Criminal mindsSix men wannabe ransomers copy-paste the outstandingly sophisticated methodology of the bomber from the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster Speed on a Bangalore milieu, and flub it. A 14-year-old schoolgirl is murdered in Noida by someone who wields a sharp-edged weapon like a...
The 'nordoma' culture: Something rottenThe first time I stepped into one of Kolkata’s infamous nordomas, it was to rescue a sinking kitten that had escaped our house in her search of her own version of foie gras. The second time I stepped into a nordoma was during the deluge of 2007, wh...
Taxi drivers: movers and shakers at the wheelTaxi drivers are usually as churlish as the belching rattletraps they steer by the injudicious overuse of biceps and forearms, and lazy feet. But their degree of tetchiness varies from country to country, and within a country, from city to city.
In New York, they curse you wit...
Cyber-forensics does a bummer - againI went on the Internet a week after it was launched in India on August 15, 1995—probably the among the first 100 in India to have taken to cyberspace in this tight-arsed, and then entirely unregulated, nation. The first week I spent, 10 hours a day, bleary-eyed like a perv, ...
The mad world of subtitle censorsThe face on the TV screen spat, “She’s such a pissy little high school c… .” The subtitle primly excised the “pissy little” and left in the “c…”. So, it read, “She’s such a high school c… .”
A few minutes later, an actor said, “My ass got so...
Fusion confusionThere is this small thing about Kolkata audiences that draws musicians back from all over the world time and again – a willingness to keep their palms unjoined and their mouths shut while the act on stage, good or bad as it shows itself to be, unspools. I’d like to think that...
