As the hindi version of the much celebrated series 24 hits the Indian telly, Thomas Crowley ponders over some thorny questions. As an American living in Delhi, I often bemoan the fact that my country has exported the worst
More than two months after the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings, news stories about the attack continue to pour in. Here’s a sampling of mid-June headlines: “FBI Knew Earlier of Boston Bombing Suspect”; “Boston Bombing Victim Found Out She Was Pregnant
Ideologies bring people together and then they drive them apart. But wait. This isn’t like communalism v/s secularism. It is about the wedges that divide the hundred shades within an ideology. Ah, summertime: mangoes starting to appear in the
Everything was going fine until a slice of anthropomorphic bread told me that he (she?) was not a product. No, this was not part of some dengue-induced fever dream (even though the mosquitoes are back in full force in Delhi).
Reading the short stories of Borges produces a sense of vertigo. Borges has a talent for dizzying reversals as he peels back the veneer of everyday reality and revels in things far more mysterious. This vertiginous effect is amplified, I
In Don DeLillo’s satirical yet chilling novel White Noise, the protagonist’s life is upended by an amorphous environmental disaster referred to simply as “The Airborne Toxic Event.” The residents of Delhi, on the other hand, seem remarkably unfazed by the airborne
Here’s a fun online experiment. Go to the “charts” section of YouTube. Make sure your location is set as “India.” Search for most viewed videos of all time. Marvel at the results. You are now looking at the most popular
A pork and beef festival most emphatically did not happen at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on September 28, 2012. Such a festival was being planned by a student group called the New Materialists, until just about everyone in Delhi stepped in to
The novelists Vikram Chandra and Sujit Saraf share remarkably similar life stories. Both were born in north India. Both went to college in California. Both now live in the San Francisco Bay area and are married to Americans. Both are
The month of June saw Baba Ramdev making a comeback to newspaper headlines, rejoining anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, and calling to mind Marx’s old chestnut about history repeating itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. (Not that the first time