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The Funeral Cake and the Scotch Dr. Anna Marie looked at the clock and cursed under her breath. Five minutes had passed. It felt like an eternity in the suffocating, post-monsoon heat of the outpatient department. The hospital had emptied out, leaving behind the distinct, depressing odor of phenyl and dying institutional light. Her desk was clear, save for the file of one Vijaya—fifty-five,…

Or Lack Thereof When did you last chase a butterfly? Better yet, when did you last see a child try to catch one? If you live in Goa, or merely treat it as your personal seasonal playground, take a moment over your afternoon feni to think about that. There was a time when walking down an unpaved village path in Bardez or Salcete meant keeping an eye out for a stray piece of rope that might…

Exporting Our Bad Manners Since 1947 Every few months, some brave soul like Akash Banerjee sticks his neck out and states the bleeding obvious: we Indians are not exactly adored when we travel abroad. Predictably, the national blood pressure shoots up. We thump our chests and scream “racism!” We blame colonial hangovers, Western arrogance, global prejudice—anything and everything except our own…

The Great Indian Elimination Circus: Breeding Burnouts for a Living Let’s be honest: if an Indian parent could genetically engineer a child in the womb to crack the IIT-JEE or the UPSC, they’d do it without a second thought, probably installing a couple of extra memory chips where the artistic neurons used to be. We are a nation utterly paralyzed by the fear of the “Unsafe Bet.” The brilliant…

Aryamba’s Thursdays at Rayara Mattah and Ram Bhavan. Of Enlightenment, Prasadam and Other Retail Experiences. “Find a guru,” proposed the Akashic reader, looking terribly solemn. “Find a guru,” agreed Ganapathi Anna. Anna was the local oracle and intuitive healer, a man who dispensed cosmic wisdom with the same casual authority that others dispensed directions to the bus stand. He even…

This post is written for Blogchatter Bloghop. Aryamba was at elevenses: ginger tea, khakra, and the firm conviction that civilisation had peaked sometime before mobile phones. Across the road an auto-rickshaw coughed to a halt. Out stepped Algasekharan, dark as roasted coffee and draped in black. He was returning from Sabarimala. For as long as Aryamba could remember, he had gone there every…

Forgotten Mothers and Silent fathers. A2Z of care and legitimacy Legitimacy beyound Care giving. Societies have a peculiar habit. They celebrate the people who arrive at the finish line holding the trophy while quietly forgetting those who carried the runner when he could not walk. We claim to worship love, sacrifice, and care, yet whenever inheritance, bloodlines, and surnames enter the room,…

June 4 has acquired a curious distinction in recent years. Somewhere along the way, it came to be observed as The Audacity of Hope Day, borrowing its name from the phrase made famous by Barack Obama in his book The Audacity of Hope. It is one of those phrases that sounds simple enough when first heard, but lingers in the mind long after the speech is over and the book is back on the shelf. The…

Two Old Men, Two Little Girls, and the Curious Business of Healing I recently reread Silas Marner and Heidi, and found myself wondering whether George Eliot and Johanna Spyri had accidentally written case notes. Not medical case notes, admittedly. No blood pressure readings. No MRI scans. No laboratory investigations. Yet there they are: two elderly men, both isolated, both suspicious of the…

Maybe Andaal could stand before a mirror and say “mirror, mirror on the wall, who am at all?” ‘ಹುಚ್ಚು ಮನಸಿನ ಹತ್ತು ಮುಖ’ would be the reply or maybe just an image from Shivaram Karanth’s museum would fllash. There are some people who enter a room as though they are carrying a secret. And then there are people like Andaal who enter a room looking as though they are carrying three overdue library…

On flip the coin day. Aryamba’s son was watching a cricket match with the seriousness usually reserved for budget meetings and heart surgery. The toss was on. The captain called. The coin went up, came down, and television experts immediately began discussing pitch conditions, dew factors, wind direction and perhaps, if given enough airtime, the mating habits of migratory birds. “This toss…

The Weight We Carry: Rewriting the Story of Multiple Sclerosis and Invisible Exhaustion World Multiple Sclerosis Day arrives every May 31st. For 2026, the global conversation is focusing on something that millions of people live with every single day, yet rarely see reflected in the mirror or on a clinical scan: “Invisible Exhaustion.” This isn’t the standard tiredness that comes from a long…

HERMIT ECONOMY AND MORE The experts are at it again. This time, they have discovered something called the “Hermit Economy.” I read about it in a heavy foreign magazine, the kind that costs fifty rupees and makes you feel illiterate by page three. It says that ever since the virus went away, people have stopped going out. They are staying at home, buying exercise bicycles they will never ride,…

Lockdowns, Media Memory, Polarization and the Rise of the Hermit Economy Ah, dear reader, lend me your ear (or at least the corner of your screen). Crises, like bad relatives, do not leave quietly after the tea and sweets are served. They plant themselves in the house and re‑arrange the furniture. When a whole society goes through a wrenching disruption, the leftover fear, grief, and…

There was a time in India when parents told children, “Beta, go out and see the world.”What they actually meant was: “Go out, become successful, but preferably within a 7-kilometre radius from home and return before dinner.” Today we have a full generation of adults who can perform laparoscopic surgery, write software for German companies, discuss cryptocurrency, explain attachment theory on…

Pip: Parwatisingari's Weblog is running a full diagnostic on the human interior — dreams, mirrors, chakras, and museums where the exhibits stare back harder than you do.Mara: That's the territory parwatisingari is covering: the surreal logic of dreams set in Goa, a monsoon-season reckoning with adaptation and healing, and what museums quietly do to the people who wander through them.Pip: Let's…