“I want to get scared, really scared without the antics”, this is what I told the discerning tourist officer at the Edinburgh Tourist Information Centre. In a flash, she pulled out the Mercat Ghost Tours flyer with a self-proclaimed ‘5-star scare factor’ and with softened vowels, muttered, “Um telling ye, thae arr the baist”. While […]
The past few months have been a nightmare for Indian women. A 6-year-old child, Ziva Dhoni, was at the receiving end of vicious rape threats because her father, MS Dhoni, lost a cricket match. Actor Anushka Sharma was also trolled mercilessly because her husband, Virat Kohli, underperformed in the first few weeks of IPL 2020. […]
There is something much more precious than petro dollars that Indians and Pakistanis living in UAE can send back home. It’s tolerance. The two nationalities form the biggest chunk of population in the Emirates. They enjoy the fruit of multi-culturalism and pluralism, but sadly their countries have moved far from these ideals. UAE has eternalized […]
A few weeks ago, I chanced upon a Twitter thread, stitching together a sociological story on the Indian Male. It began with: “Why do most Indian men still live with their parents?” A global debate ensued, some insisting it’s a good thing to do (taking care of family), others saying it’s a cop-out (not being […]
They are young, they are at the prime of their lives, their careers are flourishing, their personal life is great…so why are they depressed? Most 30-somethings, or young adults, have been complaining of an unsettling weariness that’s been weighing them down for the past few months. They’ve been juggling remote work, children, housework and the […]
There was a movie made in the 1950s called The Blob, which went on to acquire a cult status (it was also remade later, in 1988) in the horror genre. The flick’s all about an alien amoeboid entity that crash lands on Planet Earth, and embarks on a single-point agenda: devour people. The more humans […]
The dirty picture is playing on Indian TV news for weeks. Bollywood is the latest big bad villain for the nation that is regularly served easy targets by the government and TV anchors to vent its outrage on. On the face of it the TV coverage of the supposed drug use in Bollywood appears plain […]
“My passport is bored AF”“Can’t wait to walk down the (airplane) aisle again”“Can we skip to the part where I can travel again?”Yeah, we’ve all seen (and posted) the cheeky rants and statuses that constantly remind us how much we love to travel and how much 2020 has snatched from us heartlessly. Yeah, we can’t […]
The first time I got “acquainted” with Sunil Gavaskar was about four decades ago. I was in Class 3 or 4, and one of my classmates declared (during tiffin-time) she had “secretly” gotten married to “Sunny”: she took a photo of his, stared at it for some time, chanted a couple of marital mantras, and, […]
Coronavirus is the biggest crisis that the world has seen in generations. A virus like no other. It has left the world flat. 10 months since the first infection and the world is still nowhere close to defeat it. As billions around the globe wait for a vaccine to come, the pandemic has shown us […]
The Social Dilemma: Resist the occupation of the human mind Does Social Media do more harm than good? Has the technology started to hurt more than it helps? These are the most important and raging debates of our times. A plain fact of life today is that there is no running away from technology. You […]
