'If Modi arrived like a juggernaut, he left like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were being dismantled bit by bit. It was as if India had seceded quietly from him.' Shiv Viswanathan's social science fiction about what India would be like in 2020.
The largest athlete's village in the history of the Games is a visceral monument to now-faded optimism. Planned when Brazil was booming, its harnessing of private sector wealth was meant to set the gold standard for a sustainable Olympics. Instead, the worst recession in generations pushed the luxury apartments out of reach.
Kangana Ranaut is gobstoppingly spectacular. The actress has always flirted with the unfamiliar but here -- at her most real, at her most gorgeously guileless -- she absolutely shines and the film stands back and lets her rule.
After all these years, Jaws still taps into the nightmares, says Raja Sen.
'We have not seen even during Vajpayee's time what Modi and the BJP has adopted now.'
Although the markets could see a knee-jerk reaction, they rule out a sharp fall.
'That cannot be done till they roam around free, get money from Pakistan and seek attention.' 'The cycle of violence was very cleverly generated.' 'During night patrolling when it was discovered that dumper trucks were unloading heaps of stones in various places, it was the first indicator that there would be trouble.' 'Wherever stones were dumped, the stones were taken by the police to construction sites.' 'It was a laborious task, but we did it rigorously.' 'We had to use some smart tactics and soft skills to defeat the cycle of violence.''
Obama's decision to visit India must be a result of his judgement that Modi is a man of action, feels Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
'We went around with the story, but no one came forward to finance it. They would say 'Who would want to watch this?' Or they would say 'Ek to ladka dal do is me.' We said no, we didn't want to compromise.'
'Every Ali obituary I read made the point that he 'transcended his sport' -- a reference to the many battles he fought with America even as he fought in America.' 'What the obituaries leave out is that Ali equally transcended the boundaries of geography and of information -- as witness the Chennai teen who assimilated that most mobile of fighters through still images shorn of context.'