Sushmita Bose - Livemint.com
ABOUT RECENT POSTS
Member since 09-17-2008
Last visited 09-13-2009
Timezone 5.00 GMT
Total Posts 56
Post Rank 0
  • Sunday, September 13, 2009
    Posted at 1:21:00 PM
    It felt funny to be out of the blogging loop for three weeks. But despite my best efforts, I couldn't find time to go about it. I was in India for almost the entire time; I spent a lot of time in Calcutta (my parents don't possess the gadget known as the PC), and a fair bit in Delhi. My brother, who was in Calcutta too (on vacation) with his family, managed to take the wind out of my sails in the City of Joy. He got hit by bronco-pneumonia, and was hospitalised for 10 days, where he spent a substantial amount of time toying with the idea.
  • Sunday, August 16, 2009
    Posted at 2:56:00 PM
    I have mixed feelings about Shah Rukh Khan being ‘grilled' by immigration officials at Newark airport. We all know Americans are a paranoid lot, and don't have the chalta hain attitude we do. It's probably more a good thing than bad -- from their point of view. Post 9/11, terrorism has not raised its ugly head again in the US: the chief reason is because they border on being hyper about security. Compare that with India where repeated strikes in the country have still left us with gaping holes in our security system. Americans are also.
  • Sunday, August 09, 2009
    Posted at 2:23:00 PM
    On Friday evening, I went out for dinner with a friend who I met after exactly 10 years. I'd worked with him at my first workplace, in Calcutta. He moved to the Gulf in 1999; the next year, I moved to Delhi. That was that, I'd thought. (We hadn't even exchanged email IDS -- back then, emails used to be a tenuous connection and we totally missed out on the then-nascent online trend.) As it turned out, it wasn't quite that. In August of 2009, he found out I was working in Dubai, tracked me down, called my office switchboard number.
  • Sunday, August 02, 2009
    Posted at 9:44:00 PM
    I am proud to say that we ‘outed' Savita Bhabhi -- from her portal on to the Sunday newspaper. More than a year ago, when I was working for Hindustan Times , one of my team members -- who used to cover crime, intelligence and terror networks -- walked into my cabin looking a tad sheepish. "Er," he fumbled with a notebook (not the laptop version, just the paper one), "I have a story idea." He told me about Savita Bhabhi - the fact that it was the first desi online graphic novel, in episodic AND multi-lingual format. It was.
  • Saturday, July 18, 2009
    Posted at 2:22:00 PM
    In the mid-Eighties, when my television viewing was a highly monitored (and usually censored) affair ( Chitrahaar , for instance, was plain EVIL: hero and heroine singing love songs while lunging into each other ever so often was a toxic influence), I have hazy recollections of being allowed to watch a serial that aired every Sunday morning. It was called Mr Ya Mrs (or maybe it was Mr and Mrs ). It starred a rather young Archana Puran Singh and Jayant Kripalani and seemed to me, at that time, as being rather unusual. The Mrs was a working woman.
  • Sunday, July 12, 2009
    Posted at 2:17:00 PM
    Two days ago, I got an email from a follower of this blog -- Atish Saha -- saying he's looking forward to a post on consensual sex vs rape -- and he's quoted the Shiney Ahuja case as a reference point. And a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from a friend in the US who is a fan of Shiney's (yes, he has fans!). She first asked me if I'd seen Gangster -- she fell in love with Shiney after she watched it, she informed me. She also said she couldn't believe that he had up to "no good", and felt strongly he was being framed.
  • Saturday, July 04, 2009
    Posted at 4:51:00 PM
    I am too excited about the Delhi High Court order scrapping Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, so I couldn't wait till Sunday to post. I heard about the ‘landmark judgement' at 4 pm on Thursday, when one of my colleagues, a young Indian girl, informed me in a baffled tone: "Did you hear about the Delhi High Court order? They have revoked IPC 377." "Are you serious?" I almost couldn't believe my ears. I checked Google News -- and there it was. In one stroke, the Indian judiciary had emerged out of the Dark Ages.
  • Sunday, June 28, 2009
    Posted at 2:48:00 PM
    I have a simple theory about supporting a team when a football or a cricket match is going on: I always root for the best-looking side in the tournament. If it's the full line-up in cricket, then I invariably veer towards New Zealand (Daniel Vettori takes the cherry on the cake), and I am deeply saddened if they happen to make an early exit. This time, the Twenty20 ICC World Cup almost eluded me: my TV, given to me as part of my ‘furnishings' in my apartment, does not beam any of the international sports channels. I'd occasionally see.
  • Sunday, June 21, 2009
    Posted at 1:36:00 PM
    Maria Waqar, my fussy Pakistani friend is leaving for grad school: she'll either go to the London School of Economics or National University of Singapore -- depending on which place gives her better financial aid. It's a strange feeling when your best friend in a place from home is about to leave... but she's left me with a piece that she wrote on me. I wanted to share it with you: MARIA'S BLOG: 'BEING BEST FRIENDS WITH THE ENEMY' "The souls are (like) an army joined (in the world of spirits) whichever souls knew each.
  • Sunday, June 14, 2009
    Posted at 4:42:00 PM
    I've always been confused -- and rather intrigued -- about the issue of settling the bill after a meal or a drink. Unlike Westerners -- who go Dutch, right down to the service charge -- we Indians usually have this thing about letting one person pay. "Let me take this": that's the sentence everyone longs to hear at the end of the eating/drinking session, from somebody else. There are token murmurs from the others assembled around the table, like, "Really, there's no need to do this, let's split this, shall we?".
  • Sunday, June 07, 2009
    Posted at 2:57:00 PM
    Like all ‘sensible' people, my views on ghosts and spirits are very, very ambivalent. I've never personally had a spectral encounter, so I cannot, with great conviction, proclaim there is a domain inhabited by spirits and spooky creatures. But then, I know of a great many friends/relative/acquaintances who swear there is a world of the ‘living dead'. This week, I heard about yet another such incident. A friend claimed he was almost assaulted by a ‘spirit' while he was asleep. "I felt this clutch on my chest, as if someone was.
  • Sunday, May 31, 2009
    Posted at 3:43:00 PM
    In Calcutta, in the good old days, eating chicken was distinctly déclassé. Your ‘class' was determined by whether you served - among other fishy courses -- good-quality mutton (there were ‘select shops' catering to the ‘good-quality' demand) on occasions ranging from family dinners to weddings. This was much before the health lobbyists had started their anti-red meat campaign in right earnest. My grandfather, a spoilt brat in his growing-up years (he was the only son), would come back home from school in the late afternoons (after playing.
  • Sunday, May 24, 2009
    Posted at 2:21:00 PM
    In last week's blog post, I did not mention that I watched Dev D with this Pakistani friend of mine. She had been very keyed up about ‘ Emosional Atyachar' and had made me promise I would bring back the movie DVD -- one reason why I didn't watch Dev D in the theatres in Delhi. Halfway into watching the film at my apartment in Dubai, when Chanda's life was being played out, I exclaimed, "Oh-o, this is like the resurrection of the DPS MMS scandal." "What was the DPS MMS scandal?" my friend, sitting next to me, wanted.
  • Sunday, May 17, 2009
    Posted at 4:31:00 PM
    I admit I am incredibly un-cool and unfit: I've not watched Black Friday . In fact, I didn't have a run-in with Anurag Kashyap till very recently -- when I watched Dev D -- but there's nothing personal about that, just blame it on bad planning. Dev D , as far as I know (I may be wrong), did not release in Dubai, and I'd have probably given it a go-by, had it not been for my one-time boss, Aditya Sinha. Aditya is a Stanley Kubrick and Ian McEwan kind of person; he'll also probably go down in history as being the one person who.
  • Sunday, May 10, 2009
    Posted at 1:30:00 PM
    BRIAN'S DELHI DIARY Are we at the airport yet? The taxi driver smiles, pointing out to Sushmita that we're still in Dubai. We won't be in Sharjah for a little while... and you'll know when we are. He's right. Within minutes, as we cross the unmarked border into the second largest of the Emirates, the traffic snarls to the proverbial snail's pace, indicative of one of the biggest problems of trying to reach Sharjah Airport, which is home to the cheapo airline that I had the temerity to suggest to Sush we try out for our break.
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