Over half a century ago, a young man, my father Kamal Hazarika, sat at the back of a bus listening to the sound of its engine ticking over. He became inspired with its rhythmic backbeat and the embryo of a song developed in his mind. He composed the tune and penned its lyrics before any…
Category: Memoirs
A Merry Assamese Christmas Day
Prologue: When I was a child in the 80s, families from Assam in north east India who had settled in the UK would meet to celebrate Christmas Day. This post weaves together a collection of memories of those bygone days of friends, togetherness, laughter and joy . *** It was the warmth at first. Usually on the…
The Childhood Adventures of Owning a Globe
On my seventh birthday my parents gave me a globe. My own spherical world of colourful landmasses and oceans, strung together with lines and stitched down with words, sat on a shelf by my bed. At first I thought it was broken for it tilted to one side. My dad convinced me that many things in…
Miss Freeman’s woodwork class: the end of my days of mischief
It took a moment of brilliance from a school teacher to turn me around and push me on to the straight and narrow. Her name was Miss Freeman and she taught woodwork .
The Revenge of the Typo: How a Print Error Nearly Ended My Career
We all make typos don’t we? Of course we do, because we bloggers are human and proofreaders are luxuries. Nevertheless, they’re so annoying, the way they play hide and seek, like little germs, taking refuge in our blogposts till we hit the big blue ‘Publish’ button, after which point they come crawling out of the…
