Democracy’s true essence isn’t the elections, but the days that follow after it ends, when we shed our voting hats and return to the routine of being citizens. Everyday life does not depend on political beliefs. So despite what we may feel about our differences, we work and live alongside people without bothering to identify someone as “sickular”, “bhakt”, or “commies”.

Game of Thrones has painted perhaps the glummest picture of love ever conceived in popular culture. Love does not last or make us better persons. Instead, it corrupts, handicaps, and burdens as much as any other responsibility in the world.

Pop culture has led us to believe that the most intriguing stories are about people who go against the grain. But what about the majority, the 9-to-5 doers, mostly rejected as conformists? TVF’s Kota Factory offers refreshing evidence that life bristles just as mightily between the margins of accommodation as well.

It is a bit rich on the part of our politicians to insult each other in the vilest language possible, yet jail a citizen over a meme. Why is free speech the one thing that no politician or institution in this country is willing to uphold or protect?

It is remarkable that for elections in the national capital of the country, political parties have pretty much taken the electorate for granted. A majority of the candidates contesting from Delhi, especially the ones who have been parachuted in at the last minute, look like complete misfits.

Twenty years ago, John Mathew Matthan’s Sarfarosh released during the Kargil war and could have easily been a hyper-masculine journey of revenge. Instead, it was a rare Bollywood patriotic film that explored identity and conflict within the borders.

There is plenty to be admired about Gol Maal beyond its tomfoolery. Foremost of which is the creation of Ram, a male protagonist who despite being pressed by the familiar requirements of earning a living, has a touch of sophistication.

On this fateful day 100 years ago, India’s heart, the colour of its blood changed. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre is a stain on the mottled history of the heinous British Raj. So can Theresa May’s almost-apology accomplish anything if Britain continues whitewashing its imperialistic past?

Watching your grandparents age is like processing the end of time, the folding of a document that is now so far back in history that even the possibility of its survival becomes a joke. It is an eventual loss that you can anticipate – but can you ever be prepared for it?

Political manifestos in India have as long a history of contradiction as they have of ineffectiveness when it comes to being decisive in the final vote. In 1996, the Congress party’s secularism pitch was clearly spelt out. Today, the party does not even mention the word Muslim in its manifesto. Similarly, the BJP manifesto makes no mention of the job crisis.

Rather than ask whether the Congress will work on its promises from its newly released manifesto, we should ask whether the manifesto will work for the Congress. The most highlighted issues like sedition, freedom of speech, and net neutrality, are problems that concern a very small part of the electorate.

Economist Jean Dreze was detained yesterday for poll code violation and withheld from talking about the right to food. Meanwhile, biopics on political leaders continue to be publicised. The moral code of conduct is as vague as it is feeble, and what India desperately needs is a stricter set of rules in the near future.

Meena T Pillai’s resignation is only the latest fallout in a series of persistent attacks on India’s academic institutions. A great number of teachers, scholars, and students whose work and livelihood depend on the state’s funds have had their freedoms cut short by an idealistic pursuit of both intelligence and agenda.

Delhi Crime chronicles the three days of a nationwide manhunt for the six men responsible for the 2012 Delhi gang rape. Much of what happens in the series is well-known, but it is still compelling for it doesn’t glamourise either the police’s job or its capability to do so. This is reality, the series seems to say – deal with it.

Gulaal is perhaps Anurag Kashyap’s most unforgiving film and not because it’s dressed in his trademark brashness, but because like life, it is grounded in cynicism. That said, the movie earned its cult status largely due to one man: Piyush Mishra and his doomsday poetry.

Rahul Gandhi has decided that the Congress will go it alone on all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi. But there was much more to gain in an alliance for the party, than there was to lose for AAP. The Congress might think it has bigger fish to fry, like UP, but the importance of a few hands-on-deck in Delhi cannot be undervalued.

A country is often defined by the way it travels, and for India, the Rajdhani has served as the quintessential vehicle. The train, which has turned 50, has earned near-cult status as a wistful compromise between affordability and indulgence.

For a long time, Bollywood has convinced us that the shortcut to a happily-ever-after is marriage. But Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s Made in Heaven intends to tear a hole in the utter romanticisation of this custom. It shows us a side of marriage – an examination of why people choose to be in it – that has rarely been depicted on celluloid.

The World Press Freedom Day is a reminder that the one thing missing in our journalistic values is solidarity. Now, in the era of fake news and manufactured misinformation, the media needs to rally together. We need to stand up for each other’s right to speak.

A burger company that offered discounts after the 2016 surgical strikes did the same after the Balakot air strike. Other businesses followed suit, with gifts and cakes being thrown around. What does commoditising sentiments of pride and nationalistic spirit say about us?

In endorsing the superhero spectacle, Black Panther for “Best Film”, the Academy has responded to today’s age and yet, its crusade to popularise aberrant films is still catalysed by the dominance of the male genius. What else explains the exclusion of female directors from the Best Director race this year?

Like everyone else, I grew up watching films, reading books, and listening to stories that eulogised the “spark”, the firsts of love. “First meeting”, “first eye-contact”, “first kiss” and so on. How often to we give up on relationships because the elusive spark seems to be missing?

In recent days, reports have emerged of Kashmiri students and citizens being targeted around the country, further alienating a people. The Kashmir problem cannot be resolved by disqualifying its people as participants in the process.

An attack like Pulwama will naturally elicit concern and passion, as it should. But even our anger, our hostility has to be carried out by men and women who have families to come back to. Let us always remember that.

Actor-director Amol Palekar was interrupted while delivering a speech critical of the government at the NGMA. Silencing him doesn’t make his statements a lie – only something that the state’s stooges don’t want heard. But why blame the powers-that-be, when spectators like us have no interest in preserving intellectual freedoms?

Given the popularity of vengeful cinema – Simmba, Uri – and the strain of hateful politics bearing down on us, Aamir Khan’s Rubaru Roshni is that rare film that advocates and asserts the novelty of forgiveness.

Former actress Isha Koppikar is BJP’s newest star politician. The party has been publicly courting the entertainment class and has even turned to cinema as electoral bait. The Congress, on the other hand, is either too slow or too callous to ignore the possibilities that this low-hanging fruit offers.

True Detective’s third season roars back to form with Mahershala Ali. A world intoxicatingly on the other side of reality, inconsistent and whimsical, True Detective can, at times, forget what genre it is. Because it’s always busy making up its own.

Priyanka Gandhi ticks many checkboxes. For the liberal, she is an educated, eloquent woman; to the masses, she is a smooth-talking ballerina gliding across the stage of a Bhojpuri play. Her appointment as party general secretary in UP is a sign of the Congress making its final stab at relevance.

Living as a fair-skinned man in India is bit of a head-start, but can lead to some pretty awkward moments. As a child, I was repeatedly cast as the only girl in a play at a boy’s school, and in Hyderabad, a man who wanted to take a picture with me, asked me, “Which country?”

Ravi Shastri said winning the Test series against Australia is bigger than the World Cup win of 1983. To be honest, it isn’t even the best performance by an Indian team Down Under, at least in the modern era. That would be 2003, when the Aussies had a team actually worth beating.

It is a strange and disturbing thought that the very institutions founded to implement and sustain democracy, have recently had to struggle with undemocratic values. The sacking of Alok Verma a day after his reinstatement is further proof that the country’s institutions are risking losing their autonomy and integrity - in some cases, irreparably.

Shashi Tharoor’s seemingly woke sensibilities endear him to India’s millennials like no other politician has in the past. But last week, after two women entered the Sabarimala Temple, he claimed it an unnecessary act of provocation. Perhaps we put Tharoor on the pedestal too soon.

Netflix’s interactive film Bandersnatch is a gimmick, a new toothpaste you must taste before declaring it as unfamiliar. I get what it’s trying to do, but I don’t want to goddamn choose someone’s cereal, or the song they must listen to. I could live with the world being a little less interactive really.

No film in the ’90s had a woman character whose first “no” was accepted – instead her consent was treated as a challenge by the hero. But in a year when #MeToo ruled our cultural consciousness, will that old idea of what a Bollywood hero is supposed to be, change?

Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai, the 2015 docu which just received a Netflix release, is a painfully dense account of how two districts in Uttar Pradesh burned, as the politicians who stoked the fire lived to reap the rewards in the 2014 elections. The film’s incendiary content is only rivalled by its afterlife.

Mahesh Bhatt’s Zakhm completes 20 years today and feels even more relevant because of the rigidity of this country’s communal compass. The film is proof that Bhatt sees conflict like no other director from the industry.

At the Ambani wedding, other than a dance that absurdly spelled Gujju, there was little evidence of the Gujju-ness of it. And this stands true for all our shaadis. From the attire to the music, the great Indian wedding is increasingly flat and indistinct.

There is no doubt that the BJP wishes to engineer a cautiously controlled encore of 1992. Ayodhya 2.0, they wish, will echo the benefits the Sangh and the party enjoyed in the aftermath of the first demolition – a few burnt hands but a lot more face and hardened reputations.

Amazon Prime’s Mirzapur is a frothy mix of hate, aggression, and masochism. The many lynchings of Mirzapur, its acute objectification of women, and violence seems uncomfortably close. It feels oddly like present-day India, rotten yet pure.

Delhi geared up for Diwali like heroes in sci-fi films prepare to enter cities that have been struck by epidemics – with masks, but raring to go into battle. The Capital’s terrible air quality is due to a combination of reasons – but at this point, Dilliwalas, did you really need a cracker ban to stop yourselves from worsening it?

Delhi’s parks have often served as a haven for those marginalised by the city’s many problems – space, pollution, and security. To some, the park is just that stretch of earth that doesn’t smell of burnt rubber. To some, it’s the only place where they can take a deep breath without worrying about the air quality index.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the follow-up campaign to build the Ram Mandir in its place irrevocably rent the country’s secular fabric. As the Ayodhya case goes into an endless loop of deferred hearings, it is time to ask: Is secularism permanently lost for India?

The name change proposed for some places point to a pre-election stunt. But even for an electoral tactic, imagine how yawningly empty the whiteboards in government offices must be.

Minister MJ Akbar and TV actor Alok Nath have filed defamation suits against the women who have accused them of sexual harassment. But defamation is a growling denial of culpability, an act of aggressive sidestepping. Because men will go to any length to protect the myths they have lived by.

Machiavelli wrote, “Politics has nothing to do with morals.” Those waiting on the government to act against Union Minister and former editor MJ Akbar, accused of sexual harassment, look elsewhere. Politics deals with women the same way it deals with its soldiers – relevant only in the time of war and social media.

Over the last year or so we’ve witnessed instances of seemingly progressive, “woke” men, who women should have been able to rely on, being lashed by the very wind they pretended to change the direction of. The latest case in point is that of comedian Utsav Chakraborty, accused of having harassed several women over social media

The Supreme Court’s Aadhaar verdict has maintained that the database’s benefits outweigh its risks. But do they? Data is the new plutonium, a simple target that unlike our land and water, stands at a crossroads of accessibility, where it is both an asset and a threat.

Manto’s stories can broadly be divided into two sections: the ones about Partition, and the ones about Mumbai. The latter are the ones I admire the most, when he wrote about the dingy alleys of the city, where prostitutes, pimps, and decent men met, their dreams and desires in tow and humanity intact.

The murder of Dalit rights activist Kedar Singh Jindan in Himachal’s Sirmaur district, is a sign that the state has callously looked over its casteism for decades. It’s a problem that gets subsumed by a narrative of glittery mountains and wonderment.

One year after the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, it is time to acknowledge that a just country, a just bureaucracy would have no need for human rights activists, rationalists, or non-conforming journalists. It would be its own critic, its own check and balance.

At its heart, Kanti Shah’s Gunda, remains a joyous journey of one man's idea of cinema and his devotion to it. Considering the appetite for excess that we now display in our popular culture, isn't it time Gunda is appreciated for its ingenuity?

Dushyant Kumar’s poetry freed me from the cage of square cubicles and straight lives that the Gulzar School of poetry, dripping with flowery dew and the warmth of unreality, never could. My struggles were personal, and so it turned out was the language of my resistance, learned through his poetry, so irregular and unlike anything you’d have come across.

The 2014 mandate was a landmark, most significantly for the support the BJP received from Dalit and adivasi voters. But after the recent crackdown on human rights activists and Dalit voices, it seems unlikely that the party can turn it into a template ahead of 2019.

There was a phase in Indian cinema when our beefy leading men were both, the poster and the song – the hero and the wit. But the sun is setting on the ripped male form. For a cross section of audiences, the sculpted male body is now an object of ridicule.

We’ll remember Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the leader with a great capacity for reflection. Unlike so many men in positions of power today, Vajpayee admitted to mistakes, fallibility, and even the odd misplaced idea at times. Forget being a moderate – in the times that we occupy, he now feels like a pacifist.

From admitting to beating his wife and his mistresses, to soliciting sex workers, Naipaul eviscerated the notion that male morality should coexist with male genius. And yet, florid tributes to VS Naipaul flow, written by the very people he chastised in his writings.

Not too long ago, the Kanwar Yatra was a peaceful procession of a few thousand Shiva devotees. But now this march has turned into an exhibition of aggressive religiosity, with 20 million participants – easy to be roused to violence.

Our cities have long served as an illustration of wretchedness, of ghostly lives punctuated by the light of modern decadence. They’ve turned into dysfunctional, inhospitable, and in some cases plain unlivable places. Why do we even want more cities? Maybe we should invest in Smart Villages instead.

In switching West Bengal to something as localised as Bangla, the Mamata Banerjee government possibly plans to perpetuate a sense of pride in Bengali culture and heritage. But will the name change also alter the state of its problems?

The Chennai gang rape reiterates that there are predators in your backyard, in my backyard, and in our homes and families. If we cannot accept that, then our humanity is as much at stake as any notion of security the women of this country can hold on to.

English football and its fandom echoes the ethos of Indian cricket. We’re like two step-brothers separated by format, whether it is in taking pride in bashing modest teams or treating matches with neighbour countries as a patriotism test.

WhatsApp groups have replaced secret hideouts or meeting rooms of the past, where pent-up paranoia of different communities is only magnified. None from the mob that lynched five men in Dhule, thought it best to wait for the authorities to intervene. Because to them, there was no separating the WhatsApp messages from reality.

Elevating players like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar to demigod status comes at the cost of the team and greater good. If that doesn’t sound like strongman politics, what does?

The World Cup match between Switzerland and Serbia ended with an important question: Should politics and sport mix? It’s a question we should ask ourselves, on the brink of witnessing another hyper-nationalistic sport film, the Akshay Kumar-starrer, Gold.

For second-generation Indians, football has existed like a good book, only in translation, with Brazil writing the most musical of sentences and poetic of thought all along. For them, Brazil’s preposterously stylised brand of football is the only version of the game worth watching.

This year, the tiny country of Iceland is grabbing headlines for its World Cup debut. And while there’s nothing abhorrent in finding inspiration in Iceland’s rise, it undermines the heroism of teams like Real Kashmir FC, who, despite the modesty of the game in our country, not only dream, but also deliver.

The Delhi Metro’s final stretch connects the city’s two extremities of Noida and Gurgaon. The Metro’s crowning achievement is that it exists at all. It is a reminder that in city where everything and everyone seems to be going the wrong way, the Delhi Metro feels like the only thing going right.

The shooting and murder of Shail Bala Sharma, the Kasauli corporator, has exposed the rotten heart of the mountains. And we – who retreat to the hills every chance we get – are responsible for the corruption hill towns are steeped in. The problem is that our relationship with these pieces of paradise, is all take and no give.

Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, which has just completed 30 years, was a first of many firsts. It gave the nation an anthem whose strains we can still hear today. Anand-Milind’s “Papa Kehte Hain” changed the country’s music for good.

Our cultural zeitgeist is the closest we have come to an epidemic of self-love. From frantically chasing body types in the gymnasium to manufacturing them on Instagram, the self-image is seminal. But we do little for the mind that suffers every day, except perhaps to bypass that question altogether.

Earlier this week, Narendra Modi withdrew an order from the I&B Ministry proposing to cancel the accreditation of journalists who were spreading fake news. But if we are serious about combating fake news, let’s begin with the IT cells of political parties.

Greta Gerwig consistently understates the industry she inhabits, and remains herself, howsoever flawed or naïve. There must be a word that defines this lightness of being. Might we call her Lady Bird?

Pattinson’s live-wire turn as Connie in Good Time – his best showing by some measure – is the most tragic character played on film last year. But does it compare with the two leading contenders for the Best Actor Award at the Oscars?

How can one fit the Gandhian model to the average Indian millennial? Maybe the next time your Uber driver makes the wrong turn, think before you shout at his human fallibility.

How did Rohith Vemula’s death galvanise a movement, strengthen a Dalit voice in the way that so many others could not? What stood out here was that the anger took birth in defeat, in the loss of the promise that a young boy held and the path he walked away from.

Not all masculinity is toxic. But there is a sense of ease between two men, because they agree on one thing – the treatment of women. Overtly, and often, through a brotherhood of silence.

After the Dec 16 gang rape, change arrived, but not necessarily in the place it should have. The definition of rape expanded; punishment for sex crimes became harsher. Yet, this was merely a change of equipment. What needed to change was the substance. Not India’s daughters but India’s sons.

We’ve been taught by science fiction, that the apocalypse is going to be a cinematic spectacle. But it is unlikely to be an event in the pipeline of history. If the Europe heatwave, Indonesia earthquake, and torrential rain in Kerala’s Idukki are any indication, the apocalypse is simply progression.

While CP Surendran’s early work could be seen as the walk away, in his new poems he firmly occupies the inside of the fence, and looks prepared to observe and contemplate.

Why does one go to a Madame Tussauds at all? The cult of celebrity drives many of us in this country, but what convinces us to spend money to indulge in what I can only explain to myself as necrophilia of the eye?

It has been 12 years since Nirmal Verma passed away. The novelist did not write characters. He wrote people: The ones who got left behind, the ones who were forgotten by the magnetic narratives of the city.

Being a footballer in India is an exercise in loss. It comes burdened with aggressive cynicism. And the U-17 World Cup might match up to the spectacle of the IPL, but I wonder what it will do for the sport.

SNS Sastry’s 1967 film, I am 20, featuring ordinary Indians hopeful about India’s Independence, seems to belong to the future and asks the question: Might we at least get back the India we already were at some point?

With the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, Shimla has collectively lost something – its innocence and sense of calm.

Violence, of the kind done to Hafiz Junaid, is our reality now. The normalisation of a warring approach to settle imaginary debts we believe are owed to us by history... this is us.

Why do we fear our female public intellectuals like Arundhati Roy? What causes us to direct personalised hostility and abuse toward them?

Upper-caste millennials grow up cocooned, oblivious to how caste affects those around us, because we never have to confront it. We discount the role it plays in shaping our destinies.

With great hope comes greater disappointment. The Delhi CM’s meteoric rise has been just as speedy as his fall appears to be, if the AAP routing in the MCD elections is any indication.

Over the years, Sonu Nigam, the outspoken celebrity, has effectively overtaken Sonu Nigam, the ethereal singer. Today's "I wish I was from Pakistan" statement is proof that things aren't getting much better.