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What's in Vogue, and what's not
• Date published: September 4, 2008
Some people haven’t the faintest clue as to how they should go around making opulent style statements. Especially, if done with an inordinate amount of insensitivity and tastelessness. Worse still, if they have the nerve to defend it as callously.
So when Vogue India carried a 16-page photo shoot of decidedly-not-rich people strutting $10,000 Hermès Birkin bags, $5,000 Burberry umbrellas, or $100 Fendi bibs, the magazine was asking for some censure. This came in the form of three articles – in the New York Times, the Telegraph, and the Independent. The thread was duly picked up by a number of blogs. And now the story is all over town.
And as to why none of the Indian news media establishments reacted to the Vogue India shoot, your guess would be as good as mine.
Beri, Beri juvenile
• Date published: March 6, 2006
For a book priced at an astronomical Rs 1 lakh (that would be $2,250 or thereabouts), it ought to be your unfettered right to know what on earth lies between the blazing covers. But Ritu Beri isn't telling you. You need to buy the book to find out as much, that has been her repartee all this while. What the blazes!
Anyway, don't you tax your brain too much about the issue, having read those eulogising agency news items; this blog will actually vindicate your ill-founded fears. The book is not going to tax your brain much either. Yes, it is a no-brainer. The tome only proves that Ritu Beri's 28 inch waist matches her two-digit IQ. No, that's not a nasty one – there are nastier ones to come. Read on, pray.
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink:
Making Cat Calls
Mohammad bin Tughlaq had ruled over vast stretches and tracts of land that today constitute India. He was a great ruler who left behind a legacy. A legacy that is today most identifiable as an adjectival derivative of his name – Tughlaqesque. The word is too complex to have an exact synonym. Tughlaqesque would mean exotic, Quixotic, far-fetched, well-meaning, ill-conceived, arrogant, grandiose, all at the same time. It is also a word that can be routinely associated with India’s later-day rulers. Especially, the ones who have lorded over us since Independence.
There is one Tughlaqesque idea that is doing the rounds these days and the gullible Indian media has fallen flat for it – that of reintroducing the cheetah in India.
Seeing the cheetah in the Indian wild is any Indian wildlifer’s wet dream. It is something that sets our hearts aflutter. But let’s get real and see what this dream is all about.
The minister and his words