The strangest one-day international match has just finished, and I still can’t quite believe what I saw! Batting first, Australia posted 434 for four in 50 overs. Now, even a hundred runs less than that is supposed to be enough to finish off a game. But here comes the twist: South Africa chased the target […]
The “concept” of men
(Posted as part of the Blank Noise Project Blogathon) Delhi’s attitude to women and the reason why it is so can be perfectly illustrated by this following incident I was witness to some time last year. Coming home one late afternoon, I boarded a bus that got pretty crowed a few stops ahead. Among the […]
Terrorist on a red carpet!
All right, rant alert! I sometimes wonder where our priorities went—with George Bush in town, normal life has been thrown out of gear and board exam students have been told to plan their schedule around his! I remember all to well having to turn up at a strange centre for your first public examination… and […]
Loony Toons: In Search of a Lost Tradition
If the Danish cartoon controversy has proved one thing is it this: our ability to laugh at ourselves is as endangered as the rainforests. Were Muslims the world over really and truly offended by something as innocuous as cartoons or—as the conspiracy theorists insist—was the whole thing just a political controversy to divert attention from […]
Police as contract killers
Sting operations are quite the flavour of the day. And though some argue that they are passé and almost everyone agrees they can get tiresome, at times they can be horrifyingly fascinating. As in a recent Star New sting, where reporters approached police officers and offered them money to bump off a so-called gunda. And […]
Mis-leading light!
That the Indian media is more interested in pandering to the whims of sponsors and making money rather than doing responsible news coverage has been well established, and enough bloggers have ranted about it. That the Times of India (TOI) is a leading light in this phenomenon is also quite well accepted. But what is […]
Loot list!
Evidently, with passing age one’s interest in birthdays and getting presents is supposed to wane. However, having had thirty of them has done absolutely to quench my thirst—*cough* greed *cough*… Anyhow, I was extremely pleased with my haul this time around. Perhaps it was the “thirty” thing that made people generous! The guilt was too […]
A book release but no book!
If it seems ridiculous, rest assured it’s happened to me! Here I am now, with an almost-published book to my name due for release in a literature festival, and—surprise, surprise—NO BOOK! I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining. After all, my manuscript was accepted for publication with relatively minor headaches. I liked the publisher, they liked […]
LOST: India’s 10 million daughters
An elderly woman who lives in the flat below us said one day that she was off on a condolence visit to a relative. The “occasion”: the birth of a daughter. No, we didn’t need a paper published in Lancet to tell us that India is missing 10 million girls in the past 20 years. […]