Elections, Bigg Boss, and the Note3
The neta has changed, his smile now solicits, his words have a ‘yes’ fed by default into every sentence, and the past isn’t mentioned even once unless it is to remind you of a good deed done or a task completed. These reminders of the past deeds don’t come very often as we all now...
The race of his life
My first impulse as I sat down to write an article on Narendra Modi, was give it this title: Bhaag Modi Bhaag… and despite all the defence for it, I kept it aside. Why? This is because Modi is not a mere caricature anymore now. He is a formidable entity in national politics now. However,...
Blobs on my Blog 010 – The dream snatchers
‘I want to make your dreams mine,’ sounds so like the witch in a fairy tale saying, ‘Gimme more! Gimme more!’ or some fearsome Count from a Scandinavian country doing some glib selling with punch lines like, ‘Let our blood flow as one!’ Obviously, for the Count thriving on sucking blood, the sentence is...
The Manmohan Principle of colours
‘Colours are powerful,’ Specky said, ‘they transcend their boundaries and easily get accepted in new worlds.’ I said, ‘That’s a bit cryptic for me. Do you mean colours spread as water colour does and take the green of grass on to the brick red of bricks?’ ‘They can do that. But all that I’m...
Blobs on my Blog 009 – An enigma called Modi
Mr Blob, as was his usual self, was quite upbeat about Modi. He called him a modernistic messiah and someone who wasn’t shy of technology and wasn’t averse to opening up India to the rest of the world. Ms Blob, however, wasn’t as upbeat as him. She was convinced that Modi was autocratic and...
The perpetual comedians in Indian politics
There is a real time comedy circus going on in our country. Starting from Beni Prasad to DigVijay Singh to Akhilesh Yadav to Mayawati to Mamta Bannerji to K Chandrasekhara Rao, we have an unending list of big and small leaders who open their mouth and make us laugh. We were listening to the news...
“Till now the people didn’t have a choice. They now have a choice.” An interview with Arvind Kejriwal
I sometimes wonder what I would be had I been born on 16 June 1968 in Sivani in Hissar. Would I too have gone on to complete my BTech from IIT, Kharagpur? Would I too have subsequently joined the IRS and then left it to get the Government of India get serious about the...
Who votes?
What you see and what you imagine can co-exist… not always in a peaceful way, but they can tolerate each other’s presence, I’m sure. So just as voters imagine some promised future, the politician sees them all as distinct groups of people to be sold different dreams. The vital question then is: Who really votes?...
A Pa called Po
My father is not a politician. He never watches porn on the Tab that I gifted him. He never considers asking a client to send him a Tab and then never even mention that it has to be paid for. He never tweets inanities. He never rolls back his ideas for home improvement. I’ve never seen him...
Of guided missiles and misguided men
Politics, power, and public are three Ps that are always together… I was thinking initially of giving this post a simpler and more direct title: ‘The three Ps – Politics, Power, and Public’ but realized that there was less drama apparent than it actually had in it. The three Ps are like a primed grenade...
A grilling conversation with a fiery intent
‘Hi there… can we talk?’ I looked around and was taken aback to find a fiery grilled chicken piece waving frantically at me. ‘You?’ I asked with incredulity clearly infiltrating my voice, posture, and even expression. This was surely one of those hard-to-believe moments that I had, as yet, only read in novels. A conversation,...
