Deccan Herald

Narayan, Wodehouse, Divakar, and The Good Doctor

A little riverside village. Largely unknown. Childhood stomping grounds. Sri Narayan’s “Malgudi” stories. Italian food. Curd rice, chitraanna, chappati. All connected through geography. This is my story today.

Geographies and memories

The river Kaveri. Its sandy banks and small fish. Green paddy fields, 6:30am sunlight, gentle breezes, steam engines, and railway sidings. High-ceilinged houses and the comforting aroma of grandmother’s cooking. These are in the distant past. But I can go there and experience all of…

“Leave the shower curtain *inside* the tub!”

New Year’s Eve, 1982. A 23-year old. Quite ignorant of the world except for what he had read in newspapers, comic books, and seen in movies. A Boeing-747 “Jumbo Jet.” A bath tub. A shower curtain. An international journey to a far-off country, an…

Motherland — a geopious notion

People are often willing to go so far as to die for “their” country, “their” land. The “land” and “country” they are willing to die for may be a piece of property, it may be a land for a culture to live in, it may be a “holy” place, and so on. The scale varies.

Bengaluru workshops, December 2014 — Report

What do you get when you put a bunch of highly skeptical school children, some of their parents, a medical doctor, the doctor’s parents, and a fanatical geographer?

Politics, longitude, time

I was scheduled to fly from New York’s John F Kennedy (JFK) airport to New Delhi by Kuwait Airways. I flew from Fargo, North Dakota to JFK. I thought, “Why not just check my large suitcases at the counter, get the boarding pass, and then loaf around JFK for the next hour or so till…

It’s about time!

Call centre workers and IT employees experience it. Long distance jet-setters –of late, Prime Minister Sri Modi, US Secretary of State John Kerry — experience it. And geographers such as my USA-based colleagues with whom I work have to deal with it.

The world on Bull Temple Road

I went somewhere interesting on 17 November 2014. It was the annual groundnut festival on Bull Temple Road, Bengaluru.

It started as an annual folk festival and fair. Now, it is international! Every year, the media and various others write about it…

Problems in pieces

Geographers look at the shapes of states and try to understand how the shape of a state affects its life. Geographers identify a variety of shapes of states:

Compact — states are close to being circular. These have roughly the same span of latitudes as longitudes. At…

When mythology meets geography

Mid-2000s.

One of my 8th standard students, Pashmina, rode the same bus. One day she was reading a book about goddesses in different mythologies — an unusual topic for someone her age. We got talking about this. She was clearly very passionate about…