The lure of shiny objects

In my imagination, Ramchand Khemchand Academy, where I started my unremarkable education, loomed like a huge fortress over Colaba. Every afternoon, at lunchtime, we would troop down to the basement canteen for lunch. This was still the ’70s, so mothers would arrive with lunchboxes of steaming food and cajole bored children into consuming their body-weight’s ...

Railway stories 1

Great train journeys are a fixture on the landscape of Indian nostalgia. Whenever you are stuck for conversation, all you have to do is whisper something like, “Don’t you love travelling by train?”, and all manner of stories will come tumbling forth. But I realise now that these are romanticised memories of our childhood, and ...