Vijay Narayanan on August 21st, 2011

The word “flautist” entered my vocabulary when I started listening to Sir James Galway several years ago. It did not seem right to me at the time, because “flutist” was elegant and to the point. Nevertheless I have consistently thrown the term around in conversations since then, owing to its uncanniness and an urge to [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on August 19th, 2011

Several years ago, Prabhudeva starred in Alaudin, yet another in a string of forgettable movies. The name of the movie is etched in my mind for a very different reason. The movie’s trailer told you, “மணிசர்மா-வின் மாயாஜால இசையில்… அலாவுதீன்”. Oh, really? The music that played in the background was so inane it made one wonder [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on August 14th, 2011

Writing for Cricinfo, Ramachandra Guha asks of Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri: Why have these two stalwarts of Indian cricket never spoken out about the damage the IPL has done to the country’s Test team? Guha is one of my favorite writers on the subject, and is infinitely more knowledgeable, so I had expected to [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on August 8th, 2011

President Obama on the S&P downgrade: “Markets will rise and fall, but this is the United States of America,” Obama said. “No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country.” Translation: “Don’t worry if you lost a quarter of your life’s savings within the past one week. [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on August 6th, 2011

Bishwanath Ghosh has a fabulous post on the pain of letting go of one’s audio cassette collection. For anyone who had lived through the era of cassette tapes, a sense of nostalgia is inescapable. Ghosh ends his post with a Parthian shot: “Music, in short, was sweat and blood: you had to earn it and work [...]

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