wutheringheights

How can a journey become a Jaguar? Ask OCBC,” read an ad on the blue Toyota which overtook my cab soon after we get out of the Singapore Changi Airport. It’s about 7.30 in the morning and Jaffer, our driver, driving at 80 km per hour, has already made our journey a Jaguar (a luxury car). I look out of the window for glimpses of morning life. Jaffer negotiates a sharp turn and stops at the signal. A group of girls crosses the road. They are followed by an old man with a bagful of vegetables. The signal turns green and we move on. It’s just twenty minutes that I have been in Singapore but two things about it have already struck me: girls and cars. Both are beautiful. But there is a difference. The cars come in many varieties, but the girls look the same. More or less.My hotel, the Grand Copthorne Waterfront, is by the Singapore River. Small tourist boats pass by, leaving a trail of white on the black waters. You never get the feel of a city sitting in an air-conditioned hotel room, so I ...

We are still 30 km away from Munnar, travelling in a bus from Thiruvananthapuram, when my friend’s mobile phone rings. “It was from my college,” says the friend, the newly-appointed principal of a college in the tea country, “they say my house has been burgled.” I’m shocked, but he isn’t. “There was only an immersion rod, two blankets, a monkey cap and an air pillow,” he says. He is lucky: he was planning to shift the entire household stuff from his old house.The bus stops at Munnar and we hire an autorickshaw to the college. The theft still dominates our conversation. “In Munnar, if you are not home for two days, your house will definitely be burgled on the third day,” informs Selvan, the rickshaw driver who has obviously been eavesdropping. “Why so?” I ask him. “The border with Tamil Nadu is only a few steps away, and once they cross it, no one can catch them,” he says. It is tourist season in Munnar, as in the rest of Kerala, as is evident by the number of Qualis’ and Indicas that o...

The editor of The Little Magazine, a bimonthly which claims to be the platform which would carry important work in the world languages along with the best contemporary writing in the South Asian languages, recently made a well-known Tamil writer wait for more than one hour. The venue was Asian College of Journalism auditorium. The editor was Antara Dev Sen. Who was the Tamil writer, you might ask. Before I tell you who he was, let me tell you something about the event. A couple of weeks back, I received a e-mail from the Little Magazine group saying that, “You will be happy to know that some friends of TLM in Chennai have organised a literary evening with writers and translators on the 2nd of September. We hope to have an informal chat on “Accessing Indian literature through its languages” led by Asokamitran, Dilip Kumar and Mini Krishnan. Please do come, as a member of the TLM family, and join us for some tea and arattai.” (I didn’t understand the word arattai. I asked one of my coll...