E-Log

It was 6am of a cold January morning of 1969. K.Srinivas touched the first step of the entrance to his south indian food restaurant and then touched his forehead to invoke blessings.The gray, twin wooden doors had two padlocks.One at the end of a steel bar across the doors and the other that bound two round rings. Kannan,the trusted aide, put his right hand to pull out the keys that were securely tied to his sacred strings. He unlocked and pushed opened the doors to enter.He switched on a light that illuminated the first portion of the establishment - a L shaped hall with a few pillars.Across the front door was the cash counter.Another large room was at the back. Srinivas entered and walked to the low cash counter that had recently been renovated with a bright red laminate.As a habit he selected the first page of the calendar block of the single sheet ,Lord Tirupati board calendar that hung on the side wall and tore it off to reveal a fresh date.Next to the calendar was a gl...

The Bankipore Club, Patna celebrated its sesquicentennial year in 2015. It began as the Europeans Club and is mentioned ,albeit obliquely ,in Forsters "Passage to India" .By the early 1920s ,the Bankipore Club admitted some Indians who held senior government positions .The Club has weathered time and culture since then. I first went to the Club as a child of six in 1959 and spent many a childhood afternoons and memorable adolescence evenings there and have more than pleasant memories of the place. Apart from the few recreational activities the club also offered tennis,swimming and squash. It also had a billiards and snooker room. It was in these facilities that one learnt about the rules of sports ,taught almost lovingly and yet with an unspoken firmness by the Markers. As children,we were not allowed entry into the club unless chaperoned and that too either on Saturday evenings till 7pm or on Sundays.During summer we could use the pool in the late afternoons ...

I first entered the Beldih Club at Jamshedpur in 1972. We sat in the heat of a June evening watching a movie. The door of the projecjtor room was open for ventilation and a beam from the projector lamp sharply illuminated an old Parsi couple who had opted to sit in the covered area next to the small room. Once a while the night sky would light up as the glow from the Bessemer Convertor which about a mile away in the Works. The few white clouds would adopt a hue of pink for a while. With the movie over my host and brother in law, Krishan Talwar took me to the Bar where he sat with his friends, Nakul and Santu. The Beldih Bar and it's dining hall - then with no name- was a treat. No one in Jamshedpur till date has compared with the cocktail that Polak made and no one club could compete with the toast chicken that the Beldih served. We used to swear by it. Later on we sweared at it! The Bar had two doors. One from an alley from the corridor and the other leading to the la...

My romance with the   Bricks   of the   Raj   began ,a few years ago, when I was influenced by a group of four to walk with them and as they explored the streets of Calcutta that housed these historic edifices. In the day the teeming  millions shroud these magnificent structures with their purpose of business or hide them from what they were once built for. At night they stand as silent sentinels guarding their space in history. At the break of day they seem to talk to us ,almost imploring us to spend time with them, to love them as they had been loved once , to live in them and enjoy the comfort they  once offered. These ,that were once stately homes ,stand in testimony of the true expressions of a kitsch of culture that surrounded the areas  from Bandel to Calcutta. The areas where the Portuguese, The Dutch ,the Danes ,the French and later the British established their settlements that later found their way into India. These were also the p...