Hardik Rajgor

D ear Prime Minister Modi/ Vikas Purush/ Renaissance Man, How do we address you? During the 2014 general elections, all you spoke about was development. Vikas was the only word you heard on the radio, TV, or the internet — so much so that my friend Vikas refused to step out of the house. Along with that word, you were omnipresent, like watching  Shah Rukh Khan  trying to promote  Ra.One . India had been waiting for a long time, for the divisive politics of caste, class, and religion to be replaced by that of development, economics, and governance. And you had caught that pulse. You are a master orator and the microphone brings out the best in you. When the opposition spoke of caste, you spoke of  Digital India . When they mentioned  religion , you spoke about how Hindus and Muslims should work together to alleviate poverty. You even went on to win the social-media game, that would later be taken to the next level by your good friend Donald bhai. The people...

W hen one of the first  McDonald’s  outlets opened in Mumbai in the ’90s, there was a lot of excitement in our middle-class home. And though today we feel stupid like those guys who were excited about Google Plus, back in the day, all my sister and I wanted was to get hold of the toys –  Toy Story  was a rage then – and have a burger. We had no idea what it tasted like, we’d just seen Americans eating a lot of it in the movies. Fast food was a concept alien to my roti and daal-chawal-eating family and we have never set foot inside a eatery that did not have pure veg plastered outside its entrance in a tacky font.   Taking a leap of voluntary faith into the world of cancer-causing food, we set aside an evening to have dinner at McDonald’s – the place where teenagers now go when they run out of pocket money. While I was enjoying the novelty of the  Pizza  McPuff (it looked more appetitising than a McAloo Tikki), all it took my mom was a bite of one f...

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...