A look at the democratisation of cheap thrills in the hinterland Amid the cheering arkestra crowd, you often come across the odd sight of very serious looking men, as if they are trying to find the arithmetic mean between public decency and raunchy collectivity. Lurking in the background or trying to be invisible in the […]

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Even in the most glorious moments of Gautam Gambhir’s 15-year career, the vicarious sense of being deprived never left his admirers When dealing with banal certitudes, most comebacks don’t rescue you from the inevitable. A mushy Facebook video replaces that imagined farewell speech that would have followed the last outing on the imagined big stage, […]

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Shane Warne’s autobiography is a delight for cricket lovers On a January night during the 11 pm slot in 1992, cricket followers in India watched a young, overweight and blonde-haired Shane Warne for the first time in action on Doordarshan’s Test Match highlights. It used to be a 30-minute package in times when cable television […]

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If Chhath is the most visible unifier in Bihar, Sharda Sinha is its voice In November 2016, the white collar non-resident Bihari had his Chhath moment in a Sharda Sinha number, one of the only two festive songs she has sung this decade. The viral video of the song shows an English-speaking Bihari’s wife finding […]

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Shashi Tharoor’s book takes too many polemical detours to serve as an authentic account of Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister In His introduction to The Paradoxical Prime Minister (Aleph), Shashi Tharoor berates the binaries of black-and-white in our political discourse and pitches the book as an effort made by “a fair-minded Opposition MP looking […]

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The Amritsar train tragedy can be seen as the manifestation of the insignificance of human life in India’s public spaces. The free run of absurd tragedies has led to a kind of fatalist resignation What lies in an evening? A few seconds of absurdity, dismembered body parts and scattered slippers on a railway track. In […]

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Lucknow, A city known for its etiquette, is also the producer of brattish sons of politicians who keep a gun handy in their swanky cars for socialising “Ma*******, Lucknow se hoon,” said Ashish Pandey, as he prepared to leave the foyer of Hyatt Regency hotel in Delhi. An expression of the sense of fiefdom was […]

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The life of those who don’t make the cut should be a genre in itself Some 40 pages into Abdullah Khan’s debut novel Patna Blues (Juggernaut), you become envious of the lead character, Arif Khan. But you don’t quite empathise with or relate to him, even if you are an IAS-exam failure. By the end […]

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