Life etc...

Life Etc... has moved

Posted by sadmin at 
Life Etc... along with all of Livemint's blogs has moved to a new Wordpress platform. Visit http://blog.livemint.com/life or simply click here for more news on health, persoanl finance, gadgets, spaces and other musings. Also don't forget to update your RSS feeds and tell all your friends! Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it...

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Yucca and fistfights in the West Village

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
Once the charms of Bed Bath & Beyond had waned (it held good for a couple of hours, I must admit, while I pondered, among other weighty matters, the relative merits of a bamboo chopping board and a silicone cake tin), my friend Anita and I made our way a couple of nights ago to Havana Alma de Cuba , on 194, Christopher St, in the funky West Village...

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Private building, public space

Posted by Himanshu Burte at 
The Levi Strauss & Company campus development, just off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, is a great example of how you can enhance the public space of a city when you put up a new building. The site of the development is the original Levi Strauss factory--yes, the birthplace of denim. The development is placed on two generous lots across a street...

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Meen molee in Manhattan

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
Call it my piece de resistance . Or my comfort food. Or the one thing i can cook at (literally) a moment's notice and be sure of success. I'm always surprised when I hear of meen (fish) molee (fish in coconut gravy is a simple description, but read all the disclaimers below) talked of as being difficult to make... When you read my easy recipe...

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Too few sarees at the IPL... It's just not cricket!

Posted by Malavika R. Banerjee at 
Can a woman go watch an IPL game in a saree? Can she dress like that and sit in the Wankhede Stadium press box? The teams have uniforms, the cheerleaders are uniformly cheering. No surprise then, that uniformity has spread to the galleries as well. You could be a generous size 16, or somebody who has never really felt her best in the tee and jeans look...

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Multi-grain bread and Surf Excel for top loaders

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
Architect and writer Gautam Bhatia's series of rants against our unplanned cities (read the 'City Centre' articles here ) concluded in Business of Life last month. A recurring grouse is that "in dimension, scale, numbers or aesthetics, what people want and what the city offers are opposing and often unmanageable compromises". While...

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The mysterious affair of the disappearing aitch

Posted by Papi Menon at 
America is a wonderful land. When I first landed on these shores, what struck me most was the purity of the colors everywhere. After the well worn, used up looks of the many Indian cities I'd lived in and traveled through, the shining aseptic primary colors of American cities seemed a wondrous thing to behold. Of course, with time, some of the wonder...

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Guess who's watching U/A movies?

Posted by Vandana Vasudevan at 
A couple of weeks ago I went to watch New York . At the interval, while I was contemplating whether John Abraham was really a terrorist and marvelling at how the director could make even Neil Nitin Mukesh act, I heard a noise which struck me as being odd in that setting. It was a bunch of kids about 8-10 years old, running down the aisle and pestering...

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What price convenience food?

Posted by Manidipa Mandal at 
First, the disclaimers: I've got a packet of frozen parathas in the fridge, and there's often lots of little miso or stock cubes in the larder (I live alone, mostly). Some mornings, there's Maggi for breakfast (my husband seems to get garlic powder cravings from time to time, and no, we weren't pregnant last time I checked.) Now the...

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Leave me the tweet alone

Posted by Arjun Jassal at 
140 characters can change the world. Ok, let me tone it down a bit. 140 characters can help disseminate information on political upheaval (Iran), natural disasters (China) and even terrorist attacks (India). They can help connect politicians, celebrities and sportsmen, to their dedicated fans, albeit in a ‘limited way’. They can help you and me, share...

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Work-life balance...or work-life choice?

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
A recent article in Mint quotes Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric Co, as saying "there's no such thing as work-life balance (for women) ..... there are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." Sounds rather ominous. Is it really as cut and dried and never-the-twain-shall-meet as all that? Surely many...

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Is casual cruelty a peculiarly Indian trait

Posted by Vandana Vasudevan at 
Is casual cruelty a peculiarly Indian trait? I think it goes back to our feudal system where there was always some caste or community below one’s own, which one could deride and harass. Now, although the caste system has been officially abolished, it appears as though some primal gene is still active in many Indians. It suddenly gets activated, often...

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Why India should root for the return of the Elgin marbles

Posted by Manidipa Mandal at 
"Both sides stand on shaky ground," prevaricates NYT critic Michael Kimmelman, in today's Business of Life lead story . The Greeks, never in fear of racial stereotyping, have been emphatic in their demands . (What's to worry about? Everyone just knows they are the guys with the big weddings, the voluble chatter, the long community...

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As in cricket, so in tennis... yesterday once more?

Posted by Malavika R. Banerjee at 
After more than a decade of teen rule, men and women, as opposed to boys and girls, are once again ruling sports. I hasten to add that none of the men and women mentioned below are senior citizens in normal everyday terms, but they are veterans when it comes to the world of sport. Take the just-concluded Wimbledon as an example: Serena Williams, 27...

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It's raining... or is it?

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
The Met department says there will be less than normal rainfall this year. But then so many of these pronouncements are like dew in the morning. Briefly alive, and soon gone. And another, or rather many others, will take its place tomorrow. South-west monsoon reaches Delhi, is the Met’s latest. The time spent filtering all this information, whether...

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