Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
28 July 2010, 12:02 PM IST
Mani Shankar Aiyer lives in Safdarjung Lane. The road is one of umpteen in Lutyens’Delhi stretches where perfectly fine dividers/pavements have been dug up and redone - or are in the process – in the name of the Commonwealth Games. One of the million...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
07 July 2010, 11:19 AM IST
It is interesting to see how the one line that Bollywood movies – particularly during and after the 80s – drew unabashed inspiration from has been turned on its head in the changed realities of urban and rural north India and their renewed, often fatal...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
06 June 2010, 10:20 AM IST
Congress seems to be taking its obsession with the first family to new heights and smaller leaders are trying to outdo each other for brownie points from the Supreme one – and in the process, making complete fools of themselves.
How else does one...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
25 May 2010, 11:32 AM IST
These days visions of that proverbial monkey – of the real/imagined mathematical problem – who is trying to climb up an oiled pole and keeps slipping some distance for every few metres climbed, are haunting me.
Only, the monkey seems to have been replaced...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
21 May 2010, 11:42 AM IST
To say that our MPs are a pampered lot is to state the obvious. It was therefore touching to see one of the breed whimpering on television about how the MP gets paid less than a government clerk. There was naturally no mention of how the clerk does...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
27 March 2010, 07:18 PM IST
The Delhi Assembly is the most boring place on earth. The lowly standard of debate and the uncouth behaviour of MLAs – cutting across party lines – makes covering Assembly sessions in the capital among the most distasteful assignments possible. Not to mention...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
15 March 2010, 04:12 PM IST
It is interesting how extravagance is such an integral part of governance in our country that the government of the day can make heavy weather of a decision – ministers and bureaucrats traveling economy class - that should be a matter of routine in a...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
08 March 2010, 04:08 PM IST
It has been sixty years since the constitution of India that guaranteed reservation for people from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes came into effect. Reservation was in place even before that. It was a means of empowerment.
Tellingly, even now,...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
27 February 2010, 08:54 PM IST
I am not a very keen football fan - just one who occasionally sits down for a match. And promptly goes off to sleep if there are more than 20 goalless minutes at a stretch. Okay, make it thirty is the coach is a certain Jose Mourinho.
But I can solemnly...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
26 February 2010, 03:21 PM IST
The moment I heard Mr Pranab Mukherjee talking about new banking licences in his budget speech, I went: "Yippie! Serves you right you private sector banks. There will be some more breathing down your ugly necks." I am no bank-hater - by constitution...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
03 February 2010, 12:16 PM IST
I am no fan of Shah Rukh Khan. But kudos to him for standing up to the Shiv Sena where greater men from the industry, tremulous at the prospect of losing business to rampaging Sena goons have capitulated. The vanquished list reads like a who’s who of...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
06 January 2010, 06:47 PM IST
I hope lots and lots of parents in the country read about how Venkataraman Ramakrishnan who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year could not clear either the medical entrance or the JEE – an examination which a late mathematics teacher of mine used to...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
21 December 2009, 06:10 PM IST
Will Delhi 2010 actually be an egg on the face or are all these now-angry-now-placatory sound bites emanating from the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) actually the function of a “racial bias” – as most senior officials of the...
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
09 October 2009, 05:52 PM IST
Being the first black president of the United States of America has big perks. Sometimes as big as the Nobel Peace Prize. That too within less than a year in office and without any significant achievements to show! It certainly pays to be Barack Husain Obama....
Posted By
Abantika Ghosh
23 September 2009, 08:08 PM IST
When home minister P Chidambaram asked Delhiites to learn to behave in order to play good hosts a year later, he was mouthing possibly the most subscribed to view of residents of Delhi – something which all of us rue at least once a week on an average,...
Abantika Ghosh is an incurable foodie for whom life is one long (losing) battle with the bulge. Between adding and attempting to reduce calories, she is assistant editor, metro, at The Times Of India, Delhi. The blog is just about our life and times, about being a thirtysomething living in these times when economically and socially every day we are redefining our existence, finding new meanings to old idioms and after all that find ourselves at times mouthing the same old prejudices that we abhor in the older generation. Getting old eh!
The views expressed in Just So are the author´s own.
