Sunday Long Reads: Can Lionel Messi win the World Cup for Argentina, Why India doesn’t play the FIFA world cup, Vasan Bala on Monica, O My Darling, book reviews and more
The Indian Express | 1 day ago | 20-11-2022 | 11:40 am
The Indian Express
1 day ago | 20-11-2022 | 11:40 am
Can Lionel Messi win the World Cup for Argentina?From the dazzling light of the fireworks that spread over Rio de Janeiro’s iconic football theatre Maracana, Lionel Messi walked into the darkness of the dressing room. His head sunk, one hand wiping sweat and tears, and from the other hung the Golden Ball trophy. This was how the 2014 FIFA World Cup had ended for Messi. He had won the award for the tournament’s best player but it was Germany that took home the Big Cup.READ MOREVasan Bala on Monica, O My Darling’s fight scene: ‘Rajkummar Rao, Huma Qureshi treaded that line well’The pulpy crime noir Monica, O My Darling, directed by Vasan Bala, has emerged as something that a doctor would recommend to those craving old-world Hindi cinema potboilers. An adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s Japanese novel Burutasu No Shinzou (1989), this Netflix release is about a robotics expert, who is from a small town with a big dream, getting entangled in a botched-up murder plan. Some may even call it a diabolical game of snakes and ladders where the players are deceitful and desperate to grab a bigger slice of the pie.READ MOREWhy India doesn’t play the FIFA world cupIn western Africa, there is the land-locked country of Mali, about one-seventh the size of India, a large portion of which is made up of the largest desert in the world, the Sahara. A river, the Niger, cuts across the country, passing the port town of Mopti to undertake a journey into the heart of the Sahara. Just south-east of Mopti, the river’s flood plains rise gently into a large plateau that ends dramatically in the cliffs of Bandiagara.READ MOREWhat one can achieve with a binoculars in GoaIt really must be among the most relaxing ways to bird: swinging gently back and forth in a rocking chair, binoculars (and beer) by your side, overlooking a turquoise swimming pool and wondering if the white-throated kingfisher you saw, taking a dip here in Goa five years ago, still does so, or has passed on the custom to any of its children. To your huge delight, it does turn up, perching first on the water tank on the terrace and then skimming down and sluicing itself in the water. So, it’s either the same bird or has passed on the tradition.READ MOREIn ‘In Search of the Divine: Living Histories of Sufism in India’, Rana Safvi maps a millennium of shared spiritualityYe masaail-e tasawwuf,ye tera bayaan, GhalibTujhe hum wali samajhte,jo na baada-khwaar hota(These scholarly Sufi discussions, and your speech, Ghalib, you thinkerWe would have thought you a saint, had you not been a wine drinker!)The above lines by Ghalib, characteristically mischievous, also point to the fact that the bard of 19th-century India thought of himself as being close to the Sufi tradition. Indeed, Indian Sufism, which traces its origin to the 12th century CE, was quite mature in the nation’s ethos by Ghalib’s time.READ MORE1971. 1999. War Stories offers readers glimpses into the challenges of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Kargil WarDuring my childhood, an elderly relative in the neighbourhood would tell us stories about his days in the Indian Air Force (IAF). Partly annoyed at being disrupted in the middle of our games, we would retort, “Appooppa (grandpa), you have told this before” and return to playing.READ MOREWith The Education of Yuri, Jerry Pinto has proved, yet again, that he is one of the finest chroniclers of a Bombay gone byThe Education of Yuri is the first book I sit down to read as I move into a new house in New Delhi. I seem to have brought the Bombay monsoons with me, and the constant clatter of raindrops falling on a tin terrace next door provides the perfect setting to embark upon Jerry Pinto’s sometimes awkward, often funny — but always moving — coming-of-age novel set in Bombay in the 1980s.READ MOREBureaucratic Archaeology is a scholarly investigation of the history and hierarchical structure of the ASIIn Bureaucratic Archaeology, an ethnographic study of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), author Ashish Avikunthak shows how the work of archaeologists, which was originally supposed to be scholarly, has degenerated into a performance of official duty. Instead of promoting any professional and creative act of intellectual inquiry, this routine “normalises” the work into mere occupation. Archaeologists are moulded into typical government officers, within a rigid hierarchical structure. Being a bureaucracy, the workforce becomes prone to disenchantment and subject to corruption. Furthermore, such an “obedient” national-level agency, eventually, becomes a useful apparatus to serve the political agenda of the government of the day.READ MORE
