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Before and after | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/before-and-after
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 11 December 2010. In the last year or two a handful of shows and publications (like this one. Have juxtaposed images of Himalayan glaciers from the 1950s and earlier with photos taken since 2000. The story to be filled in is, of course, the one about man-made climate change. Photographs are a good way to constructively frighten people. So that’s how I approached. Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World. The same street now in St Peters...
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Business magic | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/business-magic
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 13 August 2011. Six days after it opened, three months ago, I happened by the Spell and Bound Bookshop and Café. In SDA Market, a prosperous corner of South Delhi. The market has restaurants and coffee places and one of the better-stocked. In the city. Primed by years of Harry Potter products, my eye was instantly captured by Spell and Bound’s forest-green and olde-worlde facade, with its promise of cosiness and warm bookery. All this was ready on the sixth day.
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Unfairport | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/unfairport
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 13 September 2010. Last week a design-related experience left me angry and unsettled. We went to pick up a relative at the new international airport. Terminal. The plane was to land around 3 am, so we were on the Gurgaon highway at about that time. The lane leading to the international airport exit was marked, on the big green signboards above the highway, thus: I.G.I.A. Terminal 3 . That lane took us along the facade of the arrivals hall. We stopped where...
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‘Everything is rotten. It has to be changed’ | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/everything-is-rotten-it-has-to-be-changed
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. 8216;Everything is rotten. It has to be changed’. By Rrishi on 25 June 2011. Back in the summer holidays of 1990, not yet 13 years old, I sat down to write a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev. He was then still General Secretary and head of state, and beloved of. Which came regularly to my school reading room. I wrote about myself and my family, that we liked the movies shown at the Soviet Cultural Centre. Foolish, childish, romantic? No, not very. In the newest issue of. We] st...
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Written in stone | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/written-in-stone
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 15 May 2011. To Mount Kailash, Colin Thubron climbs out of his comfort zone. Of course this is a pilgrimage. Colin Thubron walks two weeks from remote western Nepal to the Tibet border, is carried by SUV to the foot of Mt Kailash and then performs the. But Thubron, now in his 70s, appears to struggle with the idea. His other books are travel narratives and novels. In 2000 he told the. 8221; Iswor asks, “Why are you doing this, travelling alone? Thubron went be...
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‘First, they laugh at you’ | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/first-they-laugh-at-you
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. 8216;First, they laugh at you’. By Rrishi on 27 November 2010. So nice of President Obama to have talked to us about Mahatma Gandhi. Unfortunately he’s not in a position to. As Gandhi. Someone who is, ironically, is the future king of England. Prince Charles. Has a new book out, called. Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. And in it he lays out his version of a Gandhian approach to saving our planet and civilisation. It is also wide-ranging. Charles says, essent...
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Above and beyond | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/above-and-beyond
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 16 August 2011. Tea with BS: Major H P S Ahluwalia. But one doesn’t see all this, not at first. Until well after I have crossed the room and settled into one of the stiff chairs on this side of the desk, the only thing I can see is Major H P S Ahluwalia. Hari Pal Singh Ahluwalia, 75, is the chairman and founder of the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre. The immediate occasion is the release of a book. It is called. Tracing Marco Polo’s Journey: The Silk Route.
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Brain-dead beauty | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/brain-dead-beauty
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 11 October 2010. On the day of the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony, chief minister Sheila Dikshit gave a TV interview. In which she managed to appear at once smug and humble. She tut-tutted gently about the mess in the run-up to the Games, when preparations were not directly in her hands, and, because she was far wilier than the interviewer, was allowed to dwell upon what she described as her government’s success at cleaning things up at the last minute.
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A lot of little | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/a-lot-of-little
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. A lot of little. By Rrishi on 8 April 2012. From Bill Bryson, another short history of… stuff. A colleague and I came to blows over this book. It happened like this: I said Bill Bryson. Doesn’t know how to write, and she hit me with her copy of. It isn’t a slim paperback. As it turns out, we were both right. As you can tell, these are all 19th-century events and processes centred on England and the USA. In 1851, the year after the Crystal Palace went up, in the rural n...
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Imperial summitry | Under my byline
https://raote.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/imperial-summitry
Skip to search - Accesskey = s. By Rrishi on 30 October 2010. Obama meets PM. Sarkozy meets PM. Medvedev meets PM. Wen meets PM. Cameron already met PM. That makes all five heads of permanent Security Council states guests of India within a year. Good thing we did some housecleaning for the Commonwealth Games. A ruler did not leave his realm except to enlarge it, or when he had no choice. Poor John VIII Palaiologos. Nothing as enlightened will ensue from this sequence of imperial visits to Delhi. But...