The wish to be taken seriously has reached silly proportions. The amount of humbug that followed the media coverage of Amitabh Bachchan's declaration on Twitter that he was going to have a baby - dramatic pause - in the household, made me wonder why everybody's not a Hindu reader. Indrajit Hazra writes.
Rabindranath Tagore. You know, that Bengali chap you keep seeing in full facial hair flow in black and white photos, the man who wrote our national anthem and lines like “Yet hope remains awake in the heart’s lamentation/ O unbound one!”. Indrajit Hazra writes.
Last week marked 40 years of my residency on this interesting planet. Last week also marked a slightly more important landmark: 50 years since the first human stepped out of this planet on April 12, 1961. Indrajit Hazra writes.
I don’t want to sound like a sourpuss in a television studio, but Manmohan Singh has done well to heed the advice of two giants of language philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein and — no, not the PM’s media advisor Harish Khare — Sonia Gandhi.
One of the serious downsides of CD technology has been the mountain of faltoo ‘repackages’. You never had old wine in new, hip flasks trumpeted as ‘remasters’, ‘alternate tracks’ or ‘unreleased demo takes’ of, say, Deep Purple or Velvet Underground tracks until CDs came popping out of the ground.
The Congress has a designated list of 17 spokespersons. Another one joins them and they could jolly well give the 18 MPs-strong DMK a run for its money, writes Indrajit Hazra.
Evidence shows that blokes who prefer Paul over John are nancy boys - although they get more attention from the ladies. But as I reach the age in which John was killed on December 8, 1980, that theory has been bypassed by a confirmation:
Lennon was a fab singer with a voice reeking of life.
Indrajit Hazra writes.
Since Rajiv’s visit, West Bengal may have moved from the ICU to somewhere closer to the burning pyres of Nimtolla Ghat, and it’s the CPI(M) government that’s been caught in the frame of the picture of a ‘dying city’ for a while now. Indrajit Hazra writes.
Late last week, I fell splat on my bottom and almost snapped off my coccyx. (That’s the tailbone at the end of the spinal cord, sickos!) I may be still moving about as if with a pineapple lodged inside my sphincter, but the painful experience has driven one point home: drinking too much has its immediate pitfalls.
When I moved to Delhi in 1998 after confirming that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was indeed going ahead with India's plans to conduct nuclear tests, I was suddenly terrified. Indrajit Hazra writes.
There was a Vegas showgirls evening air to the launch of Raghav Bahl's first book, Superpower? Frontseaters at the event in Delhi's Taj Mahal hotel included Congressman-turned-walking bazooka Mani Shankar Aiyar sitting next to human-turned-Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari. Indrajit Hazra writes.
In that wide chasm that exists between what an Amartya Sen and an Anthony Bourdain talk about, there’s that sturdy bridge: biology, writes Indrajit Hazra.
The howls against caning in schools that we heard recently were confined to victims who were ‘children of people like us’, writes Indrajit Hazra.
The genuine possibility of the Left not ruling Bengal next year is as surreal to me as that of America becoming a Third World nation to a communist, writes Indrajit Hazra.
My friend Jia Gooptu is on her way to becoming a fine palaeontologist. For those too young to remember the Late Cretaceous period or the early episodes of Friends, a palaeontologist studies forms of life that existed in prehistoric times by investigating their fossils, writes Indrajit Hazra.