The dog lifts its hind leg against a lamppost. The cat scratches a tree trunk. The tiger sprays a bush. Different rituals, same message – this patch is mine, and I was here before you. Humans, being the most evolved species on the planet, carve their names on monuments, fort walls, temple pillars, mountain rocks…
Maharashtra Cyber has registered an FIR against stand-up comedians Pranit More, Himanshu Jangra, Dr Sejal Pawar and others over allegedly obscene content linked to a comedy show in Gurugram. The FIR is not the story. The story is that it took an FIR for many Indians to realise that what passes off as stand-up comedy…
There was a time when Trinamool Congress was a political party. At the NDA’s 12th anniversary celebrations, it appeared to have been reinvented as a snack. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies tucked into bowls of jhalmuri, Home Minister Amit Shah immediately described the Bengali delicacy as tangy, masaledar, and crunchy. Political wags…
The Telugu film industry likes to boast about numbers. Hundreds of films a year. Massive openings. Record collections. Pan-India blockbusters. On some weekends, it even rivals Bollywood in box-office revenue. But as the Telugu saying goes, raasi kante vaasi goppa – quality matters more than quantity. The uncomfortable truth is that while Telugu cinema has…
The sewer has officially overflowed. Barely had the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) recovered from its grand Delhi adventure – a revolution that promised lakhs but delivered hundreds – when a challenger emerged from the drains of public discourse. Former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju has announced the formation of the Ishq Karo Party, whose noble…
Days before Saturday’s protest, the Cockroach Janta Party’s online ecosystem was predicting nothing short of a political earthquake. Thousands of self-described ‘cockroaches’ were expected to descend upon Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and shake the foundations of the Modi government. Some enthusiasts spoke of crowds in the thousands. Others hinted at lakhs. Delhi is prepared for a…
Politics occasionally writes poetry. More often, it writes farce. Mamata Banerjee’s political career has managed to produce both. In 1998, she stormed out of Congress, accusing the Grand Old Party of ignoring grassroots workers and becoming the private estate of a select few. She named her new outfit the Trinamool Congress – literally, the Congress…
If a man wears a raincoat in the middle of May and walks around under a blazing sun expecting a downpour, people would call him insane. If another guy steps out wearing a helmet despite not riding a motorcycle, not playing cricket, and not working at a construction site, the diagnosis would be equally obvious….
Forget the old English proverb, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ That may work for Romans. It certainly does not work for Indians. We are perhaps the only people on earth who carry our culture in hand baggage, check-in luggage and, if necessary, excess baggage. Whether it is Europe, America, Australia, Africa or…
The chilling slogan ‘Raliv, Galiv, Chaliv’ still haunts the collective memory of Kashmiri Pandits. Roughly translated from Kashmiri, it meant: ‘Convert, Leave, or Die.’ In the winter of 1990, these words echoed from mosque loudspeakers across the Kashmir Valley, accompanied by threats and intimidation that forced an entire community into exile. Thousands of Kashmiri Hindus…
