What can you do in life with hard work, determination, and a net worth of $43.1 billion? A lot. For one, you can get Salman Khan to be a background dancer to an even worse dancer in Anant Ambani at his sister Isha Ambani's wedding. On a Shah Rukh Khan song.

So much has happened between the RBI and the government in the last few months that it feels like a retelling of A Series of Unfortunate Events. In August, the government appointed S Gurumurthy, an RSS ideologue, to the RBI’s central board. Today, the RBI Governor Urjit Patel has resigned citing personal reasons.

The first day of the first Test in Adelaide might not have gone India’s way, but it’s a long tour with a lot of cricket still to be played. Virat Kohli is at the top in every aspect of his game. However, there is still an area where he can improve — captaincy.

Today, children in the building cringe at the thought of playing in muddy fields and dusty grounds. But the joy of running around in the muck and making the perfect sliding tackle in the sludge is unmatched. I vote to bring keechad football back.

For a week now, Mithali Raj has been at the top of the news cycle. Fans have outraged over Harmanpreet Kaur’s decision to drop her from the team, which might have cost us the semi-final of the Women’s T20 World Cup. This outrage, this demand for accountability, this scrutiny is a good thing for women’s cricket.

Ahead of the 2019 elections, all the positive messaging and promise of acche din from 2014 seems to have dissolved. As the PM, it is only fair that you direct the country toward the kind of intelligent debate we deserve.

If there’s one word to describe a captain who leaves out a veteran from her squad in a crucial game, it’s bold. That’s Harmanpreet Kaur, India Women’s T20 skipper for you.

We Gujaratis love sweet food, truly madly deeply. We like our pizza with more ketchup than toppings and when the cook forgets to add sweet to undhiyu, she is promptly shown the door. I often wonder that if I become conscious about my sugar intake, will I be letting down my community?

My mom, like many Indian mothers, suffers from “Yeh toh main ghar pe bana sakti hoon” syndrome: An attitude of outright rejection and dismissiveness rooted in desi pride. Burger is no better than vada pav, and French fries are just homemade finger chips.

The plague of PUBG is upon us and spinning out in every direction. Everywhere I look, I find sufferers. Smoke breaks in office have been replaced by PUBG breaks, and the only exercise kids in my building get is crawling in the grass on screen in the “safe zone”.

Diwali ki safai is not just another day where the family gets together to dust the table and clear the cupboard – it is an event. Mama announces the date in advance so that dad does not have “important work” and the kids don’t have any “scenes” planned.

Virat Kohli has reached a rare peak that only few sportsmen do, where he has become so good that it has become boring. It’s not a surprise anymore when he gets a 100; in fact, it’s a surprise when he doesn’t. And that is an astonishing feat.

First the Supreme Court allowed menstruating women inside the Sabarimala Temple, now they want to regulate the use of firecrackers during Diwali. The world is just out there to destroy our great traditions of pollution and discrimination.

Manchester United has 99 problems, and football is just one of them. While failures off the pitch are behind closed doors, the visible culmination of it all takes the form of poor performances on the ground. As a fan, watching the entire spectacle at Manchester United is more heartbreaking than the entire run of This Is Us.

The new video-sharing app TikTok hosts everything from the simple, to the bizarre, to the extremely fucking weird. It’s an avenue to another India, populated by those from a different economic, social, and cultural environment as people like us. Unlike Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter, TikTok is for everyone.

Instead of looking at the positives of the #MeToo movement, I actively tried to pinpoint its imperfections – by focussing on legal loopholes or that one woman who made a false accusation on Twitter. I started finding reasons to convince myself that there was something wrong with the movement. But why was I making excuses for sexual harassers?

Once you rise above the post of manager, why try to learn employee names and bother memorising them all? The corporate experience is all about being treated like shit, and the best way to do it is to refer to a human being with the same word you can use for a stapler.

Google+ is dead, but the question to ask is, was it ever alive? A Google+ account was like a deodorant in India: Everyone had one but no one was using it. And it became as irrelevant as development is to India’s politics.

At the age of 18, I thought I was cool because I knew the lyrics to Sean Paul’s Temperature. At 18, Prithvi Shaw is plundering the West Indies bowling attack like it is his daily glass of Bournvita.

My old-fashioned father, who still believes women should do the bulk of cooking and tolerates no criticism of Narendra Modi, suddenly turned liberal when a young couple needed his help. Unlike most people from our generation, who use social media to signal our virtues, my father had become the IRL definition of woke.

The corrupt politician is aware of the fallacies in our public service delivery system and what makes the voter tick. He offers rice to those who struggle to earn two meals a day and electricity to those who sleep in the dark. He gives them access to a system that is out of their reach.

I’m in a complicated relationship with Aadhaar. When we first met, we “linked” instantly. But then things went south and the courts helped save our marriage. But what about my embarrassing pictures that she already leaked? How do I make people unsee them?

Like India’s foreign policy, an India-Pakistan cricket match was full of ups and downs. But that was back in the ’90s and to say things have changed would be an understatement. These days when India faces Pakistan, you often don’t even hear of the game until you have Cricinfo bookmarked.

Today Ganeshotsav is about visiting that one relative who keeps Ganpati and having one-fourth of a modak. As children, though, it caused more excitement than for Charlie at the Chocolate Factory, because pandal-hopping was the only all-nighter we were allowed.

Ganesh Chaturthi is when every parent turns interior designer, every kid a painter, and every uncle a craft expert. It’s an art exhibition of the middle-class — and every clay mountain or paper flower, is the pièce de résistance.

Apple has announced its new iPhone and it is driving men nuts. They know it’s the only way they will ever have close to six inches in their pants.

Can we just ignore statistics and facts, and look at the good things demonetisation gave us? Sure, we are still waiting for ₹15 lakh to be deposited to our bank accounts, but the economic literacy of the country shot up faster than Mehul Choksi’s frequent-flyer mile points.

PV Sindhu and Saina Nehwal have scripted history at the 2018 Asian Games. Their individual journeys and accolades are no doubt inspiring. But what they mean for India and for the sport goes far, far beyond those solo pursuits.

It might be the most boring shot to watch in cricket, but maybe there is still place for the front foot defence alongside some of the more eye-catching shots in the game, a fact Team India would do well to remember for the rest of their tour of England.

India was thrashed 4-1 by England but it is Navjot Singh Sidhu who had a worse summer. He has been accused of demoralising our soldiers at the border, and declared a puppet of the Pakistani government. All for attending Imran Khan’s swearing-in ceremony.

One week into your childhood swimming classes, the coach becomes more dangerous in the water than a coked-up crocodile. Scared toddlers are thrown from the diving board and horrified kids are set adrift without floats, struggling for their lives and gulping down weird-tasting water.

Sunil Chhetri has been providing fans with magical moments throughout his career, it’s just that we haven’t been around to witness them. He’s more than a “Goal Machine” and “Captain Fantastic”, he is the man who has inspired an indifferent crowd to finally pay attention to Indian football.

If Bear Grylls hosted a show on Mumbai it would be titled Man vs BMC. The traffic in the city is a true equaliser, where Mukesh Ambani gets stuck in the same jam as you and I. Two hours of commute every day also provides a lesson in anger management and patience.

The MNS, which has been breaking Mumbai footpaths to protest potholes and beating up cinema hall managers, has a unique approach to tackling problems. It can be summed up by the motto, “What would Gandhi do? I’ll do the exact opposite of that.”

Congratulations, Mumbai, your apathy truly deserves an applause. Your tax money is used to build roads, repair them, so when there are pothole-related casualties, you are paying for your own death. The biopic on the city should ideally be titled “Bombay, the City that Never Feels”.

In a world that idolises speed, Luka Modrić has mastered the art of the pause. Of waiting for the right moment. Of moulding space and time on the football pitch. With three Man of the Match awards, he’s had a stellar tournament. And yet, nothing about him screams, “Look at me!”

Everything is fair in love and VAR. This was true at the World Cup final between France and Croatia where a controversial VAR decision tilted the game in the favour of Les Bleus.

Unlike the BMC, Mumbai’s trains were there when their city needed them the most, in the harshest days of the monsoon. Timely announcements were made, heavy-duty pumps chugged water out, and food packets were provided to stranded passengers on long-distance trains. The local truly is the city’s 3 am bestie.

Every Monday to Friday, you wake up during the monsoon with just one question in mind: “Aaj chutti hai kya?” You may rant against the BMC on Facebook, but you secretly hope that your faith in its inability to deal with any rain situation is not shaken.

Dear Football World Cup, now that India vs England cricket has started, I will have to dump you. You made quite a few false promises. You told me Neymar was going to bring swagger to the Cup, but all he did was roll on the floor. If I wanted to see a brown guy with a funky hairstyle doing nothing for 90 minutes, I’d pick Hardik Pandya instead.

2018 marked a rare World Cup where England arrived sans their usual hype and unwarranted swagger. Fans and pundits didn’t have high expectations from this young England squad – until the first kickoff whistle blew.

Diego Maradona is GOAT. At the World Cup clash between Argentina and Nigeria, he showed us yet again that he is not just the world’s greatest footballer. He is also the world’s greatest football fan.

With the monsoon, comes a surfeit of #pluviophile Tinder bios. You, who takes an Uber to the ATM a couple of kilometres away, impulsively sign up for a 15-kilometre trek on a rainy Sunday. Because the exhibition of your love for the rain is incomplete without a selfie atop Harishchandragadh. What could possibly go wrong?

When Sachin didn’t do well, the Indian team would invariably fold like a pack of cards, and the situation isn’t too different for Lionel Messi, Argentina’s all-time top goal scorer. When Messi has a quiet game, Argentina looks more disjointed than India’s finance ministry.

In a letter addressed to the finance minister, Arvind Subramanian writes, “Now is a good time to look back at my memorable, if patchy, tenure as chief economic advisor. Yes, I’d have loved it if we weren’t forced to do yoga every morning. On the bright side, it has made me fitter, although I wish I could say the same about the shape of our economy.”

Cricket is no longer a contest between bat and ball. It’s Virat Kohli vs Steve Smith vs Joe Root vs Kane Williamson. Bowlers do not exist to create their own legacies, they merely exist as a hindrance to a batsman’s legacy.

As world leaders advocate stricter immigration policies and hostility toward Muslims around the globe rises, that one of the world’s most loved footballers should be a Muslim, is a sweet irony. Mohamed Salah is not merely an icon of the game, but as Liverpool fans call him – a gift from Allah.

I have a game plan against Portugal, and his name is Sergio Ramos. I’m not going to go into much detail, but I’ll just whisper “Ronaldo” in his ears before kick-off and he’ll know what to do.

The next 30 days are going to be all about football and the World Cup. So even if you don’t find the game beautiful, you need to fit in. Pick a top team and pretend to support it. Do not say things like “I think The Netherlands or Italy will win the Cup” and “The Mexico team is building a wall. Lol.”

Everyone remembers their first day of college, when you walked in, the epitome of cool – i.e. a sasta rip-off of Honey Singh who is desperate to fit in. But by the time you’re ready to leave, you know you’ll miss the little things, like the Xerox shop where you got chocolates instead of change.

With journalistic credibility at an all-time low, I now look at news channels the same way my parents look at my career - with zero expectations.

In the world of finance, Advanced Excel is the only thing that will get you respect. For accountants everywhere, Excel is not the class nerd; it is Clark Kent. It can also help further your love life – because Excel in the spreadsheets, is better than coffee in the streets.

To all the poor sods expecting their results this exam season, you have our sympathy. We get it. A two-digit magical number is now going to determine the rest of your life: Whether you get into the best college, land a good job, get a marriage proposal, or want to go to Jupiter someday.

The state has developed a rather incompetent manual on How to Respond to Protests, which was applied to the Sterlite stir in Tuticorin. First ignore an agitation, then try to contain it. And after attempts to shut a protest fails, bring out the big guns.

The result of every office conference call is like the Karnataka elections. After spending hours of time and energy on debating a subject, you reach a fractured verdict.

Uneasy lies the head that once wore the crown. As if it weren’t difficult enough to once run Pakistan, I now feel scared in my own country over my 2008 Mumbai Attack remarks. I am now receiving the only thing that is worse than hate in Pakistan – love from India.

Being the car DJ is like being a parent. No matter what you do, it’s never going to be enough. If you play pop music, you’ll be asked if you’re 12 years old. Try playing classic rock, you’ll be asked if you’re 100. Crank up some Arijit Singh, you’ll be asked if you broke up recently.

I fondly remember the early days of Flipkart, when we delivered books on our scooters. People were still reading books instead of listicles and the traffic at Silk Board junction was not yet frozen. But now I have a billion dollars, so I’ll just sit back and watch the street fight between Amazon and Walmart.

The Bollywood apocalypse movie begins with a MET warning, but given its previous history with predictions, no one believes them. This doomsday scenario and everyone’s complete ignorance to it, is articulated through a Malaika Arora item song about living life to the fullest.

The Kathua rape and murder has illustrated once again that whataboutery is our national pastime. Social media is rife with arguments that refuse to acknowledge it as a communal attack, because “where were you in 1984”? The goal of all whataboutery is to never get to the bottom of difficult questions – and to never ask the right ones.

I received sex education long before the rest of my classmates, when a senior pointed out what my name “actually” meant. Dick references became an integral part of my life like diabetes in a Gujarati meal. I do believe names shape your personality – mine taught me a sense of humour.

The metrics for being a good child are different for Indian boys and girls. There is a soft bigotry of low expectations for boys, and a very high degree of expectations from a girl. By 10 years of age, my sister was equipped to survive a season on LOST – but I was the good boy who didn’t need to do anything more than tuck his legs in.

Salman Khan walks into Jodhpur Central Jail and bumps into another “celebrity inmate” – Asaram Bapu. Bhaijaan greets him with a namaste, Bapu turns around and says, “I’m a virgin too.”

I lose control of myself to another entity when I’m using cashless payments. The real me knows that that gola-maker is a reckless purchase, but the cashless wallet version says, “Wouldn’t a kala-khatta gola be great in this heat?”

Remember that one house in the building that was lit up the entire night during board exams? Those kids have now grown up to be accountants at multinational companies. And the financial year end brings out the worst in them.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt from this ball-tampering fiasco, it is that you can never trust these interns. You had one job, Bancroft!

In the Cambridge Analytica exposé, Facebook has been negligent with sensitive data. Google was fined €2.42 billion by the EU for manipulating search engine results to favour its own shopping service. Do they then have a moral right to carry out the function of being the internet police?

Can you imagine a world without Facebook? I worry about the extreme consequences of this event, for the timeline of my life would be ruined if Facebook had to deactivate its account.

A manufactured sense of happiness is pervasive these days. On social media in the form of #HeartReactsOnly and #MyHappyPlace and #LoveMyLife. It is this constant reminder of how I’m not leading a happy life that is making me… unhappy.

Each time I go for a shower, I feel like I have entered an examination hall of cosmetic care. WTF is a “Strawberry and Cream Silky Shampoo”? Is it meant to be eaten or used on the hair? What about the egg-nourishing conditioner? Can a vegetarian use it?

The Finance Bill and Appropriation Bill were passed in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday in a little over 30 minutes. I spent more time choosing between a paneer roll and vegetable sandwich on a flight from Mumbai to Pune than our elected representatives did, about money that would affect the lives of 130 crore people.

My name has been cleared in the Mangalore pub case, but I continue to suffer the psychological after-effects of this smear campaign. For instance, I get really mad when I enter pubs. They are dull and dark and remind me of my political career.

With the winter session of the Parliament approaching, the demand for farm-loan waivers has only gotten louder. With the general elections a few months away, the governments might just cave in. But what makes good political sense, rarely makes for good moral and economic sense.

Asking for leave is about as stressful a question as asking your boss for his daughter’s hand in marriage. It will inevitably be accompanied by the dreaded question: “You’ll carry your laptop, right?”

While the Man of the Match in the men's 2016 Asia Cup won 7,500 USD, the women's captain Mithali Raj received a prize of only 250 USD. Why does the women's game receive the stepchild treatment in the same tournament?

On odd days, we love statues, on even days, we hate statues. When we love statues, we believe they will generate tourism revenue and benefit the region; when we hate them, they turn into “a waste of money and resources” overnight. Can we please settle this once and for all?

It’s that time of the year when every Std X student is asked a question he has no answer to: Science, Commerce, or Arts? They are also subjected to educational stereotypes – the geeks take Science, the average guy takes Commerce, and the losers opt for Arts.

The golden rule is everything you wear for Holi – from your chaddi to your ego – must be on the verge of disposal. Remember, moms are complete non-believers when it comes to the “daag acche hai” theory.

In a world where Google can provide the answer to every question, why can’t we get the office air conditioner to work for everyone? Why does the AC stand in the way of complete collegial harmony?

“Abhi mehnat kar lo, baad mein aish hai” is the original Fake News of the world. Don’t fall for it.

Dear PNB, we were in a steady relationship for seven years and now you’ve broken my heart. You’ve destroyed my brand faster than Salman Khan managed to destroy Vivek Oberoi’s acting career.

One of India's OG scamsters, Janardhana Reddy is back. After the infamous mining scandal, he is now arrested in a ₹600-crore Ponzi scheme case. Here’s some advice for young children: Scamster ban jao doston, bahot scope hai.

Hint: It’s NEVER the men in the middle of financial storms who pay up.

I am an SSC student, the lowest rung in the social hierarchy of the school system. While ICSE and CBSE students studied French and German, we were struggling with Marathi barakhadi. They were veer bahadur Rajput boys, we were Model ke pyjama chaaps.

To get the attention of your employer make sure your résumé stands out like Ranveer Singh at an award show. And if you graduated from a Lovely University it’s best to mention LP University on your CV. Ambiguity, they say, is better than embarrassment.

Gone are the days of good old steamed idlis and paneer-capsicum pizza. Today restaurants that serve pav bhaji fondue and red velvet dhokla flourish. It doesn’t matter if the food tastes awful. Just like our lives online, it is only important that the food we eat looks great.

After two consecutive flops “Demonetisation Mana Hai” and “GST Zinda Hai”, Arun Jaitley is hoping his next film “Budget Raja” will appeal to the masses. We’ll give it three stars but will know the exact box office collections only in 2019.

Every Mumbaikar knows a rickshawallah won’t look at you unless you address him as “boss”; no one ever questions the use of “rapchik” as a compliment. It wasn’t until I went to Delhi that I realised why I’ve always fared 37/100 in my Hindi paper.

One might think the construction worker who filed an IT return, did something stupid. He could have just carried on with his illegal business and no one would ever have known. But I think he is on to something big.

Seriously Mark, if I wanted more personal conversations about Rekha’s saree at the Filmfare awards, I wouldn’t be browsing Facebook on my phone at the dinner table.

As the most hyped film of the year releases, I am going to watch Padmaavat on principle. But the question worrying me the most is: After all the hype, what if I were risking my life to watch a movie that turned out to be a three-hour snooze fest?

Failure is a bit like watching porn, the first time is the hardest. Then comes a time when you can count your CA marks on your fingers, but need a calculator to count your attempts. Through this cycle, you get prepared for life.

My father has two personalities. One reserved for the rest of the year and one for Makar Sankranti, when he goes from Bruce Wayne to full-on Batman, patang and phirki in tow.

The ₹950-crore fodder scam is termed as large-scale embezzlement of government treasury funds given to non-existent companies for purchase and supply of cattle fodder. That sounds complex, but for Lalu Prasad Yadav it was as simple as stealing money from the family piggy bank.

We’ve come to a point where the planet is now at the mercy of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, two individuals with funny haircuts and terrifying personalities, who have access to nuclear weapons. How did we get here?

So much happened during the last year, that 2018 promises to keep it interesting. The election circus will start, Virat Kohli will be accused of being “distracted” by his wedding, and Padmavati might even release.

If Facebook were to make a year-end review video for the BMC, it would have a really distressing story to tell. This year, we’ve had a doctor fall into a manhole and lose his life, the Elphinstone station stampede, multiple deaths due to potholes, and now the horrendous Kamala Mills fire.

Back in the day, families gathered around the TV to watch Filmfare Awards on New Year’s eve, while feasting on pav bhaji. Today, the cult around the New Year party has changed drastically. No matter where you live, there will be a party within a 100-metre radius.

Mumbaikars will no longer be able to jump into the AC local before it comes to a halt at the platform as its doors will be shut. This is a great loss to the city’s cultural life.

Secret Santa is a certainty in most offices, next only to death and taxes. Some of you will draw the name of your crush and break the ₹1,000 limit, some of you will recycle your Diwali dry-fruit hamper before it expires.