Minakhi Misra

Category: Opinions

  • The wrong lesson from the Boy Who Cried Wolf

     

    Mrs. Malik was 71 when she learned how to recognise the signs and symptoms of a stroke. She learned this from a series of pictures on a local hospital’s information leaflet. On the top banner, in blazing red ink, was the hospital’s emergency number that could be called if one were convinced that they were having a stroke. “Don’t hesitate,” it said. “Just call. We’ll be there in 10 minutes.”

    Mrs. Malik carefully folded the paper till it showed just the emergency number and taped this to the landline phone set she used. She further wrote the number down in her personal phone diary, and made a mental note to ask someone to save the number in her cell phone.

    Two days later, the ambulance was at her doorstep.

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  • The Silence of Our Actions

    I bought a copy of  The Silence of Our Friends yesterday at Comic Con, Bangalore. It took me two pages of browsing through at the counter to know that this is a graphic novel I will enjoy reading and will cherish for a long time. And that is exactly how things seem to be turning out. I read the book today, all in one sitting, and kept going back to several of the conversations between the important characters and the oh-so-subtle imageries in the backdrop of the artwork. And it was in these revisits that I had the Aha! moment about this book.

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  • Beating the Bell Curse

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  • “Aren’t you worried about the money?”

    Almost everyone asks me this question. And it is a fair question too. My answer is, “Yes. I worry about it all the time.”

    But you might not agree with how I look at money or how I worry about it.

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  • Happy Independence Day

    Before 1947, if one had a distinctly Indian name, which 99% Indians did, one could literally die of a name.

    In 1943, a British Naval Officer, who was from Indian roots but had been born and brought up as a pure Brit in Sussex, was assigned to a mission at the Bombay port. He had never sympathised with the Indian cause and had taken every step he could to make it known to people that despite his roots, he was very thoroughly a Brit.

    But Bombay was a new place and new places come with their new prejudices. When the Master-of-Port at Bombay saw that someone by the name of Rustomji Jahajwalah was asking permission to dock his rowing boat, he assumed almost immediately that the line saying “Boatswain in His Highness’s Royal British Navy” must have been clearly a mistake. (more…)

  • Being an Authorpreneur: why writing feels so much like starting up

    People like Eric Schmidt scare the daylight out of me when they say we are, presently, producing as much content in 48 hours as we did from the beginning of time till 2003. Just take a minute and imagine: every single day we are producing as much text as there is in half the libraries of the world. What Schmidt is basically telling us is that we can be great writers, but if we can’t figure out a way to stand out in today’s crowded world of content, we are just hobbyists and little else. (more…)

  • World Book Day in 23 Tweets

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  • Green India == Growing India?

    Green Today?

    A serious dichotomy envelops the global economic circles today: the gradual enrichment of poor and developing countries.  This means that there will be more parties in the not-so-distant future with coffers large enough to afford those economic luxuries that were once reserved for the elite. Inspiring as it might be from the moral vantage, the fact that cannot be ignored is that the environment is already under strain and its capacity to accommodate such large scale economic activity in the future is, at best, doubtful. Ironically, the possible solutions to this dichotomy are numerous, but the task of directing the agreements of all involved parties to one single solution is not very promising. In such a scenario, India finds herself juggling three pins: creating jobs for the unemployed and supplying food to its burgeoning population, while always keeping the horizon green for sustainable growth.

    Is ecotechnology the answer?

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  • Book Review – Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North by Alex Rutherford

    The Book at Hand:

    One cannot judge a book by its cover, but one sure can get fascinated enough to buy it from the stores. That’s how I came across Alex Rutherford’s Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North. The royal battle-axe with intricate design on a dark bloody crimson cover was just the kind of thing I was looking for. A quick skim through the first chapter at the store was enough to promise a good reading experience, tempting me to put the softcover edition into my cart. To be completely frank, I had started to expect something from the book that my school textbooks did not provide; the book did not disappoint. The first in the quintet, this book did leave me with a craving for the rest of the series.

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  • Toy Story 3: Movie Review

    Although my brother feels that the movie was a yawn-a-rooney, I will differ significantly, naming Toy Story 3 one of the best pieces of animation to come out of Pixar Studios. A suiting third part to a great series, Toy Story 3 does not disappoint the viewer, as has been the case with other movie series, wherein the third part loses the charm that the previous two movies have built. This movie which was dubbed Pixar’s great gamble, has paid off big time in the Box Office, beating the last record holder, Shrek 3, with a total income of $41,148,961 on its opening day at the box office from 4,028 theaters.

    So, what makes this movie such a success?

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