tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77842242024-03-13T18:44:55.131+05:30Your Cheque Is In The MailThe serenade all freelance writers are sungzigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.comBlogger242125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-13000339788714810602021-09-29T00:00:00.000+05:302022-08-23T03:50:56.208+05:30A sporting chance19 medals, and what do you get?
A record medal tally at the Tokyo Paralympic Games: 19 medals where, in 13 previous editions, the combined medals tally was just 12. Photo-ops for ministers! Warm fuzzy social media posts! Many, many column inches and prime time minutes! Could it be, could it be, could it really be that India will now start paying a little more attention to persons with Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-2830170257696531592019-12-01T00:00:00.001+05:302022-08-23T03:47:35.160+05:30Published: The HinduIdea of Bombay, making of Mumbai
A thin boy in a wheelchair
How Zuckerberg got the blues
Desperately seeking Mariyamma
Teach for India is graduating to a different level
Women and water: grand challenges for innovators
Season of discontent (with Prakash Kamath)
Blood and the city
On a mission with a vision
Candles in the wind
The festival that runs itself (almost)
“How do you measureUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-455739816510907932018-11-01T00:00:00.000+05:302018-11-17T14:23:58.173+05:30From idea to script, from page to stage
A much-shortened version of this appeared in The Hindu on the 11th October. This in my opinion is the actual shorter version because I could have written twice as much. : )
The creators of Sing India Sing talk about what it takes to make a musical from the ground up
Deep in Bhandup, enough removed away from the perpetual traffic jam called LBS Marg that the incessant horns and engine rumbleszigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-87366078082368037142017-10-08T00:00:00.000+05:302017-10-11T11:47:17.775+05:30A crowd extra, a guest appearance, and a rainstormScene one.
A basketball tournament in St Xavier’s College. The traditional season opener for the game in the city. All the best teams in Bombay would play. Among them, several from the Nagpada area, nursery of many greats of the game. For the Bombay Central YMCA, one of the players is a fair-skinned man. You look closer, and yes, it is that guy who seems to always play the white man in Hindi zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-59525342017026704682017-10-01T00:00:00.000+05:302017-10-11T14:36:29.862+05:30Candles in the windIn a world where bad news is in no short supply, in a profession where atrocities are on the daily news list, some tragedies hurt more than others.
Journalists of almost every leaning were jolted when Gauri Lankesh was murdered; here was a journalist killed, gunned down, not in war zone or in some troubled but remote part of the country, but in cold blood, on the doorstep of her home in one of zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-24734731192055506252016-02-11T00:00:00.000+05:302017-10-11T15:09:46.965+05:30How Zuckerberg got the bluesThe campaign to save the Internet was led by many ordinary citizens. A thank-you note.
Success has many parents. And now that the Save the Internet campaign has got a happy ending, there is no doubt that many will clamour for a share of the credit. And they would not be wrong, for it was a campaign of, by and for people like you and me, ordinary citizens.
That said, there are some names that zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-7801477049973243022015-12-03T00:00:00.000+05:302017-10-11T15:04:56.020+05:30A thin boy in a wheelchairMy brother was disabled. I talked about him to friends, maybe referred to him only in broad terms in work environments, and very rarely wrote about him. When I did write about him, I was asked — both by people who knew me at the intimate-at-a-remove level that social media has made common and by those who have my family and I knew for decades — why I had never done so before.
The reasons are notzigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-38732475324105403262015-11-28T00:00:00.001+05:302022-08-23T04:15:20.941+05:30The idea of BombayPeople like me, people who came of age in the eighties in middle-class urban India, grew up in a different India. We were something of an in-between generation. Our grandparents lived through the transition from colony to nation; our parents grew up in the years of nation building. We grew up taking independence and a certain degree of development for granted, without having all the gadgets, the zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-17869859298632634142015-11-21T00:00:00.001+05:302023-12-16T10:21:30.302+05:30Published: Forbes India, ForbesLife IndiaCreature from Another Planet Obituary, Michael Jackson
Rock Show
Gunning For Glory
Book: And Another Thing?
Tip-off: Google Chrome
3 Ways to Build a Stronger Public Profile (With Indrajit Gupta)
7 Social Networking Tips for the Novice (With Elizabeth Flock & Nilofer D'souza
The Teller of Stories Profile, Chetan Bhagat
An Interview with Chetan Bhagat
7 New Words We Learnt This Year (Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-54317451982087444982008-05-04T00:00:00.004+05:302008-05-04T09:40:12.342+05:30Mousetrap - 147Homesickunseen dharamsalaDharamsala, quiet little place that is, has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to its most famous resident, the Dalai Lama. You see, after he made his escape from Tibet, the Indian government shunted him around a bit before giving him a place of residence in Upper Dharamsala, also called McLeodganj. Mcleodganj was a sort of hangout for army officers and their families zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-53432768233136305792008-05-01T00:00:00.005+05:302008-07-17T04:15:13.689+05:30Siteseeing - 18Like-a-localWhen teh interwebs were still young, my webpage proclaimed the intention to get to know people around the world, so that when I finally had enough money to backpack around the world, I’d have places to stay, friends to hang out with who’d point me to the good, cheap food, the cool places to go, and so on. Having the foresight of a new-born puppy, I didn’t start a dot com, and here I zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-72834073656266400682008-05-01T00:00:00.004+05:302008-07-17T04:13:27.177+05:30A midsummer evening’s dreamAct OneGrizzled narrator ambles in, props butt against large black cube, the only prop on stage.Narrator: Back in the day, I appeared in a musical, and got to see a few Bombay theatres from what has always been the right side of the proscenium for me. Later, performance put aside, I did reviews, visited pretty much every theatre in the city. And, despite my early pash for stages large enough to zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-55858736099925019142008-04-27T00:00:00.002+05:302008-05-04T06:54:45.707+05:30Mousetrap - 146One WorldPangea DayPangaea (to use the spelling everyone not American uses) is the name scientists give to a supercontinent, one of many in the earth’s history of drifting continental plates, a single landmass that existed some 200 to 300 million years ago, from which the continents we know today broke apart and drifted away. Pangea Day is on May 10th, and will be celebrated with a 4-hour zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-48133316712279308532008-04-20T00:00:00.003+05:302008-05-04T06:49:49.941+05:30Mousetrap - 145As spoken in..IDEA - The International Dialects Of English ArchiveTwo weeks ago, this column pointed to a site that served up a menu of common English words with their pronunciations in different parts of the world. This site, an archive that was started just over ten years ago, at the University Of Kansas in the USA, as ‘a repository of primary source recordings for actors and other artists in zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-77663930885394903852008-04-13T00:00:00.000+05:302008-04-14T02:49:24.618+05:30Mousetrap - 144The original Yahoo!Shammi KapoorWay before David Filo and Jerry Yang named their ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,’ this Indian film star had already made the word famous on this side of the world. But a lesser-known facet of the exuberant Mr Kapoor is that he was a net pioneer in this country (I’m told he is a founder and still chairman of Internet Users Community of India). This is zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-89587863367840750902008-04-06T00:00:00.001+05:302008-04-14T02:43:45.560+05:30Mousetrap - 143Tomahto / TomaytoSound Comparisons‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language,’ said that caustic wit, George Bernard Shaw. And in My Fair Lady, the Broadway and Hollywood musical version of his Pygmalion, Henry Higgins says, the various accents used just in the UK, ‘One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get.’ American accents also differ widely from region to zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-14134003921591214142008-04-01T00:00:00.006+05:302008-05-04T09:32:10.241+05:30Siteseeing - 17ResponsibleTravel & The Responsible Tourism AwardsResponsible Travel is a bit of a thing with us, starting with hikes in the Sahyadris as a college student; the Adventurers and Mountaineers Club walked with a large bag, where all hikers were supposed to dump their garbage, on pain of ostracism. ‘Take nothing by memories, leave nothing but footprints’ and all that. So it was a delight to chance zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-86385557466899390942008-04-01T00:00:00.002+05:302008-05-04T06:56:01.680+05:30Paul TherouxIn The Elephanta Suite, you examine the lives of visitors and tourists to India. Why did you choose to look at the outsiders? I chose Americans as the central characters in these stories because I cannot pretend to know much about the inner life of Indians. I have made the dramas of Americans abroad one of my obsessive subjects, and in this sense I am a great fan of the writing of Paul Bowles (zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-87179810982884167772008-03-30T00:00:00.001+05:302008-04-14T02:44:30.934+05:30Mousetrap - 142To help you along to April Fools’ Day, the plan here was to come up with a complete column-full of weird but fictitious websites. But that we rejected partly because that would mean we would have to actually think, which we can manage only once a week or thereabouts, and partly because the web is rather more weird than even your columnist’s imagination.Dream HolidaySans SerriffeThis is a very oldzigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-57550980210765316902008-03-23T00:00:00.004+05:302008-04-14T01:00:17.825+05:30Mousetrap - 141Time out!SI VaultA magazine, a global icon, though perhaps some in this country know it best for its swimsuit issue: Sports Illustrated. The magazine is over 50 years old, and just this last week—Thursday to be exact—it opened up its archives online. And, in a sign of the times, where even the most closed-fisted media organisations are discovering the benefit of making their content freely zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-5614722717062662062008-03-16T00:00:00.000+05:302008-03-16T14:23:55.841+05:30Mousetrap - 140Darn!Damn InterestingThis site does what your columnist tries to do as well: give you something interesting to read; stuff you’ll look at and go, ‘Damn, that was interesting.’ Except that the team of writers here goes much further, with long, witty, well-researched articles on all sorts of interesting topics, ‘facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-21955222953486942652008-03-09T00:00:00.001+05:302008-03-16T14:19:07.481+05:30Mousetrap - 139To the roof of the worldTibetan Uprising MovementA short while ago, this column featured the Bhopal survivors padyatra to Delhi. This is another such people’s movement. India is host to a large number of Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama himself, and the Tibetan Government in Exile. This year, just after the Beijing Olympics, it will be fifty years since the Dalai Lama escaped from the zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-12556904466152335632008-03-02T00:00:00.000+05:302008-03-16T14:13:22.084+05:30Mousetrap - 138Flat WorldApartment TherapyFriends forwarded some cool staircase designs to us a while ago. Living in a rented flat, we could only forward them on to duplex-endowed friends. Then recently someone else sent us some more rad designs and we looked more closely. The site’s mission is ‘Helping people make their homes more beautiful, organized and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-271728109710222112008-03-01T00:00:00.005+05:302008-04-16T06:10:43.491+05:30Indra SinhaYou left India as a young man. How often have you returned? Regularly since my association with the Bhopal survivors began in the mid-nineties, but before that there was a 15-year gap. Any memorable journeys? From Kathmandu to Nepalganj, an airstrip on the Nepalese side of the border. Our tiny plane whirred into the air like a metal grasshopper; the high Himalayas rose up behind the foothills, zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7784224.post-50432758657820518242008-03-01T00:00:00.004+05:302008-04-14T01:00:58.208+05:30Siteseeing - 16The Indian Railways Fan ClubIn these days of budget airlines and frequent flyer miles, and to hell with carbon footprints, this site is almost like leafing through an old picture album and finding photos of an old flame. Wait, did we say leafing through an album? Jeeze, we almost let on how old we are. ‘Browsing,’ we meant. So there. Like we were saying, this site brought back a rush of soft, zigzacklyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16061386367303982262noreply@blogger.com0