Apparently, if you’re a guy from South Mumbai — sorry, SoBo; for South Bombay, naturally — then there’s a new way to hit on a girl. You go up to her and pretend to be a dude from Andheri. This involves saying things like, “Hey, wanna dance?” (with dance pronounced with a Texan twang) or [...]
Guess what was reportedly the first buy at the business centre of the Mumbai Film Festival (which is known as MAMI but is actually the MFF)? Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Meanwhile, on IMDb, Antichrist’s popularity fell by 71%. Sharmila Tagore, who heads up the Indian Censor Board, must feel like she’s just eaten crow. Just [...]
I’m in a tiny little town in Maharashtra. It has one flyover, one temple for B.R. Ambedkar, one spa, two hookah parlours, no discos and 12 gates dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is not the kind of place where you expect to walk into a modest hotel and find not one, [...]
The Obama love fest that’s been spraying itself all over the media is something that’s intrigued me for the past few months. It’s not that I have anything against hot, young world leaders but the kind of squealing and swooning that’s directed at President Barack Obama makes it seem more like he’s ruling the roost [...]
So Mr. Pramod Muthalik of the Sri Ram Sene has decided that he’s going to send khadi saris to all those who send him pink knickers as part of the Pink Chaddi campaign. The saris will remind the loose, forward and pub-going women of the Indian culture that they’re losing sight of with all this [...]
If you’re whooshing around Mumbai, looking at cinema hoardings , you’ll notice that the ones for Billu Barber now look like this:
Till a few days ago, the hoarding said “Billu Barber” (like the website address continues to) but now you will notice the word “barber” has a white strip pasted on it. Some of you [...]
I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve fallen in love with this little thing.
I cannot even begin to tell you how darn cute this sculpture/ installation looks. Or how funny it must have looked when I got down on my haunches to take this picture. If someone had taken a picture of me, then we [...]
Someone I know had a son a few years ago. He named the kid Rolls. Last year, he and his wife had another boy. They named him Royce. It’s tough on poor Rolls, especially if he ends up being a tubby kid, because independent of his brother he’s a random verb in present tense. [...]
I woke up this morning to some loud and persistent baa-ing. Then, while stuck in traffic on my way to work, I looked to my left and saw a taxi next to me. At 9.30 in the morning, it isn’t odd to see a taxi next to you. Generally, however, the backseat doesn’t have a [...]
My best friend and I have long wondered what it is about Indian men that gives them exotic appeal because, despite what our exploding population figures may suggest, few Indian or Asian women see it or at least admit to seeing it. However, get on to the other side of the Arabian Sea and it [...]
One of the prerogatives of being senile before one’s time is that, a bit like cattle with cud, you find yourself savouring things after the shiny-eyed youth have chewed and spit it out. So, about four years after everyone discovered the pleasures of the surreptitious camera phone, I’ve realised that it’s a neat little device [...]
Obviously only those who hang upside down in the sylvan neighbourhood of Bandra, Mumbai, need heed this warning.
(A lot of the links are to YouTube videos so apologies to those with slow internet connections. In most cases they are, however, worth waiting for. )
He has Shah Rukh Khan’s title, Tamilian superstar Gemini Ganesan’s hair, Kannad cine and YouTube legend Rajkumar’s moustache. All hail King Khan, who with The Shrines (an eleven-piece [...]
Mircea Eliade, mythologist and writer, wrote about myth, ritual, religious symbolism and seducing his Indian mentor’s 16-year old daughter (she wrote a way better book in response to his La Nuit Bengali), among other things. Francis Ford Coppola did not pick this steamy, bitter romance for his first film in ten years. He picked Youth [...]