Letter from the Editor

Friends, Readers, Countrymen! Listen up — I don’t have much time. You see, this is my last issue of MORE, my final hour in the editor’s chair, and I have much to tell you before I depart from these pages, and your lives, once and for all.

(Feel free to cry and wail, by the way, in a highly public fashion. But please use a hankie. It’s a swine flu thing).

These past eight months in your company have been such a pleasure that very often, while I’m sitting at my desk, I’ll just break into song. A horrible tuneless cacophony, to be sure, but still a song of joy, the kind of joy that you experience when you follow your true calling, when you make a change in the world like Michael Jackson told us to.

Oh Dear Readers, if you could see the smiles on the children’s faces — children I’ve never met and never will, children who have never even heard of MORE — you’d know exactly what I’m talking about.

(Those of you who want to beat the ground and scream “Why? Why?” please make your way to the front).

But I’ve seen things that disturb me, too, my friends. Us lifestyle journalists, like war correspondents, are haunted by what we witness out on the front line. Oh, I’ve seen the pot-bellied businessmen in hotel lobbies, absently picking at their groin area before shaking hands. I’ve seen the MD with the comb-over and the Porsche Cayenne digging his nose at the dinner table. Many are the nights that I wake up, shuddering, a cold sweat on my brow. “What is it dear?” asks my wife. Oh nothing, just another lifestyle nightmare.

This is why MORE’s work is not yet done — as we set out to produce this latest issue about cocktails, there were those who said that cocktails were for girls and that real men drank whisky. This from real men with Rajnikanth moustaches and the bodily fragrance of a fishmonger’s armpits. This, at a time when world’s attention is upon us, at this critical hour!

But fear not, Dear Reader, for I have a dream. I dream of a world in which the the Indian executive class knows to wait in an orderly queue and uses deodorant on a regular basis. A world in which board-level corporates refrain from staring at white girls. In which belching after dinner isn’t compulsory.

Please carry the flame when I’m gone. 'Those were the days my friend, I thought they’d never end…'