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The lost joy of seeing a movie twice

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
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Happy Teacher's Day, Chandrayaan 2

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
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Compromises, filter coffee and separate bills

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
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Hindi Gotthila– Confessions of an Hindi illiterate

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 battle with the national language is a daily occurrence. At some p
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Keeping up with the fitness Joneses

The 'hum fit toh India fit’ movement is a great initiative and if you look around, it seems as if every other person you run into is gearing up to run a marathon or on some fancy ass diet. But a lot of the mushrooming fitness industry seems to be becoming more niche and out of reach of the common man. I run and practice yoga. So by most standards, I am fitness conscious. There is a thin line between that and being a fitness freak. It began a couple of years ago when I trained and completed my first half-marathon. When my already bad back started acting up and caved in after I overdid the running, thinking that it was the solution to all my problems, I took refuge at the feet of yoga as paying 400 bucks per physiotherapy session was too much of a beast of burden to bear.  When it comes to being open to new experiences, I am as flexible as a bhakt who is questioned about his blind love for all things Hindutva. Not that I had any grand illusions of doing 108 suryanamaskars
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The fortune cookie elections

Nothing changes after elections. Yet they are fascinating. Maybe it's because as humans, we are designed to perennially live in hope.  Karnataka is going to vote on Saturday. Politicians who claim to cement every pothole and bring the metro to each and every nook and corner of the city, have already hijacked all the cab drivers and finding a ride home means endless waits. And if you run into an election rally, your wait can extend into eternity. We may display apathy towards elections and our politicians, but like a bad movie that you have paid to watch, we just have to know the ending. Before the elections, newspapers publish the net worth of our netas. They run into hundreds of crores. Close your eyes and imagine a crore. Then add a few more zeroes to it. Makes you dizzy, doesn't it? Why do we vote, when we expect little or no change? It's like going to work without expecting a salary. Just before elections, roads that are already tarred get magically re-tarred
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The Seven not-so spiritual laws for the new cook

I am an unapologetic foodie. Though I can no longer wolf down a 7 course meal and follow it up with 7 Mysore Paks and then ask what’s for dinner, there are days where I can still resuscitate my teenage self and come close. Of course I have preferences. I have a weakness for South Indian food and I'm subconsciously always afraid that all Italian food will be bland and tasteless, even though I have been proved wrong time and again. At the end of every extravagant buffet, I dutifully round it up with a serving of curd rice. For the most part, I ate food. I sat back and waited for it to arrive. Be it at home or elsewhere. The arms and legs of my culinary skills extended to making a really delectable plate of omelette (with onion and green chilli) and Top Ramen Smoodles (with capsicum and carrot), and a drinkable cup of filter coffee (there was never any instant coffee powder in the house to fall back upon). Bred on my grandmother's impeccable and irreplaceable culinary mag
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