Tag Archives: DPchallenge

Central Park and Columbus Circle this week

It is about 0° Centigrade/32° Fahrenheit. Since we are at a loose end we decide to take a stroll in Central Park. It’s the kind of harsh, winter day when the brightness of the sun belies the ferocity of the cold. Continue reading Central Park and Columbus Circle this week

Becoming Indian: Memories of Graduate Student Life in the US

This is the first apartment complex I stayed at. It's changed its name and management now.
This is the first apartment complex I stayed at. It has changed its name and management since my time.

It was all there. The little bits and pieces of India that had managed to pass through strict inspection. For some of us, it was in the form of three or four bottles of the leading brand of coconut oil, enough to last two years of our serious, nothing but scholarly existence in this well-populated university town in Florida. Enough to oil our heads and necks and the pages of our complicated advanced level cheaper Indian reprints of textbooks that had traveled with us through endless labyrinthine chutes of airport security.

Continue reading Becoming Indian: Memories of Graduate Student Life in the US

Email and the Parents

It was probably the year 2001 and I was checking my email in a computer lab in a school in Florida trying to concentrate amidst the loud noise that the dot matrix printers were making on the aisle (which were the only printers completely free for students then although laser ones did exist).

I was checking an email that had the following subject line:

INFORMATION RECEIVED. ACTION TAKEN.
Continue reading Email and the Parents

Sounds of the Blogosphere

These are the records of the Earthling Bottledworder (henceforth to be referred to as EB in the third person) trapped in the spaceship Over-Enterprise for several months on its voyage to the Blogosphere.
Continue reading Sounds of the Blogosphere

Writer’s Block through Active and Passive Voices in the Head

The writer’s brain had been left alone for a while. So had his pen. His table was left all messy and dust had gathered on his notebooks. The blinds were drawn in his room every dull morning for days on end. Rust had gathered on all objects on the table from the nib of the pen to the new pins that had been clean and shiny all these years. His computer had been left in a dark recess and the chair had had so many clothes dumped on it that no one but an exceptionally resourceful person would suspect that there was an object meant to be sat on underneath. Continue reading Writer’s Block through Active and Passive Voices in the Head