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Ranjona Banerji

The world of the privileged that includes voluntary diet control and excessive exercise. (Representational Image/ Pexels)

Ranjona Banerji | The diet — where dreams go to die...

And there’s that whole dieting industry ready to 'help' you get your wallet so much thinner

22 May 2022 12:27 AM

Ranjona Banerji | What do you do, and other hairy questions

I have no husband and I have no children and this apparently automatically means that I have a lot of time to spare

24 Apr 2022 1:02 AM

Our knowledge of the Cosmos does tell us that colours of the flowers we love look the way they do because our star emits light mainly in the visible range. (Representational Image/ AFP)

Ranjona Banerji | When the tears comfort rather than the flowers

Dealing with grief is hard enough by itself, but often it is others who find your grief harder to deal with

26 Mar 2022 11:37 PM

Cover page of 'The Nutmeg’s Curse '. (By Arrangement)

Book Review | A spice’s violent trajectory begs us, do not ‘other’ nature, old societies

What happens when you get to the last page of a book feeling a bit confused and intrigued?

20 Mar 2022 12:14 AM

An overstrained medical system, the bartering and money chain, overworked doctors and nurses — and all this is without the additional destructive nature of the Virus — unless addressed now will cripple us totally as a society. (Representational image/ AP)

Ranjona Banerji | In India’s hospitals, don’t expect end-of-life care

We have learnt as a family that what we lack most terribly in India is geriatric care and an understanding of the last days of human life

20 Feb 2022 3:01 AM

There was a magical quality to a tram, as if you were somehow removed from the mad frenzy of normal Calcutta traffic. (Representational Image/ PTI)

Ranjona Banerji | A streetcar named nostalgia

These two cities, as Bombay, Mumbai, Calcutta, Kolkata, define my life

23 Jan 2022 2:09 AM

A Royal Bengal tiger walks near a lake at the Ranthambhore national park in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan (AP)

Ranjona Banerji | Some tips and tricks to survive the holidays

May the virus stop controlling us, and see you on the other side

19 Dec 2021 1:51 AM

Hoping for a world that understands what’s going to happen to all of us and a world which doesn’t look at bandaid quick fixes but at longer, happier solutions. (DC Image)

Ranjona Banerji | Old age, the final frontier; best to manage mortality

I forgive all of you who still believe that in some golden age we lived for hundreds of years

21 Nov 2021 3:31 AM

The sense of freedom was palpable in the UK in mid-September. Representational Image. (AFP)

Ranjona Banerji | It’s like 1980s redux as UK feels Brexit pain

The stranglehold of the pandemic was such that all societies now strain at the leash for freedom

24 Oct 2021 3:42 AM

Ranjona Banerji | Manoj, and the art of bonding professionally

Manoj was one of those people, one of the many we met in a short but harrowing journey from India to England this week

19 Sep 2021 2:26 AM

We used to call ‘paisa’ ‘naya paisa’ at the time, because the decimal system had replaced the old one of 16 annas in a rupee in 1957. (DC Image)

Ranjona Banerji | How paisa got ‘purana’ & self-reliance lost currency

The old coins of 50 paisa and 25 paisa were called aath (eight) anna and char (four) anna

22 Aug 2021 2:28 AM

It was Roger Federer we wanted to watch but we watched everything that was on offer.

Ranjona Banerji | Keeping score, for the love of tennis and for mother

It was in the 2000s that this love for tennis was reborn to a fulltime obsession and it was Roger Federer who did it

25 Jul 2021 1:09 AM

I remember clearly the first two major breaks I made with family listening time — Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and then eponymous Dire Straits debut album. (By arrangement)

Ranjona Banerji | Man, they don’t write songs like that anymore

My parents’ best friends had an Osibisa album they all loved, with the Afro-rock band’s signature psychedelic flying elephants on the cover

20 Jun 2021 7:34 AM

Children’s literature, if you can call Tolkien that, has been a go-to from whenever I stopped being a child, if that ever happens either. (By arrangement)

Ranjona Banerji | Freedom, as understood by escapists and readers

Those fables and fairy tales told to children follow similar patterns: that adults can be evil, you have to look out for yourself

16 May 2021 8:02 AM

Ranjona Banerji | Old sport! The story of my fitness journey

After you reach a certain age and size, in my case at least, your thoughts turn to another age and size, largely imaginary

18 Apr 2021 12:00 AM

One of the biggest achievements of this book is the lucid, non-judgmental manner in which Mahapatra debunks all the various swirls of misinformation around Covid-19 and its spread. — DC Image

Book Review: Urgent, cogent, matter-of-fact ready-reckoner on the C-virus

'Covid-19' does not just tackle the pandemic from scientific perspective but looks at historic, social and psychological angles as well

11 Apr 2021 8:34 AM

One asked me to look up the Internet for recipes, the other explained how to cook the kachnar.

Ranjona Banerji | What cooking teaches, how tastes are learned

I really learnt how to cook by experimentation. And by eating. To replicate tastes and memories

21 Mar 2021 4:27 AM

Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here By Aakar Patel. (Photo: Facebook @westlandbooks )

Ranjona Banerji | How atavism became ideology and Hindutva ambushed India

'Our Hindu Rashtra' is more a presentation of our recent history from the perspective of democracy

28 Feb 2021 4:09 AM

It’s not all sapsuckers and sappy stories. There are those harsh realities of the countryside. Of the lack of basic amenities. Health, education, migration for work. Of environmental destruction and the resultant devastation. (Photo: PTI)

Ranjona Banerji | Concrete threat, but there's bignonia, and birdsong

Dehradun has no buzz. It has higgledy-piggledy growth. Almost none of it is organic

21 Feb 2021 4:37 AM

I’m not the sort of writer who spent the Pandemic lockdown carefully crafting my creative skills and honing my “talent” so I could write that exemplar novel, that series of high philosophy essays to understand humanity, that definitive book on the state of the nation. (Representative Photo)

Ranjona Banerji | My one true calling… and how life got in the way

As an adolescent, like most others, I wrote those poems. Emotions crystallized in show-off nonsense from studying literature

17 Jan 2021 4:14 AM

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Shobhaa De