The Issue: Not Going To Work

The Soundtrack: Santa Monica

I did a strange thing on Monday. I didn’t go to work. It wasn’t as if I had planned a picnic or a Dilli darshan or a long lunch with friends (most of whom had a chhutti thanks to Guru Govind Singh). 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: Climate change
The Soundtrack: It’s too darn hot

It was nuclear disarmament when I used to wear shorts. Now that I wear boxers (as overwear only!), it’s climate change. Every generation gets its heave-ho with some global danger topic or the other. Read more

The Issue: The sainthood of Obama

The Soundtrack: Spirit in the sky

The Mayurvihar Bengali Post-Puja Cultural Association (MBPPCA) was toying with the idea of awarding Barack Obama a lifetime achievement award. Now it seems that the Nobel Academy has pipped it to the post. Which is a pity because the MBPPCA, after portraying the asura being impaled by Durga during the Pujas two years ago, had run out of ideas by which its members could show the ‘war-mongering, hegemonistic, so-what-if-he’s-a-friend-of-India?’ George W. Bush as the embodiment of pure evil — and thereby showcase their own sense of goodness. Read more

The Issue: Passing out
The Soundtrack: Tubthumping

Sometime in the very early 90s, I first passed out in college. It would be only in the little later 90s that I passed out of college. To be quite specific, I had, after an evening of merrymaking that involved guitar-playing (a passable rendition of Nirvana’s ‘Rape me’ from the band’s final studio album, In Utero), cycling round and round, and destroying a mosquito net (the holes seemed way too small), I had felt incredibly tired and, with my head swimming, closed my eyes. Since I didn’t open them again till the next morning, this act was officially deemed as ‘passing out’. Read more

The Issue: Expletives in Aussieland
The Soundtrack: Down Under

I’m thinking of going to Australia, settling down, growing old and dying there. I always had that country pretty high up on my list of charming places to live in, as opposed to a place to regularly visit (Paris, for joyous reasons, Calcutta, for nostalgic ones). Its people seem to have the right attitude to life, its cities were correctly cosmopolitan and its culture was futuristic rather than based on the past. (Read: it’s got great beer, beaches and books in English.) Read more

The Issue: Durga Puja
The Soundtrack: Doyal Baba Kola Khaba

I go totally crazy during the Pujas. It’s like someone putting all the knobs on my graphic equaliser on maximum - you know, the treble notes trembling, the bass notes boom-bassing. 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: Media information

The soundtrack: That’s entertainment/Bonzo’s Montreaux

I’ve figured it out. Finally seen the light if you will. We deal with too much information and that too of the wrong kind. And who keeps peddling this largely redundant stuff hardselling it as ‘what readers want’? The newspapers — or since I’m talking to you over a blog that I’m not keen on writing and you’re not keen on reading, the media. 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