Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
27 July 2010, 07:24 PM IST
Ministers and corporators alike suffer from Congenital Regressive Aesthetic Sensibility Syndrome (CRASS). Think concrete cows with purple polka dots or garbage cans masquerading as polyurethane penguins. Satyajit Ray boycotted all events of the Left-led...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
21 July 2010, 09:29 PM IST
It's Shining India again. Uday Kumar's cool and clever Rupee symbol elevated our once-lowly rupee into the league of swaggering currencies. Two days later came the news that a TERI scientist could well end the eco crisis which has defied the world's brightest...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
14 July 2010, 08:20 PM IST
Delhi got a swanky new airport yesterday; Mumbai's proposed airport only got a new controversy. But even if the environment ministry has blown a huge ozone hole in our project, we aren't going to turn an envious green. Showpieces must land only on the capital,...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
06 July 2010, 06:09 PM IST
Yes/No/ Both: the new Maoist film captures our confusions
Action hero as anti hero? The idea is as unorthodox as Suneil Shetty being cast as the reluctant Naxalite. But there he is the central figure in Anant Mahadevan's Red Alert, a quietly...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
30 June 2010, 09:01 PM IST
This column is not going to be kind, much less pretty. No disrespect is meant to the lovely, late and loudly lamented Viveka Babaji. But in all our bingeing on every detail about her lonely life and tragic suicide, we need to stop and think of the...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
23 June 2010, 07:52 PM IST
Their names are separated by just a nudge of syllables, both are Hyderabadis and both are India's s most famous women 'racketeers' of all time. This week put them galaxies apart. On Sunday, the low-key Saina Nehwal blazed higher into history by...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
16 June 2010, 08:32 PM IST
Diversity is our USP till you meet the United States of All-over. All the world's people, and experiences to match. From the high-octane Women Deliver conference in DC, i had flown into Atlanta to reconnect with No 1 Son and his newish wife. One late...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
09 June 2010, 03:13 PM IST
Some cities can't think local because they are overwhelmingly global. All capital cities, in a way, are natively challenged because of the swarms of 'outsiders' who come as insiders of governments and their babu biospheres. Washington, DC, named after a more...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
02 June 2010, 11:47 PM IST
Does it have something to do with Saturn becoming more saturnine, or kalam more calamitous? Blaming an Icelandic eruption would be too far-fetched, or simply too far, so instead of the volcano, should we blame El Nino? Is it the negative energy released by...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
26 May 2010, 06:57 PM IST
Am I my brother's sleeper? This question surfaces each time I dip into the now daily diet of gotra gruel – and leaves me gagging on it. My deep, dark non-secret is that I am married to my first cousin. Truth be told, nearly 40 years on, I still cringe to...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
19 May 2010, 09:01 PM IST
You can call it the camaraderie of concern. Hospital waiting rooms are a unique club, a freemasonry actually, with an esoteric ritual, even a jargon, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, unaffected, un-bothered world beyond. These spaces have a hierarchy of...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
12 May 2010, 08:30 PM IST
Oh, NOT to be in Kolkata now that the Tagore jubilee is here. It’s an ambivalent feeling to miss the literal and literary outpouring that will mark the 150th birth anniversary of Bengal’s Inescapable Icon. For a week and more, the air will be heady with...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
05 May 2010, 08:27 PM IST
Mumbai's torrid tango with Ajmal Amir Kasab is over. From the moment we saw that first eerie photograph, we had been obsessed by this baby-faced monster. We never stopped being sickened, outraged, infuriated, frustrated -- even daily...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
28 April 2010, 08:16 PM IST
Lalit Modi’s impassioned speech at the closing ceremony of IPL-3 was a hit. It was talked about as much as the missing billion-dollar WSG-MSM document, Shilpa Shetty’s missing name in the Rajasthan Royals stake, and the Bada Pav-ar’s name...
Posted By
Bachi Karkaria
21 April 2010, 09:17 PM IST
Shashi ‘sweated’, but will Lalit feel the Axe Effect?
CK Prahalad Is Dead. Long Live IPL Modi. Mercifully, the management guru passed away before he could grasp the full extent of the hostile takeover of his acclaimed theory. Lalit Modi plc...
Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Friday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.
The views expressed in Erratica are the author´s own.
