Cinema
Debatri Sengupta

Laal Topi Roosi

Elmar Rajsur is a minor celebrity in his country, albeit a slightly unorthodox one. He sings Bollywood songs for a living. Rajsur is Russian, and if his profession isn’t amusing enough, his name is, in fact, an amalgam of Raj

Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

Board of Mysteries

Ever since the Supreme Court upheld the right to gender expression in the NALSA verdict (National Legal Services Authority v Union of India and others) in April last year, transgender mobilisations across the country have started receiving the attention of

Neem Coal Tar
Saudamini Deo

What Happens When The Smoke Lifts?

I woke up at 7:30 in the morning from a dream of a woman whose face was covered with the smoke of her cigarette, and even though the smoke must have disappeared almost instantly I couldn’t see her face and

Politics & Society
Muhammad Tahir

Dear Mitron

  Dear Mitron, In case you didn’t see the customised suit I wore during President Obama’s India trip, my good name is Damodardas Narendra Modi. I am a Hindu nationalist and your beloved Prime Minister. You may have been surprised

Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

The Cool Queers

It seems everybody with a liberal worldview on social media has an opinion on all things LGBT. How else does one explain Anouk’s “lesbian ad” going viral, inspiring commentary of all stripes, with every news portal carrying at least two

Cinema
Ajachi Chakrabarti

Pappu Can’t Act, Saala

ABCD 2 Director: Remo D’Souza Starring: Prabhu Dheva, Varun Dhawan, Shraddha Kapoor, Dharmesh Yelande, Lauren Gottlieb Rating: 1.5/5   In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be world-class in any field.

Politics & Society
Pratiti Ganatra

Hashtag Hashtag

Let us go back in time a little. It is early 2009 and the world has just woken up to social media. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are still in the nascent stages of growth, each a few years old. And

Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

Je Suis Partha

3 Robinson Street has become a Disneyland of horror. The cash-strapped state government should immediately install a ticketing counter there. If the urban citizen can shell out hundreds of rupees to experience the chills in designer caves filled with plastic

Politics & Society
Soumabrata Chatterjee

The ‘Un-Human’ Internet

While researching for this article, I remembered one of the episodes in Marvel’s Avengers Assemble series that hadn’t struck me as relevant at the time. Captain America bars the rest of the gang from using the Internet during some team-building

Cinema
Ajachi Chakrabarti

Heartbreak Hotel

    Hamari Adhuri Kahani Director: Mohit Suri Starring: Emraan Hashmi, Vidya Balan, Rajkummar Rao Rating: 1/5   His face fell when he heard the bad news. He couldn’t believe it; he asked again to make sure. He didn’t need