A humming word

There are some days when we want to turn to the familiar and ensconce in that familiar song whose lyrics run on our tongue like butter. One such familiar space is Ruskin Bond (atleast for me!). I don’t want to read about plagues or diseases—nor do I want to escape what’s happening around. But what if you could turn into something familiar such as chewing the edge of your grandmother’s saree or just resting your head on that old cot. It just calms you down from this overload of information of Corona! (Yes, Karthik Aryan, we get it! No more outings and eating comfort food or icecream, outside!) If you could bring the outside, inside, then pick this book—The Road to the Bazaar by Ruskin Bond. There are a few familiar stories such as The Tunnel. Ranji’s Bat, The Great Train Journey, The Long Day but re-reading them makes it an enjoyable read. Bond paints a picture of Dehra with oil paints that it sits eternally in the heart and in the head. Mukesh Starts a Zoo was one of my favour...

As February passes like a soft breeze and we enter the simmering heat of March, it makes me wonder about love and Coronavirus. “ Choone se nahi pheltha hai ,” comes read a jocular post. Another reminded us how we, Indians, must not be scared of this virus: we can remove a tennis ball from a gutter, tap it and play with it. We can wash our hands off it yet it will be around much like love that we put on our guard around it and behave like it's coronavirus. Worse is love between people of the same sex. The most recent example for this is the film: Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan,  starring Ayushman Khurana and Jatinder Kumar directed by Aanand L. Rai. Albeit it’s a commercial hit, the film has made gay love a forced agenda. It portrayed how parents react in the most obscene and impractical way: they resort to avoiding the people involved to false attempts in suicide to questioning their own parenting to violent methods. Finally, they emotionally breakdown. The premise of...