The Songbird on my Shoulder

A collection of short spurts of thought which result in the funny, thought-provoking, poignant worldview of a Madam who lives in Pune, India - the Oxford of the East, the Home of the Shrewsbury Biscuit, and the road-accident fatality-and-brain-damage capital of the world.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

When Santa arrived on elephant-back

A few days ago, Aravinda Anantharaman, the prolific columnist who writes as Tea Nanny for Mint Lounge, messaged me about a Brazilian blog ca...

Saturday, May 15, 2021

He was one of a kind

The last time I saw Dharmam would have been about fifty years ago. I don’t think we ever exchanged a single word in conversation. And yet, t...

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Mandai Nostalgia

Mandai 26 Jan 2021 Yesterday at Mandai was so very different from what it has been for the past five years. Since 2016, the first half of R...

Thursday, November 5, 2020

And so it turns out that I am a Panemanglor too

One day, out of the blue, I was thrilled to find my name on the Panemanglor family tree. Till that moment I had never really thought of m...

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

The Awful Truth About Pocha-Pani

Lockdown, being unable to leave the house or to have anyone visit, meant that housework had to be done by the inhabitants. Three of us shar...

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Village Naya (Pingala)

This is Rukshana, whose family belongs to a tribe of wandering minstrels. Through the generations, they painted their stories and sang t...

Sunday, January 5, 2020

The Case of the Aggarwal Cross

One day, the pots fell down. I was away, in another country, so far from home that if I tried to get any further I would be on the way ...

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About Me

Saaz Aggarwal: Saaz Aggarwal was born in Bombay on 5 October 1961, so close to Chowpatty Beach that to set sail and embark on a long voyage right away, all she had to do was cross the road. Just as well she didn’t, though, because a motion disorder that caused violent retching even while watching movies shot with a hand-held camera manifested (shortly after the discovery of the hand-held camera). At The Lawrence School, Lovedale, she was dull, unmotivated and an ideal illustration of Newton’s First Law (which states that a body continues to be in a state of rest or uniform motion unless compelled by an external force to change that state). It was further a period when her bushy (and rather splendid) single eyebrow required extensive maintenance with a pair of garden shears. In 1998, the same year in which she was awarded a ‘Best Mumma Ever’ cup as birthday present, Brown Critique, an eminent poetry journal, described her as ‘a well-known Mumbai-based editor and columnist who lives in Pune’ which prompted her to rush about telling people that she was ‘well known’. This blog documents her life as a Madam.

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