Beginning a new column is like entering into a marriage arranged by others. One worries about a possible incompatibility with the conceptual audience. Am I likable? Do the topics I fancy writing about interest others? Such questions provide unease and delay the decisions. This is to be a column directed at the largest audience imaginable. What is common in me and in all of them? . Not poetry. Not art. Not even the political manifesto of a non-political person living in the small town of Cochin. An editor of a Bombay papers weekend issue advised me not to write on Cochin in my column. Bombayites only like to read of their own city or of the metros of the West. The readers were anglicised and impatient with desk talk. The upper middle classes are more westernised today than their ancestors were, while the British ruled Indian. Dress might be ethnic but the dialect was most certainly a hybrid with touches of Goanese. "Yawl are good people Mrs Das although yawl...