The issue: Turning my back

The soundtrack: The big empty

As some of you may have noticed if your attention was not taken up by an attention-seeking gnat, I didn’t write last week’s edition of my blog. This absence — a keen one that I felt in my desultory life of checking commas and inverted commas and writing sentences with the word ‘desultory’ in them — was felt by me pretty much the whole of last week. Read more

The Issue: Waking up

The Soundtrack: All I have to do is dream

I’ve been having mystical experiences. Not only do I hear voices once I’m awake, but I hear voices that tell me, ‘Get up you #*@!er or I’ll be late!’ These, to be honest, were words I would wake up to in that half-drugged, half-very drugged state that I used to experience while, waking up somewhere between 8.30 and 8.55 am every weekday. Read more

The issue: Nehru-Edwina

The soundtrack: Tainted love

So the proposed Hollywood movie on the love affair between Chacha Nehru and Edwina Madam will never be out in a cinema near you. Read more

The issue: Delhi after the Commonwealth Games
The soundtrack: The Passenger

The idea of a city being built round a prestigious international event has its modern origins in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Read more

The issue: The Chandrayan 1 failure
The soundtrack: Space Oddity

We’re a great bunch when it comes to cheering all out Incredibly Fantastical Superduper India success stories. But are we a mature, finger-on-our-chin lot when we screw up? With failure — which apparently happens to even the muscled lot like the Americans and that superhero called Successman — do we go into denial? Or worse, super-denial, by which I mean not saying that failure didn’t happen but that the failure was actually a success manipulated into a ‘negative story’ by adversaries. Read more

The Issue: Alice in Wonderland metaphors

The Soundtrack: White Rabbit

Have you noticed how Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has become the standard textbook for describing the total bawaal within the BJP? Read more

The Issue: SRK’s airport travails
The Soundtrack: My Name Is Mud

It’s nearly 5 in the morning, a very early time of the day to laugh. But I’m still finding it hilarious how ‘the nation’ (as some media descriptions have it) is shocked by the news of Shah Rukh Khan being questioned for “almost two hours” by authorities in Newark airport. Read more

The Issue: The Art of Lying

The Soundtrack: Don’t Ask Me No Questions

Last week, I was totally submerged in lies. Read more

The Issue: Fear of flying

The Soundtrack: Scorpio Rising Read more

The Issue: Television as contraceptive

The Soundtrack: Submission

I watch a lot of television. (Not news channels, but real television.) I don’t have any kids. (Although I want one, if not some.) Read more