What are words worth?

CP: outer circle Okay this is not the worst view, but take a careful look at the flooring and the scaffolding in the background. Tiles being replaced, pillars being rebuilt, roofing being refurbished...and this is the least of it. Most of CP is much worse. Drive on the roads, and more often than not you find yourself in a bottleneck because of construction on either side. Walk, and it's worse, you might fall into one of the several ditches (in Connaught Place you have to step over several, sometimes walking over precariously placed planks to cross a wide one). Three months to go and nowhere near complete. The news of the day is that the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi will witness a spectacular display of fireworks costing the exchequer some Rs 40 crore. A show up in the sky might distract some from the unfinished work on the roads! Having just returned from a trip to Delhi, I am left with a sense of disenchantment and deep worry. Is this the face we are to present to the worl...

The rapid proliferation of Western brand names on Indian streets is nothing new; it's been happening since the beginning of the "LPG" era (thanks to my mass comm students who taught me that acronym for liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation). Coca Cola, Pepsi, Levi's, etc. And more recently, Chevrolet, Volkswagen, and other such motorables. But this morning as I was driving to work I saw one that threw me just a little bit--the iconic motorcycle company, Harley-Davidson, has a showroom in (where else?) Banjara Hills! While one might say that the VW Beetle is as much a style and attitude product as the HD, the latter belongs to a culture that somehow feels a bit out of place in the rarefied corporate environs of main street Banjara Hills. Okay, accepted, the motorbikes perhaps got very bad rap based on mythologies created by Hollywood, of biker gangs and Hells Angels being the primary HD clientele, but that too is an image that is hard to wipe out of the imaginatio...

I’m just back from a wedding in the city of mandapams and katcheris, and of marriages made as a result of discussions over good strong decoction kaapi. I’m also just back from one of those weddings, this one of course not decided by the exchange of yellow and red dotted jadakams (horoscopes) but by the meeting of two young minds that had grown up together. The wedding is incidental to this post, however, which bears upon matters much more trivial. But the wedding provided the context, the backdrop, against which my determination to not be lured by the promoters of “youngistan” was sorely tested. You see, I’ve entered the “grey zone” in the past year or so, having decided not to give in to increasingly strident voices in advertising that urge one to “stay young” and buy into the cult of youth, that treats ageing as a pathology to be aggressively tackled and stayed at any cost. The cult of youth comes with a huge price tag, hung innocuously on off-the-shelf goods like anti-wrinkle c...