To what do I owe this particular silence? Well, there’s a long answer and a short answer. The short answer is: work. The long one is a bit more complex. Over the past two years I’ve been working at GEO magazine. This is my first “proper” job, as in where I need to go into […]
Author: Payal
Digitally restricted
I hate DRM. I really hate it from the bottom of my heart. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. Tell me, what’s to like about a system devised to make it incredibly difficult use the content you have legitimately bought? I paid my hard-earned money for my copies of Hitman: Absolution, Deus Ex: […]
The iPad as a parenting tool
There’s this funny story doing the rounds—about a young couple raising their two kids in modern-day urban India. When their first came along, they had higher ideals about the good and proper way to raise a child, in which the idiot box had no part. By the time the second emerged, they had significantly more […]
Comfort food
A craving for curd rice? How unglamorous! Until last week, when I was laid low by a stomach bug, I wasn’t even aware of how much I love curd rice. But after spending the better part of the week spent eating a variety of boiled things, the craving hit. I could almost smell the mustard […]
The auto-cracy strikes again
Turns out from 1 March onwards, (most) autos in Delhi are going to stay off the roads after 4 p.m., demanding a fare hike from the government. This is an indefinite partial strike and comes close on the heels of a 48-hour strike last month. But it also turns out that no one asked the […]
Can’t buy you love
Something strange happened today—I almost found myself in agreement with HT City. “Are we being conned?” screamed the headlines, asking if Valentine’s day was a gimmick thought up to line the pockets of sellers of pink and heart-shaped things. Unfortunately, a closer look revealed that the placement of the story was probably a gimmick itself. […]
Things to do
Things have been busy lately. A humungous editing assignment and a string of persistent deadlines have thrown my preferred priorities to the winds. However, I intend to rein in the madness before the month ends. What better way to start than to make a list. Things to do before February 2013 ends: Finish Mass Effect […]
Where’s all the chocolate?
There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.(Linda Grayson) For someone who doesn’t have too many of them, I sometimes feel I tend to take friendships for granted. I don’t mean in the take-advantage-of kind of way (at least I hope not!), but more in the way of not […]
A hairy story
Fact: women’s body hair is dirty. And how do I know this? Because I’ve always been told you’re cleaner if you shave your legs; and, stretching that logic, unhygienic if you happen to have armpit hair. And it’s on TV and in the newspapers, so it must be triply true. Heck, according to the media, […]
Review: The Torment of Others
If you’re a reader of crime fiction, you’re likely to have an impassioned opinion on the pair of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. I doubt there is any fictional duo that has frustrated me quite as much as them. Yet, these two creations of Val McDermid’s fertile imagination has me going back again and again […]