A Strait Apart — Part 1

(I was in Sri Lanka, by which I mean Colombo, for a week recently. While not the first country that pops to my, or your, mind when one thinks of traveling abroad, I was adequately excited about the journey. A new a country is a new country is a new country is a journey that might lead…

The New Yorker ‘does’ Management Consulting

The missus, whilst being a fanatical editor, quality checker and supporter of Dork and Cubiclenama, often says that I am too harsh on MBAs in general and management consultants in particular.
This, of course, is nonsense. And I have the PowerPoint slides…

Top 10 ways to be passive aggressive with small-time authors

As some of you may know, thanks to that zonking huge cover in the right sidebar there, in January this year my debut novel was published by Penguin Books India. And — touch wood, kiss wood, dry hump wood — it has been doing…

The black kurta is famous

(Note: Youtube video has now been obtained.)
Sunil Sethi and I recently chatted about Dork and a bunch of other things on NDTV’s Just Books show.

The outcomes of this were threefold:

Letter From London — 1

Hello there from sunny/rainy/warm/cold/crisp/damp/expensive/expensiver London. Undoubtedly the greatest city in the world after Kochi and Trivandrum.
For the last three weeks or so I have been embroiled in the controlled chaos better known as ‘settling into London’. This involves steps…

Once again you have said it best without saying anything at all

If you are a spouse, inferior half, life partner, dependent visa holder, civil partner, living-in (Shiva! Shiva!) type or similarly Facebook-relationship-status-ed, you are well aware of the many ways in which your…

The making of Whatay. Part 1: Padayappa clip

I am asked very often why this blog’s URL is Whatay.com. And indeed, why I use the term so copiously. And, doubly indeed, how this term went from being inside joke to becoming part of local lingo at that business school I once went to. (Though I have…

Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall

Have I told you about my obsession with author podcasts? About how I diligently download as many author interviews as I can onto my iPod and then listen to them many times?

Personally I like to skip the parts where they talk about one, or several, of their…