Famous for his bumbling and his outré utterances, Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson is married to a British Asian childhood friend. Government lawyer Marina Wheeler’s mother, Dip Singh, is Sikh. Wheeler’s politics are leftist; she handles a lot of EU cases:
Marina Wheeler has a mixed public and private law practice with a particular focus on […]
After the sad passing of Sameer and Vinay, I wanted to share a story with a happier ending. Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s and the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., wrote about our mutual friend Shalini Malhotra’s accident in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Shalini used to edit the first desi zine I ever […]
SAJA is reporting that bone marrow drive inspiration Vinay Chakravarthy passed away today at 29. I didn’t know him well but went to college with his brother Bharath, who’s a sweetheart. Here’s a three-minute interview with Vinay on how he found out he had leukemia.
Both Vinay and Sameer Bhatia found bone marrow donors through unprecedented […]
Where the Ambanis started: their original chawl
Anand Giridharadas of the NYT just penned a lengthy profile of Mukesh Ambani, who may soon become richest in the world on the strength of Reliance shares (thanks, Dad). He’s more a chowhound than a gourmand:
Ratan Tata cruises down Marine Drive on Sundays in fast cars and favors Hermès […]
Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:Infancy is her dis…
Meghan Asha Parikh: 27-year-old Kristin Davis lookalike with wealthy Silicon Valley dad shocks America by showing up on Fox Business without big hair.
Shy, retiring PR hound comes with TV show, blog, Tumblr, videos and Valleywag tag.
And questionable taste in exes.
I heard from friends close to Sameer Bhatia that he passed away early this morning. The Help Sameer blog shows a spiral of medical complications from leukemia, ending in a stroke.
Last year’s bone marrow drives were hugely successful in getting 24,000 people signed up for the donor registry and finding donors for Sameer and for […]
Sci-fi giant and non-child buggerer Arthur C. Clarke died today in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived for 52 years. The former RAF radarman, scuba nut and author of Rendezvous with Rama was 90 years old. Renezvous is being made into a movie starring Morgan Freeman.
… [His] technical paper, published in the British journal […]
Veteran actor Manoj Kumar – he who turned the trembling lower lip, the twitching eyebrow and the martyred expression into an art form – is upset about the way he was parodied in Om Shanti Om. Now we can’t have a veteran actor (much less one who b…
[Did a shorter version of this for the Sunday Business Standard]The first thing I see on entering Kishwar Desai’s Safdarjung Enclave house is a Mother India poster on the wall facing the door: the still of Nargis carrying a plough, the weight of the …
Kishwar Desai’s Darlingji, about the love story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, is one of the better film-related memoirs I’ve read in recent times. Despite being episodic and dry in places, it’s elegantly written, well-edited and produced (basic thoug…
Yes, Dear Leader: Amit pulls a Mao
At first I thought the Bastiat Prize meal was to be dinner with rich bastards. Sitting among i-bankers and VCs, I prepped a day-job story to suit the audience — ‘I make petroleum from the bones of the poor.’
Amit Varma has just won the Bastiat Prize for his libertarian essays in Mint, beating conservative icons like Jonah Goldberg (National Review) and Clive Crook (Atlantic Monthly). In one hand he embraces a $10K check and the iconic candlestick, in the other, his smarter and more stylish wife Jasmine Shah Varma. Congratulations!
Related posts: Kidrobot, and […]
Ever have one of those dreams where you wake up at work and you forgot to get dressed?
27-year-old opera prodigy Danielle de Niese, a Dutch-Sri Lankan Los Angeleno via Melbourne, just released her first album, Handel: Arias (thanks, Rohin). She’s an up-and-coming star who got her big break as a soprano understudy:
In the summer of […]