Sunday, July 25, 2010
Aakar Patel
It’s raining in Bombay and I thought it might be nice to write about a place where it has also been raining for much of this month. This is at an event I look forward to every year, which is ending on Sunday evening. I am ...

Sunday, July 18, 2010
Aakar Patel
It is said that right up to the time of the field marshal Ayub Khan, Pakistanis could drive across the border into India, and Indian movies were shown in all the halls of Lahore and Karachi. A piece I read somewhere mentioned ...

Sunday, July 11, 2010
Aakar Patel
Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan will retire from test cricket this month after the Lankans play India on July 18 in Galle. Murali's performance in his last appearance will be anticipated for a second reason. He has taken 792 test ...

Sunday, July 04, 2010
Aakar Patel
I have been to prison three times. I was 18 the first time, and studying for a diploma in how to operate textile machinery. This was at Baroda's MS University, named after Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, who set it up by giving it ...

Sunday, June 27, 2010
Aakar Patel
I thought I wouldn’t watch the World Cup, and when my sister in Surat messaged to ask which team I was supporting this time, I said: “None. Not watching”. It’s true that I do not support any team in particular, but I have ...

Sunday, June 20, 2010
Aakar Patel
The first really famous person I saw was Sanjay Dutt. This was at a palace in Dumas on the outskirts of Surat in 1981. A group of us were on a picnic hosted by Tajwar, my classmate whose cousins, the former nawabs of Sachin, owned ...

Sunday, June 13, 2010
Aakar Patel
One of the rituals of middle-class Indian life is the summer vacation. The weather is brutal in most parts of India before the middle of June, when the monsoon comes. Schools are shut in this period and most long leave from ...

Sunday, June 06, 2010
Aakar Patel
The British knew how to build cities, and India’s cities are all their creations. The first one they built was Bombay, which they began to settle 325 years ago. It is far and away the best city in India. The British made ...

Sunday, May 30, 2010
Aakar Patel
Most evenings, I step out of the office and walk across to a bookstore. There are three near my office in Bandra, a Catholic suburb of Bombay. Two of them are part of a chain called Crossword, which has 52 other stores in India. ...

Sunday, May 23, 2010
Aakar Patel
Those who commute to work by train in India are said to do up-down. This interesting phrase comes from the way trains are named here. Trains moving away from their point of origin are going down and, while returning to base, ...