The Cheek of Sridevi, and Bringing Up Other Bodies
Image via the glorious sridevi the empress What happened to Manju of Chaalbaaz after the credits rolled and she married the stubbly suitable boy Suraj, aka Sunny Deol? Sure he loved her, certainly he was happy he married her rather than the terrified little Anju. But in a decade after they had two children did...
The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook
I met Lavanya when I was 19 and then everyone else in the world through her. When we left college we still hung out a lot. It was 2001 and we drank a lot. We made friends with strangers. We left jobs after three days because we hated them. We carried small tubes of toothpaste...
The dumbing down of WikiLeaks
DID ANYONE else get the feeling that the Mayawati- Julian Assange exchange this fortnight sounded like the trailer of a romantic comedy? A trailer for the kind of film that has a raging, warring couple whose defences break down only in the last 20 minutes. The kind with a fiery Beatrice-like heroine who, when asked...
If It is Sweet
THE THIRD World is so useful. Like that shirt you wore for 10 years and are now using to mop the kitchen floor, you can always find one last squeeze. In 2010, American giant Kraft Foods acquired old rival British confectionary Cadbury globally (including the Indian operations) for $19.6 billion. India is one of...
Sometimes, even the darkness insists on speaking
A Kenyan folktale tells the story of a Sultan’s wife who wasted away in the palace and a peasant’s wife who was plump and strong. The Sultan interrogated the peasant – what was he feeding his wife? The peasant replied, “Meat of the tongue”. But no fancy-shmancy meat of the tongue that the Sultan ordered...
Who’s Your Papa CJ?
FIRST, THE warm-up. The MC comes on and introduces the opening act. The comedy crowd in Delhi takes the conventions of stand-up seriously. As many as six open mike nights a week, lots of professional shows and a great ton of interest — stand-up is hot right now. Hence the embarrassing Tata Docomo ad with...
The New Indian Fog
IN THE third of the four sections of The Beautiful and the Damned — The Factory — the author speculates on why a young migrant describes his chronic illness merely as ‘pain’: “Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad,...
I Will Never Heil Again
The Plot Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler addressing him as “My Dear Friend”, suggesting he mend his ways. All manner of narratives could have addressed this historical Ripley’s Believe it or Not item. The one chosen is college-circuit drawing room tragedy. Gandhi walks about. Hitler rants as the Reich collapses. Indian National...
Why Are We Such Angry Birds On Twitter?
IF YOU are addicted to the British tabloids, you will know that between 2002 and 2007, British confessional columnist Liz Jones and husband Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal had a very public courtship, marriage and break-up. Jones’ widely read Sunday column had a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened in her love life. During the marriage, Nirpal...
The ladies have familiar feelings
THE DELHI launch of Granta’s feminism issue — The F Word — took an unprecedented, iconoclastic course. All four panelists including sole contributor from India, Urvashi Butalia, what is the right word now… dissed the book for leaning heavily towards the experiences of the straight, white female. After reading the book, one is inclined to...
A revolutionary artist. How the British burnt his shocking images from the 1943 Bengal Famine. And how we can finally see them today.
SOMETHING OF the thrill of reading the Pepys diaries is awakened at the new Chittaprosad retrospective at the Delhi Art Gallery. It is an enormous show with much to see and much historical frisson to invoke. First, several stunningly produced books, including a collection of his political portraits and a selection of the artist’s letters...
Well played Zoya, well played
You understand that we don’t think women can only make ladies-type films. Understand also that we don’t have problems with ladies-type films. Ah, so now all that hedging has been done let us ask this question. Why didn’t anyone tell us Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is a chick-flick? This is a movie that has all...
