Shreya’s last newspaper column of 2023, published on its last day, offers a (light-hearted) method of dealing with the misery of the year just gone! Please click here to read it in full.
Featuring Rahul Dravid, Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, toilet bowls and marathon men, the article captures (as the newspapers have put it) the ‘highs and hilarities of cricket’. Read here
(Image: At Trent Bridge with kids, taken by Stephen Handley)
Featuring in Scroll’s popular books section, Shreya’s article on Joseph Conrad and Krakow is also an Editor’s Pick (“The best of Scroll”). Please click here to read.
“…chill out we must. Make the best of a bad job. Get our heads down and plough on. That I can do, and have always done, but this unwinding malarkey — how on this storm-tossed earth does one do that? Should I phone a friend? Ask the audience? Can Pink Floyd help me get comfortably numb?
My bestie said looking forward to his retirement sustained him. But the average age of retirement in most countries has been pushed to seventy, which seems too distant a prize to even contemplate! Gone are the days, even in prosperous western states, when you could retire in your fifties with a pension that kept you in clover for the rest of your life. A subject so triggering for France this year, that a million would-be-pensioners fought over it with the gendarmes, up and down the Champs Elysees!
How about a ‘mini-retirement’ Gary-Neville-style? We cackled when this millionaire footballer waxed lyrical about his ‘new’ idea; a centuries-old concept everyday folk call a holiday! He might be better acquainted with it in practice, however, as we plebs could do with a proper break. The average American, often working two jobs, gets ten paid annual holidays, whilst the rest of us, marginally better off, are too beset with health, financial, parental, and other problems to relax.”
Please click here to read the article in full
‘Banquets and Brickbats for Crumbling Kolkata’ is this month’s column for The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle.
“…f I crane a little from our back-bedroom window, it’s still possible to spy swaying fronds of palm and coconut trees. The sun too seems to slant into this room the way it did in our childhood, illuminating its new walls of calming azure. In the quiet of the afternoon, the tap-tap-tap of a kingfisher or ledge-loping monkey can sometimes still be heard. Even the hubbub of the local bazaar is a pleasantly muted rhythm when filtering in from afar…”
Please read it in full here
(Image: Holding forth at the inaugural Auroville Literature Festival, organised by Auroville and Government of India’s Ministry of Culture)
To read her column for August in The Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle, please click here https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/190823/shreya-sen-handley-south-asian-marvels-but-can-they-last.html
Enthusiastic reader feedback on this piece includes, “Thank you for a BRILLIANT article! It was funny, engrossing and SO original!”
Printed in The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle, please read the full column here
“….Love and sleeping arrangements have always gone hand in hand. We ‘sleep together’ in every sense of the phrase when we get hitched. But sleeping habits have as much to do with health, history, culture and economics.
The size of our beds has grown over the ages, and that’s as much about evolution as it is about socioeconomics. Humans are larger today than at any other time in history, having soared four inches in height in prosperous countries in the last century. Breadthwise too there’s been abundant efflorescence, with global obesity tripling in the last five decades.
Yet, peek into one of the many beautifully preserved historic homes in Britain, and the beds you see are bijou for other reasons…”
Published in the Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle, please read the article in full here
Shreya Sen-Handley 