Author Archives: Nagesh Alai

When we discover ourselves, we are never desolate, writes Nagesh Alai The other day, amid all the social distancing and isolation imposed by the pathogen, I had called up a septuagenarian lady living with her husband (a Parkinson’s patient) in our society, to enquire about her and asking her if she needed any help in […]

Across ages and socio-economic groups, by and large there has been a spirit of positivity in facing the pandemic, writes Nagesh Alai The pervasive pestilence of the year has snatched the corona of existence from humans and driven them to the confines of their four walls variously called as homes, hovels and huts. The lockdown […]

The face-off between the two South Indian Brahmin communities is quite lored and loved over decades, writes Nagesh Alai The other day at dinner, an Iyengar friend of mine asked me if I have tasted the award winning German beer, Ayinger. I had not. So that was an opening for him to tell me condescendingly: “Listen, […]

Nagesh Alai casts a wry but loving lookback at the evolution of calling, writing and listening to music It’s the 13th September as I write this. It happens to be the 13th birthday of my lovely niece, who is multi-talented and on top of technology and trends.  Not surprisingly, I got a Zoom invite from […]

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, we all have been left to hope for the best while bracing for the worst, writes Nagesh Alai I had literally welcomed 2020 from the top of the world – by summiting the 12,000-feet snowy but sylvan Dayara Bugyal (means “lush meadows”) in the Uttarkashi district in Uttarakhand. […]

Nagesh Alai comments on the uproar over WhatsApp’s recent revised privacy policy, and users’ eager migration to rival platforms Our footprints on the sands of time are ‘anitya’ or impermanent, but our footprints on the highways of digital are ‘nitya’ or permanent. It is a travesty of sorts that the transience of our life which […]

While digital learning has made up for lockdown losses to some extent, nothing can quite replace actual human interaction, writes Nagesh Alai The other day in the course of teaching basic English over a WhatsApp audio call to two young siblings aged 10 and 11, residing in a remote village in Haryana, courtesy an NGO’s […]

Sure, living life to the max has its attractions, but are we ultimately losing out in the bargain, asks Nagesh Alai Yeh dil maange more – remember the catchy Hinglish Pepsi ad way back in the late 1990s? It simply means that we cannot be just satisfied with just one, but need more. Symbolic of […]

‘What if’ is a powerful hindsight which has the potential of redemption and transformation of those who are lucky to outlive an event, writes Nagesh Alai ‘What if’ is a classic conundrum of the human mind creating probable alternatives to events that have already happened in their lives. Without exception, every person experiences this syndrome […]