In my post on the “Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman” I had written about how my reading choices over the past few years have been driven by what I need to learn. The pleasure of reading and discovering things organically had gone away. And inspired by the Four Thousand Weeks, I had decided…
I hope that this will be the first post in a series of several posts on things from my growing up years. My nostalgia about my childhood got triggered by my children. My elder one is twelve now, and for the past couple of years it has been quite fun to tell him that…
In some of my earlier posts, I have mentioned that I buy a lot of books. I buy whatever catches my fancy and then several books on adjacent topics or genre. But I read based on either a project I have set for myself – a specific theme, a special genre, a collection or…
Dear Readers, this is something that I have been wanting to do for quite a while. The idea germinated on India’s 75th Independence day. This was the day when India entered Amrit Kaal – the twenty five years leading to 2047, when India targets to be a developed nation. The thought was that if…
Indian movies follow a tradition of showing our police officers in one of the three roles – Corrupt, Competent, Conscientious. If the cops are aligned with the villain of the movie, they are absolutely corrupt. If the hero of the movie is the Police Officer, they are competent. And in cases where the police…
Laapataa ladies, produced by Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan and Jyoti Deshpande, and directed by Kiran Rao, is India’s official entry to the 97th Academy Awards. This movie is based on a story “Two Brides” by Biplab Goswami. Laapataa Ladies is set in the rural India of 2001. This was the time when Cable TV…
I am a long time fan of Jack Reacher and I wait for the latest Jack Reacher book every year. The books, the movies (ahem) and the series, I love them all. Even when I like someone more than Reacher himself in the story. As it happened in Reacher Season 2. This year was…
Starting in the early 2003, Shrilal Shukla wrote a column in the Hindi India Today magazine for a period of two years. These columns were a look at the contemporary news and a rumination on them. The book Khabron ki Jugali by Shrilal Shukla collects those columns. My previous post was also on a…
Satire: a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way, especially in order to make a political point, or a piece of writing that uses this style Harishankar Parsai is considered to be one of the greatest satirists in the Hindi language. My previous post on Pagdandiyon ka Zamana was a celebration…
What happens when the normal legal route to get a task done is made difficult and inefficient? Harishankar Parsai Jee answers this question in his essay Pagdandiyon ka Zamana. People start taking the routes which are not normal and not legal, because the task must be done. And what happens when this practice is…