Here is a story of two virals.   Separated by a border, two very different videos went viral in the last two months of 2011. Both shared so much in common and were oh so different   Probably what goes viral depends on the current cultural temper of that country. What it considers as an echo of its voice, however subconscious or sublimal   One viral goes on to become a case study in IIMs and goes into the handbook of aspiring...

Dylan Thomas knew what he was talking about when he penned his powerful paean about dying to that stage of our lives which forces us to come face to face with ourselves with terrible clarity – the stage when the curtains are coming down on us Open Culture, that wonderful website of all that is interesting on the web, posted this article – The top 5 regrets of the dying At someone at my stage of my life, at the launch-board of a...

Binayak Sen was convicted today for ‘sedition’ by the ‘justice’ system of this country. People around the world are appalled that such a thing can happen in the largest ‘democracy’ in the world… It would almost be abnormal today, in this seemingly ethically ambiguous world, to not feel a sense of hilarity when such heavy words are used with such seriousness. You feel like laughing out loud and then bang your head on the...

I took some time to write about Kanu Sanyal, one of the fathers of what is arguably the only genuine revolutionary insurrection in post-independence India. I took some time to write about his death not only because it was a suicide but also because writing about the death of a revolutionary means bringing in his life as well… Kanu Sanyal was found hanging in his house, at the same place that saw the break of the Spring Thunder in 1967....

I remember a childhood story that i remember affected me profoundly. The story was of the Koh-i-noor diamond and how we lost it to the Britishers. The Brits were the ‘bad guys’ who looted the best things that this country had to offer and how they obscenely display the Koh-i-noor, something that they stole from us. It was a story told with much pain, a pain which I could articulate later as born out of impotent helplessness. At that...