It was a lonely, moonless night. The three-member film crew walked into the cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges. In a distance, surrounded by the flickering light from a pyre, they saw the Aghori sadhu, meditating next to the human skull in which he cooked and ate his meals. Laid out ceremoniously before him was a corpse, a lone lamp shining inside its hollowed-out torso. They were witnessing an ancient, secret ritual of necromancy in which the Aghori was invoking his lord Kapileshwar.

Sadhu struck

Business Standard

They say in the heat of the summer, when the sun beats mercilessly down on Sirohi, all that people can do is sweat under heavy high-tension wires overhead that carry power to more influential communities. The village receives power for barely five hours a day, making do the rest of the time with generators, hand-held fans, candles and when all else fails, heat and darkness.

Geetanjali Krishna: No power to the people

It was a chilly December evening. We had been standing still on a narrow lane in Chattarpur for the last one hour. Around us, everywhere (even in the few empty plots where Delhi&rsquo;s finest hadn&rsquo;t yet built &ldquo;farmhouses&rdquo;) there were cars, motorcycles, trucks, autos, even gaily bedecked horses and carriages &mdash; all trying to go in different directions. A couple of horses urinated copiously as disgruntled bystanders skittered in all directions to avoid getting splashed.

Geetanjali Krishna: Fortune in the traffic jam

Women who stay home and look after their families often think their lives would have been much better if they too went out of the home to work. And the ones who are unfortunate enough to encounter marital conflict, often believe (and rightly so) that their lives are undervalued in comparison with their bread-winning spouses. But recently, I met Anita, and realised that life isn&rsquo;t all black and white &mdash; it is made up of fifty shades of grey... and then some. Here&rsquo;s her story.

Geetanjali Krishna: Fifty shades of a grey life

Yesterday, as I passed in front of the AIIMS trauma center, I was sickened at the sight of all the television news vans parked there. They were waiting for sound bites on the condition of the victim of the horrific bus rape that has had the city up in arms. When I neared home, a group of men and women, who worked as domestic helps and drivers in the neighbourhood, were gathered in the park, discussing the plight of the victim. I decided to hang around and see what transpired.

Geetanjali Krishna: Rape is out of the closet

The last couple of months, I&rsquo;ve been woken up early every morning by the acrid smell of wood smoke and the sound of pigeons roosting atop the air conditioner. The pigeons coo and poop, fight and mate, and whatever they do, they do it loudly. As for the smoke, the very thought of inhaling all those dioxins has me scrambling to close all the windows in the house.

Geetanjali Krishna: 2012 - A space odyssey

We often read obituaries of famous people. But when &ldquo;people like them&rdquo; die, they often pass into oblivion unsung and un-mourned. That is why I dedicate this column to Bundo, masseuse ordinaire, who good-naturedly relieved the aches and pains of countless south Delhi ladies over the last few decades. Yet, when she died last month of complications due to a kidney ailment, she was alone but for her errant son and indigent husband.

Geetanjali Krishna: A farewell to Bundo

Every time I walked past the deserted lane that once housed the Mehrauli phool mandi, I&rsquo;d remember regretfully the fragrant mornings I&rsquo;d spent there. The 15-year-old wholesale flower market was relocated by the Delhi Agricultural Marketing Board last year to what they optimistically called &ldquo;an ultra-modern flower market&rdquo; in Ghazipur. There were complaints galore from the flower-sellers, but sadly, no one in power listened.

Geetanjali Krishna: The return of flower power

&ldquo;Sometimes, when the sun is high over our heads, I still hear the boom of the dynamite. I remember how the earth used to shudder, causing utensils to fall in the kitchen and the few remaining birds to fly off squawking into the trees,&rdquo; said Sawan of Sirohi village in Faridabad. It was quiet in the noon day sun, and sitting rather sleepily on a charpoy under a tree, I couldn&rsquo;t imagine what he was talking about. Then, he took me to the hills beyond the village and l understood. The Aravalis were scraped bare of vegetation, with lodes of gravel glinting like blood in craters laid bare by explosions. Yawning valleys lay where mountains had stood barely a decade ago &mdash; now so deep that groundwater had seeped through, creating huge blue lakes. They were eerily beautiful, mirroring the stark lines of the denuded hills. &ldquo;Nobody knows exactly how deep they are, but we believe they&rsquo;re at least 50 feet deep.

Geetanjali Krishna: Memories of a boom town

Journalists often meet people who prefer to remain anonymous. But recently I talked to someone whose anonymity I immediately wanted to protect. Naming him, I realised, would mean laying bare much more than his identity. It could bring down some of the great walls of fiction with which he&rsquo;d surrounded himself. So, for the purposes of this column, let&rsquo;s just refer to him as Ashfaq.

Geetanjali Krishna: The truth about  lies

One thing I love about India is that it never ceases to amaze and surprise. There I was, driving through West Delhi, when I saw the most unlikely sight. Two gigantic Ravana heads with glittering eyes and slavering red mouths stood at a DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus stop, looking so ludicrous that, of course, I had to stop and find out more about them. It turned out that I was in Tagore Gardens &mdash; the only Ravana-makers&rsquo; colony in the capital. A short walk revealed Ravana heads stacked under the metro underpass and torsos leaning nonchalantly across urinals. All around me, people were busily pasting layer upon layer of paper on the effigies. Unpainted and still bereft of their traditional razzmatazz, they looked like ancient relics just unearthed.

Geetanjali Krishna: Michael, the Ravana-maker

Last week, as I was walking through Kinari Bazaar in old Delhi, I noticed that my favourite Ram Lila supplies shop was looking different. When I&rsquo;d visited it about a fortnight ago, it was full of wonderful wares such as strap-on monkey tails, vivid orange beards and tubes of make-up simply called &ldquo;Pank Cake&rdquo;. Weaponry of all sorts and in all its tinny splendour was hanging from the rafters. All around us were strung shiny necklaces, meant to be worn by regal queens and heavenly apsaras alike, while masks to adorn demons stood cheek by jowl.

Geetanjali Krishna: The master of festivities

Often when I look at Indian handicrafts, I wonder why we have the world&rsquo;s largest population of traditional craftspeople and artisans &mdash; yet few among them have undergone any formal training. And even fewer achieve national and international recognition. Could skills and design training be the key to bridging the chasm between artisans and designers? Last month, I met Khatri Akib Ibrahim, a young Ajrakh printer who had just completed a month-long residency programme at Delhi-based Happy Hands Foundation. An award-winning graduate of the Kalaraksha school, the Bhuj-based artisan &ndash; the youngest in a long line of Ajrakh printers &ndash; talked to me about all the new things he had learnt and the ideas he had for designing and marketing his age-old craft.

Geetanjali Krishna: Back to art school

Last week, while on the metro, I witnessed something that made me think. Two eunuchs got into the ladies compartment, clutching their bags of shopping. Sari-clad and deceptively demure, they were talking to each other in an exaggeratedly feminine fashion. Suddenly, all hell broke loose in the peaceful compartment. As one of them accidentally rubbed shoulders with the woman seated next to them, she shrieked and cringed, trying to shrink away from the eunuchs. In turn, the eunuchs were angered by her response. &ldquo;What is your problem?&rdquo; they shouted with their trademark aggression.

Geetanjali Krishna: Compartmentalising the sexes 

In life, inspiration comes in many guises and often from the most unexpected quarters. It came to me last month when I had the opportunity to chat with Aneesh, a young boy waiting to set off to the US for higher studies in the next few days. What, people may ask, could have been so inspiring about that? I&rsquo;ll just let Aneesh&rsquo;s life story speak for itself.

Geetanjali Krishna: Aneesh, upwardly mobile

It&rsquo;s that time of the year again. As Mahatma Gandhi&rsquo;s birth anniversary approaches, I find myself thinking about him and the India he fought so tirelessly to change. During his lifetime, the nation was plagued by crippling famines, which led him to famously say: &ldquo;There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.&rdquo; I wonder how he&rsquo;d react if he knew that even today, in spite of our so-called development and middle class prosperity, people continue to starve in India. Just the other day, I met a young man who spoke to me at length about what food (mostly the lack of it) meant to him, growing up alone and penniless on the mean streets of Kolkata and Delhi.

Geetanjali Krishna: The hunger in his belly

When I first saw Masterji, he was squinting over a piece of fabric through spectacles so thick that his eyes looked like they belonged to a giant insect. He stood up to greet us with a smile. That&rsquo;s when I realised he had no teeth. He also had a bad limp. Should someone so elderly be working at all, I wondered. But when Ram Swarup started talking abut cuts and patterns and necklines, I realised I was in the presence of a true master.

Geetanjali Krishna: Stitching up happiness

Often, when we talk about folk artists and craftspeople, we say admiringly that they were born with the skill in their fingers, that craft has mysteriously somehow seeped into them through the very air they breathe. Implicit in such ideas is the sense that for the perpetuation of our folk crafts, the children of a weaver or a potter or an ironsmith must practice the family craft. Khatri Hanif Abdul Majid, a practitioner of tie and dye or Bandhani from Bhuj, opened a whole new line of thinking for me when I saw his work.

Geetanjali Krishna: Thinking out of the pattern

As a student of anthropology, I have always enjoyed listening to stories. Story-telling is, to me, the most vibrant and entertaining way through which a culture expresses itself. But while I&rsquo;ve seen stories being told orally, through song or through paintings &mdash; 39-year-old Unesco (2006) awardee Sanjana Devi of Muzaffarpur, Bihar recently introduced me to a whole new medium of story-telling, Sujani. This is a form of folk embroidery practiced by village women in Bihar, in which they tell stories through the motifs they embroider on cloth. &ldquo;In the villages of Bihar, women had little opportunity to leave their homes even for a few hours. So they didn&rsquo;t get a chance to interact a lot with one another,&rdquo; explained Sanjana Devi when we met, &ldquo;Sujani has offered them a chance for self expression in a socially-acceptable way,&rdquo; she said.

Geetanjali Krishna: The story-telling magnate

As Assam burns in the vengeful flame of riots and killings, the news filtering through on the Net tells me that over 1.7 lakh people from 400 villages in Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts are now homeless and sheltered in 128 camps that dot the conflict zone. In my mind, I picture the conditions in those crowded refugee camps. Given the monsoons and the burgeoning population of the camp, it&rsquo;s only a matter of time before waterborne diseases take on the job that the rioters began. No wonder, then, that my thoughts turn to a maverick inventor, working in a makeshift workshop/laboratory on the terrace of his house not that far away, in Kolkata. Suprio Das, engineer-turned-inventor, recently designed the Zimba, a small contraption that can be attached to hand pumps and provides scientifically chlorinated water at a nominal cost.

Geetanjali Krishna: Raising a toast to Zimba

Last month saw the return of a popular TV reality show in which a bunch of enthusiastic amateur cooks go through various trials and tribulations before one of them is chosen as the master chef. It&rsquo;s a show I regularly watch, but I have to say my interactions with a migrant from Darjeeling have shown me that, in India, it doesn&rsquo;t necessarily take all this hoopla to create a master chef. Here&rsquo;s his story.

Geetanjali Krishna

Geetanjali Krishna

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