Someday, today will be nostalgia

Simple question - how many times have you seen Home Alone? I would assume more times than you can count. Actually, replace Home Alone with any of your favorite movies. You would have seen it repeatedly until you knew the dialogues by heart and what exactly was going to happen in the next scene. Still, you watched it. Sometimes out of boredom and sometimes because you actually enjoyed watching it more than once. Back in the day, life was a whole lot simpler. There was one television per home which everyone fought for. There existed only a handful of serials (as we called them back then before they metamorphosed into series). And you either saw a movie on theatre or HBO or Star Movies. Remember when the programming schedule of the week appeared in the Sunday newspaper and this allowed you to plan your TV watching time? And sometimes, if you didn’t find anything interesting, you would gladly resort to watching a movie you have already watched, ag...

India's first space mission in 1963 There are very few things that unite a country, while elected politicians do everything in their power to divide it. Till yesterday, I was convinced that was sport. What else can divide a country that speaks more languages than anyone can count and where cuisines change every 100 km or so? Movies and music can stake a claim, but the whole nation seldom hums the same song at the same time or is in the thrall of the same movie. So that leaves sport - the last man standing when it comes to hope and inspiration and integrity and dreams. Last week, the whole country united in celebrating PV Sindhu. 3 years back, in the 2016 Olympic finals, she held the entire country to ransom when she took on Carolina Marin and lost. She has struck silver many times but gold always eluded her. Then she struck gold. Like someone who spent years drilling for oil and finally hit up a gushing well where the oil never stops flowing. If you're d...

Our lives are a series of compromises. Most of these compromises go unacknowledged even as they pile up like compound interest. In this machinery of give and take, there is one thing I can't compromise on - my filter coffee. Everyone has that one thing they can't compromise on. Of course, most have us have more than one thing that we don't like to compromise on but there is one thing that stands out more than the others, like a prodigy of prodigies in an ivy league class. All things being equal, I can't compromise on my coffee. It has to be filter coffee. I have long since abandoned vending machine coffee. I have also abandoned having filter coffee in over priced coffee shops as they don't taste like filter coffee in the first place. Outside of homes that revere and give filter coffee its due, there are very few places where you get good, respectable filter coffee. My filter coffee has to be strong. Really strong. The milk just plays the supporting r...

A few weeks back, I was in Chennai to visit my sister. When I opened the newspaper, Uber Eats had taken out a full page ad with Alia Bhat and the headline read ‘For your tinda moments’.  I first thought tinda was a South Indian dish that I wasn’t aware of, the same way I didn’t know that brinjal was also called aubergine and spent half an hour looking for a brinjal recipe in a fancy cookbook. I turned to my wife, who is from Mumbai, and asked her what tinda was.  She tried her best to explain it and words like ‘kind of a gourd’ were used. Still, I didn’t really get a clear picture of what the heck tinda was. Not being a fan of gourds, I assumed it was a vegetable that people weren’t too fond of hence the need to reach out for a food-delivery service to order something that satiates their taste-buds. My next question was – how many South Indians know what tinda is? Languages have always been a bane for me. And doing batt...