The award-winning filmmaker, Neeraj Ghaywan, quit a cushy corporate life and charted his own course at 30. The result is sensitive films like Masaan, that drew accolades at home and abroad, and the second season of Sacred Games.

The “Asli Hip Hop” hook from the Gully Boy that you’ve been tapping your foot to? It was created by Nitin Mishra, aka Spitfire, whose signature verses have set the Ranveer Singh-starrer aflame. Exactly how did a young rapper from small-town Madhya Pradesh make his mark on Bollywood?

I voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2019. I backed GST and supported the abrogation of Article 370. But I am no bhakt. I am a BJP voter who is opposed to the CAA.

Chandrashekhar Azad’s now viral photograph, holding the Constitution on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, screams resistance and unity. His Bhim Army prides itself on the Constitution, a document that is secular and impartial to any one religion, caste, or sect. No wonder the increasingly distressed Indian Muslims now see an ally and perhaps even a leader in Azad.

For five years I was suffocated in a relationship of co-dependence. We were always together. But I was never present. It took me a while, but this year, I realised that I cared about my erstwhile partner a lot, but when I was with him, I had forgotten how to love myself.

When women are in the street, the State better sit up and listen. So when a JNU student leader refuses to back down despite being beaten up, and when grandmothers and mothers in Shaheen Bagh gaze into the camera and demand answers of the PM, there is only so long he can hide behind silence and platitudes.

Deshbhakti is all the fierce hijabi and burkha-clad women who refuse to be sidelined or othered. Deshbhakti is the college students picking trash off of the roads where they protested, mere hours after the police opened fire and lathi-charged.

Even if JNU was a stunt, the simple act of bringing one’s star power to a social battlefield can go a long way. The influence of Bollywood on India’s people cannot be undermined. And if Deepika Padukone has urged even a handful fans to sit up and take notice, to question the government, it is worth the fight.

I have noticed a curious trait about Indians living abroad – the sight of a fellow countrymen annoys them. It’s like what one Punjabi woman sincerely told me in England, “I didn’t escape to a foreign country only to be surrounded by more Indians.”

On Hrithik Roshan’s 46th birthday, his old friend Jadoo is throwing him a surprise bash. We managed to get an invite for the party and it’s both heartwarming and ludicrous.

Why do we women squeeze ourselves into undergarments that behave like torture devices accessorised with elastic, bows, and ribbons that are meant to irritate the skin at inopportune moments? I’ve realised you aren’t truly emancipated until the day you find yourself committed to the cause of comfortable drawers.

The silver lining to the dark cloud of the anti-CAA protests is that the Act went from being something that people had heard about but not fully understood, to the subject of a mass movement. Now, there is a sense that this idea is not fringe anymore. There’s a feeling that it could get better.

As Malti, an acid attack survivor, Deepika Padukone delivers a moving, invested performance in the uneven Chhapaak, without indulging in self-pity. It is to her credit that despite the prosthetics, her performance feels neither artificial nor gimmicky.

The thought of watching another Jedi vs Sith battle while protests raged across the country was enough to cause a little guilt. But at the demonstration against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan, I realised that even here, there were people resisting the Dark Side of the Force.

Remember the excitement as we entered the 2000s and the 2010s? The internet and fruits of liberalisation sweetened the former, as did a strong economy and smartphones for the latter. But this time it seems different — global expectations from the decade we’ve just entered seem to oscillate between tempered realism and outright dread.

The protests at JNU and Jamia reinforce one crucial thing – students are the government’s greatest opposition. They’ve been facing the threat of violence head-on with nothing more than copies of the Constitution, slogans, poetry, and a kind of patriotism that makes the world sit up and take notice.

We should have guessed it when she attempted to tarnish a beloved Rajput queen’s entirely fictitious reputation by showing off her perfectly toned abs in Padmaavat, or when she didn’t appear in a selfie with the PM. But now that she has turned up at JNU without a mask, it’s official: Deepika Padukone is an anti-national.

“The wounds smell of dead rats, and when doctors clean them, you feel the scrub down to the bones.” As if an acid attack weren’t cruel enough, victims, not perpetrators, are thoughtlessly shunned.

A youngster traverses the distance from a shady “massage parlour” in Siliguri to a plush New Delhi spa.

At the Kumbh Mela, I was caught unaware by a daunting display of dicks only to realise that here, the penis is neither a fetish nor a symbol of sexual prowess. In the world of the spiritually striving, it’s a repository of sacred power and ascetic control.

In August 2007, I scored an interview with Dawood Ibrahim’s sister Haseena Parkar. It ended with D-Company goons chasing me down the streets of Mumbai, baying for my blood.

Nothing endures at -55°C except the commitment to your nation and your men. Sachin Bali, a decorated former officer, recounts a rescue mission at the highest battlefield on earth.

No one knew it then, but a press conference would irreversibly turn the way the Noida double murders would be regarded.

Fleabag has emerged as the literal last word in feminine black comedy – more universal than the self-indulgent whiners in Girls and more visceral than the witticisms of Broad City. Perhaps, it’s because Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show has both the sharpness and the courage to identify problems with millennial feminism as we know it.

In the age of hyperlinks and 24X7 news, there is no way to arrest a snowballing rumour. The Talwars learnt this when they became the monsters in their own nightmare.

The soundtrack to Trial By Error, composed by Madhav Shorey and Vipul Angrish, brings us closer to the horror of what happened to Aarushi & Hemraj and how the system failed them.

In our increasingly cosmopolitan cities, where archaic psyches cohabit with urban mindsets, we urgently need a police force that understands the world the Talwars once occupied.