THANE AND MUMBAI ~ On the afternoon of 16 March 2012, when Sachin Tendulkar hit his hundredth century in international cricket, nearly every radio station in Mumbai lined up the song Chak De! Indiaand a Poonam Pandey joke in tribute. As radio wisecracks go, it wasn’t much of a cracker. “Don’t do a Poonam Pandey,” a chirpy male RJ advised his even-chipper…
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Mamata Banerjee: A profile circa 2014
As West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee rides a wave of triumphalism before the general election of 2014, a visit to her state reveals all is not as funny as the Trinamool leader’s limericks. Trinamool Congress chairperson and Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is a painter, and a poet, essayist and writer with 45 books to her authorship. Her preferred…
The Space Idli Mission
K Radhakrishna, the man who cooks up the things Indian astronauts will eat in outer space, also has made-to-order space rasgullas, curries, fruits and vegetables on his menu In January 2010, five months after the unmanned moon probeChandrayaan was abruptly terminated—a year before its completion, since radio contact with the mooncraft was lost—the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) announced a…
Sankar’s Thackeray Mansion
There is a young man, not exactly adrift, but looking to find a footing in the city. Not wide-eyed, nor yet hardened by knowingness, but still sensitive to the shape of experience. Amol Palekar might play him on screen, or Farooq Sheikh. And there is the restless, bad-tempered metropolis, not unkind really, only impatient in her hurry; she could be…
Why Ved Mehta Writes a 100 Drafts
The stories writer Ved Mehta—polite even when he edits your English, soft-spoken, precise in speech—tells you in person are very often anecdotes you would find recounted in his enviably large body of work. Or observations he has made in other interviews, which can be found handily collated on his website. There are also some marvellous, fantastical anecdotes that make an…