Welcome to Venky's world!

Hello, and welcome to my cyberhome.

What you'll find here are links to a representative sample of my published articles. I've divided them into several categories. These were articles published in:

Daily News & Analysis (DNA) newspaper, from my current station in Hong Kong.

Outlook Money magazine, India's first and only personal finance magazine.

Outlook Traveller, a lavishly produced travel magazine from the Outlook Group

Outlook magazine and outlookindia.com

Frontline magazine, where I was previously employed, over a period.

Indian Express, where I started my career

You'll also find a compilation of:

My Chess Stories - fiction and non-fiction - published here and there

Humour columns published in various newspapers and magazines

Interviews - with Lech Walesa, Sir Richard Branson, 'Tiger' Pataudi, Pico Iyer,
Hema Malini, Anita Ratnam...

These articles, as you'll find, cover a range of subjects and reflect a catholicity of interests: commentaries on contemporary socio-politico-economic issues (from beauty pageants to Hindutva politics to livelihood issues), travel (from the Icehotel beyond the Arctic Circle to the Roof of the World to the 'sandy throne' in Leh), chess (on, among, other things, why Taurean pawn-pushers make good husbands)...
A word about the files I've uploaded: wherever possible, I've given links to PDF files of the articles as they appeared in the magazine(s) - because they give a sense of the richness of the visual display. But there's a downside here: bigger files and, consequently, slower downloads. And in any case, since my site directory comes with server space limitations, I have elsewhere had to give links to the articles as they appear on the website(s). It's not a happy state, but I'm trying to work around the server space crunch - and the problem of slow downloads. Perhaps when I have my own domain space, my own little bit of real estate in cyberspace...
And please accept my profound apologies in advance for the infuriating pop-ups and other ads. That's the price I'm constrained to make you pay for my going with a free domain space provider. That too shall be remedied someday...
For now, do have a look at my articles, and if there's anything in there that you would like to respond to, please feel free to e-mail me. I earnestly hope that what you read here will stir you enough to write to me - or at least induce a chuckle. In my reckoning, for a writer, there's no bigger failure than writing that leaves his readers cold or indifferent...