Sharath Komarraju's Blog, page 63

When Does Frugality Become Miserliness?

As someone constantly looking to better his relationship with money and wealth, I find that three words dominate my head space more than others. They are spendthrift, frugality and miserliness. I find subtle hints all over my social milieu that casts a dark shadow upon people who are tightfisted. One of my aunts is known […]

Book Giveaway: 5 Copies of Winds of Hastinapur Up For Grabs

If you’ve already bought and read my third novel, The Winds of Hastinapur, you can nod off to sleep. (Or you could use the time you would have spent to read this post and write a customer review on the book’s Flipkart page.) But for all those of you who have not read the book […]

Meetup 147: Writing about Emotions

Last Saturday, Kabir hosted a session at Write Club with a focus on emotion. Though good writing ends up evoking deep emotions within the reader, it does so without explicitly alluding to it. That is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn as a budding writer: the importance of understating the emotion and focusing on the […]

Photo Post: Love a Dove

Doves are universally considered as symbols of love and peace. They are closely related to pigeons, and many varieties are seen in our area. I commonly encounter three types as they are frequent visitors to my terrace bird feeder. Here are some pictures I have been able to click over time. The birds are Eurasian […]

Short Story: Jump, Didi!

I count the stairs on my way up. One by one. My new shoes clack harder on the granite than the old ones used to. I bought them just today. They’re red. Four…Five…Six… I know how many steps there are. But counting has become a habit. And you’ve got to keep your habits. My mother […]

Love and Longing in Art: Troilus and Cressida

Last night, I was reading a re-telling of the Trojan War story by Olivia Coolidge, and I chanced upon the tale of Troilus and Cressida. This is one of the few stories in the Iliad that speaks of a woman’s betrayal of a man. The common theme in mythology is of how men use women […]

Did Chetan Bhagat Teach India to Read?

It’s now a truism. How many times did you come across the statement that Chetan Bhagat made India read books? In my experience, I’ve never come away from a conversation about Bhagat without hearing that sentence at least once. Usually I nod and let it pass, but over the last week, I’ve heard it four times – […]

How Advertising Picks our Pockets – and What We Can Do To Prevent It

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest, to make money they don’t want, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like. - Emile Gauvreau Advertising. The bane of the thinking man. Even the most financially aware among us give in […]

Photo Post: Water Lotus or Water Lily?

Both these flowers are found in water bodies and widespread in our region. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably but both are distinct from each other. Being a purist, I thought of clearing the confusion. Here are some points of distinction. The petals of a water lily are half the size of the lotus flower or […]

First Look: The Puppeteers of Palem

Back Blurb The village of Rudrakshapalem awakens, and tells her tale. Five friends return to the village of their childhood to find that nothing seems to have changed, and at the same time everything has. Whose voice is it that called them back, and whose hand is it that now hunts them down, one by […]