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Nov 13, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Ash Ranpura
Dear Dr Ash,I really want to give my 16-year-old son the freedom to take risks and make his own mistakes and to not be an overly protective mum. And yet, at the same time, I want to wrap him in cotton wool and lock him in his room and never allow him to ride a motorbike, or go travelling to South America. He’s started talking about wanting an electric bike to travel to sixth form college and even that has given me a near nervous breakdown.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Ash Ranpura
Dear Dr Ash,I love a good discussion about politics but one of my closest friends is always pushing the envelope. He just won’t let things drop and when I try to change topic if things are getting overheated, he rapidly steers it back. Worse still, he will almost always spend the next two weeks sending me articles and opinions from X in an effort to make me see the supposed error of my ways.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Antony Beevor |Ash Ranpura
The streets and cafés of Paris have long provided a stage for the theatre of everyday life, perhaps more than in any other city. Jean-Paul Sartre noted in the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain how waiters played at the role of waiter, delivering an order with a nonchalant flourish. The phenomenon of the waiter as subconscious actor was brought into his major work, L’Être et le Néant, that largely unreadable bible of Existentialist philosophy.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Ash Ranpura
Dear Dr Ash,I’m usually a confident sort of person but for some reason my in-laws reduce me to jelly. My wife’s father comes from what I suppose you’d call “landed gentry” and hasn’t really strayed much outside that milieu. He’s disappointed with his daughter for marrying the son of a pharmacist and doesn’t bother to hide it. When we go and stay in their huge, draughty country house I feel I’m constantly under judgement for my leftie views and vulgar ways.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Joanna Grochowicz |Ash Ranpura
It’s the first real day of summer sun in London and we’ve chosen to meet in the dark. Or rather, in a rickety eighteenth-century building amid the chipped furniture and faded roller blinds of a writers’ club in Soho. Charles Spencer sits on a threadbare banquette by the open sash window as the clinking of bottle deliveries and shouted conversations drift up from Lexington Street.
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Mar 31, 2024 | 
perspectivemedia.com | Patricia Campbell |Rowan Pelling |Ash Ranpura
We return to our beginnings if we travel far enough on a straight course. I ponder this as I heave my rucksack into a rickshaw and we weave into the Vellorean night. In the driver’s mirror, I see my nineteen-year-old self smiling back. After 30 years I have returned to Tamil Nadu in India for an exam in Tropical Medicine. A line connects the decades like an arrow – a circle in time is complete. On the plane from Oslo, I had scrolled through the Calcutta Rescue Fund Facebook page.
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Dec 14, 2023 | 
perspectivemag.co.uk | Susanna Forrest |Ash Ranpura
Jul is coming to southern Sweden. No, the pine fronds aren’t yet framing the shop windows, and yes, everyone keeps fairylights on their balconies all year round in gloomy Skåne anyway. And no, the eerie parade of white-frocked Lucias with their candle crowns has not yet been spotted on the cobbled streets of Lund, nor are the plain electric candelabras glowing austerely from windows.
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Dec 14, 2023 | 
perspectivemag.co.uk | Ash Ranpura
Dear Dr Ash,I am one of six children (we’re now aged between 38 and 54) and we will all be hiring a house for the New Year with our partners and children. I know my wife and kids will have a great time, which is why I’m doing it, but I’m already worried that I’m going to fall into some unhelpful patterns with the doctor brother who’s next up from me in the pecking order – he’s number two in the family and I’m the third.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
perspectivemag.co.uk | Ash Ranpura |Joy Lo Dico
As this is our long Winter issue, we wanted a theme that wouldn’t cast gloom into the breast of every reader. This is, after all, a time for both feasting and philosophical reflection, as we prepare for the year ahead. What better subject then, than food? Especially when, as both Sanjana Modha and Bishi Bhattacharya suggest in our pages, what we prepare and eat nourishes body and soul.
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Nov 9, 2023 | 
perspectivemag.co.uk | Ash Ranpura |Mic Wright
Dear Dr Ash,I have a teenage son who is just starting to show a very active interest in the opposite sex. In the wake of #MeToo and the recent allegations against Russell Brand, I am very conscious of trying to raise him to be respectful in his relations with women. I am really trying to impress upon him how important it is to always be sure that you have full consent before you pursue any kind of physical intimacy – even a kiss.
