The wife told me we had to visit the neighbors this morning. She said we should take a box of sweets along with us. “Whatever for?” I asked, “are they moving out?” “Their daughter passed her SSC. It is a big occasion for them. Wear your suit!” “Suit?” I asked,…
Robert Clements is a journalist and newspaper columnist. With an estimated 6 million readership, his column, Bob’s Banter is published in over 30 newspapers and magazines in nearly every state in India, as well as in the top newspapers of Bangladesh, London and Dubai and is also translated into Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.
No Need for Men..!
A few years ago, a scientist, Paul de Sousa of Edinburgh University announced at the BA Science Festival in Dublin that his team had succeeded in creating ‘virgin embryos’, or parthenotes, by stimulating a human egg to start dividing like an embryo without the addition of any genetic material from…
Mahabalipuram and Room Service..!
A moneyed friend of mine had just come back from a holiday he’d spent at Mahabalipuram, the temple town a few kilometres from Chennai. Since I’d been there a few times, I’d told him about the carvings, the sculptures and the temples, and was quite eager to hear his own…
Farmers Protests and General Eisenhower..!
And as I hear that the Prime Minister has repealed the three farm laws, I move into the future and hear people, especially the new historians of our country saying, ‘There was never any farmer protests!” ‘Ofcourse there was!” I shout, “Through days of bitter cold and other days of…
The God Particle..!
Many years ago, I sat in an apartment in New York listening to an interesting argument between an elderly man and a doctor, who had been a childhood friend of mine. They were talking about religion and the topic veered around the existence of God. Both gave seemingly convincing arguments…
The Modi Jacket..!
There’s only one person who looks good in the Modi jacket, and that’s the Prime Minister himself! Today, every tailor, throughout the country is rolling out thousands of yards of cloth stitching these new sleeveless fashion statements for men of all shapes and sizes, who look strikingly ridiculous as they…
Yuk! It’s A Worm..!
This morning I laughed as I read a comic strip where two ugly sea creatures at the bottom of the sea, awful squiggly, wriggly tentacles spread all over sea bed, bodies ugly, revolting, beady eyes peering from a mass of quivering flesh, look at each other, point to the seabed…
My Visiting Card..!
“We’re getting a visiting card made for you sir!” said someone on my staff, and I shuddered. It’s become fashionable today to hand out business cards or so it seems to me, as cards, nineteen to the dozen are dished out to me. “Pleased to meet you,” I say extending…
A Small Cycle..!
Yesterday was Children’s Day and I saw a small cycle and a little boy! Both doing a man’s job. He was the milkman’s little son, hardly seven or eight, and with his tiny painted cycle, laden with milk sachets he trudged from house to house, pushing his wee yellow and…
Many Red Sea Partings..!
’Twas while walking in heaven a few years from today, I chanced to see two Israelites, trudging a little slowly, like they’d been forty years in the wilderness, so I asked the angel playing her harp at the side of the heavenly road if them two were Jews, who’d crossed…
Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and writes a daily column, which has graced the pages of over 60 newspapers and magazines, from a daily column in the Khaleej Times, Dubai, the Morning Star, London, and in nearly every state in India, from The Statesman in Kolkata, to the Kashmir Times in Kashmir to the Trinity Mirror in Chennai.