Ruskin Bond recalls the first time he saw the Tricolour being hoisted

Forget about the politics and religious conflicts, I always see the history of India as the evolution of the different class strata - upper, middle, and the working classes, he says

Many years ago, when I first read a collection of his short stories, I had imagined him as an incredibly old man sitting in a room packed to the rafters with books, churning out tales by the dozen each day. When I meet Ruskin Bond, over Zoom, the vision doesn’t seem very far from the truth. As the video comes on, I find myself staring into a yellow-painted space, perhaps underneath a staircase or very close to a sloping roof, given the slanted wooden beams. He’s wearing a lemon-yellow sweatshirt and the brightest of smiles. Behind him, the wall is