I heard there was a kerfuffle about Humans of New York recently. This week is the ten-year anniversary of a post I've never forgotten.
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Didn't think Rashmika would be in anything sillier than Animal, but dropping this in a week when the city is still fishing bodies out of the collapse of an extremely illegal hoarding is really impressive
Just before Mumbai elections and 13 seats in Maharashtra, a direct ‘ad’ by a celebrity on development.
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It's been a month since my father died. Long transformative illness can make it difficult to remember and enjoy your past with someone you love. I'm not even ready for that, bc I'm still dwelling in the gratitude of every last minute I got to have. But here's an archival photo.
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I was just at the signal next to my house waiting to cross when I heard a strange voice say, “Come on, hurry,” when the light turned green. It was a small woman, power-walking to church. “Scary it is to cross these days, na,” she said.
“Reckless only,” I said. “Do you know me?”
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Whether you view this as scripted or unscripted comedy, it's exquisite. Hat-tip @ShoaibDaniyal.
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So this is my advance contribution to Matr-Pitr Pujan Diwas, I guess, and my Valentine. I was very lucky in the love I received and I wanted to tell everyone who’s had the same luck that you won’t be annihilated when the time comes.
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Mourning isn’t sad all the time. I know the idea that grief is a form of love has filtered all the way down to comic-book TV so I won't go into any of that. It’s just a very full feeling. It's as vivid and vivifying as any of the other things that make us feel alive.
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Finished The Romantics over lunch break -- such a marvellously watchable work for a lot of audiences whose first-ever documentary it is likely to be. I just wish there had been less boring nepo talk and more about the actual song and dance.
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I saw Zakir’s “Tathasthu” a few days ago and he had a beautiful expression of the complicatedness of this. Jis ghar mein koi guzar jaata hai, uss ghar mein har tyohar ki shuruaat maatam se hoti hain.
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(While we're at it I want to shun, mock and abhor the creeping financialisation of ordinary language. I don't want to know what you are 'solving for' if it isn't a maths problem.)
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Incredible fight to start in a country where most languages have entirely different approaches to gender and formality in pronouns, at a time when ML translation still doesn't fully get the difference between 'him' and 'her'
Hoping that this “pronoun illness” doesn’t reach India.
Many “big city schools” in India are now teaching it to kids. Also see many CVs with pronouns these days. Need to know where to draw the line in following the west blindly!
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Really hoping I and other moviegoers get to watch Payal Kapadia's film in a theatre soon. Until it's out, so delighted to see her joyous confidence, and her gorgeous actors celebrating in clothes that aren't upcycled bridal wear.
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Only about another 24 hours to see a bunch of Iranian films by women and non-binary filmmakers for free: another-screen.com/films-fro…
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Would've been an especially bitter irony if Mumbai's voters, who consistently chose peace and reason in the wake of November 2008, had sent former prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, inventor of the "biryani for Kasab" lie, to Parliament. Glad it's @VarshaEGaikwad from North-Central!
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I miss her, but not in a way that makes me sad all the time. I’m really relieved she’s not sick any more. I’m not fussed that she isn’t part of the important events of the last five years because––she kind of has been, you know?
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A @sayantanbera story that puts everyday life in big Indian cities (where millions of us were born and will die) in the perspective it deserves. livemint.com/education/is-it…
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It was a lament as he said it. I don't lament it. I’ve stopped celebrating some things (my birthday, mango season) but every celebration that does come around feels expanded in some way. The memory of love doesn’t take away from a happy moment. It makes it more dwellable-in.
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A searing story from @jyotipunwani, about a death-dealing city. deccanherald.com/opinion/lif…
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I didn’t say thank you to Auntie Marjorie and Auntie Cyrilla’s sister for making me very happy for a moment today, to be able to bring my mother alive for her in our two minutes of talk.
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Some of the social precarity around ageing into singledom is just because the few models for living alone in our society are so invisible, both to younger single people and to the oldies who've marginalised people who didn't make choices identical to theirs.
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I know no one is on Twitter for recommendations but I am greatly enjoying Sarah Thankam Mathews's "All This Could Be Different." Maybe it was good not to read American novels for a while.
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Saurabh has covered this untiringly, since long before it became primetime adventure. Thank you -- beyond relieved that you can sign off with a story of rescue.
Dateline: Silkyara
Dispatch Day 17.
The rescue mission concludes.
Thank you to my editor @YPRajesh @krishnadas56
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When someone has passed on from a household, every festivity in the house begins with mourning.
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I saw the Knives Out films over the weekend and nothing in them comes close to the experience of being online for a man getting himself sent to prison because of the pizza he eats when trying to one-up a scornful teenager.
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I usually never want to discuss this on a social media platform (the most untrustworthy use of the words “social,” “media” or “platform”). But I was among the earliest of my friends to lose my mother, so I’ve often wanted to say this to others who’re now bracing for the impact.
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What's a novel you associate with the UPA years -- of or from 'the Manmohan era,' however you interpret that? Asked on the 'gram and @artedkar said The White Tiger and @BShrayana said A Bad Character, both excellent candidates I think.
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Every day of existence ages me in a new and unfamiliar way but today I have forged a link to my foremothers: I finally get the point of Vicks VapoRub.
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It’s not an anniversary or anything. There’s no occasion for these tweets. I literally just ran into this auntie before it turned dark. We didn't exchange names. I hope I didn’t offend her by implying that she looked as old as my mother, who was herself of no age to die in 2017.
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Can we just run more BEST buses to the train stations to start with? I know it makes it seem like we have a real city on our hands and not the virgin surface of an un-terraformed planet but could we try
Pod Taxis in BKC. 🚨
MMRDA, in a press statement said that it will run Pod Taxi services between BKC to Kurla and Bandra stations.
The project will be executed at an estimated cost of ₹1016 crores under Public Private Partnership.
The fare for this will be ₹21/KM for Passengers.
To be built in three years.
Image shared by MMRDA for reference only..
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Fwiw, the part of the Ted Chiang essay that I think is most urgent for knowledge workers (and all entrepreneurs trying to build honest businesses). If you can't read the whole thing, don't worry: I'm sure Perplexity's paywall-bypassing scraper already has a summary for you.
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Fighting not to spend all day scrolling on the wonderful new dataforindia.com, with its amazing visualisations and explanatory writing. So many congratulations to founder @Rukmini and her team!
ALT A screenshot from dataforindia.com headed 'Women In The Workforce.'
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We're ready w/ this year's first @FiftyTwoDotIn story and I'm impatient for you to read it BUT we're going to take one more day and publish on Sunday morning this week.
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No first-hand information about pets or their feelings, but I've always liked this Karel Capek poem, translated by Dora Round. (Source: thefugitivesaint.tumblr.com/…)
ALT A scanned page featuring an English translation of Karel Capek's prose poem "From The Point Of View Of A Cat."
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Quite sincerely: what the fuck
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I didn't think of myself as a Shah Rukh fan until Raees. Dissimilarly but in parallel I did not think of myself as a John Abraham fan until Pathaan.
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A new collection of Perumal Murugan's piercing short stories is out from @juggernautbooks, beautifully translated by @kavithamurali. I got a flower-like compliment *and* the pleasure of reading some of Kavitha's late drafts. I hope you'll read, buy and share the finished work!
ALT A hardcover book with a white jacket on a light pink cushion. The book is Perumal Murugan's "Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories," translated by Kavitha Muralidharan
ALT Picture of an acknowledgements page in a book. From Perumal Murugan's Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories.
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I insist you come to Kala Ghoda today to hear the wonderful @shreedaisy talk about her work and many other fun things.
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Thinking of converting this to a life-hacks account. Every day a ten-tweet thread in which I assume you know nothing and only want to hear reassuring non-actionable nonsense. I would be great at this.
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Completely delightful Sharda Ugra story for the very cool new food pub enthucutlet, on what cricketers ate in the 1990s: enthucutlet.com/enthuorigina…
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“No, no, my sisters went,” she said. “Tell her you met Marjorie and Cyrilla’s younger sister.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “She died five years ago.”
“Oh god,” she said. “Oh no.”
“Ya,” I said. “Actually we live here only."
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I get that there's a black market for historical artefacts but stealing the top half of the arch of a run-down 17th century fort? Not very Dhoom 2 of them.
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“Ya,” she said. “You’re Shobha’s daughter only.”
“Ya,” I said. “You recognised me from my face only?” She said ya.
“Did you go to school with her?” I asked.
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I pointed to the colony up ahead. I went into the little stand-up routine that I use to summarise the last few years for anyone who needs a catch-up: we moved away, I moved back, I moved her in with me, she spent her last days in the neighbourhood where she grew up.
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These threats seem incredibly real and in an atmosphere of any accountability at all, should be taken seriously by authorities.
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But a friend's bracing for potentially serious news about her mom as we speak. & while I want to tell her all this I don’t want it to seem like advance notice. I’ve carped so much about thread twt that maybe it’s only right for me to be the thread twt I want to see in the world.
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For You pages on Indian Twitter will filter outbound links, tweets containing political watchwords and small anonymized accounts, leading us to enter an endless cycle of boring tweets about biryani and Bombay-Delhi.
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Bombay folks: do you have a spare laptop to give to a smart young woman who's just finished her 12th boards and wants to get started on working and studying before she goes to college? I'll pay for pick-up within the city and any maintenance.
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Hello! Our first story of the year is by @neerjadeodhar, who went on the trail of a lost movie epic from 1951, made by the men of the Chicago Radio business––with some help from their grandson, Vikramaditya Motwane. fiftytwo.in/story/our-strugg…
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Replies contained to people too young to remember the absolute chokehold over small girls that every single Madhuri Dixit outfit in Hum Aapke Hain Koun had c. 1994.
q: what is an outfit worn by an actress in a bollywood film that instantly comes to your mind when you think of an iconic, era-defining piece of costume - something that influenced pop culture & wardrobes of women irl (this is for an article will be thankful if u can answer)
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Exciting news from Penguin India's new releases email for this quarter: @meenakandasamy's translation of Tiruvalluvar out soon!
ALT Screenshot of text describing Meena Kandasamy's translation of the third part of the Tirukkural from Tamil to English. The book's cover is pin with a green and blue floral pattern.
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What are your resolutions for the new year? I'm going to write more letters (new) and start lifting weights (carried over for four years from resolution lists).
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So thrilling to see the wonderful @jon_selvaraj's name here! Look forward to reading and I hope millions more will. @juggernautbooks
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The life I live and the ideals I value were shaped by the long era of Manmohan Singh, in conversation with and sometimes intense opposition to his own leadership. His death feels personal. His family is in my thoughts.
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Something I enjoyed reading over the weekend: the news (+ analysis) about a very tradish book business in the US seeing a happy turnaround. tedgioia.substack.com/p/what…
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What a loss. I don't believe there's a good survival record for movies from the 1920s anywhere around the world––a massive percentage have vanished even from US history, I've read. Cinema's longevity (in our minds as well as in the records) is such a recent creation.
India's first talkie #AlamAra released exactly 92 years ago. The film's print is now destroyed. Shyam Benegal is the only lviing filmmaker who has seen the film. #Bollywoodflashback
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Meryl Sebastian and @ZoyaMat write on what unites Korean television and Hindi cinema. I'm in here with the great @thedramanotes. bbc.com/news/world-asia-indi…
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Very few novels have shaken me the way Human Voices has done. Many congratulations to translator @videshi_beti. And many many more to Seoul's more conservative bureaucrats who won't quite be able to "K-lit" their way out of this one. :)
BREAKING NEWS
The 2024 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
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Seeing some fixation on India following tournament host rules at the World Cup. Misdirection. Our cricket administration has made every effort to create the India-Pak match-up, host it not in Mohali or Chennai but in Ahmedabad, and crank sentiment around it to maximum intensity.
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Mood in the @FiftyTwoDotIn team Discord at the beginning of the last week of S2, courtesy Amal.
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A reminder, among other things, that in Bombay it's spelled "you'll."
A humble suggestion to the possible allies of the bjp in the newly remembered NDA:
Get the post of the Speaker.
Having experienced the tactics of the bjp, the minute they form government with you, they will break the promises and try to break your parties too.
You’ll have experienced it earlier.
@JaiTDP @Jduonline
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One thing about spending a couple of years editing a publication is that you become very very annoying as an editor.
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I should be writing all this in a letter to @_Zeets right now.
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This is not about rule-following. This is about Indian cricket, run by the son of India's home minister, trying to maximise the profits from a historically fraught tie. Whether the establishment profits from the sideline in violent jingoism running in parallel, who can tell?
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Happy Valentine's Day. Reporter @prachip79 turns essayist for today's new story, which is about why platonic love is so easy––and so damn hard––in India. fiftytwo.in/story/platonic/
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I read more than the average because my work involves knowing what is contained in certain books, but if I didn't have to my dream would be to read and form rich memories of a maximum of four books a year.
Economist and bestselling author @tylercowen reads 100+ books a year.
Here are 18 tips from him on how to read fast, read well, and read widely:
1) Cowen’s first rule of reading is as follows: You need not finish. He takes up books with great hope and no mercy, and when he is done—sometimes after five minutes—he abandons them in public, an act he calls a “liberation.”
2) The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them away, don’t give them away – if you give them away you could be doing harm to people.
3) So the way you read well is just by reading a lot, and by reading a lot your whole life. And then when you go to read actual books you’re like “I know that, I know that, I know that,” and you keep on going, and you read much more quickly. And that’s really the way to read a lot. There are these compounding returns to being obsessed with reading, and starting young, and never stopping.
4) Sometimes readers just go on and on with blather, or with personal detail that has no relevance to the argument. Or there are just pages of terminology and it’s like, well, you might still give the book a chance, but you start turning the pages more rapidly. And you’re just waiting for some bit of meat, you’re like out there desperate, giving the author still a chance, and then at some point you’re like “No, sorry. ” Zap – throw it in the trash, on to the next one.
5) Most books are not half great and half horrible. And you should look at a few different parts of the book. But especially these days an author should be able to signal by putting some good stuff up front. Because people are less patient than they used to be. A nineteenth century book you need to give it more time, it may not get good until chapter three, but these days, my goodness – you can tell so much sometimes just from the font of a book. Like there are books with bad font – management books – and you’re like “Oh my God! It’s that font again!” And you just throw it out – you don’t have to read it at all.
6) The best reading is focused reading, when you’re trying to solve some kind of problem. So if I’m doing one of own podcasts with a guest, and then I’ll read or re-read everything the guest has written. Typically it’s a re-read because I have on guests I like, and if I like them I’ve already read a lot of their stuff. So you’re re-reading with an eye toward what is actually interesting about this person, and you learn much more that way than if you just randomly pick up books.
7) I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I going to ask them?” One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcast.
8) You want to start with a problem or question when you’re reading. And again you want to read books together in groups, and you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place that’ll do it automatically, but if you’re not travelling you want the book to do it, so your early book choice is quite important.
9) My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalisations can be, to just get a sense of how different social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical eras – and plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat-out fun.
10) Every area you don’t given a damn about you probably should read at least one book in. Because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know about or care about tennis. And just go through other areas – gardening, dogs, turtles, whatever. Find the best book about dogs and read it, and the less you like dogs, actually, the better that book is going to be, because you are not sick of the topic.
11) People don’t read enough, and I think as a society we’re under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.
12) Take reading seriously, develop a passion for it, and view it as part of your practice as a knowledge worker to get ahead, but along the way, having fun doing so.
14) The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.
13) Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.
15) Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think. They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.
16) Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers. I start ten or so books for every one I finish. I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it. I am ruthless in my discards.
17) Fairfax and Arlington counties have wonderful public library systems, and I go about five times a week to one branch or another. Usually I scan the New Books shelf and look at nothing else. I can go shopping at the best store in the world, almost any day, for free.
18) Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.
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Partial answer: quantitative goal-oriented reading means reading fewer big/serious books so you can read more. A movie's quality is not tied to the time it takes to watch it, so highbrow watching doesn't come into direct conflict with racking up numbers.
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"Unlike my previous research experience with interviewing women, everyone was very eager to meet repeatedly and chat. But none seemed to believe that I genuinely wanted to recruit them as respondents for my research." @BShrayana's barnstormer: lifestyle.livemint.com/news/…
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And there's more! @karishma__m__ and @BhavyaDore are SOPA awards finalists! sopawards.com/the-sopa-award…
Amazing 24 hrs for @FiftyTwoDotIn stories:
- sp mention for @ssantoshini: @ACJIndia Awards
- sp men for @afidelf: @ACJIndia Awards
- sp men for @deepa_padma: @onewm Awards
- shortlist for @Ankur_pali: @onewm Awards
All solid journalists being SEEN for their hard yards! Love it❤️
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Also a reminder that some of my favourite Hindi movies from the aughts were YRF "flops": Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Aaja Nachle, Rocket Singh.
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Subtle mid-century style taxi top: not as spectacular as some of @GreaterBombay's most notable but pretty stylish, I thought. (Go see Rachel's wonderful taxi top photos if you haven't in a while.)
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–– and a story that @ssantoshini pursued for years, about how residential school system in Odisha is shaping the lives of young Adivasis. Thank you to Sarita and @afidelf for choosing to work with us. Flowers to @amalshiyas @medhavenkat @vikramshah1991 @elzac_29 and @GauravVaz.
Second:
Sarita Santoshini @ssantoshini | @FiftyTwoDotIn Residential schools for indigenous people have a long and dark history around the world. How they have changed the lives of young Adivasi people in Odisha’s mining-interest regions. fiftytwo.in/story/uprooted/
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Eid mubarak! We'll try not to keep you too long from your evening plans. Do join us if you're in Bombay. Please tag @AsiaSocietyIC if you'd like to register.
Discover how the intersection of technology and the humanities shapes our world with Rishi Jaitly (@jaitly), Senior Advisor at @OpenAI, and Dr. Robert Newman, President of the National Humanities Center, in a conversation moderated by @supriyan.
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@kjavadizadeh and @brianglavey got me thinking about this poem, which I hadn't thought about in some time, again, and the defiantly sublime lines about drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles (?!). So serious.
ALT The text of Having A Coke With You, a poem by Frank O'Hara.
"It doesn’t detract from your seriousness if you’re thinking about your boyfriend while you’re looking at a painting." You have to get pretty near the end of my conversation with @BrianGlavey for this gem from him, but well worth it imho. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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In another life I would really have liked just to tweet 50,000 times about #ARRHindiBracket with you
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Glad I malingered over reading Katherine Rundell's beloved series of animal essays (lrb.co.uk/contributors/kathe…) so that my unprepared heart could be battered by her love letter to John Donne, "Super-Infinite." The purest pleasure to read, and I will read everything else she writes.
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So happy for @vinayaravind and his fantastic story. Congratulations and thank you for working with us at @FiftyTwoDotIn!
Congratulations 𝗩𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗱 on winning the #RedInkAwards2022 for the category 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐒 (𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝘁).
@vinayaravind @FiftyTwoDotIn
Story:fiftytwo.in/story/reels/
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What a day of outrageous judgements and restrictions even by hysterical 24x7 news standards.
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You should listen to this because it explains a watershed in modern Indian history and it wasn't written by lawyers. Kudos to @rumbotupalli and @BhavyaDore for making FOTC S2, with our own @rkarnad back on the mic.
🎙️PODCAST OUT NOW! Friend of the Court is back with a new season! This #ConstitutionDay, revisit the #basicstructure case. Tune in 🎧 to the first 2 episodes now as we go back to the early years of independence to unpack the events that led to the case. 🔗anildivanfoundation.org/podc…
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Really just the only magazine left in the English speaking world. vulture.com/article/what-is-…
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(And genuinely sorry to everyone I've been late or remiss in writing to -- I'm not out of commission, just temporarily out of energy)
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Congratulations to The Wire's readers and supporters, and to @seemay! thewire.in/media/seema-chish…
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Making it to a textbook is a special feeling but edtech decks will do just fine*. Several of our stories rly were commissioned to bring aspects of Indian life + history alive for younger readers. Let us know if you spot @FiftyTwoDotIn in your study material!
* conditions apply
Never gave the competitives much to my parent’s’ disappointment but hey made it to the study material with my @FiftyTwoDotIn story on the Naga accord fiftytwo.in/story/accord/
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Incredible that there are Pakistanis eating biryani within Indian borders right now and one of them isn't @karachikhatmal.
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Closing with a crash. The wonderful @sowmiyashok brings @FiftyTwoDotIn's second season home with a haunting story about the death of Subhas Chandra Bose, that is really about the lives we have lived in India. fiftytwo.in/story/holograms/
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Crone twitter (baby-loving auntie sub-division) passing through to let everyone in their 20s know that this simply isn't true.
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In November 2021 I went to a concert for the first time since the fearful isolation of pandemic-era lockdowns, to listen to Rashid Khan, who set everyone in his audience a little more free. Go home safely ustad sahib.
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