Opinion | Diary of an airport anthropologist
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Opinion | Diary of an airport anthropologist

There’s no place like large city airports to get a sharp yet nuanced sense of what India today is all about. In cities with two terminals, this is especially true of “low cost” terminals rather than the newer “global” ones, which are great to experience, but lack an Indian soul—just like those very upmarket shopping malls. Some would argue that this is exactly what these airports are, only with an airstrip or two attached. On a bus ride to the aircraft at Ahmedabad airport was a group of four loud and excited Gujarati-speaking men with a 10-year-old boy in tow, clearly from small-town Gujarat. Remember the bygone days when people wore suits and ties to get on a plane? They wore traditional weave kurtas and shawls with narrow pants, embroidered mojris and ear studs with great confidence, not self-consciously trying to become invisible in a sea of Western attired men. […]

March 15, 2019 0 Comments
Alyque Padamsee: Always a champion, never a challenger, he strode the ad world like a colossus
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Alyque Padamsee: Always a champion, never a challenger, he strode the ad world like a colossus

To say that he was brilliant, impossible, dazzling, utterly his own person and the definer of Indian advertising is an understatement. Like he said in his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger” Alyquee Padamsee died at the age of 90. (Source: directordhruv/Instagram) They just don’t make ad men like they used to. The charismatic Subhas Ghoshal, the charmingly intellectual Subroto Sengupta, the visionary people magnet Prashanta Sanyal. And now, joining that list of ad men who have died but will live forever, through legends about them, is Alyque Padamsee. To say that he was brilliant, impossible, dazzling, utterly his own person and the definer of Indian advertising is an understatement. Like he said in his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger”. And no-one could even come close to challenging the pedestal that he occupied—the world that he strode like a […]

June 12, 2018 0 Comments
Dear Gen Now
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Dear Gen Now

Setting up #MeToo as an all-or-nothing issue will make us ignore the considerable gains already made. My reply is that setting this up as an “all or nothing” issue will make us not notice the considerable gains that have already been made or the never-before foundation we now have that we can build on. Here is the sad truth. If you randomly pick any Indian woman who has stepped out of her home into the wider world of work, be it four or 40 years ago, there is a good chance that she will have a story of experiencing gender-based harassment in the workplace. Of being at the receiving end of behaviour from men in positions of power or co-workers, which made her life miserable. It breaks my heart (though it doesn’t shock my mind) that even so many decades after my generation entered the workplace, the situation remains pretty […]

October 16, 2018 0 Comments
There Are Good Days and Bad Days
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There Are Good Days and Bad Days

Rama’s husband Ashoke Bijapurkar, adman and consultant, passed away on February 11, 2015 after a cardiac arrest. Rama is a market strategy consultant and an author. Friends sent me Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook post, which I read with tearful resonance, like so many others around the world. Hit with a tsunami that erased my life as I knew it from the age of 20, I still yearn for, as she puts it, ‘Option A’ (her late husband). I admire her for being able to share coherently her innermost thoughts and feelings of the first month without Dave. I know that she has young children and the hard work of raising them ahead of her. As I sit down to write this exactly four months after Ashoke passed away on February 11, I am grateful that I am not young and my days of heavy lifting, be it professional, societal or familial, […]

June 21, 2015 0 Comments
Retirement Plan
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Retirement Plan

In which the householder decides to relinquish her family, the duties of daily life and retreat into the woods, if only for the little while I can’t wait to go into vanaprastha, that stage in life when you are entitled to say “what goes of your father” to household stuff and live in a zen world. Where you don’t have to do collective bargaining for all manner of decisions — what to eat, where to holiday, what colour to paint the walls, should the dog be allowed to sleep on the bed, should bedsheets be vibrantly patterned or in boring pastels and so on. In order to prepare for it, I have been taking a vacation all by myself, once a year, where I live untidily, wake up early to watch sitcoms and not worry about being slothful, and have cereal, toast and egg in the evening because quite simply, it […]

May 31, 2014 0 Comments
We Are Like That Only: Getting Inked
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We Are Like That Only: Getting Inked

Market research shows that this constituency is very concerned about what impact it will have on the governance of the country, rather than the impact it will have on the Sensex. A family that votes together is bound to debate endlessly. Election stress hit our household too, despite us being south Bombay types who are supposed to be unconcerned with them. SUMMARY A family that votes together is bound to debate endlessly. Election stress hit our household too, despite us being south Bombay types who are supposed to be unconcerned with them. (My favourite from a list floating online titled 10 Reasons Why South Bombayites don’t vote is: “What? No valet parking?”). Actually, it isn’t true that they are unconcerned. My informal market research shows that this constituency is very concerned indeed, perhaps not about what impact it will have on the governance of the country, rather what impact it […]

May 11, 2014 0 Comments
Tai-Pan or Fry Pan
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Tai-Pan or Fry Pan

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR GOES TO BUY A PACKET OF BUTTERFLY TEA AND A BOTTLE OF WELL WATER A FAVOURITE STORY told by the sales manager of what was in the old days known as Lipton Tea went thus: an elderly lady walks into a kirana shop in Chandigarh and asks, “Lipton di chaah haigi (Do you have Lipton tea)?” The shopkeeper grins broadly and say, “Behenji, lipatna hai to lipto. Mainu ki frank painda (Lady, if you want to hug, then do so. What difference does it make to me)?” Lipton, when pronounced as it is sometimes in north India as “Lipaton”, sounds like lipatna, or hugging. And chai when pronounced as it often is as “chaah” is the word for desire. I thought of that story, because now we have the very English brand name Tetley in our midst. And when I went to a shop in Delhi […]

April 12, 2013 0 Comments
Confessions of a Part-time Teacher
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Confessions of a Part-time Teacher

On the memories and anxieties of a convocation ceremony IT’S CONVOCATION time again and as the invitations start coming in, I feel that familiar lump in my throat. At the institute that I am associated with, the convocation takes place on the weather-beaten but majestic, red-brick Louis Kahn Plaza that has seen over 60 batches of bright-eyed young men and women “walk the ramp”, so to speak, in their fancy dress robes, on top of the world, even if just for today — because tomorrow they will be at the bottom of the heap of the real world! Their mixed emotions of anticipation and trepidation are so palpable, it makes me nervous just to breathe in their vicinity. And I really empathise with the bemusement on their parents’ faces, laced with pride, at this new avatar of the offspring that they are yet to get to know. My heart goes […]

March 30, 2013 0 Comments
A Home With a View
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A Home With a View

What’s it like for a city person to live closer to the real jungle I DESPERATELY wanted a place of my own that opens out to the outdoors. I lived most of my life as a “concrete jungli”, a phrase coined by my armyman brother after witnessing a command mother-daughter performance, when my one-year-old and I visited him in small town Assam. For the better part of the trip, every night my daughter would look at the sky and say “ite”, and we had no clue what it meant. Until it hit me one day that she was saying “light” whenever she looked at the moon, because the Mumbai child had not seen the moon thus far, and worse, her parents had not realised it either. It wasn’t visible from our window (only other buildings were), the car park was indoors, and exhausted Mumbaikar working parents never took the one-year-old […]

March 12, 2013 0 Comments
An Open Plan
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An Open Plan

When the husband and the contractor renovated the house. My husband has a home renovation fetish. He itches to break down walls, paint them, alter window heights and enclose balconies. I am not enthused by the whole process. I have a theory that painters take as long as they do because our homes are more comfortable than theirs and there is a dis-incentive for them to finish their work. They get paid on a daily rate, and they certainly enjoy a nice afternoon snooze alone in the room that is being painted, get tea and cold water twice a day, or more if they ingratiate themselves with the household help. I walked into the house yesterday to find all the pictures taken down, and a happy husband telling me that the painters would arrive tomorrow. I protested violently that I hadn’t been consulted, to which he said I had been, […]

February 3, 2013 0 Comments
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