drkjshenoyIt was when I was in high school that I discovered my flair for story-telling. This became apparent when my friends regularly gathered around me and listened with rapt attention at my narratives. And then, my teacher assigned to me the task of writing a story for the school magazine.
drkjshenoyThe ongoing hullabaloo surrounding the presidential primaries in the U.S. brings to sharp focus the fact that Americans are the champions of superlatives and the hyperboles. When the multi-state elections are conducted on the first Tuesday of February, they call it ‘Super Tuesday.’ The elections throw up not just delegates but Super-delegates as well.
drkjshenoy“How could you dish out the dirt about a language that is full of beans? You must be as nutty as a fruit-cake,†I protested. It was a retort to my friend’s charge that the English language betrays the English people’s fixation on food. Yet, once I regained my cool I chewed over my friend’s theory and did a bit of digging, for, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
drkjshenoy Hybrid is an animal or plant that has parents of different species or varieties. Mule is a classic example which is hybrid of a male donkey and a female horse. So is tigon, a hybrid of tiger and lion.
But in a world of fantasy, if we were to get special powers to cross-breed things – both animate and inanimate – what might we do? I, for one, think of strange and funny possibilities, some of which I have enumerated below:
drkjshenoyIt is not a tree as many think. It’s a grass and the tallest grass in the world. And it’s the bamboo, the plant of the sub-family Bambusidae. China, the world’s biggest user of the plant was once considered to be hiding behind the ‘bamboo curtain’. Yet, this piece is not about the uses of bamboo but to touch upon an eco-socialogical trick it plays right atour doorsteps – in Mizoram.
drkjshenoyCall it pseudonym, pen-name or even nom de plume. All of it refers to an assumed name under which a person writes or functions as an artiste. The practice of pseudonym is as old as literature itself. George Orwell, for instance, was the pen-name of a person originally called Eric Blair. Similarly, Mary Ann Evans wrote the pseudonym of George Eliot. Why do people use pen names? The reasons could be many:
drkjshenoy In any given nation or province the demographic pattern should show more females, say 1010, for every 1000 male population. This is the law of the Nature. Afew of the reasons why females should out-number males are:
• Female fetuses (babies inside the womb) have more resilience than the male ones as evidenced by the fact that 70% of spontaneously aborted fetuses are males.
• Unlike the popular perception, young and old females are more resistant to diseases and live longer than males. Moreover, heart attacks are less common among females than their male counterparts.
drkjshenoy‘Ek beti ke bina insaan ki, khas kar ke aadmi ki , zindagi adhuri hai.’ (Human life, particularly of a man, is incomplete without having a daughter). These were the words uttered by the renowned poet, writer and thinker Javed Akhtar during one of his TV appearances recently. He was speaking in the context of the status of the girl child in contemporary Indian society.
drkjshenoy ACT 1: 24th March, 2020AD, Wrestler’s Day Test Match.
The Indian cricket team led by Sunil Damle is playing their first test match against Australia led by Tricky Banging, It is more of a shouting match than a cricket match. Cricket is played only during the commercial breaks. But the soft mallet of Indians is no match for the Aussie’s ‘sledge’ hammer. Things come to a head when the Indian tweaker Narmohan Zing allegedly calls the Aussie player Mathew Desmonds an alligator. Though Zing denies the alligator allegation, he is fined $1 Million.
ACT2: 25th March, 2020 AD.
