The Week - Columns

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

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THE SEXES

By Shobhaa De

I don�t want to beat around the bush with this one�my subject for this column is Jaya Jaitley. Why resort to silly alibis or anonymity? Jaya is not the garden variety �other woman� in any case. She is a special woman with several extraordinary talents.
It is indeed a pity that she has found herself in the eye of an ugly storm that focuses on just one aspect of her multi-dimensional life�her over three-decades-long relationship with George Fernandes.

Osho, the original thinker

THE SEXES

By Shobhaa De

It has taken 20 long years after his death for a small section of society to acknowledge and celebrate Osho. With the publication of Life�s Mysteries�An Introduction to the Teachings of Osho (Penguin India), perhaps a new generation of readers will get the chance to access Osho�s formidable work sans prejudice and bias.

Everybody hates Tiwari

THE SEXES

By Shobhaa De

I was not in India when N.D. Tiwari�s filthy laundry got washed in public. But whatever filtered through sounded dreadfully gross. As more and more sordid details came tumbling out of that over-crowded closet, I raised a cynical eyebrow and asked myself: �So, what else is new?� Tiwari isn�t the first dirty old man in Indian politics to be caught with his dhoti down.

Three cheers to Sushmita

THE SEXES

By Shobhaa De

It is customary for columnists to write a year-ender that reviews the months gone by (notice how everyone exclaims, �How time flies! This year just whizzed past my ears.�) and come up with a report card based on supposedly dramatic milestones that define the rapidly fading annus horribilis (thank you, Queen Elizabeth!).

Haste over a fast

PMO BEAT

By R. Prasannan

Prime Ministers should not make haste. Manmohan Singh normally does not. On Telangana he did. Never in the last half decade in power had Sonia or Singh shown any hurry to grant Telangana or deny Telangana.
They had come to power in 2004 virtually��promising a separate Telangana in the Common Minimum Programme.

The battle of bologna

WICKED WORD

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Dementors in Harry Potter suck the soul out of people. Ron Weasley is terrified of them. Weasel words in English act like Dementors. They suck the life out of sentences, like the weasel sucking the yolk out of an egg without breaking the shell.

Weasel words are misleading or evasive words.

Wrong side of the blanket

WICKED WORD

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Humans hunt for a superconducting metallic rock in the movie Avatar. They call it unobtanium. This word mates �unobtainable� and the �-nium� ending of rare elements. Engineers at a warplane workshop in California found it difficult to obtain titanium from Russia in the 1950s. So they dubbed it unobtanium in jest.

Lay of the land

WICKED WORD

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Abhishek Bachchan, all set to anchor Bingo on boob tube, must be full of beans. Bingo developed from beano, a card game using dried beans, in which players shouted �beano� to declare a winning hand. Toy salesman Edwin Lowe popularised it in New York in 1929. He called it bingo after a player exclaimed �bingo�, instead of �beano�, in her excitement.<

Climax in Copenhagen

WICKED WORD

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Ghost story writer M.R. James, who taught at Eton, was a crossword fiend. He boasted that he could solve The Times��crossword while his four-minute egg boiled. Another crossword fanatic questioned the claim in a cryptic letter to the editor. �He may have been to Eton,� punned the letter writer, �but I am sure the egg wasn�t.�

Dirt or pay dirt?

GUEST COLUMN

By Subroto Bagchi

I STARTED work as a government lower division clerk in 1976 for a hefty monthly salary of Rs 305.25! From then on, I have seen my personal compensation go north in a way I could not have imagined. During the 33 years of my career, I have mostly been an employee and for the last 10 years, I have been an entrepreneur.

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