Where tea stirs remembrance

In a current landscape dotted with fast-food hegemony and the rapid erosion of lazy afternoons, is nostalgia enough to carry forth the legacy of Irani cafés in India?

Read More

The Hungry Ghost

She told me we wouldn’t eat any of the dumplings.  That, it was bad luck to eat food left out for hungry ghosts.  It would make them angry.  I remembered reading about hungry ghosts, wasted, mouths too small to eat.  They tried to possess people, sometimes the emotionally weak, so as to be able to taste the food they craved…

Read More

Ashoka’s Dream

To Uphold the World Bruce Rich Ashoka book review

Years after an unexpected encounter with the remarkable reign of Emperor Ashoka Maurya, Bruce Rich has written an insightful meditation on the relevance of the ancient Indian ruler to our own age of global discontent.

Read More

The Inner Teacher

It has been calculated that it would cost US $4 billion to educate 500 million Indian children conventionally to basic level — but only half that via the Net…

Read More

Crow Home

The sky seems to be a mix of dust and smoke, laced with an urban haze: something gray, something muddy, not blue at all. Maybe it had been blue once…

Read More

The Barter

The first day we met, he introduced himself with these words: “I am Heinrich, from Bavaria, located in the south of Germany.”

Read More