Earlier this month, I saw a few scenes of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ when my daughters were glued to it. There’s this scene where Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) puts Andy Sachs (Anne Hatheway) in her place when she expresses disdain and nonchalance over some high-end luxury garment. In the space of a few minutes, Priestley … Continue reading Luxury, Desire, Economics: The World Behind ‘The Devil Wears Prada’
In popular imagination, the Allied invasion of continental Europe is dominated by the Normandy Landings. The opening amphibious landing scene in Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and the Cold War narrative of the joint Anglo-American thrust to free Europe and clear the road to Berlin have both contributed to this narrative. The truth was that months … Continue reading The Forgotten ‘Battle for Italy’ and Naples in 1944
Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is essentially a meditation on whether a copy of a work of art can possess the same “essence” as the original. I watched it mainly because it featured Juliette Binochet, and the film certainly did not disappoint. It was charming, eccentric, strange, and undeniably brave in attempting something though Kiarostami could … Continue reading Warhol and Jasper Johns’ ‘Coca Cola’
After “A Room with a View’, I felt I had to read Forster’s other famed work – “A Passage to India’. Though I’m late to the party, I’m convinced that this book would rank as one of the best works of fiction written by a foreigner about India. The closest rival to this claim would … Continue reading Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’
Military life inflamed their ironic sensibilities and their skepticism. A single crude acronym that captured the soldier's lowered expectations-SNAFU, for "situation normal, all fucked up"-had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint … Continue reading GI Slang
One of the defining features of our age is that every third person seems to be preparing for a marathon. Until a few years ago, before my kids started school and turned me into a “morning person,” the most irritating part of logging on to social media after waking up late on a weekend was … Continue reading The Cooper Test
I finally watched Wim Wenders' 'Perfect Days' which came out in 2023 only to discover that the wonderful movie was commissioned as a marketing pitch for the 'Tokyo Toilet' project. The 'Tokyo Toilet' project was an initiative of Nippon Foundation under which 17 toilets were redesigned by 16 world famous architects including Pritzker awardees, in … Continue reading The Tokyo Toilet
Crime 101: After I long time, I ended up enjoying a properly executed crime caper. The business model of streaming platforms has made quantity triumph over quality. So it was good to see one that stood out. Jane Eyre: I tried watching this after finishing the book. But the adaptation was weak and I quit … Continue reading What I Watched – April 2026
The duo performed at the Delhi Tamil Sangam today. A concert that was to begin at 6pm, started after a painful hour of speeches by a bunch of men who were introduced as IAS this, Secretary that, CEO, Ram-sevak and so on! They sang for two hours: Ka Va Va in Varali by Papanasam Sivan … Continue reading Trichur Brothers at Delhi Tamil Sangam
E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, beyond its exploration of class in Victorian Britain, also captures the tourism mania that gripped the country at the turn of the century. With the British Empire at its zenith, the continent and far-flung regions such as India, Egypt, and South Africa became accessible, exerting a powerful … Continue reading Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’
