The PM to be, L.K.Odd-vani is a great movie buff and like most stereotypical Hindi film characters is a hopeless blusterer. In last many posts I had talked about his and BJP's poll strategy of passing the Indo-Pak friendship lollypop to the minorities and the feel-good lollypop to the majority urban masses. This, he hopes, [...]

Praful Bidwai writes in his column about BJP's poll strategy:
Vajpayee must pave the way for the 2 per cent-rating man to take over. The BJP knows Advani is like Dick Cheney, equally devious, but more rabble-rousing and demagogic, who cannot match Bush's ratings. Therefore, gullible sections of the public and the BJP's upper middle-class supporters [...]

On the Holi eve, NDTV India had Prasoon Joshi, the man behind the Coke campaign, speaking on the advent of humour in advertisement on the Indian telly. He cited that people today wish for “instant gratification” and “entertainment everywhere”, hence the campaigns such as “Kya aap close-up karte hain?“, Alpenliebe's (the jingle so reminiscent of [...]

Nitin Pai of “The Acorn” has written this fortnight's guest post for my Hindi Blog. You can read it here. Thanks Nitin!

Strange are the ways of Google! Here is another compilation of some of the funny referrers I got in past few months (typos are deliberate):
b a t h n i g secnes from indian cinema
aruna irani mother tongue
Singh and spam and false name
email addresses of tractors management officers in india
what kids [...]

Vir Sanghvi must be having a premonition that led him to jot very similar views in his column Indian Muslims and Pakistan that I expressed in this post in my Hindi blog about how BJP strategists think that the lollypop of Indo-Pak friendship can lure Muslim voters. However in his attempt to being non-partisan he [...]

Talking of Television in the Indian context there are clearly two divisions. On one side there is the state-owned Doordarshan (DD) and on the other lies the herd of satellite TV channels. The distinction off course is in the very way they function. DD has been, traditionally,  the mouth-piece of the ruling party, serving its filthy [...]

With my investments I have been hitherto happily content, alike one third of Indian population, keeping the perils of share-bazaar out of the purview. A recent print article by Vishnudutt Nagar provoked me to wonder on the irony of this. People like me who rely on small-saving schemes, saving accounts and term-deposits have been of [...]

Congress has a supposedly fitting reply to the India Shining campaign of BJP, they now have a website called A Nation Betrayed (website now defunct) which highlights the antonym; though I wonder what took so long to wake them up. Apparently the site is put up by a youth wing of the party indicating that [...]