Author: Sushmita Dahal

Sunil Grover’s show Mad In India premired on February 16 amidst lot of speculation and expectations. After the comedian quit popular TV show Comedy Nights with Kapil over alleged tiff between the two, fans were expecting him to present something novel and entertaining on the new show. Colors had also issued a warning that Gutthi – Sunil’s extremely popular character on Comedy Nights with Kapil – could not be recreated on any other show, necessitating some amount of innovation. However, the show’s first episode failed to make a mark. To begin with, Mad In India is not Sunil Grover’s show, as believed earlier. If anything, it seems like a poorer version of Shekhar Suman’s Movers and Shakers, with Manish Paul trying hard to fit into Suman’s shoes. Moving on to the content on the show, most of the gigs and jokes that Manish Paul, Siddharth Jadhav and Sunil Grover tried were way too lame to entertain. Fans expected Sunil to offer something new on this show, which was touted as his – just as Comedy Nights with Kapil was Kapil Sharma’s show on...

Rhett Miller’s songs are about joy and loneliness, about girls named Doreen and Victoria and Salome, about four-eyed girls and Don DeLillo and J.D. Salinger, about T.Rex and Elliott Smith and Loretta Lynn. He’s the thoughtful literature lover who has written for McSweeney’s and the Atlantic and Salon. He’s the generous musician known to show up and play a fan’s bachelorette party. And he is the most messed-up motherfucker in this town. “Most Messed Up” is the title of the new Old 97′s album, arriving on April 29, and first listen marks it an instant classic. It is an album steeped in pain — pain caused to others, pain drowned in whiskey and pills. Also, bad behavior, bad decisions, betrayals, confusion, frustration, madness, some of which is also fueled by, or smoothed over by, drugs and booze. It’s life on the road, it’s life at home, and none of it is easy. In the lyrics, I count 11 fucks, seven bottles of whiskey, Jameson, malt liquor. Oh, and orange ones, blue ones, green ones, white ones. One intervention. People drink all the way to the bank and then drink again. They get drunk and get it on. They swim in oceans and oceans of alcohol. Yes, it has been an emotionally draining time for Miller — but a liberating one as well, too. Something in the awfulness of the pain...