MTV: Viva, Trivia and Beauties on Duty!

MTV - on its arrival in India - taught us two seminal things. One, it was possible to crack all your canteen jokes on television. Two, there...

Words from the Wonder Years

Words that are an intrinsic part of our growing up – and used every day – abdicate in favour of others, never to return again. Some words I ...

Jokes from Across the Vindhyas

My dear friend - Mr Arunkumar Balasubramaniam (boy, in Calcutta, they have addresses shorter than that!) - has requested me for a Tamil joke...

Dawaa Ya Dua? - Diseases in Bollywood

Taking a cue from this post , which lamented the lack of diseases in Bollywood, I was tempted to think of the various ailments produced by t...

Been There, Done That: A Sales Adventure

In the recent past, we have seen Indian versions of chick-lit and lad-lit coming of age, as a large number of IIT graduates, IIM graduates a...

21 Years Ago

Sharjah, as an international venue, may have been a novelty, but it had one huge negative as far as Indian schoolboys were concerned. All th...

Abbas Mustan: Bollywood's Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was initially considered to be a lesser director – a maker of thrillers and potboilers with only murder, espionage and such...

Shubho Nabobarsho

How does one celebrate the Bengali New Year's day? Unlike English, a Bengali day 'astronomically' starts with sunrise so there i...

Take 5: Five Bits of Random Trivia

I read this really cool piece of trivia in the papers about how Brett Lee's nickname came to be Oswald. Apparently, Steve Waugh is the m...

What is a Brand? Are Film-makers Brands?

If I remember anything from my marketing courses many summers ago, a brand is a promise. Colgate is not a white logo on a red background. It...

Veerasamy - The Man of Action: "Sollama Varathu Tsunami....Solli Varathu Veerasamy" (Spoiler Warning: Plot Revealed Below)

There comes a time in every office when all of its members decide they need a break from the mundane realities of life, and the unrelenting ...

300 - The Carnal and The Intellectual (Spoiler Warning - The Plot is More or Less Revealed Below)

It is very rarely that men are seen as sex objects in a movie. But the team behind 300 was out to change all the stereotypes. An army of 300...

The Byline Boom

Maybe the beginning was "To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before"...maybe it was the advent of classy gangster movies of the bre...

Podi-pishi, R.I.P.

Leela Mazumdar passed away last Thursday (April 5). For those who have not the good fortune of reading her, I think it would be appropriate ...

Jhingalala

Long long ago in the land of Bollywood came a movie by the name of Shalimar . It was one of the first (if not the very first) bilingual film...

1, 2, 3... Infinity

I was just going through some old newspapers, in one of which there was an article about the fear children have for mathematics. In a survey...