If the Al Queda troglodyte Osama bin Laden can take responsibility for anything beyond 9/11, it’s for the phenomenal growth in the U.S. intelligence apparatus – both domestic and overseas as well as counter-terrorist organizations. The Washington Post the other day had an interesting piece on the explosive, untrammeled growth in U.S. intelligence organizations post […]
Remind us never to be sober while watching a Bollywood film. One needs to be sufficiently fortified with Bacchus to be able to endure the ordeal of a Hindi film. Old or new movie, it matters little. The other day we watched Dharmatma (1975), the first of several instances of Bollywood purloining the Godfather for […]
(For SI blog reader Racer44) As we’ve said time and again, everything in India is different. Be it the notion of honor, treatment of women, matters of love, poverty, child labor or corruption, in all of these and more India is sui generis. Mostly for the worse. Hell, even a simple English word encounter has […]
We have enjoyed many of Tom Cruise’s films in the past. Movies like Rain Man, Collateral, The Firm, A Few Good Men, Mission Impossible et al have afforded us mucho pleasure. So, notwithstanding the generally poor or tepid reviews we went ahead, albeit with tempered expectations, to Cruise’s new film Knight and Day. Verdict There […]
By SI Blog reader Racer44 (Parts 1 to 3) (For SI readers Boopalanj and Shadowfax_Arbit who first mentioned this tour de force) Note to SI Readers: I have used the word “Sozha” which I have verified with scholars as being the phonetically correct spelling, as opposed to “Chola”. Caveat: Before delving into the review of […]
We know that India cannot have a free government. But she can have the next best thing: a firm and impartial despotism. – Our favorite essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay (in a letter to the Scottish philosopher James Mill in 1833, a year before Macaulay arrived in Madras) Source: New Yorker P.76, May 31, 2010