My first encounter with coffee left such a bitter taste that I silently swore I would never have it again. I must have been about eight or nine, and it was one of those rare occasions when we were left at home unsupervised.  It wasn’t that I had any particular …

For decades, the approach and departure of festive occasions—Carnival, Independence Day, Divali, Christmas, Old Year’s Night—have elicited desperate missives.  Complaints about unbearable levels of noise from unrelenting sound systems and fireworks have poured out to the impervious Environmental Management Authority (EMA). Nothing’s changed. On its website, the EMA describes four …

True story: ‘In 1919—over 80 years after Emancipation—a Trinidadian petitioned the King for compensation for 31 freed persons previously owned by his grandfather, which he claimed had never been paid.’ It’s one of the astonishing tales recounted by Professor Emerita Bridget Brereton in her newly released book, History Matters: Selected …

After a time, poor service wears you down—lowers your expectations to the point where you feel special when you actually succeed in completing a transaction, or most of the processes get by smoothly.  This is my lucky day, you murmur happily, just because it took only one hour to pay …

I see you write about me again, she said, laughing. Mystified, as she was not present in my mind as I wrote my last column, I asked what she meant. She was referring to the people who bottled everything inside and the unexpected eruptions that come from what might seem slight …

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the barrage of brutality. How many times in recent days have I felt my stomach churn because of the news bombarding us?  Rage is roaring through our space, so unfettered that we can’t help but feel that, here and now, all fall down. …

One day, I received an email from someone I did not know, a cricket writer, who told me that he had just completed the first draft of a manuscript on England’s tour of the West Indies in 1954. There was a section in it that looked at the aftermath in the …

Two days ago, Kieron Pollard turned 35. He did not play in the Mumbai Indians’ match against Chennai Super Kings on the same day, which proved to be one of the rare victories for the MI team during this IPL season.  Before the match, the ESPNcricinfo website posted a discussion …

Every now and again, I indulge in a binge fest of Viv Richards. It’s therapeutic. Maybe it was triggered by his 70th birthday on 7 March, but it was such an intense submersion that I felt compelled to write about why Viv Richards resides in my mind as the greatest …

Having admitted that he hardly knows anything about ‘sub-continental Indian/Hindi naming conventions’, Winford James proceeded to write a column in last Sunday’s Guardian that revealed that he did not even bother to inform himself before presenting readers with an interpretation that was breathtakingly appalling. Declaring that he is ‘a big, …

When she was a wee thing, my daughter loved stories. She had favourites and wanted to hear them over and over.  There would be phases; the same one from the night before and the night before, before eventually moving on to another. By the time she was about five, she …

A long time ago I had this dream of opening a café of sorts. A place where I could serve small dishes made with local ingredients; where the food and drink were simple, tasty and fresh. I wanted the quality to be outstanding, but I also imagined it to be …