A personal history of listening to music — the old radio Jan 22, 2012 My memory is fading. This has to be written down. 30 years is not an awfully long time, but nothing has changed more than the way we buy and listen Florence Cathedral Jan 12, 2012 At 90€ for a round-trip per person, the train ride from Rome to Florence doesn’t come cheap. But the lure of seeing Michelangelo’s David won and on Fogged up Nov 21, 2011 As October approached, the days here began to get shorter. The sun, which used to rise right in front of our window, began its south-easterly Marken - Volendam - Edam Oct 6, 2011 For about 9€, you can get a “Waterland ticket” and travel on the Arriva buses all day. Because of the construction work at the Amsterdam Centraal In which I try to define homesickness Sep 28, 2011 The hardest part about moving to a new country is not the new job, not the weather, not a new set of rules, mores and traditions, but homesickness. This non-committal summer Jun 30, 2011 The seasons in Delhi live inside a neatly organized chest of drawers. Summers get three drawers. Winters one. Spring and monsoons get a small drawer The Book Fair at Dam Square May 22, 2011 We were at the second-had book fair at the Dam Square today. While English was rather poorly represented, it didn’t stop us from spending time in If music be the… May 15, 2011 [The events in this post took place on the 13th but I finished writing it today just as Azerbaijan were crowned the Eurovision song contest Rough Draft: On Letting Go May 12, 2011 One of the hardest things I did before moving to Amsterdam was to give away my collection of 500 odd audio CDs - painstakingly curated over a period Maastricht May 9, 2011 My wife is a bigger travel junkie than I can ever hope to be. When I come to a new place I like to - “wear it off”. Going to the same haunts over The Old New Home at Amstelveen May 3, 2011 Tomorrow we complete a week in our new home. This is the fifth roof we are sleeping under in less than a month. Six, if you count the flight to Rough Draft: Spring/Summer etc. Apr 24, 2011 Those first three days in Amsterdam are about to become three weeks. Here are some more rants and observations - this time with pictures from my Keukenhof Apr 20, 2011 The Dutch pronounce V like “Fa” and so for the longest time we didn’t know if the Indian chap gallantly manning the reception on Sundays was Faisal Rough Draft: The first three days in Amsterdam Apr 12, 2011 A new job has recently brought me to Amsterdam. More posts like these; some with pictures, will follow shortly. It’s been a wonderful experience in That nagging feeling Nov 22, 2010 Time is flying away faster than I can comprehend. Past seems too distant. Future - even distant future - seems uncomfortably close. This passage Karthik Raja ‘borrows’ from Mahler Aug 29, 2010 Listen to the intro of this song from the Tamizh movie Ullasam. Stop after ~13 seconds. Now jump to the first movement of Mahler’s 4th Symphony. Ladakh in April - Day 4 - Snowfall in Leh Jul 29, 2010 When I drew the curtains off our ground-floor room’s windows I saw a sea of white. My first reaction was that I had been struck by the opposite of Number 9 Dream Jun 12, 2010 While I knew that Japan was driven to such desperation during World War II that they resorted to Kamikaze, I had no idea that a similar suicide unit iPad vs Kindle vs Wood pulp Apr 7, 2010 This passage I came across recently in Yeats Is Dead, struck a chord: “I think books are wonderful”, the woman said, evidently bent on Ladakh Vacation - Day 1 Sep 5, 2009 We were leaving everything behind - well for 9 days anyway - our work, the media, the Internet, the swine flu and the mosquitoes in the Kingfisher Next page