Experiences

Have you ever walked and walked around the outer perimeter of a commercial airfield following the fence, on a hot summer day, wearing a suspiciously prison-break-looking orange top? I am the idiot who did it, twice over, and this is my story. The last air show I attended was when I was seven, in Thiruvananthapuram. The show was canceled because the air-force personnel were not able to control the crowd, who insisted on watching the show standing on the run-way. Ever since, aviation display and I have politely avoided each other. ‘Maybe it’s time we got reacquainted,’ I thought as I set out enthusiastically for the Prairie Air Show this morning. It looked like a piece of cake—take the local bus to the airport, watch the show, and come back by the same bus. But when Priya rushes where angels might want to take a rain-check, could disaster be far behind? Of course the air show was at the other end of the air field, in what seems to be a different county altogether. Of course I ...

A few days back, my sister fixed me with a metaphorical stern eye (she was a school teacher in her previous birth) and commanded me to come up with an idea on the theme of national integration, for my 9-year-old niece's drawing competition. It shouldn't have, but it kind of started a long chain of angsty thoughts. I feel that most of the cliched national integration messages are just token sentiments and deep down, we really don't want to integrate as a nation. We're happy in our regional/communal silos. In fact, it looks to me that we love to hate each other. I mean, does any other nation have so many acceptable derogatory slangs to denote each region and each community of the country? Do they make fun of their fellow countrymen like the way we do, be it the "ayyayyoji" stereotype of the South Indian in the movies or the Sardarji jokes? And I don't know whether any other nation resists intra-country assimilation as much as we do. Or whether any other big ...

I confess to an overwhelming curiosity and an adolescent "Heh heh!" in my head that made me linger at the "erotica" section at Borders this weekend and buy my first ever book in this genre. I don't know what I expected from an anthology of short stories on "women's erotic fantasies," but nothing prepared me for the enthusiastic and "in-your-face" form of uber-feminism that I encountered. This was a far cry from sleaze and perversion that I was half-expecting (one wonders where those notions came from)--these were 19 expertly crafted stories by obviously intelligent women authors. Among them are doctors, poets, a medievalist, a comedy writer, and one who thinks it's her "civic duty to write smut!" And as the editor puts it, "These fantasies are fierce, fearless, unapologetic..." The editor is more fascinating--Violet Blue (not to be confused with a porn star of the same name) appears to be a celebrity (I saw he...