Minnie Vaid

My first fiction book Fateh is now online. Paperback version on amazon soon as well. Please read, comment, share. FATEH amazon.in/dp/B0B6HSLNYX/…

They call this the ‘road to heaven.’ Looking at that horizon, I can see why. I haven't been there yet, but I can already feel the silence. A reminder that while we are blessed with friends and family to cheer us on, the most important journeys are the ones we take within ourselves. We all eventually have to find our own road. #SundayWanderer

@Gill_Iss Saurabh is just awful. His show was also terrible and anchoring is worse.

Manoj Bajpayee owned Saurabh Dwivedi with his words😭🤣🔥 Saurabh Dwivedi has now learned how to show respect to others...!!

@MasalaBai Indeed we are. Prayers tonight for all.

You are witnessing evil beyond imagination.

Archvies | Over the past few years, the Indian diaspora has become political—while keeping a safe distance from the storm centre of the toxic right-wing politics it spews—and Priyanka Chopra is simply the high priestess of the blinding bourgeois hypocrisy it has come to typify. Like Chopra, the larger community of Indian immigrants to the United States and the United Kingdom have been in the news for what they choose to endorse and ignore. Indian-Americans in New Jersey recently apologised after including a bulldozer—now a symbol of anti-Muslim hate—in a parade to celebrate 75 years of Indian independence. The New York Times noted that, “to those who understood its symbolism, it was a blunt and sinister taunt later likened to a noose or a burning cross at a Ku Klux Klan rally.” In September 2022, the diaspora in Leicester and Birmingham went on an angry march, threatening Muslim residents in the area. Wherever the diaspora is concentrated, it is now flexing its muscles to threaten South Asian Muslims. The seeds of hate sown in India have spread like a metastasising cancer, infecting all corners of the world where Indians live. The real grift, for me, is that Chopra—like the rest of the diaspora—keeps getting away with her delusional self-narrative. As a UN ambassador, she has stood up for everyone from George Floyd to Iranian women while inviting Modi to her wedding reception. She is by no means the only actor with a broken moral compass; Bollywood’s role as a propaganda machine for the Hindu Right recently made it to the New Yorker. But she is among the few who live in a dual reality, code-switching from propagandist to civil-rights champion more easily than one slips in and out of pyjamas. Read Vidya Krishnan's essay on how the hypocrisy of the Indian diaspora is overwhelming: caravanmagazine.in/communities/hy…

To those who were defending Hardik's behaviour, watch this video. He not only hogged the trophy in the stadium, where players like Dube and Rinku did not even get a chance to hold the trophy. But this self-obsessed cringe “auraman” did not leave the trophy even in the bus. 🤢

We need prominent signs at all airports (and announcements in flights) about NOT USING MOBILE PHONES IN SPEAKER MODE (for calls, watching videos, etc.) in waiting areas, in planes... basically in any public area. cc @DGCAIndia @MoCA_GoI @mohol_murlidhar @RamMNK Need a public campaign for this ....should be extended for all public transit (railways and bus too).

Just witnessed this clip.   Nas can be set aside; his Zionist position is already known and requires no further dissection. He is a known but common evil.  What truly demands reckoning are Nikhil Kamat and Tanmay Bhat, living exhibits of everything that is rotting at the core of contemporary Indian public discourse.   These are men who have been handed enormous platforms, cultural capital, and the ear of millions, yet remain staggeringly, almost comically unlettered.  Their influence is not merely harmless celebrity; it is actively corrosive. They wield the power of mass communication with the unearned confidence of those who have never once been intellectually challenged in their own circles.   This is Dunning-Kruger effect in its purest, most grotesque form: men so profoundly ignorant, so Jahil, that they lack even the self-awareness to suspect their ignorance.  They speak with the swagger of Jawaharlal Nehru, but their thoughts are as shallow as a WhatsApp forward. Worse still, they have created for themselves a esoteric little ecosystem, a mutual-admiration sauna where they all soak together, marinating in the same shallow certainties, reinforcing one another’s blind spots until their shared mediocrity begins to feel like wisdom.  In that echo chamber, ignorance does not merely survive; it becomes doctrine.  And that is the real tragedy.  India, in 2026, finds itself in a strange and humiliating intellectual dark age, not because the country lacks brilliant minds, but because the loudest, richest, and most visible ones are precisely the ones least equipped to carry the decent conversation.  A single serious intellectual pushback, a solitary honest question asked with precision, would reduce these paper-tiger pundits to dust.  Yet no one in their orbit ever delivers it.  This is not comedy. This is a civilisational decline wearing a thick dark hoodie in deep Bombay summers, casually planning the next exotic holiday, asking whether you’ve tried that dish yet, peddling twenty-day weight-loss miracles, and cracking jokes while an entire nation quietly forgets how to think.

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@SandhuKanwar Of course I remember you Kanwar! You helped us so much in our shoots. Came home and met Bittu also many times.

@MinnieVaid Hi! Minnie, Kanwar Sandhu this side. Remember me from your punjab reporting days?

My first fiction book Fateh is now online. Paperback version on amazon soon as well. Please read, comment, share. FATEH amazon.in/dp/B0B6HSLNYX/…

Know what I hate? Counting calories. Sure, it works, but it’s a pain in the ass. Here’s the exact system I’d use to drop 30 lbs of stubborn fat (WITHOUT counting calories): 1. STOP eating 3 hours before bed and…

@BDUTT So true. But it’s not Le Carre writing remember ?! Hard man to top. Or copy.

On a completely unimportant note, night manager season 2 is terrible. Tedious, self conscious and so boring

@RujutaDiwekar You charge a hefty fee for the same right?

i thought i had seen it all - pay to win awards, coverage, recognition etc, then i saw this in my DM. Pay to get people to lose weight!

Word!

Stop digitising the menu at restaurants. It really isn't convenience to scan the QR and then verify through OTP before ordering just for the waiter to get back and reconfirm what we've just ordered. Want to give us a real digital experience? Show us how our food is prepared or let us 'call the chef' for any specific instructions. Pathetic experience in most restaurants now.

A 1 crore earning techie's life has no value in Bengaluru. And if you're not earning that much? Your life has even less. My sister and her friend were driving home in my car. They stopped at a red light - the logical thing anyone does. A drunk driver in a mini-truck didn't feel the need to stop. He slammed into them instead. I know he was drunk. She knows it. The highway police knows it. The truck owner knows it. No arrest was made. The truck driver never showed up at the station. The owner never showed up. Nobody cared. My sister and her friend - both injured, both terrified - kept going back to the station, back to the accident site, explaining what happened over and over, just trying to get a report filed. I was in the US. All I could do was talk to them on calls, helpless. Here's what the police told them: "If nobody died, an FIR doesn't make sense." "Just claim first party insurance." "Third party insurance doesn't pay much anyway." And then, quietly, one officer pulled them aside and told the truth: "These truck mafia bribe us. Nothing will happen." Nothing happened. The truck was KA04 AE6550. The police themselves said if they'd been on a two-wheeler, both would be dead. We had 100% insurance from Reliance. Claim rejected. Reason? "Misrepresentation of facts." These two, even while injured, kept showing up to represent the facts. Reliance still found a way to deny them. The law says if someone hits you from behind, the person behind is at fault. It was a red light. How does a truck driver not see that? Trust me, this isn't about money. I'll manage the repairs and the medical bills. I have savings. And I have a decent credit score; I'll take a personal loan if I have to. That's not the point. The point is this: my sister is afraid now. Afraid that anything can happen to her at any moment and there's no one - no system, no law, no institution - that will protect her. But how do I tell her the world is supposed to be fair? How do I tell her to trust the system? How do I explain that the drunk driver walks free, the truck owner was never questioned, and the police pocketed their bribe and closed the file? I can't say to any official, "What if this was your daughter? Your sister?" Because their daughters travel in cars with security escorts. They will never know what it feels like to be ordinary and unprotected. So I'm saying it to you, an ordinary reader. You're on the road. You stop at a red light. A drunk driver in a truck rear-ends your car. Your loved one is inside, terrified. And then you learn: there is no recourse. None. The truck owner pays off the cops. The insurance company rejects your claim. The system shrugs. This is Bengaluru in 2025. This is India in 2025. This is what your life is worth here. One more thing. The friend in the car? He's one of the smartest people I know. close to top 100 rank in IIT-JEE. AI engineer and one of the biggest data companies. At 23, he is valuable to be paid more annually than the cost of five such trucks, that too, in India. He's patriotic. He pays his taxes. He stays in India even though he constantly gets offers to move to the US. This is the confidence our system gives to someone who is clearly an asset to this country. All this unfairness - for a drunk truck driver. @blrcitytraffic @BlrCityPolice - tell me. I've always avoided raising fingers publicly. But what else can I do?

@nowme_datta One question for the dudes who wrote season 2 (and now 3 as well coming up) of #TheNightManager : what is your AUKAT trying to continue and utterly spoil the mastery of the master John Le Carre?! Matlab KUCH BHI! Twists and turns with zero logic. Pah Bah and Gah!

It is too early to post anything about the Season 2 finale episode of The Night Manager but I have thoughts.

@mypowai happy to share details if you want to write about this.

Total commercialisation of a private clubhouse at #NaharAmritShakti owned by @sukhrajnahar where pool is given out for weddings and the club for shooting ad films! Just deplorable. @NectarfieldClub

Dear @ICC, It is with a heavy heart that we now announce our unavailability to replace Pakistan in the upcoming T20 World Cup. Regardless of whether they now withdraw, the short timescales ensure it is impossible for our squad to prepare in the professional manner necessary to compete effectively in this global cricketing spectacle. We are not like Scotland and able to turn up on a whim, with no kit sponsor. Our players are from all walks of life and cannot simply drop their occupations to fly halfway around the world to experience temperatures only normally felt in Finnish saunas. Our captain, a professional baker, needs to attend to his oven, our ship captain needs to steer his vessel, and our bankers need to go bankrupt (again). This is the harsh reality of cricket at the amateur level of the game. This news will be extremely disappointing to our fans. Despite being the most peaceful nation on Earth, we maintain an army of online followers, and are the world's 14th most followed national board on X. We were ready to give the Dutch the biggest shock they have experienced since William of Orange lost the Battle of Landen in 1693. And the Americans were looking forward to taking on Greenland, or so their orange-dyed leader thought. Our loss is likely Uganda's gain. We wish them well. Their kits cannot be missed unless you have epilepsy, in which case they are probably best avoided. The future is always ice, until it isn't. Yours sincerely, Icelandic Cricket Association

I'm in love with this sentence: “Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach.”