Blogs

When football star Lionel Messi came to Kolkata, something strange happened. It reminded everyone that in India, VIP culture is still very strong — and ordinary people often come last. In many Western countries, leaders don’t act like they are special. Once, France’s president had to walk for 30 minutes because the road was blocked….

The results of Kerala’s local body elections sent a strong message: many people want change. The Left government (called LDF), led by Pinarayi Vijayan, has been in power for 10 years and controlled local councils for a very long time. But this time, voters were unhappy. The main opposition, the Congress-led UDF, won many local…

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…