Category: Humour

Call me Warne, Shane Warne Shane Warne dared — and won. Not many gave him or his team much of a chance in the Indian Premier League. But then, he won despite his reputation. And it would be fair to say that many weren’t even talking strictly about his professional rep. After all, Warnie isn’t the sort you’d describe as a gent in flannels. He’s a sort of buccaneer with his romps, his drinking, his smoking, his devil-may-care attitude, always…

To smoke like Belmondo In Jean Luc Godard’s Peter The Fool, anti-hero Peter/Pierre was so mesmerised by Humphrey Bogart’s buccaneer charms in the doomed love classic Casablanca that he started imitating him. And what did Pierre find most attractive about the plain-looking Bogart? His way of smoking the cigarette while it hanged incisively from a given angle in his mouth. The drifter Pierre, while running from gangsters, never lets the cigar fall from his mouth — as if that was his armour against…

Shazia goes where few have gone before She was all over the Mumbai papers in the last few days speaking about what she does best — comedy. So naturally, Mumbai was waiting for her. Had she been a he, a chubby-looking white British actor with a Yorkshire accent, it would not be news. But Shazia Mirza is brown, young, Muslim, and a woman and the British Council has taken adequate care to inform us that she makes fun of all…

Yellow loves the Green Long ago a song chronicling days spent in a guiltless tavern, said: We’d fight and never lose/ For we were young and sure to have our way. The winners and losers of the first round of the soccer World Cup possibly lie printed, clearly, on a chart near you — the names are mostly predictable, the bets have been worked this way or the other. But the song keeps coming back reminding us that the…

Samuel in style Writing about Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright and novelist is an act of supreme dilemma. Because, here is a man who gambled with meaning-making, eschewed verbosity to manufacture silence and played upon language to extract its hidden humour and cruelty. When the war-weary mid-century Europe was looking for a structure of belief, a frame of reference, Beckett gave it none and instead recalled even the last strain of certainty that could hang on to literature’s hoary claims.

I wept for George the Best It is not easy to walk the streets of Mumbai and not feel guilty about being a Bengali these days. Sourav Ganguly’s exclusion – and then, inclusion – in the Indian team has assumed political proportions – so much to question the myth or reality of a nation-state like India that has to negotiate many other furtive nation-states turning sides within itself. It has not been long since I have arrived in Bombay and…