Some months ago I did something I had never done before: I hurt a human being with my vehicle. She took one step into my path when I was almost at a standstill, so she wasn't grievously injured, but it was my fault for driving up that close behind her. I will never forget the sight of her going down by my front passenger wheel in slow motion. She ended up with a torn ligament in her foot and weeks of pain and inconvenience. I ended up wracked byâ€¦ regret doesn't begin to cover it. It was the deepest guilt and self-loathing that I had ever experienced. And I wasn't even texting at the time.Being distracted at the wheel of a car is about the most dangerous thing you can do in your daily life. It doesn't take much speed to cause serious injury to someone. Sometimes, if you don't kill them, the life left to them is worse. If you caused something like that because you were texting, could you forgive yourself?Almost everyone I know, myself included, texts while driving. Not just when waitin

Texting can wait

Business Standard

Right around this time of year I begin to worry about garlic and crosses and whether either of them might cause my flesh to start smoking. It's mostly the fault of the monsoon clouds. Delhi goes without sun for so long that I develop an anaemic pallor, or so I assume because mirrors no longer reflect my face. I develop a cataleptic tendency to lie rigid in bed until mid-morning because the darkness is fooling my circadian rhythm into thinking that it's still only dawn. I develop an uncontrollable craving to sink my fangs into the necks of passing municipal councillors and drain them of their blood.My therapist says that last thing is just rage, related to sitting in traffic on waterlogged roads. Or at least that is what my therapist would say if I a) had a therapist and b) could attach giant flippers to my car and swim my way to his/her office.I'm not really turning into a vampire. The reason I know this for sure is that vampires typically make a point of being very well turned out and

Home alone: the vampire diaries

My right hand has been in a viciously expensive wrist brace for two out of three weeks now. I would love to say that I was rescuing a baby from a burning building, but the truth is entirely prosaic. The top of my shoe, which had come loose weeks before, was protruding; it caught the lip of the stair going up to my front door and tripped me, and I dislocated my thumb breaking the fall.Besides refreshing my appreciation of the seminal importance of opposable thumbs, this event has refreshed my appreciation, not for the first time, for the unsung art of maintenance.Shoes, like everything else, wear out. I'd been tripping over the protrusion even on flat ground for weeks. There was no good excuse not to fix it - I'm in the local market multiple times a week and it would have cost me five seriously devalued bucks to have the cobbler fix it. Now I can't pick up so much as a pen, and my incarcerated arm smells, thanks to Delhi weather, like wet dog rolled in cat vomit. Benjamin Franklin put i

For want of a nail

I was ten years old when Charles and Di got married. Shortly thereafter, I watched her cradle the new-born Prince William in her arms. So I got quite misty watching William and Kate holding their son in front of the same hospital, with Kate wearing a dress much like the one Diana had worn.I've finally worked out why people like me, who think that prime ministers should walk or drive themselves to work and sit at round tables that erase hierarchy, can still get mushy about the royals. It's because royalty is about as relevant to today's world as a whalebone corset, so it's an interesting oddity. Also I don't have to pay for its upkeep. Royalty is a favourite old story, a story that is fascinating for being so completely out of touch.And yet it keeps, with every generation, a certain contemporariness. Keeping tabs on what the British royals are up to is a lot like keeping tabs on Grey's Anatomy when you're not a doctor - it's a glimpse into a small, specialised world, and the storylines

A royal pain

You know how, given the right lighting and the right positioning, you can project huge dramatic shadows onto a screen with nothing more than a couple of wiggling fingers? The India show we take around the world, and around India at election time, is a bit like that.The midday meal tragedy in Gandaman village in Bihar, in which over 20 children have already died after eating food that appears to contain traces of insecticide, is a horrific glance at the reality behind some of our great dancing shadows, in this case the Right to Education Act and the midday meal scheme. Gandaman is only one particularly terrible instance of a lousy general trend - children all over India regularly suffer food poisoning and poor nutrition from a scheme that is meant to benefit them.India has good laws on paper. Making the laws generates a sense of action, which too often remains just that: the impression that something is being done. The right to education law mandates one teacher to 30 students, but tens

The shadow republic

May 1, 2011. Dear Diary, I'm so bored. I've paced around the vegetable patch so often, it's starting to put me off my food

Diary of a terribly good looking fugitive

It began in Tahrir Square in February 2011, when Egypt overthrew Hosni Mubarak. Actually, it began with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia in December 2010. Come to think of it, it began in the streets of Indonesia in 1998 that led to Suharto getting kicked out. No, it began with a little something in 1989 called Tiananmen Square (known online as Big Yellow Duck in order to evade Chinese internet censors). Well, to be fair, there was the Yellow Revolution that brought Cory Aquino to power in the Philippines in the early 1980s. And, of course, there was that business with the French Revolution in 1789...These are not movements organised by political parties. Popular protests often do quickly find political backing, and often are quickly taken over by political parties, but the initial spurt of chaotic energy on the streets comes from ordinary people. It is easy to allege that the December 2012 protests in Delhi were politically motivated, but the profile of people first on the street - s

People power

It's been a stupid couple of weeks. First, a subspecies of the African black rhino was declared extinct

The Darwin awards

The Madras High Court's judgment on June 17, which decided an alimony dispute between an unmarried couple who have two children, took over the cerebral cortex of Twitter and other social media spaces a few days ago. Nothing animates conversation like sex, and since India has so little of it - the conversation about sex, that is, not the sex per se - we can be forgiven for indulging in some excited chatter and a lot of jokes.With respect to the case at hand, the judge made a perfectly sound decision requiring the man to pay alimony to the woman he had lived with and had children by, even though he had moved on from the relationship. The general idea is solid. The judgment says that if you've lived together as sexual partners long enough, and have kids, you can't just walk out without honouring your financial obligations. Makes eminent sense. If he'd left it at that, there would be nothing to talk about.The problem lies in a few startling sentences in the judgment that seem to struggle t

Courting controversy

CIA World Factbook update: India, located in South Asia, is a large developing country with 6.3 billion pieces of private information that US has snooped on, and Edward Snowden is a dirty rat

Peeping Sam: It's complicated

On June 2, while everyone was gagging for yet more news about cricket, a young woman named Preeti Rathi quietly died in a Mumbai hospital, her body destroyed by a man who, a month before,had tapped her on the shoulder and thrown acid in her face as she turned. Nobody yet knows who he was, or why he did this.An acid attack is what Jane Welsh's 2009 master's thesis on the subject calls "an intimate act of terrorism".There is arguably no more vicious way to hurt a human being - plus it's cheap, requires no expertise or effort, and ensures constant and permanent pain. Nip out to the local market, pick up a bottle of sulphuric or hydrochloric or nitric acid for less than the price of a Coke, chuck the contents in the face of your target, disappear as people focus on the horror of sizzling, smoking flesh, and Bob's your uncle.Acid melts flesh and bone in a matter of seconds. You have to look at the photographs of survivors to appreciate what that means. Chanchal Paswan would want you to. Las

Facing up to acid attacks

What greater joy than to make music on a beautiful-sounding device that can make a party out of a living room?

The hills are alive

I feel increasingly that Delhi is my city. Maybe it's a by-product of the forties - that's when you're part of the generation that for its brief time rules the world; not yet with money, perhaps, but with energy and decision making. Younger people seem more waffly, and older people more tired. You get the impression that it's all up to your generation, though thankfully not up to just you. (You know you're the boss when younger people start migrating to Twitter and Tumblr because "there are too many adults on Facebook".)Whatever the reason, Delhi is my city, even though I often loathe it. It has a crappy record with women, it is puffed up with laughable self-importance, it has pathological levels of aggression and a depressing lack of civic sense, it has hopelessly entropic tendencies, and old boys' clubs run its institutions. But this is where I live, and I take it personally.When someone tosses a plastic bottle or a paper plate or a dirty napkin out of a car, I take it personally. Wh

It's the personal, stupid

Those of us who like to complain, cannot stand those of you who keep banging on about the glass  being half full. Know that there is a time and a place for your optimism, and that that time and place is far, far away from us. There are things we wish to dwell on and wallow in peace, because dwelling and wallowing makes everything better.The problem is that even the best, most skilled and experienced of moaners often runs into a linguistic wall. You can feel the feeling exactly, it's right there, but the available lexicon doesn't quite do it justice. Nothing messes with a good bellyache like having to shout incoherently because you don't have the right vocabulary. Well, the wait is over. It's called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.I heard about it at a recent book launch. Writer and editor Anita Roy used a couple of words from the Dictionary to help her describe things in the book being launched, unwittingly setting off a thrill in my whiner's heart, that was very much like spotting t

The dictionary of obscure sorrows

What we think of as "normal" is constantly evolving. Somewhere along the line, it became normal for people to prioritise work at the expense of everything else. It became normal to suffer a chronic shortage of sleep because of long work hours and conference calls scheduled in other time zones. At some point, people accepted that it is normal to sit in an office chair for eight hours a day. We decided that careers are more important than relationships. We don't think there's anything odd about paying with our health for money, and then using the money to tend to our health."It's work," is a non-negotiable reason to spend dinner texting under the table, skip family events, and, most of all, to avoid the difficult work of asking uncomfortable questions in the general vicinity of "Who am I, what am I doing here, and what does it all mean?".Work lends purpose to life, and contributes to an economic machine that we benefit from-but only up to a point. At the end of the day here we are, marki

The point of it all

In the last few days I've come across unnerving violence in places you wouldn't expect to find it. One was at Brussels airport, and one was at a book launch at the India International Centre (I know!).Brussels airport at 6am is a very quiet place. I had half an hour to get to my connecting flight, and spent most of that time walking all the way over to terminal B, because apparently I am unable to correctly read a boarding pass, and then walking all the way back to terminal A. By the time I got to the security gate, there were five minutes left for boarding time. Why do they make these airports so large if their layovers are going to be so short? This one would be properly sized for Defence Colony International Airport, but it seems like overkill for a small European nation.Anyway, I had just joined the shambling queue of walking dead at security when a loud clatter turned our heads: one of those short steel poles that hold security cordons had fallen over. The lady who had knocked it

Action-packed days

What happens to children who never find their way home, or who do after an interim, is symptomatic of a society so violent that violence is banal

Treasure hunt

Each camp's supporters loathe the other camp, and maintain a cheerful blindness to the opposite side's strengths

Home is where the heat is

There's been so much noise in the last couple of weeks about NaMo versus RaGa, so much noise about MaBa (I guess), and her TMC goons, so much noise about JaTy (why not) and the dark cloud over his role in the 1984 Delhi riots â€¦ so much noise in so many different forms of professional and personal media, that there's not much left to say. Except, perhaps, that they probably all deserve what's coming to them.You can't throw a pea without hitting a scam. You can expect that every two minutes some leader or the other will open his or her mouth only to say something crass that fully measures the increasing distance between power and its purpose. Politics is taking on that rather desperate edge it tends to when things are falling apart, the Opposition smells blood but is far from seductive itself, and the electorate is thoroughly disgusted.That's why I've taken such pleasure in reading about other things these last few days - things related to nature and animals, both always vastly more in

And now for something completely different

I don't know what we ever did to the Schengen countries to make them so skittish, but it's no fun trying to visit them. If bureaucracy could burst into flesh and blood and stand up and communicate, the visa paperwork would behave like the parent of some country you're trying to marry.Who are you? How dare you? Do you really think we're going to deliver our tender provinces into your goatish hands so you can knock them up with tourist dollars? Speaking of which, how many dollars do you got? Woah, hang on, take your foot back out the door - I wasn't inviting you in, I was just making sure you're not marrying her for her bank account. How many dollars do you got - just to prove, see, that you'll go home? You aren't going to move in here like one of those no-gooders who live off their poor spouse until her hills are worn brown and her jobs all taken. No sir. You'd better state your intentions, and feel suitably inadequate doing so. Our little princess can have whomsoever she wants, you und

India visa vis the world

There are good arguments for and against throwing Sanjay Dutt in the clink for possessing weapons. But why the big fuss about Sanjay Dutt in the first place? That's the power of movies, and movie stars. They inspire people to yearn and dream, and to do amazing things. They move people.That puts me in mind of a young man named Jameel Shah. I think about him three times a week anyway, when I strap on my tango shoes, but that's with gratitude for his shoe-making skills. This week I've been remembering his story.A small backgrounder: anyone who practises a dance form knows that a good pair of shoes is critical. They must be lightweight, flexible, secure around the toes and ankles, with strong heels and suede soles. Padding in the toes helps. A good pair of dance shoes makes the difference between a magical evening and a miserable one, and it's very hard to find a good pair in India.Mr Shah is the eldest of eight kids born to poor farmers in Bihar. He hopped on a train to Delhi when he was

Dreaming in Dharavi

This action follows the authority's issuance of show-cause notices to approximately 10,771 projects for failing to comply with mandatory disclosure requirements.

real estate construction building

Ram Charan-starrer Game Changer was released today across the world. The movie has already minted over 26 crore through advance bookings and it is likely to collect over Rs 50 crore on its opening day

Game Changer

In its Q3 update, Phoenix Mills said its consumption (retailer sales) in Q3FY25 stood at Rs 3,998 crore, up 21 per cent over Q3FY24

Stock Market, Market, Crash, Funds, up, Stock, Lost, decline, statistic, Crisis, Capital, BSE, NSE

Ahmedabad (Gujarat) [India], January 10: GTPL Hathway Limited, India's largest Digital Cable TV Service Provider and a leading Broadband Service provider, announced its Financial Results for the Quarter ended December 31, 2024

GTPL Hathway Reports Stable Performance in Q3 FY25

Last month, Trai recommended a clear definition for international traffic, classifying SMS messages originating or terminating on devices, servers, or apps outside India as international

telecom

Revenue for the company grew 5.6 per cent to Rs 63,973 crore in Q3 FY25. Sequentially, the firm's revenue declined by 0.4 per cent

Subrahmanyan's '90-hour workweek' formula is one step ahead of Infosys founder Narayan Murthy's suggestion of working 70-hours a week

SN Subrahmanyan

Veteran writer, poet and filmmaker Pritish Nandy breathed his last on Wednesday at the age of 73

Pritish Nandy

On a sequential basis, the profit after tax (PAT) grew 10 per cent over Rs 387.75 crore reported in Q2FY25

IREDA

Analysts expect Q3FY25 to report continued weakness in O2C earnings

Reliance industries, Reliance oil business

Federal Register filing named it as qualifying as a Chinese military company as determined by the Pentagon, along with Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd

Cosco shipping company

Praising the Ukrainian forces for their efforts, Zelenskyy said, I thank all our warriors who are bringing the war back home--to Russia--and giving Ukraine more security and strength

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy

The uptick in ONGC share price came after Hong Kong-based capital market firm CLSA upgraded ONGC to 'high-conviction outperform.' CLSA has set a price target of Rs 360 per share.

ONGC

After nine years, Justin Trudeau resigns, leaving the Liberal Party to choose between frontrunners like Chrystia Freeland, Mark Carney, and Anita Anand

Justin Trudeau

Barr's early exit now clears the way for Trump, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, to appoint an entirely fresh slate of banking regulators and begin work on a more industry-friendly agenda

Michael Barr

Challenging the decision of the Biden Administration to investigate the activities of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and his companies, an influential Republican lawmaker on Tuesday said such selective actions risk damaging critical alliance partners.
In a strongly worded letter to US Attorney General Merrick B Garland, Congressman Lance Gooden, member of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded answers on the Justice Department's selective prosecution of foreign entities and the potential harm such actions pose to US's global alliances and economic growth and that if there is any Geroge Soros connection to it.
The Department of Justice's selective actions risk damaging critical alliances with key partners like India, one of America's strongest allies in the Asia-Pacific region, Gooden said in his letter dated January 7.
Instead of pursuing cases with tenuous jurisdiction and limited relevance to US interests, the DOJ should focus on punishing bad actors at home, rather than chasing

Gautam Adani, Adani

The temporary work permits are the only real way to employ Indian immigrants in the US, since national caps make it nearly impossible for them to get a green card

H-1B Visa

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar said on Tuesday that we should do away with the VIP culture, particularly in temples, as the very idea of VIP darshan militates against divinity.
He also called upon the people to rise above the politics of disruption and help the country reach its objective of a developed India by 2047.
"When precedence is accorded and priority is given to someone -- when we label it as VVIP or VIP -- this is belittling the concept of equality. VIP culture is an aberration. It is an incursion. When viewed on the anvil of equality, it should have no place in society, much less in religious places," said Dhankhar.
The Vice President was launching the country's largest 'queue complex' at Sri Manjunatha Temple here. The facility is known as 'Shri Saanidhya'.
While delivering his keynote address, Dhankhar criticised the tendency prevailing in today's political milieu, where people, instead of engaging in dialogue, disrupt democratic values.
According to him, the politic

Jagdeep Dhankar, jagdeep, Vice President

Knowing Manmohan was one of the greatest privileges of my life. He showed me and everybody else what leadership and service truly mean

Mitali Saran

Mitali Saran

Page 10 - Mitali Saran

Texting can wait

Home alone: the vampire diaries

For want of a nail

A royal pain

The shadow republic

Diary of a terribly good looking fugitive

People power

The Darwin awards

Courting controversy

Peeping Sam: It's complicated

Facing up to acid attacks

The hills are alive

It's the personal, stupid

The dictionary of obscure sorrows

The point of it all

Action-packed days

Treasure hunt

Home is where the heat is

And now for something completely different

India visa vis the world

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MahaRERA freezes accounts of 1950 stalled realty projects to protect buyers

Game Changer box office Day 1: Ram Charan targets a blockbuster opening

Phoenix Mills shares rise 3% on posting Q3 biz update; consumption up 21%

GTPL Hathway Reports Stable Performance in Q3 FY25

Telcos urge DoT to implement Trai's definition for international traffic

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