Rumi Nations

In 20 years, all of us will be old. And I wonder if I'll remember the news item where Saif Ali Khan hits a guy or so it's alleged by a gentleman. In 20 years, Saif will be old too. Kareena will be old as well. I'll be old. I won't have grandchildren to bore to death with tales. Perhaps, I'll just relieve the memories by myself. Recall the days of my youth when Tiger Pataudi was old and I used to watch him on TV. The inexorable passing of time and the flow of time and generations is a mysterious thing. I don't know anyone who has escaped these things. The Eventual decay and ending of all things would have been quite unbearably sad. Luckily, we live life day-to-day. The human body is an ancient and ungainly, clumsy machine that has its inescapable idiosyncrasies. We need food once every few hours ... munch, munch, munch. We need to drink water at intervals. We BREATHE. Blink too. Then there's the business of ... what goes in must come out. If only, some...

The banning of burqas by the French government has lead to debates. Can we make an absolute statement that women who wear burqas are oppressed. What if women willingly wear them? Has anyone done a survey among the women of France asking them whether they would like to wear burqas or not? What would the results of such a survey be if conducted among the Muslim women across the world? I think a majority of women will say that they do not mind the veil. But what does that say? Dresses are so inextricably linked to the culture of a nation. I can attest only to the fine differences of what is appropriate and what is not that is prevalent in our own culture in India. We can take the majority of Indians who happen to be Hindus. Do all Hindu women have an agreed viewpoint about what is appropriate to reveal in public and what must be hidden?

It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. “I want one more hug!” Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, “I miss you!” But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out aga...