls. That has almost been eliminated now. Movie going is for the upper middle class now. People will definitely…