A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one shouldnot live. Having lived, or rather, having...

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to...

Trying to find answers to why and how my life got into such a dismal mess, I sought answers in the scriptures, in religion and philosophy, but it only confused me further. Stories, on the...

our situation reminded me of a fable I had read somewhere. Chased by a tiger, a man slips and falls over the edge of a mountain. As he falls, he manages to grab a bush...

Become aware of yourself. Everything will come to you, Chinmay, when you are in that most wonderful place on earth, the centre of your being. If you learn just one thing from this book, let...

Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the...

Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired...

each copy of a book has its own unique personality. Reading a book from the library is not the same as reading another copy of the same book from the same library, which is again...

Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all...

Beware of ‘god men’ and ‘god women’. Even people who have not been depressed for a day in their lives get sucked into the seductive delusion of spirituality. If you must seek, seek by yourself,...

I hated this love that I had for my family—love that demanded my time and energy, that sought to control my life down to every thought and action.I now realize that it was not love...

How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from hiscreation? They create each other. On...

When you feel that unpleasant darkness invading your mind, read this book and these stories will help you return to the light and warmth of life.

I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.

O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a...