Earlier this week, when every reporter in the US was leaning into the wind in New York to yell into the camera about Sandy the Hurricane, a French friend put up a Facebook update about how oh yeah, Sandy the Hurricane had actually ripped through the Caribbean before it arrived at the hallowed shores of New York. At about the same time, a Canadian friend wrote an update about how Sandy the Hurricane was shortly going to cross the US border in Maine into Canada. Those reporters had almost nothing to say about Sandy&rsquo;s effect on Haiti or on Saskatchwan, though it&rsquo;s also true that Saskatchwan is a difficult name to yell into the camera.

Think perspective

Business Standard

The volume of press that a US election generates is just short of gross. Are you sick of it yet? Not me. I can&rsquo;t quite let go, because I&rsquo;m so relieved at the result.

Mitali Saran: 2012 vision

I committed, a few weeks ago, to spending one column telling you what&rsquo;s so great about tango. This is that column &mdash; partly because I meant to think up some other ideas, but didn&rsquo;t have time now that I spend all my waking hours looking up YouTube videos of debates and newsclips related to the US election. It beats me why I&rsquo;m so interested in the US election. I suspect that CNN has somehow found a way to whisper into people&rsquo;s ears as they sleep about how the US&rsquo;s choice will impact us all.

Tango crack II

Ah, October in Delhi: a nip in the early morning and late evening air, cool breezes, blue skies; and all around, the acrid but always invigorating smell of schadenfreude.

Mitali Saran: The battle of the moustaches

One of the great perks of tuning into the news, recently, was watching anchors try to say &ldquo;Pussy Riot&rdquo;. I remember, two years ago, tuning in to watch them try to say &ldquo;Eyjafjallaj&ouml;kull&rdquo;, but &ldquo;Pussy Riot&rdquo; is way more fun. They can&rsquo;t repurpose their snigger instincts into indulgent smiles about young punk-rocker collectives with weird names (wotchergonnado), since it&rsquo;s a story about hot young women getting tossed into one of Russia&rsquo;s very serious clinks. So they struggle with all kinds of syllable stress tricks to help them keep a straight face. Puh-SEE-RYE-t. POO-see Write. PuZY Right. And (from NDTV) Pussy-uh, Riot-uh. No, there&rsquo;s just no good way to say it without sounding idiotic.

The Internet laugh riot

There&rsquo;s something depressing about following the US presidential elections, however glancingly, in contrast to our own (mostly) five-yearly national carnival. The US process is far from perfect, as anyone who recalls the Florida vote-counting fiasco of 2004 would agree, but it has many upsides. It&rsquo;s fairly simple. It&rsquo;s fairly transparent. It&rsquo;s torn to shreds by the 24/7 basilisk eye of the media.

Mitali Saran: Red, white and blue

Ajmal Kasab&rsquo;s expressionless face has been branded in a billion heads since that day in November 2008 when India sat riveted to the three-day orgy of violence unfolding in Mumbai.

Mitali Saran: Maybe death is too good

You know how, when you have the delicious feeling that life is sorted &mdash; bills paid, great friends, good food, lots of tango &mdash; you also develop the creepy feeling that it&rsquo;s all too good to last? Mark that feeling. For it is widely recognised that when life looks really good, you can bet your bottom dollar that a shitstorm is not far behind.

Perspective: an ode

The drama about cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, tossed in the clink by the Maharashtra police on charges of sedition, has been jostling for space with the drama about a Libyan mob attacking the US consulate in Benghazi to protest a film whose best feature is tastelessness, made by some shadowy guy whom nobody seems to know and everyone seems to dislike.

Mitali Saran: Good offences make good neighbours

I love US presidential elections, those media-drunk carnivals of image manipulation.

Democrips and Rebloodicans

People love to talk about &ldquo;reasonable restrictions&rdquo; on free speech. &ldquo;Reasonable&rdquo; turns out to be what they personally consider to be reasonable. The most generous will draw the line at &ldquo;incitement to violence&rdquo;, asking &ndash; rhetorically &ndash; whether the freedom to create any book, painting, speech or act is really worth spilling precious blood and losing irreplaceable lives. But wherever they draw the free speech line, it is almost certainly different from the next guy&rsquo;s. And that&rsquo;s why it doesn&rsquo;t work.

Mitali Saran: Free speech vs free-for-all

It could be that the prime minister is very clever and we citizens are very stupid. That must be why I, for one, cannot understand what on god&rsquo;s earth he&rsquo;s thinking. I&rsquo;m referring to the mysterious connection between two-thirds of India going dark for the better part of two days, and the power minister immediately getting promoted to home.

Mitali Saran: Whistling in the dark

So there I was, floating in a crystalline blue infinity pool, gazing out at the staggering aquamarine water that demarcates a reef, in the Maldives. Earlier in the day I&rsquo;d been immersed in the gluey blue twilight of a lagoon, swimming side by side with manta rays. An aside: The nicest thing that can be said about a manta ray&rsquo;s mouth is, Well, that&rsquo;s certainly different. Please google it. Nobody should reach the end of life having never looked into the mouth of a feeding manta ray. It&rsquo;s much like suddenly happening upon an ugly baby&mdash;it gives you a nasty turn, which if you weren&rsquo;t wearing a snorkel would pop out of your mouth as a bark of alarm; and then you immediately feel guilty about it.

Manta matinees

If you turned on the television the day Olympic medal-winning boxer Mary Kom came home, you saw rings of police personnel struggling through a mob, trying to keep it at bay from what looked like &mdash; well, nothing. Mary Kom is a very diminutive person, so for several seconds it looked like anarchy focussed on a small empty centre.

Mitali Saran: Smells like team spirit

Every so often, when the world has a fortnight like the one just gone, I think about Douglas Adams&rsquo;s The Hitchhiker&rsquo;s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of four books. If you haven&rsquo;t read them, please put down that copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and start immediately. It is the most useful guide to life ever, after the instruction manual that comes with the average phone, which today looks much more like a NASA console than any NASA console ever did.

Take me to Squornshellous Zeta

So last year, while many terribly important things were happening in the world, I began to learn the tango. Please do not ask how this happened, because it involves a love story that ends in Kleenex and vodka and generally reaffirms the mulish transience of the world.

Tango crack

Parting is such sweet sorrow, but coming back is a hoot. A few weeks ago I was in Java and Sumatra on one of those travel-writing assignments that make it worth getting up in the morning. It&rsquo;s been 25 years since I stepped on Indonesian soil, as regular readers of this column may recall-and by that I mean readers of this column when it last appeared on a weekly basis, which was 19 months ago. Given the pace of life these days, those readers will long since have grown up, gotten married, become disillusioned with their career choices, gotten divorced, had hip replacement surgery, and moved countries to get away from their poxy grandchildren.

Return of the native

Investment banker type&rdquo; is shorthand, among the less well-paid, for a person who builds his or her life on bourgeois safety, creature comforts, flashy toys and frantic networking. It&rsquo;s not a compliment, especially after 2008. Bhaskar* is a middle-aged financial engineer on Wall Street whose life has the familiar patina of glamour, and is pitted with the usual problems: difficult relationships, cultural hopscotch, inner turmoil. But meeting an investment banker type like Bhaskar is like going from the sauna into the ice pool &mdash; a healthy shock to the system.

Mitali Saran: The banker and the sadhu

I&rsquo;ve been getting that spooky feeling lately, of walking in the door to find that things are unusually quiet. There are signs that someone was just there &mdash; soiled coffee cups on the table, still-smoking cigarette butts crushed out in the ashtray &mdash; but your hollered hellos go unanswered. You pick up the phone and dial, but that seriously annoying fake-chirpy voice comes on: &ldquo;The number you are trying to reach is currently unreachable. Please try again, or call later.

Latchkey nation

Swapan Seth, who runs an advertising firm called Equus with his brother, is a focused, intelligent man who gives off a kind of coiled energy. He describes himself as hyper and anxious. &ldquo;Oddly enough, though, people see me as calm and collected,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;So the panic attacks felt like a bit of a chink in the armour.

Mitali Saran: The maven and the panic attacks

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think that smoking is a pitifully stupid, self-destructive thing to do; and those who totally agree and will nevertheless calmly disembowel you if you try to take away their cigarettes.

Mitali Saran

Mitali Saran

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