The Middle

EVERY house in the neighbourhood had stickers on boundary walls. Then there were billboards of various sizes on electricity poles, electricity transformer enclosures and even trees. Wherever one looked, the smiling image of the candidate was staring at you. This...

OUR newly posted brigade commander took charge in July 1995. Thenceforth, it was a hectic schedule with briefings, introduction to various roles and familiarisation with the terrain. The responsibility to acquaint the brigade commander with the battalion’s area of operations...

Brig Jagbir Singh Grewal (retd) OUR newly posted brigade commander took charge in July 1995. Thenceforth, it was a hectic schedule with briefings, introduction to various roles and familiarisation with the terrain. The responsibility to acquaint the brigade commander with...

BEING in the civil services is akin to living as a nomad, with transfers arriving unannounced. With little time to pack, this resulted in papers, clothes, toys, crockery, et al being hastily thrown into cartons, with a vague promise to...

IN 1987, I joined Gujarat as an IPS probationer and called on the state DGP. He asked me why I had left my job of an SBI officer to become a cop at a substantial salary cut. I avoided mentioning...

DESPITE its small geographical size, Haryana has made a great contribution to national life. While its feats in sports are well known, its contribution to the electoral field in the form of ‘Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram’ is not remembered by...

MY mother often reminisces that theirs was one of the first Punjabi weddings in Yorkshire, England, in the 1960s. She shows newspaper cuttings to bolster her claim. The headlines read: ‘The teacher weds the lady twice’. This was to acknowledge...

EVEN before the announcement of any election, many business houses and people in government jobs (seeking greener pastures) start ‘investing’ in the prospective winners. I remember an incident when I became a witness to what generally transpires during meetings between...

EVERY morning is a mini marathon for me as I shuttle between my son’s routine and my own. I have never felt guilty that I don’t spend the first half of the day with him; that’s because my job is...

HALF a century ago, on my first posting to Ladakh, I arrived by the Air Force An-12 courier flight. As I stepped on the tarmac of the Leh airfield, the chilly morning wind hit us, but its freshness, sans pollution,...

I won’t forget in a hurry the two teachers of my alma mater where I had my primary and upper primary education — CK Master and OC Master — and their squabbles. CK was our class teacher and OC our...

ON a UN mission, I commanded a large contingent of 1,500 troops. The line from Shakespeare’s play Henry IV couldn’t have been more relevant for me: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’. The battalion was not a homogenous...

Sripriya Satish WHILE taking a stroll in a neighbourhood park, I saw a woman struggling to feed her baby, who was reluctant to accept even a few morsels. She tried to coax her child by pointing out the beauty of...

Shankar Gopalkrishnan MANY moons ago, one of RK Laxman’s classic cartoons showed a person emerging from an array of parked cars. Relief was writ large on his face as he announced to a passerby, ‘I solved the parking problem! You...

Tanisha Singh THERE are protests that don’t make an impact. Instagram stories that don’t seem to move people. Sometimes, there are candlelight marches. Rape survivors relive what happened to them through a new headline — it’s an everyday story. Someone...

Chitvan Singh Dhillon PASSENGERS onboard the executive-class coach of the Shatabdi Express from New Delhi to Chandigarh make for an interesting case study on the fragility of the human ego. The travellers typically consist of the movers and shakers of...

Saurabh Malik THE rickety bus groaned as it climbed higher into the mountains, winding its way through clouds that clung to the hillsides like a misty veil. The journey from Chandigarh to Shoghi had only just begun. Inside, the air...

NJ Ravi Chander I grew up listening to stories about World War II from my uncles, granduncles and grandparents who served in the war. My paternal uncle Major P Sampangi Raju’s unit, 12 Field Company of the Madras Sappers, was...

Rashmi Oberoi MY summer vacation was spent at our family bungalow, Ahmedalli Cottage, in Kolhapur, my mother’s home town. Many relatives who had nowhere to go were given refuge by my grandmother in that huge cottage, which was built in...

Rama Kashyap THANKFULLY, this year’s Nuh Shobha Yatra concluded peacefully amid an Internet ban and tight security. Last year, when communal clashes took place during the procession, I was in Gurugram with my son. Tension spread through several districts of...

Tanya Verma A year has passed, yet the tragedy at Summer Hill’s Shiv temple, also known as Shiv Bavdi, continues to haunt many. I vividly recall the dreadful morning when the news of a devastating landslide near the Shiv temple...

Usha Bande VELLICHOR — the word sounded quite captivating and set me wondering if it could be a portmanteau word. Maybe a combination of the Tamil velli (silver) and the Hindi chor (thief), I thought. Not quite convinced by my...

SV Venugopalan A job in a rural branch of a bank offered a variety of interesting experiences. It was a privilege for me to reside in a village amidst simple, earnest and affectionate people during the early 1980s. Joining straight...

Shobhit Mahajan THE car windows were vibrating as if they would break. And my eardrums felt as if they would be punctured. The ‘sonic boom’ was not because of an Su-30 taking off from Palam airport but from a Dak...

RS Dalal I recently received an invite to a book launch. The author was a young, brilliant paediatrician whom we had befriended a few years ago when our grandchildren were born. ‘How could a doctor so busy find time to...