The Delhi Stories — The sentry of the Central Reserve Police Force, bored and tired, excused himself from his taciturn colleague. He had stood for three continuous hours. He walked towards the temporary toilet erected for the sentries-on-duty, and peed while he spoke to his other half and informed about ‘uneasiness in the body’…

The Gothenburg Tales — The three visitors waited, after they had warily pressed the button on the destination-control panel, and the doors to the elevator closed reluctantly. They had to reach the second-storey of the five-storeyed library but the elevator descended down. In the lowest floor of the library, a woman past her prime…

The Gothenburg Tales — The septuagenarian, head in Stage 7 of hair loss on the Norwood Scale, stood by the bar supping his gin-and-tonic, and merrily chatting with the bartenders and with two customers who were closer to him but with the coronavirus-dictated social distance. For his age, he was agile and loquacious. …

The Gothenburg Tales — The tips of her hairs, flowing down to her shoulders, were coloured in blonde, possibly the darker hairs were also coloured. (People past their thirties are having grey hairs in the digital age of information, disinformation and misinformation due to stress or genetics or both. …

‘In fact, there is no Shangri-La. It is as mythical as the River Saraswati.’ — The fifteen-year-old daughter sat sulking in the living room of their house in the multi-storeyed apartment. Since the first wave of the lockdown due to Covid-19, she had not gone anywhere out of Delhi. She was lost in thoughts. She had not attended the last rites of her maternal grandparents…

‘We need oxygen cylinder for our son. Do you have any contact? Please help us.’ — While she was kneading the non-wholegrain wheat flour to make chapatis for her family, the mother of three and the wife of a jobless husband heard a bleep on her old cell phone. It was lying on the table in the other room; the only other room. She asked her…

Volvo Cars’ infotainment system with Google embedded, pure electric cars to come with Recharge tyres — The cars in the third decade of this century are also substituting as smartphones and extension of offices or homes. With unfolding innovations in technology and changing patterns in car usage and the climate-change consciousness, the automobile sector is embracing and innovating. Volvo Cars is introducing a range of upgrades…

‘If you break this door and let this dog go, then we will all go elsewhere.’ — The whimper of a dog fills the floor. I go still as I step onto the threshold of the ground floor of the multi-storey building under construction. I look around. The whimper continues but I cannot see the dog. I start to climb the stairs but the whimper of the…

The word explained with an example of its usage: Imbed and embed — These are the times of embedded technologies and imbedded vanities among other embedments and imbedments. Imbed, verb, is a variant of the word ‘embed’. Embed means to fix something deeply and firmly in a surrounding mass like the pulp around the mango seed, to enclose closely such as fossils in…