Lord of The Twits: 100 Followers in 10 Days

Published on April 7, 2012 in Silly and Technology. 22 Comments

[Crossposted from my Outlook article here on strategies for increasing Twitter followers]

Start off by tweets that contain words like “Justin Beiber”, “IPod” and you will find an army of bots (automated spam followers) attaching like ants over a lump of sugar. Bots are some of the best followers—they swell your numbers, do not snap back and put the faces of celebrities as profile pictures so that you can delude yourself into thinking, even if for a split second, that Megan Fox is following you.

On the topic of profile pictures, here is an important tip. If you are a woman, please include a “hot” picture of yourself. It does not have to be revealing (although some tasteful cleavage can sometimes go a long way) but something that is both seductive as well as mysterious, like an eye or a glistening red lip, framed in shadows. A bare ankle (with anklet) or the back of the neck can do wonders.

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The Asli Agent Vinod

Published on March 25, 2012 in Reviews. 30 Comments

[Also published in DNA]

Gather round, children. Today I shall tell you the story of Agent Vinod. Not the Saif Ali Khan- Agent Vinod but the one who came before him, the original “Agent Vinod” from the 1977 movie with the same name.

It was a landmark year for international intrigue. Times were so bad that Iftikaar,  known to play the staid police commissioner who encircles the bad guys ( “Police tumhe chaaron tarah se gher liya hai”), had crossed over to the dark side. There he was heading an international gang of intrigue, which not  content with blowing up what looked suspiciously on-screen like toy-trains and doll-houses, had also hatched a sinister plot which involved kidnapping and imprisoning great scientist Ajay Saxena (Nazir Hussain)  in a lair that had sharp dildos descending from the roof and, even more dangerously, lip-shaped TV screens. Why did they do this? So that they could obtain from him a secret formula he had developed, one that could negate even the effects of a Hydrogen-bomb.

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The Essential Soumitra

Published on March 23, 2012 in Bengal and Memories. 20 Comments

Apur Sansar:  For Apur Sansar, the final film in the “Apu Trilogy”,  the great director plucked a young radio announcer and small-time theater actor from anonymity to play the titular role. Soumitra Chatterjee. Nurtured by Ray’s genius, Soumitra brought to the world of light and shadows the unforgettable character of Apu, boyishly handsome, romantically intense and poetically fragile, journeying on the lyrical road of life, pushing aside the poverty, despondency and death that he encounters on the way. That last scene  of “Apur Sansar” in which Apu’s face becomes an almost wordless kaleidoscope of sadness, joy, guilt and hope as he reunites with his estranged son Kajal is so heart-wrenching that not even the greatest curmudgeon can prevent the eyes from welling up with tears. It was as triumphant an arrival of a great actor as one could hope for. So sensational was he that would go on to become the exacting Ray’s favorite actor for all time.

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The TMC’s DNA

Published on March 20, 2012 in Politics. 72 Comments

“The rail hike is against Trinamool’s DNA”. —Derek O’Brien, Trinamool MP

Over the past few years, in a series of blog posts, I have put the three-leaf-clover of the Trinamool under my electron microscope, trying to decode its DNA. My conclusion, not that it is particularly novel, was that “What people were calling the eclipsing of Communism in Bengal with Buddhadev’s defeat was actually its revival. Because Trinamool’s DNA is an exact clone of what used to be the CPM’s DNA under Jyoti Basu.”  ”Under Jyoti Basu” is a significant modifier because there had been a slight jiggling of the CPM DNA during the rule of Buddhadev Bhattacharya, where based on some genetic perturbations, the new leader had come to embrace concepts hethetro considered anathema to the Communists, like the aggressive wooing of industrial investment. It was not however an X-Men type radical mutation, (which was what was needed) because when push came to shove (with Didi providing both the push as well as the shove), Buddhadev was found to be unwilling, or unable to, chemo out the cancer of  ”party”-sponsored violence and intimidation.

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Farewell Sir

Published on March 10, 2012 in Cricket. 71 Comments

If Sachin was the teacher’s pet marked for greatness ever since he joined the school, Ganguly the arrogant gang-leader of the cool kids and VVS Laxman the freakishly-talented loner in the corner, Rahul Dravid will always be the hair-cleanly-parted, diligent “good boy”, the one who studies every waking hour to get the best grade.

The perfect student.

Not for him the arrogance of knowledge. Nor the satisfaction of absolute success. Dravid was always learning, and as one of the  first ads he shot for so prophetically said, “always practicing”.

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