The Best of TEL


Starting amidst uncertainties, with a question mark looming over the next issue, The Equator Line, (better known by its acronym TEL) has moved on to occupy a space that one has always felt for, but never knew existed. Only in its third year, the quarterly is about a world within ours but undiscovered until recently. TEL is now more than a way of life – it’s about fond smells from the street-corner shops, primetime noises of evening television, about a time left behind long ago. The lone DD days. Growing up watching the Amitabh Bachchan movies. TEL is about knowing how our lives have changed, surreptitiously, inexorably, under the spell of new technology. It’s not so much about stunning you with blaze flashes of information shrapnel as opening a window to a brave new world you have known about but never really appraised. If the magazine is different, it is in its tonal quality, the way it looks at the world around us.

The late morning light bathed the Howrah Bridge, which straddled the river, paving the way for what I dreaded at the moment – meeting Appa at the end of yet another failed trip. The outstretched arms of the bridge dominating the skyline were like an assurance, a source of comfort, before I faced his sharp barbs….