Stand Together

One of the Telugu movies currently showing in Hyderabad has some pretty obscene imagery. I wonder where are those nationalist fanatics who say Sunny Leone’s two piece bikini is ‘against Indian culture’. I want to know how they would defend the placing of ‘R’ rated posters on billboards, bus stops and buses, which everyone, including children can see. I wonder how that affects the lives of the 4 million people who reside in this city. It surely affects me. As if the heat of the summer sun is not enough to put up with, I am forced to look at steamy images of men and women making out while travelling to work and back home. How did the posters of this movie get on to the billboards? Who gave them permission and what are they spending on this intense marketing campaign. It is obvious that Hyderabadi people have an appetite for ‘R’ rated movies but I have never seen such a wide marketing campaign. Why are people not up in arms about these posters? When we believe that the clothes women wea...

Kenya Airways – The Pride of Africa is in fact the shame of Africa. Anybody who has traveled to Africa knows that Kenya is an important connecting port and Kenya Airways knows how to make you miss your flight even if you have reached the boarding gate 10 minutes before takeoff. So here is the story and it’s a rather long one. I was returning to Johannesburg for the Easter weekend and the shortest flights I found were of Kenya Airways and not knowing any better I went ahead and booked them. The nightmare started at Mumbai airport when the flight took off 45 minutes behind schedule and knowing that I have a layover of just one hour I was tense throughout the journey. The flight attendants onboard KQ211 kept reassuring me that I will not miss my connecting flight to Johannesburg as there are around 20 people on the flight travelling to my destination. But, there always has to be a but in the story, so, but, we when we reached, the plane needed repairs and when the doors opened those...

I’m currently hunting for an apartment in Hyderabad. Obviously I want a place that is safe, has no water shortage and is close to work. Hence, I decided to look at apartments in the posh and plush gated communities of Hyderabad. So far my visits to these popular, in demand locations have been thoroughly depressing. Among the popular gated communities I visited were SMR Vinay City, Rainbow Vistas and Reliance Paradise.  I have many friends who live the high life in these towering buildings but a visit was enough to convince me that this is not how I would like to spend my days. Although the high rises look inviting and statuesque from the outside, there were no better than posh ghettos. There was concrete dust all around, in the basement, in the elevators, in the corridors and inside the apartments. Most apartments ended as soon as you entered, leaving nothing to your imagination. Gated communities in Hyderabad made me claustrophobic and I could just not see myself living...

After reading and hearing a lot about Bollywood actress Sunny Leone’s recent interview I decided to watch it. To be honest my exposure to Bollywood movies in the last three years has been very limited and I have not seen much of Sunny Leone. Now that I am temporarily back in India I see a lot of her on TV but it has not been enough for me to form an opinion about the actress. Her interview with Bhupender Chaube gave me an insight into the brave and fearless woman she is. I feel inspired again, inspired enough to write after several months. While on one side we want a lot for women in India such as safety, education and equality, on the other side knowingly and unknowingly we say things that may condemn a person for his/her past, at least that is what the interview demonstrated. Not only the questions asked were unfair but were set up to diminish the dignity of the actress. What the interviewer did not realise is that he was questioning the dignity, the past, present and futu...

Hi! I have entered a Novel Suite competition. Unfortunately I came to know of it today and it’s the last day of voting (5 October 2015). I would be delighted if you could vote for me. Many thanks! Read and Vote here:  https://novelsuite.us.launchpad6.com/contest/1/entry/78 Cheers, Smriti

Not every story in the world depresses me but the cost of dying in India does and the heartlessness of hospital managements and doctors only add to it. A baby’s death and a hospital’s refusal to hand over his final remains to his grieving parents does not shake anyone . But I say it should! It should shake us up from our lethargy, lack of consciousness, the mute agreement to make payments before any treatment is given and most importantly it should shake the government and revolutionise India’s healthcare. I don’t know where the basis of ‘money first, treatment later’ principle lies but I have only come across it in India. In most other “big economies” it is treatment first, payment later, as it should be. In May 2012 I was very sick and was admitted in a private hospital in Johannesburg. I had my medical aid card on me and was swiftly admitted with no questions asked. They didn’t want to know anything from me except what ails me. And yes, there was absolutely no mention of m...

I find calm in living my life at my own pace as against to the pace of the world. Honestly, I cannot keep up and it is absolutely OKAY. Social media is a mirror to what is happening around us and how fast the world is changing. There is something new every day that tells us how our lives do not measure up to the lives of others. Every single post on social media makes you want to compare your lives with the lives of your peers. Sometimes even a picture of a new born baby makes you cringe and you realise that ‘you’re not there yet'. With everything that is going on, including the Indian National Rupee falling so low, do we need the extra stress of cringing at our own lives? We blame the Kardashians for ushering in an abominable era of reality TV into our living rooms but we do not realise that we are in a rat race called ‘keeping up with the world’ where every ‘full stop’ we type on social media matters. We are living in a world where we are striking things off our...