Taimur sticks his tongue out at camera, Kareena Kapoor heads to the gym. See pics
Kareena Kapoor Khan’s glamour, Stree’s screening, airport spottings and lot more from planet Bollywood.
Updated: Aug 31, 2018 19:15:32
By HT Correspondent
Kareena Kapoor Khan on her way to her gym. (Viral Bhayani)
When it comes to glamour, there no dearth of it in planet Bollywood and flag bearers of this trend are our eternal beauties, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Malaika Arora. The two stunners were out as usual on their gym routine but their choice of clothes and the overall attitude had all of us asking for more.
However, when it comes to attracting attention, there is one other person who wins hands down and that’s Taimur Ali Khan. Kareena’s little boy was spotted walking along like a boss. One look at his priceless expressions and one would know that this boy enjoys all the attention he gets. In a recent picture, Taimur was dressed in a white T-shirt and yellow long shorts and is showing his tongue to the camera. He also has a faint smile on his face.
Looks like Stree is getting a big thumbs up from the fraternity. The film’s screening in Mumbai saw a number of film personalities including Yami Gautam, Vicky Kaushal, Taapsee Pannu, Kabir Khan and his wife Mini Mathur, Gurmeet Choudhary and his wife Debina Bonnerjee in attendance.
Katrina Kaif was spotted at the airport; however this time it was a bit different as her mother Suzanne Turquotte too was there. Seen at the airport too was Zarine Khan while Jacqueline Fernandez was seen about town.
When Cheteshwar Pujara was scratching around for form during his early-season stint with Yorkshire, amassing 172 runs at 14.33 in six County Championship outings, it might as well have been a down-payment for today's moment of fufillment at the Ageas Bowl.
In batting for five minutes shy of six hours to make his first Test century in England, and only his second outside of Asia in a 61-Test career, Pujara first laid the foundations, then shored up the super-structure in partnership with an unexpectedly doughty tail, to secure a priceless lead of 27 with a superb unbeaten 132.
It was the innings of a true Test-match No.3 - a player with enough faith in his own game to let the match come to him, and block out all competing emotions; elation as he and Virat Kohli eased into a 92-run stand for the third wicket that, at 142 for 2, had looked set to secure a hefty first-innings advantage, and despair, as Moeen Ali reprised his feat on this very ground in 2014, with a brisk five-wicket haul that rattled through the lower middle-order either side of tea.
By the close, England had inched their way to 6 for 0 in four taxing overs, with Keaton Jennings escaping his pair with a nudge for four off the hip against Jasprit Bumrah. But, as Pujara's efforts had amply demonstrated on a pitch that retains good carry for the quicks and is showing increasing purchase for the spinners, application of the sort that England's batsmen had so manifestly lacked first-time around will be required over the weekend if they are to turn a battling day's work into an opportunity to arrest their alarming mid-series slump.
In terms of sheer skill, England's bowlers paled compared to India's peerless display of swing and seam on the first day. But they lacked little in application from first ball to last. Stuart Broad bashed his way through the openers in a deck-hitting morning spell, before Sam Curran and latterly Ben Stokes - brought into the attack after even Jennings amid concerns about his knee injury - found sharp bend through the air to dislodge, respectively, Kohli for a fluent 46, then Ajinkya Rahane for 11. Rahane never got going before Stokes nailed him on the knee-roll - a plumb lbw that came excruciatingly close to being denied by the most marginal front-foot call imaginable.
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It's about believing one bad winter doesn't make you a bad player - Moeen
James Anderson, however, found none of the magic that Bumrah in particular had produced for India, and for much of the day his lack of penetration appeared symptomatic of an England side who had relinquished the right to dictate terms with their flaccid first-innings batting. And yet, he gave nothing away as usual, not least against the strokeless Rishabh Pant, whose 29-ball duck was India's joint-third-slowest in Test history, and marked the moment at which the innings began to tilt back in England's favour.
It was Moeen who ended Pant's miserable stay, pinning him on the pad as he returned to the attack in the final over before tea, and extracting a leg-stump lbw from umpire Oxenford. Twenty minutes, and six deliveries later, Moeen struck again as Hardik Pandya was beaten in flight as he clipped airily to short midwicket for 4, and all of a sudden Moeen had four for eight in 16 balls when Ashwin - dragging a reverse-sweep onto his timbers - and Mohammad Shami - pinged through the gate first ball - fell to consecutive deliveries.
But throughout it all, Pujara simply leant on his bat at the non-striker's end and trusted himself to steady the innings in his own good time. He had brought up his first fifty in 98 balls, taking 36 deliveries to drill his first boundary through the covers off Curran when Kohli, at the other end, had needed just two to do likewise against Broad, and he promptly marked the achievement by wearing a fierce bouncer from Stokes on the forehead.
Anderson too, rattled Pujara's lid on 78 - moments after the fall of India's eighth wicket - but he continued undaunted, changing his tone subtly to shield the No.10 Ishant Sharma from pace and spin alike, while stepping out of his crease to dump Moeen for a brace of boundaries through backward point and cow corner. England opted for a twin-spin response, with Rashid returning to the fray after twice dismissing Ishant in the opening Test at Edgbaston. This time, however, his long levers proved sufficient to eke out a vital 14 from 27 balls, which was finally ended as Moeen tweaked one into his inside-edge for Alastair Cook at short leg to swallow a looping chance.
At 227 for 9, England were back on course for a slender lead. But Bumrah, uncomfortable against the quicks at Trent Bridge, seemed emboldened by the challenge of guiding his senior partner to a priceless century and beyond. Pujara's moment finally arrived from his 210th delivery, an uncharacteristic but utterly effective wipe into no-man's land at long-on off Moeen, and as the India balcony rose in acclaim, he set himself to restore the advantage that ought to have been pre-ordained given the discipline he had put into his stay.
India's 46-run stand for the tenth wicket would prove to be second only to the Kohli-Pujara alliance, and like all the best tail-end partnerships, it sucked the wind clean out of England's sails. Pujara combined a judicious management of the strike with a determined pillaging of runs where the opportunity arose, the best of which were a brace of cleanly flogged fours off Stuart Broad through the covers and long-on.
Broad, however, eventually ended the fun with his third scalp of the innings, as Bumrah fenced a lifter to Cook at first slip for 6, but the backslaps that greeted Pujara as he crossed the boundary rope told a tale. India believe they are right back in this series, and though they face the prospect of batting last on a pitch that won't get any easier for batting, particularly if England's twin spinners find increasing assistance as the weekend wears on, they also have in their ranks a player who has mastered the conditions like no-one else on either side
In all of India's economic history, it's hard to find anything quite as indefensible as demonetisation. In fact, its irrationality is world-beating - Narendra Modi promised to put us on the world map, and he has - just not the way we expected. Even bad economic policies, most of the time, "succeed" in some way or the other - they may achieve some of their aims, even if at a very high cost. It's truly rare to come across a policy that fails on every possible yardstick, including those imaginatively invented well after the decision was taken.
But demonetisation seems to have achieved this near-impossible feat. Of course it didn't wipe out black money. We know that now the RBI has confirmed that 99.3 per cent of the demonetised cash was returned. No giant windfall gains accrued to the government thanks to people refusing to return cash. Gautam Adani or Anil Ambani did not have to stand in ATM lines to withdraw spending money. The growth of digital payments has not seen a structural, sustainable increase. People are still throwing stones in Kashmir. And morally, I doubt that we are a significantly more honest nation now than we were on November 8, 2016.
It's true that Arun Jaitley and others repeatedly stress that direct tax revenue has increased sharply - but they compare this to the NDA's poor performance in the two years prior to demonetisation. Go back a little further, to 2013-14 or 2010-11, and the growth in direct taxes over the past two years doesn't seem unusual at all. In fact, as NIPFP's Rathin Roy, a member of the PM's Economic Advisory Council, has put it, "the growth and buoyancy of direct tax revenue in the 2014-17 period is lower than in any sub-period this millennium." This is just another example of the government choosing its base years cleverly in order to claim incredible success.
On November 8, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the demonetisation of high-value currency notes (File photo)
It may be natural, now, and look back at all those pathetic attempts to rationalise or defend an obviously irrational step with contempt. But spare some pity for all the columnists, economists, CAs and assorted experts who were convinced that, after all, any decision must have some positive fallout if they could just find it. How were they to know that this was that one special policy which would actually have nothing good about it at all? Let me confess that I was among them: while thinking that demonetisation was an awful step, I thought it would at least get people to put more of their money in banks. But, as the RBI also confirmed this week, Indian households are holding more of their savings in cash and not less. In fact, they haven't held this high a proportion of cash for six or seven years. So, yes, I was wrong. I assumed that taking people's cash away meant they would not want to hold so much cash again. But in retrospect, it seems obvious that in fact it is now banks that people will not trust, and not cash. I guess that's what happens when you tell them that they don't have access to their own accounts any more unless they stand in lines longer than first-day-first-show at a Salman Khan movie.
The one argument left for defenders of demonetisation to trot out - since it depends entirely on things that haven't happened yet and may never happen - is that now we know which accounts cash was deposited in, and we will be able therefore to track down people with giant hauls of unaccounted cash. First of all, this is unlikely to work. Think about it - people clever enough to come up with a system to change all their cash under those circumstances are mostly going to be clever enough to not do it under their own names. And secondly, even the attempt to chase up the cash will have a dangerous effect on the economy.
Seriously, the only defence of demonetisation left for the BJP's WhatsApp economists is that it opens up the potential for a raid raj. This is such clever economic policy-making that not even Indira Gandhi came up with it, and I thought she had found every way possible to harass taxpayers and reduce growth.
Congress party workers protesting against demonetisation on the first anniversary of its announcement
So, where's the accountability for the worst economic policy decision of all time? The Governor of the Reserve Bank who signed off on demonetisation - although management of the currency is the RBI's domain - has redeemed himself by clearly revealing the size of the demonetisation disaster. The Finance Minister - who may not even have been in on the planning of the measure - is reduced to writing angry blog posts defending demonetisation. And the government just appointed S Gurumurthy, one of the intellectual giants behind this brilliant plan, to the board of the Reserve Bank of India - so no accountability there either. As for the Prime Minister himself, whom all of us heard saying we should hang him or set him on fire or something if he was proved wrong about demonetisation - well, it joins the long list of things - being tough on China, 'Make in India', the Ganga clean-up, bringing back black money from abroad, and so on - that the Prime Minister never seems to talk about any more.
So, I ask again, where should we look for accountability? Whom can we blame this extraordinary disruption, this bizarre decision, on? I know - perhaps we should wait a few years. And then we can blame it on Nehru.
(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)
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