Kusum Choppra

I have always been very proud of being an Indian to the core. Despite a lifetime in the Far East, my father, a proud media man in the INA (Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose), never gave up his Indian passport. In college, I even won a Femina Best Letter award for a letter in which I wrote that I felt truly Indian because few people recognized me as a Sindhi. Most took me for Punjabi, Maharashtrian, Bengali, even Muslim, depending on the clothes I was wearing when I met them. Then I became even more Indian:   a Sindhi   married a Punjabi,   children born and bred in Gujarat,   a Sindhi-Parsi son in law, a Sindhi-Gujarati daughter in law and another Kashmiri.     Sara Hindustan Hamara!! I was born in Singapore and brought up in Jakarta, Indonesia.   That made for an Overseas Indian mentality which looks back at India with a romantic attitude, enhanced memories of a happy childhood and detailed ones of India’s drawbacks.   Fortu...

I just lost a response I was giving Elizabeth on her post about the unnerved feelings during promotions of her book. Perhaps because I'm new to the SheWrites system. Sorry haven't posted since joining as I was going through several upheavals. Just about balancing out to start the process of marketing my new anthology of hope for Women traumatized by a host of issues, from domestic violence, widowhood and divorce to rape and inheritance. Writing was exciting, giving twists and unexpected turns to each story. But the new onerous task of marketing here, there and everywhere is frightening to say the least. I'm looking back at my adventures with my protagonists in the anthology titled Nirbhaya & Others Who Dared and those of my next novel which is partly written with quite bit of nostalgia, as I unravel the intricacies of modern day marketing of a book that tells the tales of a gang rape survivor, a stalked woman, a lady army officer, different attitudes to divo...

What is in a name? asked the Bard centuries ago. Today…. plenty. Apart from the numerological implications of a name, surname and nickname….  Look at it this way: The name plate is a signature of Male Ego.    His name is there is bold letters.   May be his father’s too, or sometimes his mother’s. If the wife’s is there, it becomes a big issue. That is even in times when men are often forced to buys homes in their wives’ names to escape a chunk of tax. Then there are the emergent double barreled names:    wife and husband, both names.    Otherwise the wife with double surname, her maiden one and her marital one.    In the case of Muslim ones, the names of her father and her maiden surname.   Where’s the room for one more? Guess where all these thoughts come from? LOL ….. lounging in the tender sun and just looking around.    The name plates were a reminder of neighbors.    Other...

If music be the food of love, play on!   Said the Bard. In our times, he would say IF food be the music of blogs, Blog On … .. Ha Ha!! Bloggers and foodies got together to admire a new generation evolution in fast foods that is happening in   right in Ahmedabad. Imagine, taking apart the economic models of MacDonalds and KFC, central purchase, central kitchen et all, perked up with a minimal franchise fee and putting them together in a desi model to dish out economy priced yet filling Desi Fast Foods, from desi looking premises rather than fancy Restaurants with their overheads pricing them out of your daily pocket, All this from KUTCHI KING   outlets reaching out from Ahmedabad to out of Gujarat…may be soon Dubai …………. Here comes KK for your desi palates! Kutchi King is evolving all the time.   After the urges for hygienic bataka vadas, dhabeli, vada pau, bread pakoras et all,   now come the ground breaking Chinese Burger with fri...

I blinked at his question “How many countries have you travelled through in your life?” A young blogger at a blogger’s meet.   Scratching memory, I counted one short of a bare handful.   His mouth almost fell open. Obviously memories would raise their heads. How do I manage to sound so well travelled, when in fact I am about the laziest person I know? Two types of input surfaced:   Reading and… Reading. Today, the Net is a treasure trove of facts for those who care to dig for them; but the older generation reading carried us on magic carpets into distant lands that never failed to emote and evolve into treasured memories. Regina Pacis School, Jakarta in the 1950s taught geography and architectural appreciation from Std. 1. Obviously they did a very good job for me to remember my first standard geography lessons on the rain forest lands of Brazil, Congo and Indonesia itself; plus architectural wonders of early England and Europe. The library at Hutchings Hi...