Preface: This is not my usual weekly blog, which is generally slated for Sundays. It being Deepavali (or Diwali), I am reproducing, out of turn, a piece I wrote on this festival a few years ago. Some of you may have read it (you are free to re-read it or skip it), many of you probably …
Continue reading ” Deepavali and Diwali. India’s ‘son et lumière.’”
One of the earliest advertisements I can recall, and this was much before I took up advertising as a profession, was for Signal toothpaste. The tag line for the brand was, ‘the red stripes contain hexachlorophene,’ which promised to take care of bad breath. Many of us rushed to the nearest provision store (Amazon was …
A prefatory note: I wrote this piece exactly three years ago on the shenanigans of the incorrigible cricketer-turned-politician, Navjot Singh Sidhu. For reasons unfathomable, I failed to include it in any of the three collections I published in book form. This column that slipped the net, as it were, was more in the nature of …
Continue reading “Sidhuism – a blissful state of mindlessness”
Let’s hear it for India’s top gun industrialist. Mukesh Ambani’s personal net worth has crossed $100 billion. He joins Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and a handful of other worthies who have worked their way up to the top of the wealth ladder. The list, recently put out by the …
The term ‘batsman’ has been amended to the gender-neutral term ‘batter’ in the Laws of Cricket to stress the importance of the women’s game, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) announced recently. As an avid cricket aficionado, I have been in recent times turning my mind over to the subject of cricketing nomenclature. In particular, I …
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ – John Greenleaf Whittier As you age irrevocably, well into your dotage, you start to think more about things. All sorts of things. Could I have handled things differently, should I have handled things differently? Should I have considered …
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 …
(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 …
Continue reading “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are (not quite) dead”
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 …
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 …
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