The story
When I see a forgotten thing, of whose significance only I know, there’s a tightening in my chest and I think to myself that this forgetting and this discovery are a story. When the excitement fades, I...
View ArticleSabotaging bad movies
Reading a story today about the new old Bollywood meme of rumor and gossip being used to sink movies, I wondered why the firmament isn't called out more often on this lie. When a star becomes part of a...
View ArticleThe wives who stayed behind
Rajni George has written a lovely story about women whose husbands live and work in the Middle East. Towards the end of her piece, George delves on the classic conflicts immigrants grapple with in a...
View ArticleAmitabh Bachchan's *cough* work
Even by the breathtakingly atrocious standard of film reporting at Bombay Times, this story is incredible. An excerpt:Amitabh Bachchan gave a funny dialogue of a South Indian film, "I will hit you so...
View ArticleAnother place, another plane, another time, another space
There are nine screws above me. Nine white dome-shaped heads pierced through the wings of the fan. Two hanging lights bracket this fan, and they all swing this way and that when a strong breeze rushes...
View ArticleAirtel and me, the media.
It was a pretty calm and unexciting day when the phone rang, as it always did, quite suddenly.Voice: Hello. I'm calling from IMRB on behalf of Airtel broadband to check customer satisfaction. Could you...
View ArticleThe spirit of inquiry
Reading The Emperor of All Maladies today, I came by a passage whose sentiment I found familiar ."Basic research," [Vannevar] Bush wrote, "is performed without thought of practical ends. It results in...
View ArticleThe phantom leap
Eight days short of six years ago, when there was time for internal dialogue, I wrote this. Many things have changed since, but the conflicts present in the last paragraph have remained. There have...
View ArticleWhy they left
Last Sunday, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Samanth Subramanian, and I caught up.As an aside, one of the things I'm irrationally proud of - don't ask why - is that Samanth edited the first article of my...
View ArticleThe pianist
The pianist, a quiet man from Washington, contemplated what he would do after he gave up what he was born to do. Greying, slowing, he no longer relegated tasks to the future, when he would be greyer,...
View ArticleThe Dubai-returns
To me, a memory is a story whose cast and lines change imperceptibly with each recollection. Seen from other angles, memories become a kind of hazy witness report. Put together, they overlap to form...
View ArticleThe half-way point
Bear with me a moment. I'm trying to explore the nature of something.I've found that when it comes to memories, there is an inevitable point when what you know and what you feel and what you feel about...
View ArticleBeautiful words from a beautiful book
"When you write a book, you willingly step into the public arena, no longer reporter but being reported upon, no longer jotting down notes on the debate but joining in it. You should welcome to...
View ArticleA fan's note on Indian cricket
I don’t remember when exactly I began to have this fear, but the specter of an Indian team shorn of its extraordinary fortune (there’s no other way to describe how so many great batsmen turned up at...
View ArticleThe Times of India is too big for details
Indranil Basu’s front page Times of India story on the discontent in Indian cricket makes me cringe. Here’s is a bloated rumor masquerading as a major sports story. Just take a look at the headline,...
View ArticleCaravan reportage: Mark Mascarenhas
The February 2012 issue of The Caravan contains my first story for the magazine. In it I take a look back at Mark Mascarenhas, Indian cricket's first superstar agent, who also ushered in a new...
View ArticleThe man with no name
It's been interesting to see how people refer to Shirish Kunder. Many identified him by name, of course, but a noticeable number didn't. Our biggest English paper referred to him as Farah Khan's...
View ArticleWhat liberty should be
Like me, a lot of you probably haven't heard about the Whitney v California case from 1927. I just stumbled up on the case, and can't help but envy the society that benefits from it. The judgement is a...
View ArticleNot as global as kabaddi
In one devastating paragraph, Sambit Bal tells you why cricket isn't a global game:Only notionally is cricket a global game. It is a mainstream sport only in ten countries. Of these, nearly half can't...
View ArticleHow can I invest in Rohit Shetty?
I just realized that Rohit Shetty has directed five movies in four years. And if all his announced projects come to fruition, he will have eight movies in six by the end of next year.Shetty doesn't...
View ArticleObituaries deserve better
The first paragraph of Mumbai Mirror's remembrance of Sharada Dwivedi:It is rather ironical that writer-historian-author of several books on Mumbai, who was instrumental in forming the Kala Ghoda Art...
View ArticleRights for votes
Over at the Wall Street Journal, Eric Bellman reports on developing countries demanding more rights for their overseas laborers.The millions who go abroad to take jobs as domestic workers - mostly...
View ArticleKapil Sibal's super amazing plan to boost social science research that will...
Giving them awards.(Poetry, tablets, taming the internet, and now this. Seriously, is there any problem Sibal can't solve?)
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You don't say
In this month's issue of The Caravan, I looked at the regulations that have led to unprecedented levels of self-censorship on modern Indian television. As channels grow more reluctant of causing...
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