A Rough Guide to Terror Tourism
(Wrote this a year ago, about a week after the Mumbai terror attacks) “Ram Gopal Varma ki yahi kamayee Do sarkar banaye, ek girayee.” On SMS Bungee jumping. Paragliding. Skateboarding. I mean – yawn. Because on December 1st, as I watched our dear Chief Minister tour the ravaged interiors of the hotel Taj and Trident, I knew it was time to make way for the hottest, hippest way to take a break, let your hair down, tune out, switch off. Terror tourism. Now I don’t know about you fellas but my motto is - “be prepared”. So, I write this in preparedness for the outside chance that someone amongst us might just g

All the World’s a Parking Lot
(Appeared today in the BANGALORE MIRROR) We’re drowning in traffic, they tell us. Slowly choking to an agonising death on roads that are more pothole than road. And so, the End of the World – according to some, just a short 1095 days away – will be because we will all fall into a Giant-Pothole-in-the-Sky. Naturally, with such doomsday prophecies in the air, I have become a keen observer of traffic. And have come to the conclusion that the problem is not only that there are too many vehicles and too few roads. (Forecasters predict that very soon, roads, along with the tiger and the fruit bat, will be extinct and future generations will gaze at pictures of th

The Future Super Power
(MY COLUMN IN THE BANGALORE MIRROR TODAY) “Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.” Dave Barry Well, it’s finally official. Karnataka will now have regular load shedding – two hours a day in Bangalore, four hours a day in “other urban areas” and twelve hours a day in “rural” areas. And there’s no need to gasp in outrage about that twelve-hour bit. After all, what does a farmer need electricity for? To watch his paddy grows? Besides, I have a more important point to make and this realization dawned upon me one relaxed, peaceful day just tw

The Truth About Calendar Girls and Chastity Belts
It’s quite astonishing how many misconceptions the average pappu-pinky-on-the-street has about stuff. And I count myself to be one such pappu-pinky For example, the popular belief is that the Miss Universe and Miss World contests and the annual Kingfisher calendar exist because there are many amongst us who like to ogle at pretty women, preferably in minimal clothing. Wrong. The real reason  – something that Donald Trump, Julia Morley and Vijay Mallya have known all along – is that every 10-second ogle of a woman in swimsuit saves upto 10,000 Ridley turtles, feeds one million starving children in wherever-it-is-they-are-starving and arrests the mel

Post-Diwali Peregrinations
  I’m confused. The recession is over, they say. And it must be. Firstly because the experts say so. After all, aren’t they the ones who warned us about the collapse of the stock market