Daily Archives: May 11, 2008

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A Panchayat president I interviewed recently told me sweetly that people listen to her because she’s plump.  Two years and twenty additional kilos earlier, I would have missed the import of the statement, but now I don’t.  Let me give you a quick background before I start. I was very thin and was often called a skeleton, stick of a coconut leaf and other colourful adjectives. I left to the US in 2005 and after two years of Americanisation I got on the weighing machine. I pushed the scales to a familiar position and it remained upright.  I nudged it […]

The importance of a pot belly

Thanks to a Historian, I now see the sublime where I merely saw superstitions The district gazetteers provide a good background to the important events of a district in a historical perspective.  They were originally written by British civil servants and was then taken over by people appointed for the task with India’s independence.  The British “manuals” (as they are often called) offer colourful details about the wars, positions taken by various parties, etc.  The post independence gazettes (at least in the Madras Province) have a greater slant towards understanding development in a historical perspective.  I was going through some […]

A Brahmin historian at work