Even as a child, I was a free bird. I loved singing and dancing and watching movies and acting and reading books. It was only in school that the bullying began, with people telling me I “walk like a lady” and such. I only went to school to study. There was nothing else in it…
Turmeric, kumkum, agarbattis, wick are some of the items used in pooja. And then there are the other items like coconut, adike (betel nut), dhoop, Kapur (camphor). My name is Mohammed Farooq. I am a Muslim man and I run a Hindu pooja store. My grandfather opened this store in 1969 to sell coconuts and…
I started singing when I was an eight-year-old child named Bhakiyaraj. It was only thirty years later that I was recognized as a man named Bamba Bakiya. I grew up in a joint family to a father who loved music but could not pursue it. He spent a lot of energy pushing my musical journey,…
1995. I was in Nigambodh Ghat- New Delhi for a relative’s funeral. It was then that I saw a man collecting half-burnt logs from the funeral pyres. Initially, I thought he was stealing the logs and but then he told his story. His young son had passed away and the couple didn’t have funds to…
She held my hand and taught me how to walk. Today, I hold hers and take her around the world. Amma was like any other middle class orthodox homemaker in Kerala. Her life revolved around her 3 kids, husband, kitchen and home. I had taken it for granted that this was her world and she…
When I was barely a year old, my parents discovered that I wasn’t responding to their screams while standing in front of the Television. A test revealed hearing loss. At the age of one, when no child goes to school, I was enrolled in Bala Vidyalaya School, a school for the deaf. After four years…
As a third generation soldier, joining the Indian Army was never one of the many career choices I had – it was my first and only choice. The call of duty, the pride of the uniform and the zeal to serve the motherland, were always the biggest passion and inspiration for me. I grew up…
As the Bangalore Police commissioner, I along with my 21,000 strong police force, have had to re-define the word “normal” in the last few months. We worked in 3 shifts, manned almost 400 check posts and used every available resource as a force multiplier to fight the Corona pandemic. When we enforced Section 144, it…
My parents had this dreamy, filmi kind of love marriage. My father was from Tirupattur, my mother was from Lucknow and they met while working together in Chennai and eloped! I was born in Coimbatore and was only 2 months old, when my father was transferred to Bangalore. Our nuclear family became complete, with the…
He was born in Davangere as one of five kids. Even as a child, Ravi was curious about everything, the kind of student who would ask a doubt minutes before the break and make everyone stay back till he understood the answer. In June 1980, he joined the Armed Forces.And then there is me. I…
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