“People who love to eat are always the best people.”

  "People who love to eat are always the best people." Julia Child An American chef, author and very famous TV anchor, Julia Child established French food in the American palate. If you haven't seen Meryl Streep play her in the film 'Julie & Julia' then you ain't seen nothing! Every festival in India has...

Nobel Prize for Economics & the Santiniketan connection

"This urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty. The poor appear, in social theory, as much as much in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless or self-sufficient," Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo wrote...

Button Masala talks to the soul

Sukol, Derrida and Solitude It’s been a year that Sukol took his life, and his dreams and ambitions with him. A year in which we discovered his desperation to belong to a society he believed in. A poor Santhal tribal dark complexioned boy in his late teens who stood at 5 feet height had been...

The world’s nest at Santiniketan

India's first Nobel Laureate, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1929: I was brought up in an atmosphere of aspiration, aspiration for the expansion of the human spirit. We in our home sought freedom of power in our language, freedom of imagination in our literature, freedom of soul in our religious creeds and that of mind...

The Santiniketan Express: to melody and peace

I took the train Santiniketan Express from Howrah at 10.10 am to go to Santiniketan, my parents' present home. It is a place where my parents shifted to nearly 20 years back from their earlier home of nearly 25 years, Jaipur. They decided to spend the rest of their life at this idyllic hamlet called...

The young boy who didn’t like going to school

Dear Arushi Wish you a very very Happy Birthday 🙂 many happy returns of the day. This post is about a young boy called Robi who didn't like going to school. He was born on 7th May 1861 at his father, Debendranath Tagore's house, in Jorasanko, Kolkata. He was born more than 100 years from...

‘Varnika’ explained

Many friends have asked about the name of my blog and tiny firm 'VarnikaDesigns'. The name is borrowed from 'Varnikabhangam' from the Six Limbs of Indian Painting. The Six Limbs of Indian Painting is a set of cannons and guidelines that were assembled around the 6th century to guide artists for creating paintings. If you...