House hunting: Episode 2

It was THE lane with the most beautiful house in the world. It was THE lane where I wanted to live when I was a six-year-old girl. The lane hadn’t changed much over the last 30 years, except for two new apartment blocks. I was visiting one of them (the red garish one) on Househunt, Episode 2. [...]

House Hunting: Episode 1

It’s been 12 years since I last went house hunting on my own, and it’s interesting to see how the market has changed…and I have too. The first time I went house hunting, I had just turned 21. So I didn’t ask for too much—just a room with a view and my own independence. In [...]

Double metre maddaam??

It was just another evening of commuting from Kammanahalli to Koramangala. The auto driver hesitated for a moment and then nodded. I jumped in.   There was another momentary pause as he wondered whether he should take a left or right turn. Like most Bangalore roads that run in circles, both ways would lead us [...]

Time to move on?

I’ve watched it happening over the years to friends of mine. One day they’d get up, look at the city of their birth, and discover that it stifled them. They felt it was time to move on. But I never thought that it would happen to me. Bangalore was after all my great love affair. [...]

Monsoon magic

Morning light kisses the sky. A soft wind languorously unties my hair. The promise of a scattering of raindrops tantalizes my skin. This monsoon morning my heart beats again.  I am alive. So I live. (Written in Bangalore, one monsoon morning) Copyright – Christina Daniels

A loophole loving nation?

It was just another morning on my way to work. I was at the strategic left turn into the industrial area that is home to my office and a long list of other international technology companies. The traffic clogged intersection usually has most of the bikers getting onto the narrow adjacent mud road and beating [...]

The theatre of intimate personal spaces

It’s the fulfilment of an old dream. Bangalore now has its second intimate personal theatre space, especially reaching out to residents of Whitefield, Indira Nagar, Koramangala and all their adjacent areas. The Jagriti Centre of the Performance Arts, the brainchild of Arundhati & Jagdish Raja, now beckons Bangaloreans to an evening peppered with the magic [...]

Rear Entrance – By David Barun Kumar Thomas

It’s funny how very often in life you set out to help another person, but the person you usually end up helping in the end is yourself. This was exactly what happened when my friend of many years BS asked me to join a panel of writers launching David Thomas’ debut novel Rear Entrance in Bangalore. [...]

The good banker

It was in 2002 that I first approached the United Bank of India for a student’s loan to complete my MSc at the London School of Economics. I still remember walking into their office off Brigade Road, all of 26, to ask for loan. I did not have parents who would back me up, but [...]

Movie reviews move out of this blog to Citizen Matters

I first became a blogger five years ago in November 2005. It was a month after I had gotten married, and I think that blogging was my way of keeping in touch with the Christina who always wanted to “create”. It was a part of me that I was not going to let die, as [...]