Hardik Rajgor

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...

C orruption  in India is like oxygen – it is integral to our lives. From the local traffic police to spectrum allocation at the cabinet level, corruption is as rampant as potholes on Indian roads. You can move your file faster in a  government  office if you accompany it with a bit of “chai paani”, a word we have coined to convince ourselves we are not all that dishonest because it’s not quite “rishwat”. Corruption is a major election plank for our political parties. One party says, “Mera PM chor hai”, the other says “Tera pura khandan  chor  hai” and the average person on the street believes, “Saale sab chor hai”. This defeatism pervaded our Supreme Court recently, when it took the hands-off position by allowing politicians with criminal backgrounds to contest elections — so long as they were loud and clear about their criminal antecedents. This, presumably, would help the voter make an informed choice, and possibly avoid the worst among equals. But is ou...