Artist Paresh Maity is among the most disciplined people I know. Having observed him up and close, I can avow that he allows nothing to distract him from his early morning wake-up. He takes long, brisk walks and practices yoga vigorously. He might enjoy making a splash in his outr&eacute; costumes that he designs himself but you will rarely see him at parties &mdash; where, he won&rsquo;t join you for dinner, in any case, because he&rsquo;s probably already eaten his regulated meal. He&rsquo;s picky about his oats, he&rsquo;ll only have herbal tea with ginger through the day, his choice of high-fibre biscuits are not locally available, and freshly cut fruit and juices travel with him in his car every time he sets out on an errand. He doesn&rsquo;t drink much beyond the very occasional glass of red wine, and he doesn&rsquo;t smoke.

Smoke and mirrors

Business Standard

In the guest house that we call home, in the comings and goings of family and friends and strangers, none of us noticed when Narendra Modi sneaked in while no one was looking, before going public and spilling the beans on how our household functions. Or, embarrassingly, on why my daughter won&rsquo;t drink her milk &ndash; though she and her brother are both partial to cold coffee, foolishly believing it to be milk-free &ndash; because, as the chief minister so astutely noted, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s fattening, Ma.

Kishore Singh: Dieting, Modi style

Would he or wouldn&rsquo;t he? On previous visits home from America, my brother-in-law hadn&rsquo;t bothered to visit us, leave alone stay with us, preferring to head straight to his in-laws&rsquo; home in Jaipur, leading to some unworthy but nevertheless enlightening comments on the subject of his relationship with his wife. Now here he was, five years later, and my wife was upset.

Kishore Singh: Relative clauses

We know a few lucky parents whose children have moved out, now that they are earning and can pay for their own keep. Empty nest syndrome? &ldquo;Keep dreaming, love,&rdquo; trilled Sarla, who got rid of her brood even before they&rsquo;d deposited their first cheques in the bank. Other friends have at least been keeping up appearances, but they&rsquo;re not exactly moping that their kids have moved from the spare bedroom to Skype, from where they&rsquo;re unable to demand milkshakes or pancakes before you&rsquo;ve been served even your first cup of morning tea by the cook.

Kishore Singh: Dependants for life 

On a day when a 12th-14th century Green Tara thangka set a world record at Christie&rsquo;s New York at a whopping Rs 10 crore, India&rsquo;s modern masters delivered somewhat less rakishly, even though, at a hesitation&rsquo;s worth over Rs 5 crore, abstractionist V S Gaitonde hit the highest spot with unerring good taste and some predictability. While there&rsquo;s no doubt that the crore club is up and doing well, in New York the celebrations were somewhat muted as analysts wondered where the record prices that once regularly made newspaper headlines in India, had disappeared.

Autumn blues

Fresh off Satyamev Jayate, Aamir Khan and spouse Kiran Rao put some of that money to use as auction debutants with a cautious bid for six lots of Bollywood memorabilia &mdash; most famously, a jacket worn by Shammi Kapoor.

Objects of desire

It&rsquo;s Ramzan in Hyderabad and with haleem a specialty, how can I leave town without having some? The city is a gracious host, but I&rsquo;m here for less than three hours and a fortifying lunch simply isn&rsquo;t part of it. In fact &ndash; and unforgivably &ndash; instead of demanding some of its excellent idlis or dosas, I&rsquo;ve had a ploughman&rsquo;s lunch consisting of a grilled chicken sandwich which, in a concession to provincial tastes, is accompanied by a fiery Chinese chilli sauce. The accompanying fries &mdash; let&rsquo;s say, they wouldn&rsquo;t inspire a cordon bleu chef or a fussy eater.

Kishore Singh: Fresh from yesterday

The 19th century was a difficult period for artists in India as the arrival of European painters and, in 1840, that of photography, meant the demise of their ateliers. Instances followed of the painter taking up the camera to turn photographer, though, mostly, &ldquo;the painter embellished the photographic image by retouching the sepia tones with colour, thus anticipating colour photography nearly a century before it came into existence&rdquo;, writes Pramod Kumar in the introduction to his delectable volume on royal Indian portraits &mdash; the first serious study in India of portrait photography. &ldquo;It is almost as if in its first 150 years, photography was trying to substitute paintings at court,&rdquo; he acknowledges.

Beyond mask and ceremony

Have you ever felt disoriented running into people where you least expect them &ndash; figuring they&rsquo;re somewhat familiar from, perhaps, a television reality show, and nodding at them vaguely &ndash; only to be jolted into the realisation some while later that you&rsquo;d failed to recognise your wife&rsquo;s best friend, the consequence of which will surely be terrible? Or looked up from the book at an airport to find yourself staring at a face that you know you ought to be able to put a name to &ndash; Adil from the office? Rocky from the gym? Inder, a former colleague? &ndash; before it strikes you, a half hour later, that you&rsquo;d stared stonily at your neighbour with whom you&rsquo;d shared occasional gossip and a drink, and who is probably unfriending you on Facebook at that precise moment?
Blame it on lifestyle choices that have led people to live in different cities so you don&rsquo;t know where you&rsquo;re most likely to run into them, or, indeed, where they call

Kishore Singh: Do I know you?

Nominated for the Turner prize in 2007, a participant at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, Uganda-born, London-educated and highly-awarded Zarina Bhimji&rsquo;s is not a name many Indians are familiar with. Yet, the artist &mdash; or, actually, photographer &mdash; isn&rsquo;t without distinction. I chanced upon her name in a column in FT&rsquo;s How To Spend It that quoted the Whitechapel Gallery&rsquo;s Iwona Blazwick as saying that she hoped to pick up an edition of a work by &ldquo;a photographer who is a bit under the radar&rdquo;. &ldquo;Indian&rdquo; photographers don&rsquo;t often merit attention in the UK press, far less among discriminating collectors or curators, so Bhimji &mdash; who won the New York International Center for Photography&rsquo;s Infinity Prize in 2003 &mdash; must have registered her presence forcefully among the cognoscenti. Not that she&rsquo;s a star &mdash; yet.

Under the radar

The other day, my wife and I were counting the institutions that have perished in the last decade. &ldquo;Coming home for lunch,&rdquo; I recounted my father&rsquo;s office calling ahead so that the meal could be laid piping hot as his car drove up to the porch. &ldquo;High tea,&rdquo; she added, though, in truth, I cannot recall my mother-in-law bothering herself with cucumber sandwiches or freshly-out-of-the-oven cakes, or with tea either, come to think of it, Irish whisky being more her style. &ldquo;Honeymoons,&rdquo; I slipped in, for being an over-rated indulgence. The list grew. Writing letters the old-fashioned way, family mealtimes, barber Sundays at home; joint families, homemade ice-cream and grandma&rsquo;s pickles. Bucket baths and sleeping on open terraces. &ldquo;Chinese shoemakers,&rdquo; piped in my Kolkata-raised wife. &ldquo;Tailors,&rdquo; I chucked in for good measure. &ldquo;Tailors,&rdquo; my wife paused, &ldquo;but you still have tailors.

Kishore Singh: Cut down to size

My daughter has a friend whose extended family goes off once a year on vacation. &ldquo;Together,&rdquo; marvelled my daughter, who has grown up seeing members of her parents&rsquo; clans behave like combustible elements when left in the same space for even a few hours, leave alone a few days. When, a couple of weeks ago, 70 constituents of her friend&rsquo;s tribe headed for Goa, my child wistfully wondered, &ldquo;How much fun that must be.

Kishore Singh: Family plots - and sub-plots

Southpaw, the curious kitten who could never stay out of trouble long enough to say &ldquo;Miao&rdquo;, was tense as she broadcast a message on the linking bandwidth calling for an immediate assembly of the Nizamuddin and dargah cats at the baoli. &ldquo;Everyone, now!&rdquo; she ordered, causing Hulo the warrior and Beraal the queen to twitch their whiskers in indignation.

The further adventures of Nilanjana

One hardly expects President Pranab Mukherjee to begin his innings at Rashtrapati Bhavan by sending out invitations to lunch, which suggests itself as a lonely affair in the cavernous dining halls of the world&rsquo;s largest residence for a head of state. The kitchens that serve the president must have adjusted to the shock of shifting from shuddh shakahaari cuisine to daab chingri and maangsho, fare the First Lady has declined to personally prepare. But given how fussy a Bengali can be when it comes to his food, the cooks will need to brush up their skills in the use of shorse and posto and all things chorchori if they are to make the cut and get Mukherjee to send out invitations because Begum Sheikh Hasina has sent hilsa fresh from the Padma for the president&rsquo;s pleasure.

Kishore Singh: Flavours of Rashtrapati Bhavan

He was the enfant terrible of Indian art, its Damien Hirst, she was his muse and mentor and co-artist; he came from the dark heartland of deprivation in Bihar, she was a Briton who returned to her roots in India; they&rsquo;d had a difficult time trying to establish a toehold in the tradition-bound Indian market till Dame Fortune, Swiss gallery owner Pierre Huber and London promoter Charles Saatchi winked at them. In no time, Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher had become the darlings of the contemporary art world, more likely to be spotted in Venice or Basel than in downtown New Delhi or the local supermarket in Gurgaon.

A house for Subodh & Bharti

Even as you read this, somewhere in Delhi a friend&rsquo;s Husain is being painstakingly restored, its dirty chrome being cleaned of over five decades of grime to reveal a sunshine yellow patina. When completed, it will look almost new, as though painted recently &mdash; only its subject and treatment revealing it as an early work of the master. For years, the painting hung at the friend&rsquo;s house, not so much neglected as unremarked. That will likely change when it returns, picked clean and polished, a Husain that will occupy pride of place in a home that has nurtured it but &mdash; as in most homes &mdash; failed to realise that art, like humans, requires regular pampering and cosseting.

Work in progress

When Sarla and her husband deplaned in Istanbul, en route to London, my wife hoped it would still be raining. It had poured on the afternoon a few days previously that we&rsquo;d spent at the Istanbul airport, waiting for our delayed connection to Rome but unable to enter the city because we hadn&rsquo;t bothered with visas, a hitch that Sarla had crowed over when they&rsquo;d come to wish us bon voyage in Delhi.

Kishore Singh: Heavy weather over friendship

My wife is keeping a journal. Day one opens with the scintillating &ldquo;Started tour with the cathedral.

Kishore Singh: Holiday overkill

The impressively long queue at Vatican City&rsquo;s Sistine Chapel ticket office made our hearts sink. Did we really want to see Michelangelo&rsquo;s Last Judgement, the Renaissance artist Raphael&rsquo;s tapestries and Botticelli&rsquo;s paintings, or would we rather sit in a caf&eacute; with our guide books and glasses of chianti? It wasn&rsquo;t a choice, really &mdash; not when we were tourists, anyway &mdash; and we joined the serpentine row which, surprisingly, cleared fast. But the visiting hordes had merely moved inside, and like sheep, we were herded from room to hall, from courtyard to chamber, barely able to spend time on what we&rsquo;d lined up to see. And when my wife proposed queueing up a second time because she&rsquo;d missed Michelangelo&rsquo;s Pieta, the family came close to blows.

Queue up for art

One of the perils of being on board a cruise ship for any length of time &ndash; a mere week in our case &ndash; is that you cannot escape from the enticements laid out to lure you into splurging. Even as sensible passengers in their hundreds would leave the ship at port after an early breakfast, my family would appear content to stay on board. Cleaver, our Peruvian cabin attendant, would knock tentatively to ask, &ldquo;No go port, nice sightseeing?&rdquo; I&rsquo;d assure him that we would be on our way as soon as everyone was up, had brushed their teeth, and balanced the previous night&rsquo;s accounts &mdash; because Diwali, it seemed, had already arrived in our alternate time zone.

Kishore Singh: On a losing spree

The Brazilian honeymooner was my age by any reckoning, his glamorous bride a little younger, and like us they&rsquo;d reserved berths in the overnighter from Venice to Rome. She held up a band of diamonds on her finger for our admiration, stretched out her legs over his, settled into her travel pillow, and was off to dreamland. Burdened by her weight, he snoozed rather than slept, but they at least didn&rsquo;t seem put out at the train&rsquo;s lack of air conditioning, or the attendant&rsquo;s inability to open windows, turning our carriage of six into a sauna. In the morning, the middle-aged bride touched up her morning face with make-up, did mysterious things to her two-toned blonde hair, slipped into her stilettos and turned diva, while we wondered where to wash before heading for the airport.

Kishore Singh

Kishore Singh

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