I just put up our advent calendar. I think it was more fun to make it rather than search stores that sold one. Making packets recycled from grocery bags, one for each date, putting in little goodies, candies, and chocolates, and hanging it up was most fun. It will be even better to open it…

My friend Xu Xiaoying visited us the week before last and we had a nice.time She hails from Shanghai; we met in Berlin, Germany, and had really bonded well, in the lab and outside it. The experiments would last until late in the night and we would intersperse it with good talk, and good hot…

My memory of that day is vivid. Graduate school had pushed my nights very late and I had slept in. I was woken up with a call "go turn on the tv!!" Sometimes our bodies respond to such commands without a word, hearing the undertone of shock, terror and pain in it. The idiot box…

"Happiness starts with healthiness!!" crooned a lady extolling the virtues of a pet supplies shop. I was startled. My ears rang so loud, I thought I was in the bell tower of Notre Dame. The transformation of 'health' into 'healthiness' was akin to a bad dream. How in the world does one keep track of…

For the February issue of Palki 6, I simply had to pen down my thoughts on the one of the most celebrated saints this part of the century: Valentine. How do I love thee? “Let me count the ways.”The world will soon gear up to welcome spring. The little city of Loveland in Colorado, USA,…

Winter ground is different. The white blanket masks everything. The earth peeks out merely through a web of pathways and black, tarred roads. I walk to the entrance of the grocers, ready for mundane tasks. Life doesn't always give happy servings on a platter, bitter memories somehow seep in, always.My friend Barnali recently hosted an…

'Tis the season to be jolly.Well, jolly was far from the emotion I was feeling. The media tried hard with its glitzy pleas to spend, but glitzy somehow did not equate to jolly. It was as if the entire world was begging the common man to do something for the US economy. Period. But wait,…

This year I tore off a page of my diary and set it off in a palenquin.A ride down a long-ago lane.From the diary of a remote IndianMy first memory of the US is the strong fragrance of coffee at the Cincinnati airport. Excited and full of hope, I dreamed of making it as a…

And so passes a doyenMy grandmother, a feisty, petite, fair lady with black hair and green eyes lay down her life to a mixture of Alzheimer's, paranoia and old age.A wife of a freedom fighter, amma had stood alongside her husband in his ahimsa struggle against the British rule. Post independence, she did oppose his…

So it was,After years of living in the US, I finally made it to a ball game, thanks to Tim. And wonderful seats way down near the field.Denver, the mile high city (Go Rockies!). There's a line in the stadium marking this, to show you if you really are in the nose bleed section or…