Gateway to India

2011-09-23T16:50:00.000+01:00

Books on Buddhism and Hindu Puranas A unique and rare collection of theoretical and practical Buddhism by leading scholars like Edward Conze and Lama Anagarika Govinda and scholarly translations, - nearly 400books. Also a complete set of Hindu Puranas; a tale of birth and life story of Vishnu in various Avatars. Hardback collectors item. See listing at Amazon.com - more to come: http://

Vanity Publishing or an Archive for the Future?

2007-10-10T08:52:00.000+01:00

Three months ago, just before Christmas 2006 I bought a dot com domain name and found an Internet Service Provider to host it in the United Kingdom. There is an ongoing cost of hosting and a annual cost of paying Nominet a fee as the domain name registration authority. I have bought the cheapest package on the market, although this meant sharing a web server with associated poor shared bandwidth

My Gifted Friend Cheryl Braganza

2007-10-08T16:15:00.004+01:00

I have been blogging about mid 1960s when I arrived in England after an arduous sometimes frightening hitch-hiking journey by road from India. One of the friendships of that era I remember and cherish was with the gifted poet and painter Cheryl Braganza at Onslow Gardens in South Kensington. I remember her as a petite and beautiful young lady with an exotic background. Born and brought up in

Remembering Anil Saari

2007-10-05T14:04:00.000+01:00

My dear friend Anil Saari Arora, an eminent Cine-theorist, cine-critic in India died after a 6 month of unbearable suffering with stomach cancer in October 2005. He and I kept up a correspondence using e-mail and he presented me with his latest output of poetry which was prolific and ranged from trite to sublime Here is the obituary & an appreciation which I wrote about him, and was printed in

Hacks And Headlines - A Novel By Rashme Sehgal

2007-09-30T09:03:00.000+01:00

I was asked to review a first novel by my dear friend Rashme Sehgal, Hacks & Headlines. It is no accident she was married to my dearest friend Anil Saari. Rashme started her career in the 1970s as a poet and short story writer. She moved to journalism and went on to work for several leading Newspapers including The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times of India. Some of the landmark events she

2007-09-25T17:45:00.000+01:00

I have not been deliberately slow in adding to my blog. I suffer bitterly from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and have been unable to maintain my blog. Some of my time has been taken up by building a new website appropriately called www.asia-major.com and ultimate one stop resource centre on all things Indian. Wait and you will not be disappointed. Meanwhile if anyone has experience of CFS as an

I love India

2007-09-15T16:30:00.001+01:00

I was born in India but have lived in England for the past 42 years, having travelled here by road with no money in my pocket, and had a biblical finish in Paris on the 40th day. All I want to do is share my feelings for India with you out there - and give you rich links to the world that is contemporary India: tourism, Hotels, history and so on. I will provide a rich links to all manners of

Journey's End

2007-06-04T09:40:00.000+01:00

View Larger MapI was finally in Paris, my Mecca, and had endured 40 days of overland travel with no money to get to it. I had a map of Paris in my head, each known name of a street or an arrondisement connected to a famous writer. Whilst my kind host Inderjit was at the Ecole des Beaux Art, I would get up late, help myself to a strictly rationed portion of French baguette, get ready, and then,

Down and Out in Paris (and London)

2007-05-21T09:34:00.002+01:00

with apologies to George Orwell We were finally in France on the home run to Paris. We discovered why not a single French driver would stop for us and give us a lift. The French car insurance prohibited the driver of a French car from giving strangers a lift and in the event of a claim for injury, would refuse to pay. No driver was prepared to take that risk. A Scotsman gave us our next lift

An Italian Odyssey

2007-05-14T10:49:00.001+01:00

When my journey began, and as we walked across No Man’s Land at Wagha border we did not realize how weary would become of the whole enterprise and feel both homesick and, at the same time, long for an end to our journey. We had travelled two days by train across a barren mountainscape to Iran, with smugglers as fellow travellers, and then we had been befriended by students and fellow scribes in

A Bohemian Interlude

2007-04-25T15:47:00.001+01:00

GVK, It seems our Blog2Blog has somehow turned in to a monologue from me, and the counterpoint like a shruti that we provided each other seems to have gone silent. Maybe you will chime in again, as I am describing a Yugoslavia that was part of Nehru’s Pancha Shila ideals of non-aligned countries being able to assert their views on a world run largely by neo colonialists. What is your take on

Dreaming History

2007-04-05T17:48:00.001+01:00

Whenever I recount the story of our meeting with Col X, my friends tell me that it is a figment of my imagination, a false memory deeply embedded in my mind that I nourished into being. My friend GVK in his Blog to Blog said that my account was “stranger than fiction”.When my journey began, and as we walked across No Man’s Land at Wagha border, took a two day train across a barren mountainscape

Hobson's Choice in Turkey

2007-03-26T09:40:00.001+01:00

Turkey was full of history, but we were unaware of it. Even the mesmeric names of its cities and towns meant little to us. We had been on the road perhaps for two weeks since we left New Delhi, with no beds to sleep on, nowhere to have a shower. As we travelled west, the terror of Mount Arrarat and the bleak unfriendliness of Eruzurum was a distant memory, although we were not much closer to

Manna From Heaven

2007-03-13T15:41:00.001Z

Dear GVK, thank you for your kind e-mail in response to my latest blog saying that it was an absorbing read. You mention somewhere that I am diffident about my writing; this is natural for me because when one becomes a writer through choice or through an unbearable compulsion, one is aware that one is in a land of the giants: there is great timeless journalism and great prose out there and one

The Wrath of Mount Ararat

2007-03-07T09:00:00.001Z

GVK, your blog B2B with K: Where we were the day Nehru died makes compelling reading. It was the 27th of May. Unlike you we were not at sea but on a bus travelling at speed from Zahedan to Teheran. It was the day Jawaharlal Nehru died and this seismic event brought an era of hope and great secular dreams to an end. We had been feeling upbeat and triumphant as our host, the radio journalist

End of an Era for India or A tryst with destiny?

2007-02-25T09:41:00.002Z

I have had a kind passage at the hands of those who have been following my B2B dialogue with GVK, somewhat unwittingly comparing our respective experiences travelling between Europe and India , if in opposite directions. One reader asked why myself and Subhash were “turfed out” at the Indian side of the Wagah border and not allowed to carry on across No Man’s Land like the rest of the

Facing No man’s Land: End of the Journey?

2007-02-19T10:01:00.002Z

GVK, I am left way behind by the account of your journey back from London to India in a 12 seater bus driven by Brian, your memorable if obsessive driver. I was surprised by the racism and xenophobia that you perceived in Germany. Bavarians used to be exceptionally xenophobic even towards their own East German cousins. I would very much like to compare this with my own experience or lack of any

Name Dropping On Friends

2007-02-15T13:34:00.000Z

Name dropping on Friends: Chagall, Kandinsky, Laxman Pai, K.S. Kulkarni and V.S.GVK ,. You refer to a lot of Coffee house friends including V.S, the painter. You made me reminisce even more about my year or so in Delhi as a reporter. I met V.S and a multitude of aspiring painters most of whom avoided the Coffee House but gathered in a dark carnivorous (not cavernous) upstairs cafe called I think

The Journey Begins

2007-02-07T18:07:00.002Z

GVK, your account of transiting through Kabul of the 60s is gripping. One sees in one’s mind’s eye, an Indiana Jones tableau of a polyglot bazaar, teeming with scheming money changers, bandookwallas, local Mafia godfathers, European hippies hunched over steaming tea cups in dark cavernous teashops, rows of run down buses parked cheek by jowl. I overstate my Indiana Jones sinister perspective. A

Why did you return to India?

2007-02-01T15:24:00.000Z

My friend GVK has finished his response in B2B with K : My indebtedness, to Satish, Subash with several intriguing questions unanswered. GVK what did you think of the 60s renaissance? Did you feel a part of it? Did it excite you? Did you sense a new cultural and political paradigm shift in the mid sixties England? The second question is why did you leave England and

The Sixties: A New Renaissance

2007-01-30T12:00:00.000Z

The Sixties: A New Renaissance GVK is well ahead of me in our B2B dialogue. I lack his skills honed over 4 decades and moreover my state of health is like a dried up well with no resources left to use. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a punishing illness, and sadly it is a collective term for a group of symptoms and not a diagnosis in itself. GVK is right about the power of blogging. I can well

Remembering Mr. Chandra in Fleet Street

2007-01-26T09:58:00.000Z

What a deft portrait that my friend GVK has drawn of Shroff Saab who could be a great character in a Naipaul or even better a Prawer Jhabawala story, a person beached and stranded like a whale which lost its way. I must confess that I have the vaguest memories of this phantasmagorical character and it could not have been me who told GVK in Chennai in 1996 of Shroff Saab’s passing away. We met

B2B: Our Fleet St. Days'

2007-01-24T13:50:00.000Z

B2B: Our Fleet St. DaysRecalling our days of friendship and collaboration in the mid sixties London, GVK forgot to mention that India Weekly brought out by a media oligarch Dr, Tarapada Basu (an avuncular manipulator of human resources) was sited in the famous Fleet street. I am grateful for the fact that I arrived and worked in the legendary street when it was still thriving. I recall that

A Further chat at Desicritics from GVK

2007-01-24T09:09:00.000Z

My friend GVK has obviously thought he needs to encourage me out of my sloth and commence our Blog to Blog chat and has done a interesting piece at Desicritics Blogging it out with my frind Kini - He has no need to be contrite about not answering my annual round robin New Year Greetings. I an happy enough that blogging has reconnected us. I am a believer in friendships however or whenever

GVK responds

2007-01-24T09:07:00.000Z

My friend GVK has kindly responded to my posting about our days in the 1960s London, inviting me to enter in to a Blog to Blog (B2B) chat, and inspite of my illness, I have decided to engage. Here is what he says:January 20, 2007 A blog-to-blog chat with my friend Kini My UK- based friend Kini,T R, has said some nice things about me in his blog. This is my pay-back piece. This way, he would

G.V.Krishnan, my gifted friend & his blogsite

2007-01-20T11:11:00.000Z

What better way to spend your retirement than write your own blog from your own blogsite? My old friend GVKrishnan, now settled in Mysore does it with a difference at his blogsite http://mymysore3.blogspot.com/ - I am envious of his prolific output and his engaging no-nonsense outspoken analysis of socio-political issues in India. There is a real treasure trove of his work on his blogsite