Remember how the rich are always complaining: &ldquo;I had to wait six months before they could deliver matching Maseratis for my father and me,&rdquo; or &ldquo;I got my wife a 15-carat diamond, but that show-off Sudhakar on the seventeenth floor got his wife and girlfriend both 20-carat diamonds, and now my wife won&rsquo;t speak to me&rdquo;, or &ldquo;I sent my private jet to Paris because the cook insisted on fresh scallops for tonight&rsquo;s dinner, but Customs kept the package in a non-airconditioned room, and now everything is ruined.&rdquo; Well, that&rsquo;s the way Bangaloreans are. Mostly, of course, about the weather, which they treat as their personal climate control. &ldquo;It is so hot,&rdquo; every one of them gripes, when, in fact, it is gloriously cool.

Kishore Singh: Bangalore's whine club

Business Standard

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

Seriously, when you call someone home for dinner at 8:30 p m, what time do you actually expect them to show up? As New Delhi becomes increasingly cosmopolitan, the issue of the &ldquo;right time&rdquo; is betraying a black hole of social information. In &ldquo;sophisticated&rdquo; Delhi, if you&rsquo;re invited for dinner, it is alright so long as you drop in some time before midnight, which is when your hostess will lay dinner, thereafter having it re-heated and served at hourly intervals.

Kishore Singh: Around the dot in Delhi

After the Mona Lisa, The Scream is perhaps the most discussed, dissected, hated, applauded, analysed, doodled or caricatured painting &mdash; and now, at Rs 600 crore, it is also the most expensive work ever to be auctioned.

Screaming, with surprise

If you can get past your initial instinct of squirming because there&rsquo;s a stranger squatting at your feet to submerge your soles in scalding water before proceeding to scrub the dead skin off, a pedicure can be quite stimulating &mdash; besides being hygienic, of course. An exfoliating massage is just as refreshing, only you wish masseurs wouldn&rsquo;t bow before your knobby knees before ridding them of their extinct cells, leaving the skin more than a little raw. And though the environment aims to soothe, one can&rsquo;t help wonder why a spa chooses to be namby-pamby instead of, well, invigorating.

Kishore Singh: From retro to metrosexual

Twenty-five years ago, when India was still in the Dark Ages, Bina Ramani was our bonafide import from America. She was also many other extraordinary things &mdash; a feisty, independent woman who spoke freely about her failed marriage in conservative Delhi and set the tongues wagging on the cocktail circuit with her &ldquo;boldness&rdquo; when she set up her own business, piquantly named Once Upon a Time, in the city&rsquo;s unknown backyard, Hauz Khas Village.

Kishore Singh: When Hauz Khas was a village

Grannies in India daily escort their young wards past shockingly erotic &ldquo;art&rdquo; on temple walls without embarrassment. Where Western visitors are reduced to blushes in Khajuraho, their Indian counterparts don&rsquo;t turn a hair at the prurient nature of the sculptures. Several paintings from the miniature tradition could cast doubt on the moral credentials of the nation, but these have never caused offense. Indeed, for many Indians, these works aren&rsquo;t worth a second glance &mdash; and we&rsquo;re not discussing adolescent teenagers here. Why these same people turn to violence when it comes to viewing art in a gallery is a subject of some debate, but attempts to muzzle creativity and freedom of expression are hardly new, as the wise people who approved the NCERT books with cartoons as illustrations are discovering to their horror.

Without any malice

For as long as I can remember, my daughter has been a fan of Shah Rukh Khan, but that bond snapped when the actor and cricket league owner lost his cool and turned abusive at Mumbai&rsquo;s Wankhede Stadium. &ldquo;But he only did it to protect his daughter,&rdquo; I pointed out to her. &ldquo;Puh-leeze,&rdquo; she retorted, &ldquo;can you imagine how embarrassed his daughter must have felt in front of her friends,&rdquo; cavilling on about the necessity of new-age dads who insist on behaving like cavemen.

Kishore Singh: The father of all battles

For someone who is a part of most group exhibitions, has a relationship with galleries all over the country, and is on buyer lists, it is strange that Laxma Goud is less well-known than he ought to be. Or, perhaps, that should read that he is somewhat less well-known as a person and an artist, though his art, at least, is well enough known.

The randy goat, and other lusty art

The Indian Premier League makes good business sense for some, but also, as my Bengali peers point out, &ldquo;nonsense&rdquo; for others. I am at the receiving end of that nonsense as the jamboree moves to Kolkata and the Eden Gardens, resulting in an acute shortage of hotel rooms in the city. My regular hotel can&rsquo;t promise me my room on all the days of my stay there, so my office fixes my board and lodging alternately at the city&rsquo;s &ldquo;finest business hotel&rdquo;. That it&rsquo;s walking distance from my place of work is a saving grace.

Kishore Singh: Too efficient to work

Rajeeb Samdani is enjoying his celebritydom. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he says of the hype that followed when he snapped his fingers and wrote a cheque for an undisclosed amount for a digital collage by Rashid Rana that had been grabbing eyeballs at New Delhi&rsquo;s India Art Fair earlier this year, &ldquo;Kiran Nadar spending $2 million is no longer news &mdash; that is expected &mdash; but Rajdeep Samdani spending that money on buying art makes it news.

Moment of truth

New Delhi might tout itself as India&rsquo;s capital of art, but that&rsquo;s on account of its buying capacity rather than its ability to attract footfalls to its museums and galleries. Certainly, there&rsquo;s little by way of public art in the city, while Mumbai recently got itself Sudarshan Shetty&rsquo;s winged double-decker bus. Word is out that the Patna government is commissioning art for its public spaces, even if parochially by Bihari artists, and that includes its native star, Subodh Gupta, who currently lives and works in the National Capital Region.

Out in the open

On Tuesday morning, after what seemed like barely hours after I&rsquo;d gone to bed, the alarm roused me up to find dinner from the previous night still laid out on the dining table. On Monday morning, my wife had announced that she was going out of town &ndash; something she&rsquo;d made a habit of doing every few weeks, always without notice &ndash; only this time she&rsquo;d made sure to time it with the cook&rsquo;s decision to take a fortnight off, also without notice.

Kishore Singh: Fed up and unfulfilled

The wooden deck on the third floor of the house, sandwiched between a swimming pool suspended in a night sky and a bar managed by a barman who, never once, got off his mobile phone, thronged with Dhaka&rsquo;s bright and beautiful and &ndash; as someone in our cynical Indian circle pointed out &ndash; &ldquo;flighty and social&rdquo;. There was a sixties glamour to the scene, in the way the women dressed their hair and held their vodkas and smoked their cigarettes while the men paid court to them in an old-fashioned way.

Kishore Singh: Dhaka's bright and beautiful

It had been a trans-continental romance when, six decades ago, the Macedonian teenager fell in love with an Indian army officer from an aristocratic background. Despite all odds, they married, she came to India and made her home within a Rajput fiefdom, he went on to create a career out of hard-won victories in the field that earned him laurels and promotions, they raised a family, he died&hellip;and therein lies the twist.

Kishore Singh: Portrait of a lady and a life gone by

This morning, while leaving for work, my son pinched a bottle of white wine &ndash; &ldquo;for after&rdquo;, he said &ndash; weekends being when he heads off from office to be with his friends, though my wife insists that any wine bottles are intended for a girlfriend, while the whiskies are for keeping his stag friends in scotch spirits. Going by the depleting stock at home, he&rsquo;s been seeing the significant person almost as much as his buddies, though the lack of supply at least in the bar could be on account of my wife &mdash; not because she&rsquo;s taken to tippling like my mother-in-law used to, but because she&rsquo;s hiding away bottles from our son and daughter who must think their parents own a brewery.

Kishore Singh: Peek-a-booze

The actor we bump into occasionally at parties is more an acquaintance than a friend. Even so, I could tell that the hirsute eruption on his head &ndash; what fashionistas refer to as &ldquo;big hair&rdquo; &ndash; seemed on account of artificial help.

Kishore Singh: Hair goes

The last decade saw contemporary artists scale up the size of their works thanks to prosperity that allowed them access to huge studios &mdash; whether Subodh Gupta&rsquo;s Very Hungry God, or Rashid Rana&rsquo;s digital collages, or Jitish Kallat&rsquo;s wall of fibreglass bones forming Mahatma Gandhi&rsquo;s speech at Charles Saatchi&rsquo;s gallery in London, or even Surendran Nair with his tongue-tripping names for his canvases.

Bigger is better

It&rsquo;s the latest fad in the city and it&rsquo;s called the paparazzi diet, but I wouldn&rsquo;t have known about it if my wife&rsquo;s friend Sarla hadn&rsquo;t got spooked when she spotted a photographer heading her way. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to hide me,&rdquo; she said, ducking behind a potted aspidistra. I looked on curiously as she spat out her salmon and goat cheese crostini into a napkin, tucking the proof away in her jewelled minaudiere. From the same bag, she whipped out a tube of lipstick to touch up her lips while removing all evidence of asparagus cigars and wasabi lamb tarts. A quick whiff of perfume, a glance in the mirror, the glass of chardonnay hastily pushed out of sight, and Sarla abandoned her spot behind the leafy plant just as the photographer reached the spot. &ldquo;Darling!&rdquo; Sarla air-kissed cheeks she&rsquo;d been ignoring till then, pouting and posing for the benefit of the photographer.

Kishore Singh: Feeding frenzy of a paparazzi diet

In what is being widely reported as rollback season, indications from the critical March auctions are pointing to a disenchantment with the modern masters &mdash; either that, or like Mamata Banerjee, the aam aadmi wants better rationalisation of prices.

One step forward, two steps back

With two spiffy luxury hotels in the neighbourhood, I found myself signing up for an annual membership that would earn the family all manner of goodies &mdash; for a charge, naturally. While I paid the fee, the complimentary room stay voucher was purloined by my son, the meal discount vouchers were claimed by his sister, but every time we head out for a drink or a meal at either hotel, the kids make sure the bill still gets charged to my account.

Kishore Singh

Kishore Singh

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