Blogs

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Jordan on December 15 as part of his three-nation tour to Jordan, Oman and Ethiopia is far more than a routine diplomatic engagement. His reciprocal visit to the Hashemite Kingdom comes seven years after his last passage through Amman in February 2018, which was not a full-fledged bilateral visit…

Codes are like secret languages that only some people understand A tough gang in the NCR once used a very simple but clever code. They didn’t use computers or fancy spy tricks. They just used… stickers. Yes! Ordinary stickers on truck windscreens. If a truck had a special sticker, police guards would let it pass…

Reel difference: Dileep has been acquitted but the challenge to Malayalam cinema’s power structures has had a lasting impact They say a good criminal plans ten steps ahead. Pulsar Suni, the main perpetrator in the prominent case where a Malayalam actress was abducted and sexually assaulted in a moving car in Kochi in 2017, thought of…

Kahani Mein Twist: We’ve always had jingoism but the panic is because now right-wing cinema has learned craft The country is having a nervous breakdown over a film most people never planned to watch, but the meltdown is sending them to the theatres anyway. Rage spreads by word of mouth like nothing else. The internet…

Unsettling signals: India figures in the NSS but the limited-purpose framing should concern us   The 19th century German statesman Otto von Bismarck once remarked that, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” It captured the essence of the hand that fate dealt America. Surrounded by vast oceans…

Nightlife is good and natural, and it’s not a cultural import Knee-jerk is a normal physiological reflex, but why is it our default response to politics, economics and civic life? If one SUV brand figures in multiple crashes, we want to ban it. If one nightclub burns down, we want to pull the plug on…

Inadelightfully geeky podcast episode, Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamath chatted with Elon Musk, who tossed out some heavyweight existential bombs: “What’s the meaning of life? Where did the universe come from? Why does anything matter at all? What is the ultimate end?” We took those exact questions straight to Grok – Elon’s own AI creation –…

If China consumes luxury as evidence of momentum, India consumes luxury as a negotiation with memory. Brands that succeed here will be the ones with the deepest listening & meaningJaya wears Prada, but only after completing the ritual most affluent Indians quietly perform: the object must have travelled. The leather must carry foreign air. The…

Lionel Messi’s visit to football-crazy Kolkata should have been a celebration. Instead, it became yet another reminder of how badly Indian sport is organised—and, more importantly, who really matters in our sporting ecosystem. Fans paid an exorbitant ₹12,000 per ticket, only to return home without even catching a glimpse of their hero. Messi, predictably, was…

We are at our go-to restaurant to grab a quick bite, if you can call two sabzis, one dal, two starters, three desserts, and fifty-seven naans a quick bite. My wife, who for some reason has become a gym freak, is staring down my soul, wondering if I have any shame left. “Chew slowly,” she…