Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 32

Questions of light

I don't know if I've mentioned this booklet, published by Vikas Samvad two years ago. It is really just a reporter's diary, but it came from me wanting to take a closer look at the places and people I had been reporting about while writing for news magazines.

As is the case with many reporters who are based in cities, I traveled into villages only when there was some crisis unfolding and I

Thinking of witches

Here's another poem. It comes directly from having watched the Hindi film Ek Thi Dayan, and its sadly confused take on the subject.

The idea seemed promising - a growing boy, fed on a foolish diet of myths about what witches look like and what their motivations might be, turns against his stepmother. The consequences are tragic. The film, however, is a failed promise to itself. It blunders on

Jet Blues

Dear Jet Airways




There are some things you just don't
do. Such as telling a passenger who has shown up with a confirmed
ticket, three whole hours ahead of an international flight, that the
flight is overbooked.





If a flight is overbooked, it is your
problem. You are in a fix and you must extricate yourself painfully,
expensively. You don't get away with it by saying: “This is the
norm.

Love in (and upwards of) Simla

The landscape is grim—a mix of rock and mud that yields at the slightest provocation. But the wind does extraordinary things to it, cutting and smoothing over the rock-face until it seems as if a hundred thousand faces or feet are waiting to emerge from the mountains. You imagine that you see a furrowed brow, a nose, a set of giant toes. In fact, there is a story about how an invading army

The Madness Around

Have often thought about sanity, the people we consider sane, and the forces that push some of us beyond - into that other place in the head. Some of those thoughts are compressed here, in another story for The Small Picture in Mint.

A new single read

I have a new short story out. It is the story of a man who has almost nothing to live for, except the fact that a woman called Noora still lives.

Available only online so far. Rs 21 for the e-single (as single short stories are sold now for readers who use, erm, readers). You can get it here.

On testing the way the wind blows

A few days ago, former Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar Sushil Kumar Modi reportedly tweeted: “Advaniji has failed to gauge the public mood”. He said LK Advani should have declared Narendra Modi as the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate for the coming general election.
It is no secret that 'Advaniji' had held prime ministerial hopes for over twenty years, and now it’s too late. His brand of

More than a database of grief

There is a stockpile of shared grief within each of us. It threatens to render the taste of life ash on our tongues. Each riot, every famine, each genocidal attack, racist attack, each horrific moment of hate. The maps of the world, of our place in the world, of our identity are marked by pain. And we go on. That is the thing. Without knowing why we suffered, or how to learn to trust again, we

Saying it with the body

There is something about a rally or protest
that announces itself even when it is not announced audibly. Like girls walking
down the street in rows two or three thick, a fantastic array of colour and
style. You stop to look. When you see the first fifteen or twenty, you wonder
if it is for a festival. When you see fifty, and none of them conforming to any
particular dress code, you know it is a

Legislating filial love

A few months ago, I read about a law that makes it mandatory for Chinese citizens to visit elderly parents. My immediate thought was that this is an unimaginative, if not un-implementable, law. My next thought was — have matters really come to a pass that the state must legislate family relationships? 

Then I remembered that India had also passed the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and