Posts Tagged With: India
It’s Hard Out There For A Talking Head
ME: Hello? HT: Hello ma’am. I am Swapnil from [news channel with staggeringly high viewership]. Will you give me your opinion? ME: Er, what is this about? HT: Ma’am I would like your opinion. ME: On anything in particular? HT: Yes ma’am. That press gag law. You have written many things about it. ME: The [...]
Protesting Against Protest
Some months ago, Mamata Banerjee won the West Bengal elections with a thumping majority and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) virtually disappeared from a state that was once considered its stronghold. Banerjee’s success should have been an example of how an insignificant figure can take on Frankenstein proportions if one mishandles the public relations [...]
Ignorance is Bliss
This morning I discovered I don’t have the temperament for white collar crimes. I woke up to an SMS from the Income Tax Department. “DMTINNSDL” (no idea what that stands for) told me that there was a discrepancy in my papers; letter has been sent; call on blah blah number or visit the website for [...]
Pride of place
Sir V.S. Naipaul, novelist and Nobel laureate, wants a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card. If The Onion had reported this, it would make sense but it appears this is for real. According to news reports, Lady Nadira Naipaul was hoping to sashay in to the Indian embassy in London and pick up a PIO [...]
Royally pissed
In Disney’s most recent bid to be modern and cosmopolitan, “The Princess and the Frog“, the princess actually appears at the end, by which I mean that the little black girl who is the heroine of the story needs to marry a prince in order to fulfill the movie’s title. However, much of the movie [...]
Counting cows and other animals
Two hours into counting and here’s what the leads look like: Congress-led alliance:225 BJP-led alliance: 149 (is the cow looking a little less petrified?) Janata Dal and Communisty Party-led alliance: 70 RJD-led alliance: 32. There are 543 seats altogether. In Orissa, Navin Patnaik has emerged as a winner without tying up with either Congress or [...]
No correspondence
Who says one man can’t make a difference? It took only one man to turn me from a faithful reader of the New York Times to someone who looks at all their articles with the kind of suspicion generally reserved for … I dunno, pap smear tests. This one man has had his articles on [...]
Talk to her
We had the first bout of rain last night. Once upon a time, I’m told the monsoon used to come to Mumbai on June 10 with the regularity of a cuckoo clock. It’s become less punctual over the years and this lack of punctuality has given rise to what is rumoured to be a $2.5 [...]
Not like this only
I like Manish Vij. I really do. Aside from everything else, he gives me solid publicity by plucking things I write here and plonking them on his most entertaining website Ultrabrown. Which is why it’s incredibly infuriating to find him not just mentioned in an essay that had me chewing on the edge of my [...]
World Domination
