[Long personal post. Go away]Yesterday evening I pulled out my 1990 diary from the dusty old mini-cupboard it’s been in since…well, since December 31, 1990, I should think. It’s the first of my 18 diaries, most of which have entries on every page…

One of quite a few that we are sure will surface soon.

There Will Be Blood does for moustaches what Janis Joplin did for the bell-sleeve minidress. That’s a fine caterpillar adorning Daniel Day-Lewis’ upper lip. This actor, Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) and Freddie Mercury make a case for man-patches as spectacle.
The film starts slowly and goes out with a ham sandwich: Day-Lewis plays […]

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story plays like the stretched-out SNL skit that it is. The humor is broad and obvious. Repetition passes for humor. There are only a couple of inspired bits. You need to have seen the original to get the jokes. And a roster of undermotivated SNL hangers-on are clearly wondering whether […]

Annie Zaidi has a very nice review of Baghdad Burning, the National School of Drama play by the theatre group Aaranjan, based on Riverbend’s famous blog. I saw the play at the NSD a few days ago and was thinking of writing about it, but Annie has cov…

The Dead Bhuttos

Benazir Bhutto’s elegant, nose-jobbed mug was all over U.S. news today. She was attractive, vain, and spoke elegant Anglicized English. It was the perfect storm: terrorists’ media whoring met the Cable Fluff Network and Fox ‘News’ fetish for attractive women in trouble. The story of her assassination turned into the Natalee Holloway of […]

Those who cannot remember the past…
The book Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile makes it clear that very little has changed in American policy towards Pakistan in the last 30 years. The U.S. still backs the dictator du jour:

… without Zia running Pakistan by martial law, there could be no Afghan war. Officially there was […]

A clarinet-infested score (cf. Dor) is a sure sign that a movie is out to win Oscars, not to innovate. The Great Debaters aims for the schmaltzy, unambitious mainstream, while director Denzel Washington hams like a younger Bill Cosby. But one scene redeems the movie. The final debate is held at Harvard’s Memorial Hall, the […]

The afternoon I ran into a former Miss Universe at a Bandra candle shop, I spontaneously decided to spend half an hour there browsing these Indian Christmas ornaments. You’ve never seen knicknacks inspected with such care.
Happy Christmas, Hannukah, Eid.

On Rich Bride, Poor Bride, Sri Lanka Hindu couple Jana and Calvin argued over whether they want broken-down peacocks or kissing llamas at their Canadian wedding.

Minivan crashing into TV studio during the 10pm newscast: $50,000. Ravi Baichwal’s reaction all over national TV: priceless.
He is married to journalist Sonja Nordahl and has two children, Tejas and Gabriella India. [Link]

You’re going to learn it, biatches

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon). The Khamoshi of French art cinema. Uses the same gimmick as Brick Lane, forcing your high-bandwidth brain through the narrow keyhole of a locked-in person and a virtual illiterate, respectively. Dialogue is built up letter by letter by […]

[A version of a piece I did for the Sunday Business Standard]Shillong did that to people…preserved them in its Shillong-flavoured timelessness – the same rumours, the same jokes, the same gossip, the same petty jealousies. The scale of the town cor…

Pakistani lawyer atop Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s car, before Musharraf sent the tanks in (via India Uncut):

Somewhere amidst the strippers, cocaine and Emily Blunt’s micropanties in Charlie Wilson’s War lies the faintly-beating heart of a good political movie. That the film is entertaining, I don’t deny. That it will double Kite Runner sales is doubtless. But this T&A-centric movie is more West Wing than Syriana, fictionalizing history, soft-pedaling 9/11 blowback and […]

Such are the many transgressions of vehicle-drivers on Delhi roads that we sometimes lose sight of the rule-flouting done by pedestrians. These are the people who are most at risk and you’d think they would know this - but no, they walk out into heav…

In ‘94, Sir Vidiadhar appeared on Charlie Rose, along with New Yorker film critic David Denby:

Chris Sharma, a sales associate in men’s furnishings at Nordstrom in Tysons Corner shows us the proper way to tie a bow tie.

The Charlie Rose show recently put its video morgue online. Check out Salman Rushdie interviewing Deepa Mehta:

(A step-by-step primer, based on personal experience)Interpreting the wedding card: The wedding card will chattily describe the occasion as “a divine union of twin souls, blessed by your kind and benevolently auspicious presence”. This is merely a …