Hardik Rajgor

T here are many things Diego Maradona could have done after his stint as the world’s greatest footballer of all time. He could have, like other legends from the world of  sport , chosen a dignified, greying life spent in a suit throwing instructions at footballers from the other side of the touchline, he could become a  football  pundit on TV, or he could have simply posed for photographs while doing humanitarian work across the globe. But that’s not who Diego Maradona is. Maradona’s entire life has been a Mountain Dew commercial – full throttle, filled with thrill and  adventure . If his life were to be summarised as an inanimate object, it would be a Formula One car. It moves at speed, there’s a lot of thrill, but a permanent risk that things could come crashing down any moment. He is Argentina’s comic star, action hero, and chocolate boy all rolled into one. When he’s not busy smoking pot, sporting a Che Guevara tattoo, and trying out a funky hairstyle, he...

D ear <insert name of Finance Minister here>, I don’t know who I should address this mail to, because I’m not sure who the Finance Minister currently is. Are we doing the odd-even thing, where it’s Arun Jaitley on odd days and  Piyush Goyal  on even days? Anyway, I will address it to Arun Jaitley ji because I don’t know of any other way to say it – I am  katti  with Piyush Goyal. I would like to tender my resignation from the post of Chief Economic Advisor after serving almost four years in office. The finance ministry seems to be a  “sinking ship”  – even Rahul Gandhi knows it – and I don’t want to be around when it hits the iceberg. The  economy  has hit a rough patch, fuel prices are rising, the  rupee  is getting weaker and the current account deficit is widening. I was among the world’s top 100 thinkers in 2011 – I can’t have a blip on my  CV  just because you lot can’t get your shit together. However, t...

W hen I played Brian Lara International  Cricket  on our Pentium 4 PC as a kid, I was an addict who had figured the game out – quite the way  Nirav Modi  had figured out the loopholes in the banking system. If the computer bowled a good length delivery outside the off stump, I had to move my batsman a bit, press Shift + Right Mouse Button (RMB) and it would go for a six. Every single time. Perhaps it was a game bug but I couldn’t care less as I smashed 250 runs in 20 overs and became the gaming nerd of my society. To put things in perspective, it was 1999 and these were humble times. A time when good batting line-ups would struggle to chase 250 runs in an ODI game. As I watched  England  take Australia to the cleaners at Nottingham yesterday, amassing 481 runs in a 50-over game, I realised that Codemasters, the developers of Brian Lara International Cricket, had actually made a prophecy all those years back. It wasn’t a game bug after all. Every good ...

“W hy did you fail in Geography?” the questioning would begin, with me in the hot seat like  Mark Zuckerberg . My parents and relatives were everyone else, taking turns to destroy me. “But dad, what about the fact that the entire class  failed ?” I would ask. I had no clue where oranges were growing in  Maharashtra  but even as a 10-year-old, I had mastered the classic Soviet tactic of “whataboutery”, or deflecting the problem by raising another problem, that the New Yorker labelled as “a strategy of false moral equivalences”. If everyone failed then it became acceptable for you also to fail. You don’t have to deal with the larger problem of being poor in the subject if you can raise suspicion over the evil Geography teacher itself. How could she fail everyone? Make no mistake, I wasn’t the only one in my  family  doing it. We engage in whataboutery every day, all the time. The other day I was pointing out how dad’s stock investments were tanking like...

“S ir, is your name… Hard-dick?” By the age of 14, I had lost patience to correct every person who got my name wrong, so I just nodded at the immigration officer at Jerusalem  airport . She showed my passport to her colleague sitting nearby and they both shared a giggle. I thought the horror show was over but I soon heard my name pronounced incorrectly again. This time, over the loudspeaker because I’d forgotten to collect a document. Some people around started laughing and my  mom  looked at me with a confused face and asked “Beta, kem hasse che badha (Why is everyone laughing?)” My parents and relatives all studied in Gujarati-medium schools and in the language – as well as in  Hindi  and Marathi – Hardik has a sweet meaning. It means “from the heart”. I won’t go into the specifics, but let’s just say  Gujarati  is a deceptive language. Gota is a deep-fried delicacy and muthiya is a breakfast snack. So while my name had a positive connotation i...

“I believed it was the right thing to do,” said Tony Blair about the  Iraq War , because self-righteous belief is more important than fact and reality. He had kept repeating to the British public that there were  Weapons of Mass Destruction  in Iraq. As it turned out, there weren’t. The fake news was further spread out by large sections of mainstream  media , as they cheered for military action. Thousands of British troops lost their  lives , and many others wounded on account of the “intervention”. Iraq’s education system – considered one of the best in the region at the time – was in tatters. Sanctions and blockades were introduced and instability was created in the entire region from which they struggle to recover even now. WMDs, however, were never actually labelled “fake news”. For decades, it was institutions in the form of governments and traditional media that had the monopoly over the circulation of news, information, rumour, gossip, and eve...