MOBILE gaming or broadly video gaming has caught India like fire. It has become a common sight to find people fiddling with their mobiles in any public place. Even in interactions within a family or closely-knit friends, ‘phubbing’ (the act of ignoring someone you are with, and giving attention to your mobile phone instead) has become common. The spread of internet availability also is making us give more importance to our mobiles than to other forms of social interactions. One of the major pass-times for the young is to play various games on mobiles.

IT is both apt and reductive that two images dominate others as Girish Karnad is remembered on social media: one, with Gauri Lankesh, protesting the killing of Karnad’s fellow Dharwadian Prof M S Kalburgi; the other, wearing the MeTooUrbanNaxal placard, at the memorial to mark the first anniversary of Gauri Lankesh’s own killing. Over the past few years, Karnad was seen as one of the most consistent, fearless and principled defenders of freedom of speech, cultural diversity and democracy.

KRISHNA Sobti (93), eminent Hindi fiction writer, passed away on January 25, at a hospital in New Delhi. She was ill for a long time but she was mentally active and creative.

IT was on January 1, 1989, that the Delhi-based theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam) was performing its play HallaBol just outside Delhi, in Jhandapur, Site IV Industrial Area, Ghaziabad. The play was attacked by local goons with the patronage of the Congress party. In this brutal attack, in broad daylight, Safdar Hashmi, the convernor of Janam, and Ram Bahadur, a young migrant worker from Nepal, were killed. While Ram Bahadur died on the spot; Safdar Hashmi died in hospital the following day, January 2.

IT is unusual for this paper to discuss a movie. But Kaala is an unusual movie. Of course all movies end with the hero defeating the villain or the ‘victory of the good over evil’. In that sense, Kaala is also a usual movie. It is the timing, the issues that are discussed and the political symbolism that layer the movie, which makes it unusual. Discussing the technical details, the treatment of the plot or the performances of the actors, is not the intent here. The intent is to dwell on the politics of the issues and the symbolism employed in the movie.