No rice recipes in this piece, just a rice-eater’s lament on quibbles over how to cook rice — More than 3.5 billion people in the world eat rice. I am one of them. My rice consumption, however, is not on a regular basis. It would not make a dent in the 504.3 million metric tons of rice which was consumed worldwide in the 2020–2021 crop year. With this…

Placing the phrases ‘writing for a living’ and ‘not all about money’ in a sentence smack of contradiction. But, really, it isn’t so. — The phone call was not unexpected. It was general election year, and crunch time for the candidates was only five weeks away. The caller, for the second time, wanted me to accept an election project. Her client was a candidate seeking re-election to a national post.

And get away with it (promise, no plagiarism involved) — There will be moments, even days, when a writer’s creative juice would one day take a jaunt to somewhere. This is not unusual. It’s not even something (for writers) to be overly worried about. Our intrinsic creativity sometimes takes a break. Even machines need downtimes, right? But what about when…

Both can cut and either can kill — Time and again, I come across and experience situations in which someone bad-mouths another. Like a freelance writer who called a young editor a b**ch just because the latter had rejected the former’s story submissions, one after another. After calling this editor names, the contributor continued to submit his manuscripts…

Cannot be rammed down the throats of those who dislike something, anything, or most especially someone — Simple me learned ages ago that you cannot force anyone to like, let alone adore, something or someone that the person dislikes with a capital D. (Take my daughter who hated marmalade on her toast.) Meanwhile, some people with unlimited riches and power presume that someone could be elevated to…

A young man’s plaint — (NOTE: It’s an essay written by a relatively young man. Its wistful tone has so touched me that I stopped many beats between reading the words in the piece, rummaging answers to what has gone awry in this young man’s journey. …

But should we expect perfection in our locality? — Racial sensitivity is a topic that is flogged all over. In print, in broadcast, on social media — you name it. It is also a topic that is supposedly discussed in the academe, from primary years upwards. No-one can escape the topic unless one lives under the rock, snoozing in…

How a day trip to a wildlife park provides the answer — It is common knowledge, I believe, that corvids are intelligent birds. Crows, ravens, and rooks are the most intelligent birds in the world. They are all corvids. (Parrots, by the way, have high IQs, too. They are not corvids.) My interest in corvids started a few years ago with the…

Says the magnolia — Beauty, as the cliché goes, is in the eye of the beholder. You may find someone, or something, beautiful but another might perceive this someone, or something, repulsive. But who amongst us would not see the inherent beauty in flowers? Until recently or specifically, when my husband and I moved…