manedge

Mumbai has been the subject of so much malice. Ever since we can recall, a majority of the Hindi movies have been made in Mumbai, and on Mumbai. The underworld, the brothels, the dirty slums, all have been portrayed with romanticism, again and again, bringing more and more infamy to the maximum city. But going by the New India narrative, when Kota feels maligned by the makers of Mardaani 2 , which is a sequel to the same drama that led to  Padmavati being   renamed Padmavat, Mumbai should have felt so maligned by now, it could as well drown itself into the Arabian Sea. So then I am reminded of so may cities across India who would be crying wolf at being labeled negatively - Wasseypur, Mirzapur, Ghaziabad, Aligarh, Gurgaon, the badlands of Bihar, UP and MP and of course Ramgarh. If we look at the non-Indian moviedom, there would be many candidates vying for the Hall of Shame - New York, Las Vegas, Sicily, to name a few. To those who have reasons to complain, however invali...

When Greta Thunberg accused the world leaders of having stolen her childhood, many people thought she was pointing fingers in Trumpesque style at Trump himself - "How dare you?" When I was younger than what is Greta's age today, in the 1970s and in school, the term global warming had started getting attention. We were told how the world would be hell in 50 years' time with glaciers melting and sea-levels rising. But there were comforting voices as well who brushed under the carpet the seriousness of the issue by putting up interesting convincing arguments. And so two generations - mine and the one before that - continued to plunder the world. Forests were uprooted. But weren't we planting 10 trees in place of one that we had cut? We were doing so by overlooking the reality that a tree that took thousands of years to stands on its feet was being replaced by saplings which may or may not survive a few years. After all we have been planting saplings every year a...

It is early morning. My daughter Saumya and I decide to go to the nearest town on my cycle. As we begin the journey, we come across a steep road. By instinct Saumya, who is sitting on the cycle's carrier, tries to press the brakes to regulate its speed. I prevent her from doing so. We go down the slope and suddenly it is dark. As we emerge from the trough, light returns. Suddenly I realise that we have actually an auto-rickshaw hooked to our cycle and that we have no idea who the owner is. We get into this nearby town after some time and enter a by-lane by mistake. We come out of the by-lane and return to the town. We abandon the auto-rickshaw deciding not to take the risk of towing it back to our town and getting caught. Saumya wants painting accessories. We look around for shops. Some two or three shops are open, as the light coming out of them shows, but they aren't stationery stores, I tell her. So move out to a nearby street, on one side of which is a large ground of some...