Odds and Ends

The problem of the second half

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Every Sunday, my sister goes to see one of the newly released Hindi movies, and then texts me her opinion. "The first half was decent," she said about Dostana last weekend. "But the second half was terrible." This is invariably the sentiment I hear about any commercial Hindi movie (or Tamil, for that matter; I heard it a couple of...

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Change we want to believe in

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
At a function yesterday, the Bharatiya Janata Party L. K. Advani seems to have made some mystifying remarks. He opened, apparently , with the remark that "[j]ust as the winds of change have swept across the United States, I have no doubt that India too will witness change when the next parliamentary elections take place in a few months.” Advani...

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The tale of two cities

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
From this article on Washington D. C., this lovely anecdote that is worth quoting in full: How far apart the two Washingtons lie was rather poignantly suggested in 1990, when federal authorities set up an undercover drug purchase in Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House, in order to provide a prop—a seized bag of crack cocaine...

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The sometimes-admirable Crichton

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
The bestselling author Michael Crichton, who passed away a few days ago, initially wrote under two pen names - John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. The names seem innocuous enough, but they were apparently sly references to his ginormous height of 2.09 metres, or 6 feet 9 inches. The surname "Lange," in German, means "tall," while a Jeffery...

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Memories of 2000

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
The very first time I started to seriously follow a U. S. Presidential election, it fortuitously also happened to be the most exciting election yet. It was 2000, and I was a student at a state university that technically lay between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh but that really lay in the middle of nowhere. Around us were towns that voted staunchly Republican;...

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Eating through the recession

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
You know that an economic slowdown has gotten really serious when it starts to make its presence felt on even the Dining pages. Over the last few weeks, publications in the U.S. -- and especially in New York, home to the enfeebled Wall Street -- have started examining how restaurants are responding to weaker wallets. Even in states like Florida and...

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The long and short of shorting

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
In today's edition of Mint, Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz weighs in on the wisdom of blaming hedge funds and their intensive short-selling habits for the alarmist currents that are running through the financial markets today. In particular, he says: "...in complex markets, short-sellers are akin to investigative journalists...

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The banana republic of Mumbai

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
When it was launched, I had resolved to keep Odds and Ends resolutely apolitical, but sometimes this kind of promise is hard to keep. Especially today, when I read about this particular spot of ghastliness : Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena goons beating up legitimate candidates for a legitimate Railways entrance exam. This sort of thuggery...

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Guinness record scuttled by visa power

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
When I wrote this story , Ashish Sharma was looking forward to visiting New York to participate in the Netflix movie ultramarathon, an endurance contest that involved watching films for an obscene number of hours. Unfortunately, his defence of his own record was scuttled - by the US Consulate, which refused to give him the requisite visa, despite two...

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Sad guys on the trading floor

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Some time ago, I wrote an article about the images that defined the molten days of the Lehman Brothers-Merrill Lynch collapse. Recently, a colleague forwarded me a web site that consists entirely of photographs of depressed brokers and traders. The captions are sometimes funny and sometimes not, but the web site is one of those awesome time sucks, which...

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Men and women of letters

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Anticipating the Nobel prizes is always fun -- sort of like anticipating the Oscars, but with more intellectual pretensions. Unless you're a scientist yourself, there's little point in picking odds for the Physics, Chemistry and Physiology awards; it's more interesting to read later about what draw the Academy's eye. (This year, in Physics...

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Why so serious?

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
NBC.com is fast becoming one of the most popular web sites to track the American Presidential election - not, heaven forbid, for its acute political commentary, but for its clips of Saturday Night Live and its lampooning of the candidates. Just since yesterday, when its clip of the vice-presidential debate sketch went on line, it has attracted nearly...

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Delete: Humanity

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
To come to work to Connaught Place, in New Delhi, on October 2 is to experience, very slightly, the eerie sensation of living some part of Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us . Weisman seems to be taken with the conceit of what would happen to our known surroundings -- forests and meadows, but also cities and towns -- if, or when, the human...

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The semantics of a financial crisis

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Two pieces in the last few days - one in the New York Times and one in Mint - have talked about the news media's relative restraint in covering the financial crisis over the last couple of weeks. This has not gone down well in at least one quarter. The popular blog Gawker has accused the press of coddling the banks with pulled punches. It's...

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Foam for dinner, and soup for dessert

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
I read a lot (a LOT!) about food, and usually I know what I will like and what I will not. So it's no little source of vexation that I simply cannot seem to make my mind up about El Bulli , Ferran Adria's restaurant in Spain. Restaurant magazine has judged El Bulli the Best Restaurant in the World a record four times, so there must be SOMEthing...

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