Indian Writing

Appuswamy had always been harboring a small, unambitious desire – to operate an ATM machine using his wife Seetha’s card and count the crisp currency notes. Seetha knew it for certain that Appuswamy, in his early seventies, was unfit even to gently tap an electric switch and drive away the darkness and an ATM machine for him would be as unintelligible as Aero Dynamics. To keep Appuswamy’s attempts at bay, Seetha always carried a small pouch and the ATM card inside it and like Mary’s lamb, it remained inseparable from her.

Mahadevan writes an Appuswamy-Seetha Patti story.

Also check out his paean to the Jhangiri, Emperor of Tamil sweets:

Jhangiri enjoys a social status in the south. For the man who is adept at preparing Jhangiri, Mysore Pak or Laddu is too primitive, like a club player to a World Cup wonder. As Jhangiri is generally served on arrival of the bridegroom’s party at the marriage hall on the eve of the marriage in Tamilian marriages, its quality can make or mar a marriage. What more, mere absence of Jhangiri in a marriage, mellows down the merriment. If the Jhangiri is a little pliable, the groom’s granny in her nineties would start grumbling. If it is too crisp, his young aunt would resort to her taunts. If it is too sweet, the diabetic brigade ( I am an humble soldier in this brigade) would start its diatribe and if the level of sugar is low, it would be relegated to the last serve…

The lives of migrant workers:

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest…

About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home. “Your loved ones across that ocean . . . ,” Nadine Sarreal, a Filipina poet in Singapore, warns:

Will sit at breakfast and try not to gaze
Where you would sit at the table.
Meals now divided by five
Instead of six, don’t feed an emptiness.

Yesterday was Shakespeare’s anniversary, marked as World Book Day. Here is a group of child labourers at a rally for the right to education, at College Square near the statue of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Picture by Amit Datta, from The Telegraph.