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Saturday, February 20, 2010
Vol. 4 No. 8
LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE
A Shiv Sena activist defacing a poster of My Name is Khan and hoisting the saffron flag at a movie theatre in Mumbai last week.
BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH YAHOO INDIA’S ARUN TADANKI >Page 6
KABADDIGITAL Carrom, ‘gilli danda’ and ‘teen patti’— traditional Indian games are being resurrected in videogame form >Page 7
THACKEROLOGY
101
THE GOOD LIFE
CULT FICTION
SHOBA NARAYAN
THE SIMPLE, BUT EXOTIC BRINJAL
A
s a mother whose kids read her articles, let me begin by saying that this column is R-rated. Keep it away from kids. To paraphrase the title of an iconic food essay by the late great David Foster Wallace in Gourmet magazine: Consider the brinjal. Genetically modified but roundly rejected by farmers; placed in limbo by India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh; spearheaded by the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco) through... >Page 4
What’s the Shiv Sena’s appeal? The Mumbai Marathi is disinherited from his city, and the Thackeray clan gives him an illusory sense of power >Page >Page 10 10
MUSIC MATTERS
R. SUKUMAR
SHUBHA MUDGAL
YOU NEED VISA POWER Inaugurating a series on his 51day cruise around South America, Wendell Rodricks recounts how the merrygo round began at home >Page 13
‘I FEEL OLD!’ Farhan Akhtar on inspiring others, his acting skills, and his alter ego >Page 17
DON’T MISS
in today’s edition of
MIDDLE AGE: READING THE SOUND OF AN COMICS ON MATH INDIAN HARMONY
E
veryone has a midlife crisis. Mine, funnily enough, is math. Funnily, because I studied pure math in college, the kind of stuff where you spend 30 minutes proving that 1 is indeed greater than zero and then another 45 proving that 2 is greater than 1. One did this by assuming the reverse (that 0 was greater than 1 and 1 greater than 2). Then, you would proceed logically from this assumption till you arrived at something totally illogical. Or absurd. And since the result was absurd, the process... >Page 15
I
f my ears were ringing with songs from the soundtrack of the Marathi film Natrang the last time I wrote for Music Matters, this fortnight I’m going around humming and trying to sing Bengali and Assamese songs, even as I take delight in the news that the Natrang soundtrack won a National Award for its music composers. Now I have two more gorgeous Indian voices to thank for filling my ears and my heart with the wonderful... >Page 17
CELLULOID COUTURE