An IPS officer heading one of the most high-profile districts in Delhi was once shunted out because he personally made a hoax bomb call from his office landline to settle scores with an amusement park owner. Around the same time, another senior Delhi Police officer was taken to task as he managed to get so drunk one evening, he ended up abusing the police commissioner on his wireless set - with the entire top brass listening in to this unexpected Prime Time entertainment with great embarrassment. If you haven't yet begun rolling over, here's another one. A district police chief in Delhi once held a press conference claiming arrest of the accused within 24 hours in a case where two foreigners were raped. Nothing wrong with this just that he decided to get the victims to the press conference and paraded them in front of the media. He even gleefully agreed to pose for the cameras, with the two victims standing haplessly on either...

Rubbing egg yolk on your scalp maybe great for the follicles, but if the yellow is on your face, it isn't quite as pleasurable. The act of wiping egg off your face makes you feel low; it stinks and is almost always messy. I know it, as I have had quite a lot of the yolk on my face lately. I am one of those who had written the epitaph of IPL even before the first white ball was bowled. We should have known we were in a hopeless minority. Evidently, actually only a few of us had dubbed IPL as the world's most expensive suicide attempt ever. I mean a few armchair critics and journalists, which are occasionally confused as the same thing. But then didn't Richard Dawkins say, though cats cannot be herded, but if present is some numbers, they make a lot of noise. So we made noise. We wondered with a sage-like foresight how many...

Arundhati Roy's book, Power Politics, uses the delectable imagery of how it increasingly appears Indians are being rounded up and loaded into two convoys of trucks - the tiny one moving towards a glittering destination and the large one, comprising of the unsung, hurtling towards darkness and then disappearing. Award ceremonies are widely criticized for egging on only the mini-convoy. For celebrating those who glitter and are considered glamorous. For feting fluff and frivolity. So when you have an awards night where the underdog, the unsung and the simple is celebrated and put under arc-lights, you would expect a certain solemnity in the air. You would expect the invitees to feel privileged to be a part of a celebration where status and power - the two heaviest loads being carried by the mini-convoy - have been offloaded. But Delhi is different. It's a city whose air contains highly noxious and intoxicating fumes of power whose constant inhalation cripples egalitarian...

This past week, the thinking and the chattering classes got neatly split into two. Is Modi the face of a new India, or has his victory pushed us back into the divisive abyss of hate politics? Reams have been written and hundreds of hours of airtime have been spent in attempting to analyse his feat through the prism of ideology. Few have considered that victory and defeat in an election isn't just about vindication of the winner's ideological plank. It is as much about managerial efficiency, ability to plan and the sheer stamina to work hard, a work ethic cherished the most in corporate India. An ethic that distinguishes a profit-making corporate from a sick PSU. The fact is, almost all pundits have either under-estimated or ignored that Modi has proved to be more of a corporate while contesting elections. And has also won them because he is pitted against an opponent which is increasingly behaving like a sick PSU. One where...