Feline Musings

For an Indian woman, the pressure is emotional as well as social. While she wants to give the best to her husband, by maintaining an orderly house, a daily schedule and hot breakfast and meals served with love, any desire to go lax and easy is ruthlessly subdued by family expectations that you take the best care of your husband. So, if a hot, savory breakfast was the mother’s responsibility (and love) towards her son, the duty immediately falls on the shoulder of the “bahu” to ensure that the son is sent to work with a fully appeased stomach!

She also explores smaller, more marginal traditions, including Goenka’s Vipassana meditation camp, the Parsis in Mumbai, and the now-fading Bene Israel Jewish community. She mentions Varanasi in her travelogue, Osho Rajnish’s sex-cult, and provides information on Jain culture.

All eyes are on her. She is sitting in her car intently taking a drag as she waits for the traffic light to turn green; she is stirring her coffee at Barista and raising smoke tendrils; she is reading a paper and lighting her cigarette; in between shaking a leg or two on the dance [...]

 I have been having recurrent nightmares about a woman. A woman’s plight has petrified me and made deep inroads into my psyche. I feel helpless – not because I cannot protect myself from the nightmares, but because I cannot do anything for her. This woman revealed to me a fold of our tattering social fabric, [...]

 The world went gaga over their tattoos – Saif’s love tattoo, Sanjay Dutt’s colorful shoulder tattoo, the ink-stained torso of Arjun Rampal, not to forget Rakhi Sawant’s oh-so-conspicuous tattoo and the “kaanta-laga” girl, Shefali Zariwala and the arrow piercing her heart tattoo – the list is endless.  
Tattoo amongst modern youth and their icons is yuppie, [...]