My first two days of full-time, stay-at-home fatherhood have been interesting. My wife headed back to work on Monday, her maternity leave over, and I took over, armed with a page of notes–written by my wife–detailing what my daughter’s schedule was to look like; its most important components were, obviously, her nap and feeding times.Continue reading “Dispatches from the Daddy Front – I”
Category Archives: General
Winning Chaplin’s Autobiography
The record for the longest tenure as a book on my shelves belongs to Charles Chaplin: My Autobiography. But that’s not the only distinction for the little tramp’s tale. It also represents the only academic award I have ever received in my life: its jacket bears a stickered certificate stating that I have been awarded the ‘ProgressContinue reading “Winning Chaplin’s Autobiography”
The Subway: Let the Love-Hate Clichés Roll
When I first moved to New York City, I lived on 95th Street in Manhattan and rode down to 42nd Street for my graduate seminars. My first commute on the subways was blindingly quick: I took the 2 or 3 downtown express at 96th and Broadway and one stop later (at 72nd Street) I disembarkedContinue reading “The Subway: Let the Love-Hate Clichés Roll”
The Slap of Love: A Mother’s Day Story
I should have 9511 stories about my mother. One for my every day of my life that she was alive. Today, I’ll recount just one of them. As just-above-waist-high kids, my brother and I used the local park for our evening sports sessions. In the winters, this mean cricket; in the summers, soccer. Play endedContinue reading “The Slap of Love: A Mother’s Day Story”
More Than 140 Characters on Twitter
I must be a very savvy social networker, because I use both Facebook and Twitter (and indeed, I even have a Tumblr page). That’s a little inside joke – just between me and myself, because in point of fact, I don’t consider myself to be any such thing. And nothing quite shows up my socialContinue reading “More Than 140 Characters on Twitter”
Of Prefects and Punishment Drills
In my ninth and tenth grades, I attended boarding school in India. Like many boarding schools of its type, it incorporated the disciplinary mechanism of the prefect: senior schoolboys placed in charge of those junior to them, armed with the rule book, and cricket bats and hockey sticks with which to hand out six ofContinue reading “Of Prefects and Punishment Drills”
Babies and Personal Archaeology
Before my baby daughter was born, one of the most common statements made to me by extant parents was, ‘The birth of your child will change your relationship with your parents.’ Well, my parents aren’t around anymore for my relationship with them to be changed. In one sense. In yet another, I have come toContinue reading “Babies and Personal Archaeology”
Learning from Babies
What a baby does best is make the world new all over again. It does so by reminding us how the ordinary is just the extraordinary taken for granted, how the most elemental facts about ourselves give us the greatest occasion for wonder. They are the commonest creatures of all, with thousands born every minute;Continue reading “Learning from Babies”
The Twenties: A Rush to Judgment Would Be Premature
In ‘Semi-Charmed Life: The Twentysomethings Are Allright’, (The New Yorker, January 14 2013) Nathan Heller writes: Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties….Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings isContinue reading “The Twenties: A Rush to Judgment Would Be Premature”
Writer and Reader, Bound Together
Tim Parks, in the New York Review of Books blog, writes on the always interesting, sometimes vexed relationship between writers and their readers, one made especially interesting by the blogger and his mostly anonymous readers and commentators: As with the editing process…there is the question of an understanding between writer and reader about what kindContinue reading “Writer and Reader, Bound Together”
Samir Chopra 