Shougat Dasgupta was born in Bombay but left when he was six weeks old. His only other stint in India was a four year stretch, 2002-2006, in Delhi where he worked as a journalist. He has been a fitful graduate student for the last six years in New York City and Washington, DC where his single achievement was developing a fearsome one-handed topspin backhand. He moved back to Delhi in June to work at Tehelka.
I read with considerable interest Shashi Shekhar’s blog post decrying Ramachandra Guha’s new book Patriots and Partisans. “I have not read his latest book”, Shekhar writes. But this is a minor detail. It does not stop him harrumphing, of a book he has not read, that, “Intellect it would seem has [...]
By now, two days after Ajmal Kasab was hanged with a haste that belied the four-year judicial process, what is left to be said? The triumphalists have already turned their attention to Afzal Guru. The desire to hang Guru has spread across parties, called for by stalwarts and Twitter warriors [...]
It’s not often (and by not often, I mean never) that I find myself at the cutting edge, part of the vanguard. In her much talked about new book, The End of Men, Hanna Rosin describes a world in which women, at least urban professional women, are a generation or [...]
The Redditor who posted a photograph, surreptitiously taken, of Ohio State University student Balpreet Kaur in the /r/Funny section was taking part in a centuries-old tradition: pointing and laughing at bearded ladies. The bearded lady was an established circus attraction paraded for the amusement of gawping crowds, PT Barnum’s suckers [...]
On Friday afternoon, I watched the new Woody Allen film, To Rome With Love, a trifle in which Allen’s familiar obsessions flicker feebly, sparking to life for the briefest of moments before dying as if he were trying to strike a match on a windy day. During the auto ride [...]
It’s 7.23 in the morning. I have been awake since about four. I have a first blog to write and I’m threshing about for a subject like a fat man swimming laps in a paddling pool. It’s not about the ‘tyranny’ of the blank page (what an irritating phrase). Who [...]
