Vijay Amritraj

Yes i do have a soft spot for Mamatadi. Im open about it. Again i dont agree with her politics but im perennially grateful to her for getting rid of the communists. The INC had given up. Only she could have done it & I have undiminished respect for that.

1936 :: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Says That Congress Presidentship Not A Monopoly of One Person

Queue in front of Satyajit Ray's house in Bishop Lefroy Road to pay tribute to him on his birth anniversary.

One of the more entertaining privileges of living in India is watching our unlettered rich and powerful perform socio-political analysis. These are men who built empires through connections, contracts, and the occasional government favour and have somehow confused that with wisdom. So when a prominent industrialist puts out a piece explaining why the BJP juggernaut will keep rolling, it's worth spending five minutes dismantling it. Because it falls apart in about that long. The framing is clean, I'll give him that. Clean in the way a card trick is clean. It looks elegant until you see where the cards went. His argument rests on a 50-50 split: BJP owns Hindu nationalist identity, which is roughly half the country, and everyone else is scrambling for the other half. Therefore BJP wins. Forever. Ameen. Summa-Ameen. Except the 50-50 is made up. BJP's actual ideological base, the RSS-mobilised, Hindutva-committed voter who is there regardless of candidate, regardless of price of onions, regardless of anything, is closer to 20-25%. The rest of their coalition is caste arithmetic, welfare delivery, regional anti-incumbency, and Modi's blind cult following. A significant chunk of their voters are OBC and Dalit voters with concrete material grievances who backed BJP for concrete material reasons. They are not ideological soldiers. They can be peeled away. They have been peeled away. So the first constant in his equation, the one he treats like holy scripture, is false. But even that isn't the biggest problem. The bigger problem is that he treats opposition fragmentation as a law of nature rather than a political failure. He looks at fifteen parties jostling for the same space and concludes: this is permanent, this is structural, BJP wins by design. Read that again slowly: BJP wins because the opposition hasn't solved a coordination problem. That's it. That's the whole secret. There is no juggernaut. There's a fragmented opposition handing over seats they should be winning. UP 2024 made this embarrassingly clear. When SP and Congress actually ran together, with some semblance of coordination and clarity, they won 43 seats in a state BJP had treated as a fortress. The juggernaut didn't wobble. It fell on its face in the one place where the opposition briefly got its act together. And here's what our industrialist friend also conveniently skips: BJP isn't dominant because it owns an ideological half of India. It's dominant because it has a machine. The RSS is the fuel, the cadre, the penetration, the ground structure that no opposition party can match. That's the real asymmetry. Not some metaphysical ownership of Hindu identity. Now, our industrialist friend could have asked the genuinely interesting question hiding inside his own argument: why hasn't the opposition solved this coordination problem in a decade? That would have been worth reading. The answer is partly structural, partly the ego of regional satraps who'd rather rule their fiefdoms than challenge nationally, and partly a failure of political imagination. Had he asked that question, he might have earned his seat at the table of serious political commentary. Instead, he built a tidy little argument with a predetermined destination, one that just happens to conclude that the party he has never found reason to criticise is invincible by the laws of mathematics. That's not analysis. That's propaganda written with CAPITAL letters. (No pun intended)

The clip that's making a lot of news from Express Adda with Ruchir Sharma Why foreign investors are not interested in India.

China 🇨🇳 is Irked after Pakistan 🇵🇰 Allocated the Pasni Port to United States 🇺🇸. The Chinese are pulling back their Investments from the CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor) shutting down their Factories and Infrastructure projects in the Balochistan and other areas. Asim Munir has thrown entire CPEC and its Projects along with China 🇨🇳 Pakistan 🇵🇰 relationship under the bus just to appease the Americans in particular Donald Trump.

This is how obsessed a Chief Minister should be with infrastructure development.

A line of cinephiles formed to watch Jean-Pierre Melville's landmark French film 'Le Samouraï' (1967) today at Regal Cinema, Mumbai!!

Hyderabad has, without question, the worst cuisine of any major Indian city. Peking duck, truffled lobster, dim sum, biryani cannot be ordered without lashings of red chilli powder and salt Telugu food must have been tasteless and horrid until chillies came to India to hide this

Recently, a Pakistani friend of mine (we'll call him Danial) got a postdoc at the Lund University in Sweden. We met at his office for coffee. I congratulated him and we caught up. "I need you to do me a favor, Mushtaq," he said. "Of course." "Please don't tell anyone in my family or friends that I work at the Lund University," he said. "Why? What happened?" "Man, just don't mention where I work especially if a mutual friend asks," he said. I was taken aback initially. But then I put two and two together and realized why he didn't want me to tell anyone about his workplace. In Pakistan, the word "lund" means penis. Being the reliable friend that I am, the very next day I rang up Danial's dad and eight of our mutual friends. I told them that Danial was doing well in Sweden and dropped the name of his university ever so nonchalantly. Things went exactly as planned. His dad called him and asked how he was settling in at the Schlong Institute of Dick Studies. Another friend asked Danial how his project would contribute to the research at the Weiner Academy of Sausage Sciences. Every few days, someone from Pakistan calls him to ask how his research at the Phallus Institute of Dong Dynamics is going, or if he was looking for a permanent job at the Johnson Institute for Shaft Studies. He has started looking for a new job. Since Lund was causing Danial all sorts of problems I decided to help him. The poor thing took all this Lund stuff really badly. Apparently, some of our friends tried setting him up with a beautiful British-Paksitani woman, Yasmine, who was visiting Copenhagen. Now Danial has limited social skills when it comes to women and Yasmine was way out of his league. Yet he was able to charm her somehow and took her out for a date in a trendy restaurant in Copenhagen. Things came to a head when she asked him where he was currently based. "Lund," he said. "I wasn't sure initially, but now I quite like Lund." She thought he was a closeted gay looking for a lavendar marriage and was trying to deceive her. She got up, threw her wine in his face, and stormed out of the restaurant but not before yelling "You sick little perverted motherfucker" in the poshest British accent. Anyway, I decided to help him get out of Lund. I asked my colleagues here in Danish academia if they were hiring any researchers. Søren, one of my colleagues, said that he was. A marine ecologist, he had recently won a big grant to conduct research in the North Sea. I showed Søren Danial's Google Scholar profile. He was clearly impressed. "He's exaclty the kind of researcher we need," Søren said. So, I rang up Danial and told him that Søren here in Copenhagen is interested in hiring him. "Yes," He said without even letting me finish. "I'll take the job. Just get me out of Lund, man, it's hard, Lund's hard." I told Søren that Danial was willing to accept the job. As we parted, I asked him what his research project was about. "Effekten af ​​bundtrawl i Nordsøen," Søren replied in Danish. In English, this means "The effect of bottom trawling in Nordic sea." The only problem with this is that the Danish word for bottom is "bund." In Pakistan, bund means buttocks. Danial will join Søren's project in a few weeks. This time around I'm not going to tell his father or our friends anything about his job. Just kidding. I've already told them and they've started working on names like Keister Institute of Booty Sciences. It's going to be great I also took the opportunity to update Yasmine about Danial's upcoming project on bundtrawling. "I knew it," she said. "I already knew it."

Anyone who remotely follows politics is super invested in the West Bengal election results. The mood is like what it was before the results of 2014, 2019, and 2024 Lok Sabha results, and everyone wants the same party to win. A pandemic of anxiousness. A wretched weekend ahead.

I travelled through Great Nicobar today. These are the most extraordinary forests I have ever seen in my life. Trees older than memory. Forests that took generations to grow. The people on this island are equally beautiful - both the adivasi communities and the settlers - but they are being robbed of what is rightfully theirs. The government calls what it is doing here a “Project.” What I have seen is not a project. It is millions of trees marked for the axe. It is 160 square kilometres of rainforest condemned to die. It is communities that have been ignored while their homes have been snatched away. This is not development. This is destruction dressed in development’s language. So I will say it plainly, and I will keep saying it: what is being done in Great Nicobar is one of the biggest scams and gravest crimes against this country’s natural and tribal heritage in our lifetime. It must be stopped. And it can be stopped - if Indians choose to see what I have seen.