Could we draw creative inspiration from our dreams? — Dream, When You’re Feeling Blue Dream, That’s the Thing to Do… - Robert Creely (Introduction to Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams) The subconscious mind is immensely creative when we dream. You would never hear about a boring dream. They are all eventful, and full of color. I believe that recording…

A collage of lines borrowed from a few of my favorite poems — Fine lines shine in poems. Incandescent, intensely hot from the fusion of words that form them. Charming like a flowering Champaca that waylays you along a nocturnal trail with a sudden whiff of scent; as a magpie robin’s elaborate, earnest tunes make you look up from the morning paper. I…

So reads the letter pad on which I found my 10-year-old’s Drabble — I once yarned creative bedtime stories for her. But now, I have a lot to learn from her about the craft of storytelling. I stumbled upon a story she has started writing. I always read these to learn about the workings of the little mind. She makes these up from…

You may ignore this — nothing noteworthy or important — I write because it is my favorite itch to scratch, and is satisfying that way. I am a dabbler, and many things interest me. I want to write about them all. This space will feature long form, short form, poetry, and my other writing experiments. …

Sometimes, silence and non-words are more eloquent than speech — That words have been juiced out of their lives is well-documented. So, I shun verbosity — empty words tire me. Yet, these expressions need words. Ones that may have some life…I manage to scavenge a few precious ones and struggle to string them together. What might appear as flaws in…

The advice I cannot ignore is the one I never get — Are you good at giving advice? Some of you are. Let’s say the lead character in a movie, a middle-aged man becomes a pauper owing to some bad decisions he made. He has absolutely nothing and nobody to help him, except his vast experience running a successful business. Long after…

A utopian list of lofty resolutions from a disgruntled consultant — Regeneration or Sustainability — however you call it — is about a just and equitable society; nothing more, nothing less. It is not only about how we treat natural systems. No amount of ‘going green’ is going to help us. Nature has ways to find equilibrium, and it will prevail…

A critical stock-taking of how civilized we are — Ah, the confounded war — the badge of lesser mortals, of which and whom we wouldn’t deign to speak, with the high air of our own flatulence — is here at our doorstep! Please, let us not flatter ourselves. We live in duality, among two worlds, we choose one or the…

My translation of a 2,000-year-old Tamil poem and a message of hope — The Black Ibis or the Red-naped Ibis is a remarkable bird and is endemic to India. Living in small groups, nesting atop trees like the Palmyra and Peepul, the Red-naped Ibis has a dark brown and black plumage with a bright red patch on its nape. The Tamil (தமிழ் —…