26th March 2018 Kolkata, India
The pile of bricks was sitting just outside the entrance to the site. The humble brick has been used for the construction of buildings for longer than recorded history. The myth of a ‘mother earth’ or ‘earth goddess’ is as old. Many ancient civilisations worshiped a female deity who represented the fertility of the soil. […]
2nd December 2016 Kolkata, India
There are about 123 million cattle in India, so the Kolkata based Telegraph newspaper informed me recently. The paper was citing India’s 2012 national cow census. That’s a lot of cattle, or roughly one for every ten Indians. The equivalent number in Britain is 1.9 million. This is the size of the total dairy herd […]
16th September 2016 Kolkata, India
It is a cracking first line for a novel: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.* As a thought – that the past is somewhere different – the line sounds very appealing. The past is distant from us and we can’t access it immediately. But the idea is nonsense, of course, […]