The President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, recently had the world in splits, embarrassingly so, with a stunningly casual throwaway line while addressing the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. It happened at a joint live video communique announcing the formation of an important defence strategic alliance between the United Kingdom, Australia and …
Author Archives: sureshsubrahmanyan
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are (not quite) dead
(A one-act play. With apologies to Tom Stoppard) The curtain rises and on stage are two beds in a nursing home. Lying on the beds are two very ill middle-aged males. At the foot of the beds hang two boards with the same bold legend on each, ‘Rosencrantz – Nil by mouth, Guildenstern – Nil …
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Footnotes in the sand
I am somewhat ambivalent on the subject of footnotes*. I can take them or leave them. For the most part, I find footnotes intrusive as they tend to get in the way of the natural flow of whatever it is that one is reading. Not all authors take recourse to this literary device. Those that …
Murder most fowl
Just for a change, this week I decided I will take a bird’s eye view of various happenings around the country, particularly those that had something peculiar or ridiculous to comment upon. Fortunately, in India we are never short of news items culled from our dailies that amuse and / or startle us. Whether these …
Uncle Tom at the park
I ran into an old timer a few days ago during my morning walk at our nearby park. I employ the phrase old timer with due care, given that I am not exactly a spring chicken myself. Let’s just say that he had the drop on me on the seniority front, which made him a …
Citius, Altius, Fortius.
Let me push straight off the starting blocks, to employ an athletic aphorism, seeing as we are all still wallowing in the warm afterglow of the Olympic Games just concluded in Tokyo. A word of caution. I may step on sensitive toes while offering my personal take on how the country has reacted to what …
A kingfisher’s tale
The former Indian business tycoon, Vijay Mallya, after protracted legal proceedings in the United Kingdom, has now been officially declared bankrupt, paving the way for a consortium of Indian banks to pursue a worldwide freezing order to seek repayment of debt owed by the now defunct Kingfisher Airlines. News reports. A good friend of mine …
WhatsApp Doc?
Just over a decade ago, 2010 to be precise, an extremely important development took place in India. The WhatsApp messaging application was launched, barely a year after two bright sparks, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, flagged it off in the United States. Those of us who happen to own a smartphone, which is practically the …
O! For a horse with wings
They sway’d about upon a rocking horse / And thought it Pegasus. John Keats, Sleep and Poetry. The three wise Gods of Asgard, in the Kingdom of Norse decided to get together at Valhalla to discuss a matter of great pith and moment. They were all double-masked to keep away a strange and unknown pestilence, …
Pleased as Punch
During the early 70s, when I was fortunate enough to land a job as an executive trainee in one of Calcutta’s leading advertising agencies, I had precious little idea of what I was letting myself in for. The hurly-burly, non-stop excitement of working shoulder to shoulder with bright-as-buttons creative copywriters and art directors; tough-as-nails, smooth-talking …
