Hardik Rajgor

E very  Gujarati  wedding menu has two kinds of dal; there’s “normal” dal and then there’s meethi dal .  The first bland and boring version is for the six people at the wedding who are fitness conscious and are obviously not Gujarati, and the latter is for the rest of us who will die of diabetes. Then there’s sweet kadhi ,  sev tameta nu shaak, and basundi – all this even before you reach the dessert counter – for the sugar rush we need to dance to  “Sanedo”  later. They say some stereotypes exist because they are true, and this is certainly true for us Gujaratis. We love sweet food, truly madly deeply.   You could say Gujjus are as obsessed with sweet food as paps and admins of dank meme pages are with  Taimur Ali Khan . In a Gujarati household, the sugar jar is placed right next to the salt jar, and used as liberally as  Virat Kohli  uses expletives on the field. We can live without water but not sugar and jaggery, especially in ...

O ver the years, fans of Indian cricket have worshipped different gods and their virtues –  Sunil Gavaskar  was an artist at the crease, VVS Laxman was a wizard, the stoic dependability of  Rahul Dravid  was the yin to Virender Sehwag’s yang, and Sachin Tendulkar was the genius on whose bat blade rested a billion dreams. But Virat Kohli is Gavaskar, Laxman, Dravid, Sehwag, and Tendulkar all rolled into one. King Kohli  has mastered all three formats of the game. He is immune to the colour of the ball, the size of the ground, and the quality of the pitch. When the match demands patience, he has more patience than a kindergarten teacher. When the tempo needs picking up, he shifts gears faster than a Bugatti Veyron. In desperate times, when the team needs to grind it out, his precise efficiency is like a  soldier’s  on the battlefield. As captain, his brain seems to work faster than a supercomputer while making calculations and taking risks. India...

E veryone has seen a TikTok video, even if you have never heard about the video-sharing and Karaoke app and don’t know what it is. In that sense, it’s a bit like  GST  – it doesn’t matter whether you understand it, and there is no way to escape it. And it has hit the online world like a tsunami. Remember that friend from college who posts  Instagram  videos, lip-syncing to famous Bollywood dialogues and songs? The ones where you watch and go “Why?” That is probably a TikTok video. If you’re wondering “Hang on, isn’t that Musical.ly?”, congratulations, you’re catching up. Musical.ly was acquired by the  Chinese  company ByteDance in November 2017 and they merged it with their app TikTok in August 2018. TikTok has exploded worldwide and has more users than Reddit, Twitter, Skype,  Snapchat , and LinkedIn. I don’t know what’s more surprising, that TikTok has gotten so popular so quickly, or that a Chinese product has lasted more than ten days. For t...

F or the first time in life, I got a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to be a woman. I was gripped with fear and uneasiness. As  India’s #MeToo movement  gained momentum over the past two weeks, I watched a lot of supposedly woke men get called out – for sending unsolicited texts and dick pics, predatory behaviour, and outright  sexual harassment . I followed some of these people on Twitter, I have enjoyed some of their work – their films, their writing. These were not those “other” dastardly men who rape women and brazenly skirt the law. These were not those men who make it to front pages of newspapers, men who’ve made you think, “Who are these monsters?” But as the past few days have taught us, these men belong to a different breed of monsters – they are one among us, or rather we are the monsters.   We are on the news now. Our behaviour has been unacceptable and downright shameful. We the regular people who have had a decent education and enjoy privileg...

I t was not a festival, it wasn’t anyone’s birthday in the  family , as far as I could remember. It wasn’t even the weekend. So I was taken by surprise when my house was abuzz with energy in the middle of a workweek. There was a serious amount of pav bhaji and grilled cheese sandwiches that had been ordered. For a  Gujarati  family living in Kandivali, it felt like  Navratri  had arrived early. Before I could figure out what was happening, mum told me we had guests – my dad’s colleagues. Really? When did dad start making friends at work?   Pratik* from my father’s office had come home to visit us, all the way from  Kalyan . Seated next to him was a woman, who I guessed was his girlfriend, but I couldn’t be sure. It was 10 pm on a  Tuesday , way past my father’s bedtime. And yet everyone seemed quite content chatting away. “Why aren’t they leaving?” “They can’t be staying over!” “Do I have to sleep in the living room today?” My mind was overf...