Lounge Loves: ‘Cover to Cover’, Nara Thai and more

Wicked and Witty

When days get too hectic or mundane, the social media account by screenwriter-cinematographer Bahaish Kapoor is my refuge. Kapoor turns scenes from classic films on their heads to have actors like Ashok Kumar, Raj Kapoor, and Meena Kumari engage in some wickedly witty repartee. I have so many favourites—Jeetendra in a disco pose saying: “You think you are introverted? Wait till you never meet me.” Or this serious scene from Anand that has taken on a completely different tone, with Rajesh Khanna wanting his gravestone to read, “Mistakes were made” and Lalita Pawar replying with a straight face, “Isn’t that already on your birth certificate?”

—Avantika Bhuyan

Time Capsule

I stumbled upon a coffee-table book called Cover to Cover in a Tokyo hotel lobby recently. It features 700 covers, jackets and layouts from books and magazines published in countries like Japan, the US, UK, France, Spain, and the Netherlands from 1988-90. Due to dim lighting in the hotel at the time, I couldn’t get good pictures of the inside pages, but gathered from the colophon that its editors spent three months in 1990 physically working through bookstore shelves every morning to collate these covers. I kept thinking about the coincidence of finding a book that begins with my birth year on my birthday trip. And what would an exercise like this look like now, in India, across themes? I’d like to imagine someone is doing it already, for someone else’s cosmic birthday find 38 years from now. A time capsule to reaffirm that print will always matter. —Shephali Bhatt

Monsoon Menu

Monsoon means spicy noodles weather. I have been craving good noodles for a few days; not the Indian-Chinese variety, but something flavourful and filling that isn’t doused in soy sauce. My mild intolerance to gluten has added another challenge to finding the perfect bowl. After sampling my fair share of insipid buckwheat soba and glass noodles, I Swiggy-ed a portion of Thai basil chicken noodles from Nara Thai. It was made with rice and I hoped it would hit that particular monsoon craving of comfort, spice and everything nice (IYKYK). It held up to its promise. It was fragrant with basil, the chicken pieces were succulent and it had the right amount of spice that doesn’t numb the tongue. —Jahnabee Borah

Ideas That Kill

When it comes to reading fiction, I gravitate towards horror. Having read countless novels, short stories and anthologies in the genre over the past decade, I can safely say that the hardest kind of horror to get right is cosmic horror. One modern novel that does it exceptionally well is There is no Antimemetics Division, written by a British computer programmer and author who goes by the pen name “qntm”. It is about a secret global government body which is tasked with capturing or nullifying monsters and extradimensional entities that pose a threat to the world. The most dangerous of these are the “Antimemetics”, beings that don’t want to be perceived as they infect people and often entire worlds with destructive ideas and concepts. It’s one of those books that you just can’t put down till you’ve finished. —Bibek Bhattacharya