I went to a pub recently after a long hiatus, and they were playing the same songs that I got drunk to in my turbulent adolescent years in pubs all along MG Road. “Retro night?” I asked the bartender. He shrugged and smiled enigmatically. I contemplated the possibility that a compilation of these songs had been handed down from pub owner to pub owner, that these songs were not really popular with the public....
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An old friend of mine called me the other day from London, after we reconnected on Facebook. “Shyam,” the voice said. “How are you? This is Jay, It’s been a long time.” It took me a few seconds to realise that this was indeed Jay, my Malayali friend who had previously spoken with a mild and pleasant Malayali accent. So what was this? Why was he sounding like Sir John Gielgud? Should I call him...
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What is common to a Rabbi and dating? Sounds like the start to a bad joke, but it is in fact a serious question, one that you probably don’t know the answer to, unless you googled it or you happen to be Arul Mani. So allow me tell you the answer: speed dating. That’s right. This ultra fast form of dating popularised in the 1990s by Sex and the City and other TV shows in the US was devised by a Rabbi of an...
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Sartre would have been fascinated by the social workings of contemporary Bangalore. Heidegger would have been inspired beyond insanity. And Socrates, I can just see him now, walking around the social scene urging everyone to look within, saying, with a wave of his wine glass, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” “Authenticity”, defined as “the degree to which one is true to one’s own...
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Shortly after the terrorist attack that Americans refer to as 9/11, a professor I was working with at a university in southern Illinois told me that it would probably be better if I didn’t venture out at night for a few weeks, “until things settle down”. Overnight, images of the brown-skinned hijackers, and of Osama Bin Laden had been burned into the American consciousness. There were reports every day of...
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A few years back, I was in a lift in a hotel in London. There were four or five of us, staring up at the numbers, or at the door, lost in our thoughts as we waited for the lift to get to our floor. On the second floor a young man walked in. “Hiya, guys,” he said in a singsong Welsh accent. Nobody replied, and the lift started to move again. The friendly Welshman persisted: “I know we are not supposed to...
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The video that might signal the end of ND Tiwari’s political career could easily have launched him on an entirely different, and arguably more important, career. If he had played it right, ND could have been an inspirational figure for the old, the infirm, and the sexually dormant all around the country. Across the globe, another octogenarian politician Bob Dole is remembered more for his Viagra ads than his...
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The most frightening thing about the swine flu epidemic is the alacrity with which a segment of the populace began wearing masks. For all I know, you might have a mask on right now. If so, then please do yourself a favour and get rid of it. It’s useless. Firstly, if you bought the mask from one of those frantic looking men at a traffic signal, you should know that the mask began its life as a bra. (Those men...
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There’s the messy way to eat a mango, and there is the wrong way. Unfortunately, I see an increasing number of people eating it the wrong way: any method that requires the use of a knife, a fork, or a spoon – cutting it and scooping it out, slicing and dicing it into cubes and using a fork and so on. No, the right way to eat a mango is to eat it with your hands, your mouth, your eyes, your spirit. Look at it...
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“Come in, come in. Sit down,” the astrologer said, his eyes hidden by the reflection of sunlight on his glasses. I was here to test a long standing hypothesis of mine -that astrologers were psychotherapists in another form, providing comfort and solace to those who sought them out. To test the hypothesis, I thought it best that I observe the interaction dispassionately, and so I had roped in a friend,...
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