Tagged: India

A great relationship?

Some notes on David Cameron’s visit to India and the Anglo-Indian bilateral relationship in the Huffington Post.

Last week the UK prime minister, David Cameron, was in India making a strong pitch for bilateral trade, talking of the potential for a “great relationship” to be formed between the two countries. On the surface, Britain and India have much in common, including a language, a legal system, and cultural links. However, all this potential is yet to be translated into the unique relationship that Britain says it desires. Mr Cameron’s visit is unlikely to swing the balance.

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Trivial Pursuits

An interesting tidbit from Ram Guha’s masterly book, India after Gandhi.

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As an aside, I wish we were taught more of our post-Independence history in school. For some reason the NCERT seemed to believe that history ended in 1947, with everything that came after relegated on the civics and economics textbooks.

Hamlet – The Clown Prince

I was initially skeptical of Hamlet, arguably one of Shakespeare’s finest tragedies, being re-imagined as a comedy. In case you don’t remember the storyline, Atul Kumar (playing a clown who plays Hamlet), helpfully summarizes the plot for the audience at the beginning

Hamlet dies, Ophelia dies, Gertrude dies, Claudius dies

How could you make this funny? As it turns out, by the end of the evening, the audience were rolling in the aisles with laughter.

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Go Goa!

Before we left, we tried to understand the term susegad. From a variety of travel guides and internet resources, we gleaned the following :

Susegad, is a way of life in Goa. It’s roots lie in the portugese word socegado which – loosely transalated – means ‘laid back’. A less charitable reviewer even called it ‘indolent’.

What is true however, is that the pace of life in Goa is slower, much slower than anything I’ve ever experienced.

In our quest to have a ‘real beach holiday’ we scouted around for a quiet, non-touristy beach. We finally hit the jackpot in South Goa near Palolem where we found a piece of unspoiled coast. For as far as the eye could see, we were the only ones on the beach. Four days with no cellphone access was a completely new experience for me. I’d never been so ‘out of touch’.

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