Crash! Boom! Bang! If maniacal Mumbai had a sound to it, I’d hazard a guess, and say that this is how it would be spelt out in words. Marjane Satrapi passed away on June 4 due to sadness, as revealed in a family statement. “Can someone pass away due to this reason?” Social media platforms […]

Cricket Lovely Cricket, At Lord’s where I saw it.” One can bet that this calypso composed by West Indies’s Lord Beginner to celebrate the region’s win over England in 1950 was not sung by die-hard cricket lovers as they left the famous cricket venue in London on Sunday. What those spectators got for shelling out […]

A man and a woman behind the ubiquitous safety door of every Mumbai flat start a polite conversation. “Sir, hum BMC se aaye hain Census survey ke liye. Can we speak with you for a couple of minutes,” they ask. You nod in acquiescence. A few ticks in a book the woman is holding, and […]

Indian families are suffering from a huge mental health crisis. The evidence is there in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2024 report. Family problems accounted for 33.5 per cent of all suicides in India in 2024, up from 31.9 per cent in 2023. Among those below 18 years of age who died by suicide, […]

The dust clouds seemed to have settled post the massive demolition drive at Garib Nagar, outside the railways station in Bandra East. Now, the Western Railway will begin developing the cleared space into a circulating area for train passengers. Officials have been quoted as saying the area will be similar to the space outside the […]

There was a bit of bad news from Thailand a few weeks ago following its announcement of a change of entry rules. Its popular 60-day visa-free scheme for 93 countries was cancelled, and I can only imagine how that must have upset a lot of Indian tourists who have treated Bangkok and Pattaya as weekend […]

Firstly, huge congratulations to first Satwiksairaj and Chirag Shetty for their triumph in the Singapore Open badminton tournament. They had been playing brilliantly throughout but were stumbling at the last hurdle and so it was great to see them emerge as winners once again. Badminton is such a fast-paced sport that very seldom has a […]

Lobo Lobo, my cable TV tech guy came over dressed in a football jersey and carrying a trophy — it resembled the FIFA cup at the base, except at the top it was the Mumbai map (not the globe). “Uhm, Lobo Lobo, want to explain to me what’s going on, why are you carrying a […]

The term Chandala, referring to the “lowest of the low” in Brahmin lore, appears a few times in the Vedic literature itself. It is essentially absent from the Rigveda Samhita and emerges only in the later strata of the corpus — the later Samhitas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. The references are scattered, but each one is […]

Simple, opaque inked characters. Easy-to-read features. Not a lot of perspective there either. How good could it really be?” I still remember a student saying those words to me as I handed him a copy of ‘Persepolis’. I understood why he said this, considering his entire concept of graphic literature revolved around American superheroes and […]