Between a rock and a hard place.

Since I finally started taking a newspaper at home because I finally ran out of Archie Comics to read on the pot, I am getting news seconds after I wake up. And since I am deprived of the joys of 50 channels of news on TV (Because I haven't bought a TV, yet) this early morning contact with news feels good. And, I did eventually subscribe to the Times of India, because for four bucks you get one hell of a lot of newspaper - it might even be thicker than a regular edition of the New York Times, and the NYT does sell for ten times price (Here, one should refrain from making the quip that the NYT is a hundred times better than the ToI, so actually the ToI should cost only 40p). Anyway, back to the point. While I like DNA and even once in a while read HT, I do find Mumbai Mirror to be the best new newspaper to have been launched. Why? Because its is so completely vapid and it makes no bones about it. And heck, I love the Subhash K Jha columns on Mondays, yesterday's one had something about how Aishwariya Rai was singing Happy Birthday to him from Slovakia. But, today, the Mirror carried something really interesting. An interview with Shashi Tharoor (this link won't work beyond a day because of the awful way the Mirror archives its site, go to the archives of 8th November 2005 and search for the piece). Now Mr Tharoor is an UN Under-Secretary General and has attempted to write several novels (I say attempts because, they are exactly that). Now Tharoor, unlike many of his other influential batchmates from the St Stephen's Class of 1975 is a Congress apologist and he has hardly vieled his intention to join that den of corruption (of course, that depends if his ambition to become Secretary General get squashed). So when his potential future employer and his current employer have a spat over a man who believes the Berlin Wall was a good thing, it makes for interesting reading.
By the way, I finally worked out why the Lefties supported Natwar. Its because that man also had Dinosaur-era opinions of global politics. And talking about our commies, the ToI had an interesting piece today about how the party leaders had a tough time controlling the crowd protesting at the Indo-US air exercises in Bengal. Because the crowd seemed to be more interested in watching the F-16's and the E-3 AWACS rather than listening to doddery old Bengali men. And Indiatimes in all their glory doesn't have a link to the story as yet.