childhood Archives

Daaru Aur Danga: When Your Family is the Drunk Catholic Stereotype

The jolly Catholic drunk is a fun stereotype, a trope for your entertainment, the life of the party. What you almost never see is the hangover, the accompanying headache of which is shared by the entire family. I grew up in one such family.

Damian D'souza July 29, 2016

Pop Culture

Why Stephen King’s Stories Only Get Scarier with the Passage of Time

Stephen King’s books reveal their depths slowly. Great horror comes from a fight between hope and hopelessness, empathy and the lack of it, and all of King’s stories straddle that fine line.

Amal Singh July 28, 2016

Pop Culture

50 Years of Scooby Doo: What Shaggy and His Gang Taught Me about Fear of the Dark

Scooby Doo proved time and again how needless the idea of fearing the unknown really is. It is the reason why a scared 10-year-old me dared to enter dark alleyways and stopped fearing the demons under his bed.

Pranay Dewani July 25, 2016

POV

Why Do We Inherit the Worst Traits of Our Parents?

Growing up, I wanted to be nothing like my parents. I spent a significant part of my teenage years defining myself in opposition to my parents. Yet, over time, the very traits that I disliked about them slowly became my own – and that’s when I truly understood them.

Poulomi Das July 24, 2016

POV

How to Fake It, If You Can’t Fly It: A Cheat Sheet to Makar Sankranti

My relationship with Uttarayan or Makar Sankranti, is like that of a sibling. There’s a lot of cribbing, but at the end of the day, I’ve come to love it as my own. Windy afternoons and multiple attempts to fly a kite defined my childhood. Years later, I still can’t fly one, but I have chosen to accept my fate.

Abha Mehra July 21, 2016

First Person

My Life as Sweaty Betty

Hyperhidrosis is a weird kind of illness. It’s enough of a condition to have an important sounding name, but it isn’t debilitating enough for people to feel sorry for you.

Sadie Gonsalves June 30, 2016

First Person

How Delhi Power Cuts Shaped Our Childhoods

Anyone who has lived in Delhi of the 1980s and ’90s, will remember the legendary load-shedding power cut that used to be a way of life – and how it characterised our adolescent days. Power cuts were to Delhi what traffic was to Mumbai.

Anurag Bakhshi June 16, 2016

Bollywood

Madhuri Dixit, the Woman of Middle-Class Dreams, and My Papa’s First Crush

I have grown up on stories about my father’s not-so-secret childhood crush on Madhuri Dixit from the time when they were neighbours in Mumbai. As a child with a congenital heart condition, Papa had spent a large part of his childhood as the one-boy audience for her daily kathak practices. She didn’t know it, but Madhuri Dixit was making life a little bit bearable for an angry teenager.

Sonali Kokra June 10, 2016

Culture

Darna Mana Hai: What Lies Beneath Our Ghost Stories

Ghosts don’t exist in a vacuum. They are a culmination of numerous things – actual historical events, social oppressions, and injustice. They surround us; breathing, living entities, that are hoping we might inhale them and keep their legacy alive. Or occasionally, just offer them a piece of fish.

Aditi Sen May 13, 2016

POV

Ganesh Chaturthi of My Childhood: How I Learnt the Art of Pandal-Hopping

Today Ganeshotsav is about visiting that one relative who keeps Ganpati and having one-fourth of a modak. As children, though, it caused more excitement than for Charlie at the Chocolate Factory, because pandal-hopping was the only all-nighter we were allowed.

Hardik Rajgor May 9, 2016