What I’m going to write about happened yesterday so I’m a little late in writing about it. Actually, it happened day before yesterday because it was in yesterday’s newspapers. While I’m fully aware that in the world of internet reporting it’s better never than late, this is not an e-paper (hallelujah). Therefore, let me tell […]
This was a surprise. Yesterday’s Delhi Times had a piece – probably taken from some website or syndicated from an international publication – listing Hollywood’s “most mushy lines of dialogue”. The list mostly contains genuine samples of mu…
Yesterday the Times of India fluffed the globalization of the Indian publishing industry — a worthy thesis. And it did so by name-dropping (1) bartending for dummies; (2) Khaled ‘Melodrama’ Hosseini; and (3) The Secret, whose thesis that the universe rearranges itself to suit your desires is trivially refuted by my sex life. The story […]
I love our newspapers, sometimes more than I love the Guardian whom at present I love most intensely since they’ve shared with us an extract from Philip Pullman’s Once Upon a Time in the North, the book that will be the background to the Northern Lights trilogy. Newspapers in India realise that we live in […]
So my beautiful, talented friend Deepanjana Pal landed the lead role in a Calcutta art phillum done by her director-mother. The movie explores Rabindranath Tagore’s relationship with his sister-in-law Kadambari Devi:
Bandana insists that her film doesn’t portray Tagore and Kadambari Devi as lovers. “… I haven’t portrayed it as an affair. Although I haven’t shown […]
Two ToI habits I love:
On the left, a paragraph about how Kylie Minogue is dying of breast cancer. On the right, picture of said pop star half naked. Classy.
Three-paragraph items where headline, para 1 and 2 are just a quip padded and rewritten. Then you get to para 3 and realize the quote is wildly […]
The consensus is that Russell Peters was a hit in Bombay. He flew in a few months ago to work on local material for this city, Bangalore and Delhi. I ran into him late one night at the Taj Lands End in Bandra; he had three groupies on his arm, whom he probably expensed as […]
Here are some of the best (paraphrased) one-liners from the Kitab literary festival a week ago. On the pole-dancing Gandhi clip :
Gandhi wouldn’t have minded the pole-dancing video because he felt that every labor has its dignity.
I have a problem with my state because Keralites congenitally think they know everything.
Keralites read literature as political documentaries […]
The Indian Express has a very funny misquote in a story about a Calcutta-based phentermine spammer:
… Internet users from Asian countries were barred from viewing the site through fireballs to elude security agencies. [Link]
Methinks they meant firewalls.
Also check out this pearl from the Times of India’s mention that Gloria Steinem is replacing loose cannon […]
Hold the presses — Preity Zinta’s dog is ill! In the next ten minutes, we must find a sexy photo of her and print it inappropriately next to the dying pooch. Is this possible?
We can rebuild it. We have the technology.
Brought to you courtesy of — who else? — the ToI. Here’s another gem:
The seven-year-old […]
Bennett, Coleman & Co. continue to tabloidize the ToI. First this classy teaser atop the style section:
It’s actually not the subject I object to, tawdry as it is. It’s that they run random news of the weird from wire services without citing the basics — who, what, where, when, why, how. In what country did […]