World View

Veteran Malayalam actor, director, and screenwriter Srinivasan died recently at 69. He had been unwell for several years, with rumors of his death even spreading last year after an emergency hospital visit. His prolonged illness left him extremely frail. He needed help to walk, his speech was hard to understand, and his once-sharp voice had […]

You can’t get enough of a good story. In the last few months, I went on three entertainment binges, totaling almost 150 hours (nearly a week of my life). These were on Donna Tartt’s two tomes in audio format: A Secret History and The Goldfinch, multiple viewings of all three seasons of Mike White’s The

Bankability is the cornerstone of relationships.  My earliest memory of the word “bankable” is from decades ago. After staying with me for a year, my cousin was moving to a different town.  In the goodbye gift, a book, she, a banker, wrote, “You can always bank on me.” The word has always stayed with me

I recently took an eight-week Shakespeare class at a well-known acting school in the city. Like for most people, Shakespeare was an enigma, and the class, surprisingly open to even non-actors, was my chance to demystify the Bard. There were around ten people in the class. Some were pros, but they assured me newbies would

Since I don’t have cable, I had to rely on NBC’s YouTube clips. As a result, I mostly watched the US-dominant events, and track and field in particular. There is something visceral about seeing peak-performing men and women outrunning each other. As Woody Allen famously said, after skipping the Oscars despite winning the best picture,

The closest equivalent to the Indian “thali” in the West is a “platter,” although that bland word sucks the juice out of the delectable thali. A thali is a multi-course meal served on a single plate, and you can eat it in any order. Every thali has salad, rice, Indian bread, at least two main

I spent my childhood summers with my grandmother in Kollam, Kerala. As I grew older, around eight or nine, my parents dropped me off and returned to the nearby city of Kochi, where we lived. My grandmother lived in a traditional house with a courtyard (sadly dilapidated now) with my widowed aunt and a maid.

Caving in can be fun. Like thousands of people in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in South India, Kerala, I, too, have been caught in the Manjummel Boys spell the last few weeks. Manjummel Boys is a smash hit Malayalam film about a real story of courage and friendship. It was playing in

Faux pas show us we are human.  I had tea with three others in my Pilates class the other day. I was the Indian American in the group; two were middle-aged black women, and one was an older white woman. Since we were dressed in sweatpants, gauging what we did for work wasn’t easy. Our

Recently, my apartment building did not have heat or hot water for several days because of a steam pipe blast on my street. Although it was winter, the weather was relatively mild, and a space heater and fleece jacket were enough to get by. I remembered the Bennet sisters from Little Women warming their beds