Many decades ago while in my teens I loved taking the double- decker bus from the city, run up the stairs to the upper deck, rush to the front seat, and enjoy a glorious ride to the Mumbai suburbs. As night set in, I would put the front glass pane…
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.
Fighting Fair in the Bedroom…!
Most of the nastiest fights take place not on battlefields or war zones, but within a bedroom. Fights, which are mainly words, and I’m not going to talk about fist fights or slaps or blows because perpetrators of those methods need to be shamed in public and have no place…
History and Heritage Erased..!
And now that the elections are over, I was happy to hear the elected representatives are eager to get down to work, “We have so much to do!” sighed a newly elected representative, “First I want to rename the street I live on after my father, the chowk at the…
Being Bored Again..!
After yesterday’s column on the Gift of Boredom, I decided to delve a little more on the benefits of being bored: Enhanced creativity: Boredom can force your mind to wander and explore new ideas. When you’re not focused on specific tasks, your brain has the opportunity to come up with…
The Gift of Boredom..!
Tomorrow I’ll be addressing teachers and my talk is on ‘Fostering Creativity and Imagination,’ “What’s a gift we all have received but we most dislike?” I’m going to ask, and then will tell them, ”it’s the gift of boredom.” Then I’m going to go a step farther, “If you feel…
Don’t Close Your Gates..!
“The ultimate tragedy,” said Martin Luther King, “is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Yes, the silence you maintain when wrong things happen, is as bad as carrying out those same acts of injustice against the innocent. God…
Do You Dare Ask?
All the change for the better that’s happened in our world, is because people simply asked. Why am I a slave, and not free like the white man? Cried the blacks in America, even as they were aware of a constitution stating, all men were equal, even as they saw…
Stop Thinking, Start Thanking..!
While walking in the park a few years ago I passed an elderly gentleman, a friend of mine, who seemed to be walking a tad slowly and pensively, “A penny for your thoughts?” I asked. “I think I’m getting old!” he said sadly, and at that time his daughter passed…
Home, Hearth and Heart..!
T’was just this morning I opened the paper and found a pretty model showing her dainty self on a dozen different beds. Bewitching, she looked beckoning newspaper readers to glance at different rooms of a hotel she was advertising for: The Arabian room, Chinese and Polynesian, French and English, Mexican…
Distracted on Life’s Highway..!
Once while driving down the highway I thought, “What a drive!” As I drove I noticed tire marks that crisscrossed the road. “Burst tires!” I realized. Tires of motorists who had not checked their air pressure before venturing onto the highway. I noticed that these tire markings veered onto the…
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.