“If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.”

Funny! The ‘book of quotations’ I took this from tags Bertrand Russell a controversialist. Those were the days! You could make a career out of being controversial. It would be, if nothing else, stimulating. Think of the rush that would come upon you with all the death threats, imagine the excitement of possible banishment from your country, not to mention the infamy.

The concept of spaces governs part of what constitutes one’s identity in the contemporary world. The intangible zones that one passes through in the course of his or her daily pertaining to one’s private and public life make up a major part of what the modern society has so surreptitiously been divided into. It takes effort to realise that the spaces we encounter in modern society are gendered. In spite of the fact that the divides that women and men encounter everyday are so starkly visible and affect persons of all age groups. Even in an urban and supposedly more independent scenario, the divide only makes its presence more clearly felt.

Rohan Mishra stood in the balcony holding the railings. He turned mummy-wards every few seconds and she served him some tasty white goo with a spoon. He would then resume his squirrel watching.

Through the branches of the neem tree, Rohan saw 13-month-old Disha Das in her balcony. She was walking out of the door. Eager voices from within egged her on. She stopped and tottered. “Fall, Fall!” Rohan wished. But she turned around and walked back into the room, towards cheers and loud claps. “They will spoil her this way.” Rohan thought as he gulped down his food.

Rohan Mishra decided he liked ice cream a lot. He thought he probably liked ice cream more than he liked mummy and felt ashamed of himself. So he put the ice cream away.

He had spent the last two days practicing his English and now knew three words. One was Banana. The other two were too hard to pronounce (but he knew them). He had been using his spare time to say Banana whenever he could. One could never practice enough.

Subs (sub-editors, deskfolk) are sworn servants to the style sheet. A style sheet is what dictates the eventual look of any newspaper or magazine. It contains details regarding type face, font size, column widths etc. It also specifies what way certain words are to be spelt wherever they appear. Style sheets tell you that ‘here’ is a no-no. You must always spell out the name of the place. Style sheets wouldn’t let you get away with acronyms. Style sheets, in short, screw the way a sub looks at anything he is reading.

I wrote this piece for Digantik.com in 2005.

Neither at the reasonably comfortable hotel room at Parvatipuram, nor when I am at the base camp of the team that takes a periodic trip to the hilly villages with the Mandal Revenue Officer some 18 kilometres from the town, does the realization of where we are going dawn on me. It is only when the jeeps can no longer cross the ditches and our path started getting ever more vertical that ‘the walk’ started. Our luggage, mostly containing edibles and filming equipment, was unloaded and the officials who we were travelling with led the way to what was to be the destination of our lifetime.