Joyous Devi

We still had two hours of daylight left when we left Chindwara  on our way to Panchmarhi – both in Madhya Pradesh.  It had been raining since the morning and its occasional ferocity threatened to wash out the Handloom Exhibition which had been sponsored by our organisation and  enthusiastically set up by the weavers from the nearby regions.  Our bullet point agenda  had already delayed us and we were wondering if it would still be possible to visit Patalkot, a tribal village, which entailed a  17 kms detour from the main road. The drive to Tamia, a picturesque town on the way, was like stepping back in time to a land infused with poetic images and an era, which could well have fitted into a passage in  history. Vast fields covered in verdure stretched into the horizon, its edges fringed by the rays from a watery sun.  Hutments bandaged in tarpaulin and guarded by herds of buffaloes dotted the land - no factories, no malls, no cafes in sight...

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Writers must serve a social purpose More reason why people should refrain from commenting on areas that they have little knowledge of....

Joyous Devi: Ma! Let Me Be Born...

The trip to Jhansi nearly didn’t happen. Relying on  the self proclaimed largest  radio taxi network in the country Meru cab, was not such a great idea I realized, as I stood waiting  for the taxi to show itself,  vacillating between the extremes of anger and nervousness and feeling the biting cold seep through all my insulations. It was 5:30 in the morning, and despite frequent  calls to the cab’s control room, I didn’t see the cab anywhere in sight, until it arrived, tearing through the surreal fog like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, with barely 20 minutes to departure time. But make it I did, thanks to the energy levels of  two coolies who appropriated my  rather small pieces of luggage between them as soon as my cab drove into the station ramp. They  ran, like twin heroes in a Hindi film, undeterred by  baggage checking  machines or the crowds on the platform or even the inexorable tick tock of the clock ...

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Salman Rushdie & India's new theocracy

Ejected from the aircraft, the walk across the tarmac terminates into a swanky, building - the Raja Bhoj airport in Bhopal. Its clever architecture and clean lines, make one take a double take, for it’s a vision of modernity most unexpected in anything other than the A 1 class cities; in Madhya Pradesh even more so, a state associated with many kinds of unflattering data. But it makes a statement, political as well as an aggressive bid to woo the tourist and capital. The drive from the airport unveils a city, which breathes easily with its past when a succession of four Begums ruled the city from 1819-1926, and its contemporary avatar – green and spread out, the waters of its two lakes uncluttered by polythene or other refuse. It’s an example other cities in India could well emulate. And while a BJP ruled state, which has very recently passed the rather hair brained order of according seven years imprisonment for cow slaught...

And as the current year runs its last stretch before it can expel its final shuddering breaths to become: the Year that Was, a reference in the past, a collection of wooly memories; everything within us - the human parallel to the animal instinct of marking territory – invents ways of marking this time. Time intrinsically linked to our sense of our chronological existence, which at a deeper level is an uneasy acknowledgement of our mortality. So that the very celebration of this ‘ time’ holds a kind of quiet keening, a sense of loss, which we try every which way to subsume under a collective , concentrated kind of forgetfulness. This induced amnesia is expressed best through a party and any invented excuses for a celebration. And so we have imported some, concocted some, traditionally followed some, while some remain with us as a hungovered presence from our colonial past, specially while marking this time of the year. There is, to begin with , a mad rush of...