Cuckold

Let nobody fool you, most couples are conjoined on earth. The mismatches, now they are a different story. They are made in heaven

No amount of culture or civilization can subdue or hide the wanton violence in man.

Where do songs go when you cease to hear them? Where does the turbulence of the air disappear after thousands of birds flap their wings homeward at eventide? Where are the cries of the Rajput women who spatter their red palm prints on the wall and leap into the flames of johar? Where is my childhood, my catapult, my broken slate, my first parrot, my youth and first sin and all those that followed, where is my old age and the first time I saw the woman from Merta? Ask Gambhiree. She knows it all.

run. He is spoilt and his ambition is the work of an idle and over-reaching mother.

The only battles that he and his kin fought, the only blood they spilt was on the chessboard. Massacres and carnage were not to his taste. He preferred the long, slow, tortuous death. I

As you sow, so shall you reap has a neat ring to it but you are making a grievous mistake if you put your faith in that kind of cheap sentiment. There are no just deserts. The wages of sin are not necessarily hell and the path of goodness is often lined with treachery for the world is predicated upon the principle of randomness.

people talk with a sense of wonderment about the incredible bravery of us Rajputs. This is missing the obvious. Whether it’s Father, my brothers, my ancestors, I or my countrymen, we are, it goes without saying, unsurpassedly fearless and valiant.

Rigour and ruthlessness do not preclude sympathy with another’s point of view.

We watched the field exercises first and then sat in on a class by. Shafi Khan on classic attack formations. It was a lucid talk with ample diagrams and case-studies.

They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Not always, but at least occasionally, it can break our obsession with the self.

I sometimes think that Buddhism is the toughest religion in the world. It not only eschews all talk of god but does not allow any instant remedies. Responsibility for one’s own acts is its only metaphysics. So

Grammar, he felt, was a sign of competence, not of excellence.

If not absolution, I yelled, give me oblivion.

The only miracles in life are wrought by time.

Life teaches me a hundred things every day, and I forget ninety-nine of them, sometimes all hundred of them.

I am a very possessive woman. But I knew that if I were to keep you, I would have to let go of you. I

There is no truer meditation than music and no journey of discovery greater than that of looking within. A

Enlightenment and tolerance, it would seem, have little to do with being lettered or unlettered. His

She was more serene and self-possessed in her nakedness than the supernaturally calm larger-than-life image of Lord Mahavir in her grandfather Adinathji’s courtyard. I closed my eyes. She stood inside them. In

We rework our own memories and reinvent ourselves to suit our tastes and predilections every day.

Perhaps moksha lies in not thinking about the afterlife.

You would be entirely justified if you spent your entire life railing against your misfortune. But there is another option. Rise above your fate. Internalize your calamity and give it a heroic dimension as Bhishma did. It was a thoughtful disquisition and its central insight applied to all of us since there is no man born who is not handicapped in one way or another. So it is up to us to make the best of a botched job. After

But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it’s fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it. Excess

my joyous companion of the mornings. Who knows what pain we cause our dearest ones?

It’s not enough to be honest and loyal, frankly it doesn’t matter if you are not, so long as you are perceived to be so.

I have the strange feeling that man created language but now it creates us.

Nobody sang steamy overwrought songs to Rama, Vishnu or Shiva. What was the source of the irresistible attraction of the peacock-feathered god? How was he able to get away with the very things that would land any other man in jail for life? Did the women, in their heart of hearts, want to walk the streets with see-through, wet blouses and wait for some dashing young man with a peacock feather in his phenta to tug at their odhanis? Whatever

There’s something about doing a job well that is akin to art.