Lounge Loves: Reading newspapers, László Krasznahorkai's speech and more

Cheering the Underdog

There were a lot of comparisons made between the nail-biting 2021 Formula One finale and this year’s, but honestly, 2025’s final race was a bit of an anti-climax. Abu Dhabi 2021 will go down in history for that puzzling finish that probably robbed Lewis Hamilton of a record-breaking title, but going into this year’s race, McLaren’s Lando Norris seemed confident he had it in the hat. What I was waiting to see was if his teammate Oscar Piastri would somehow be able to win (if both his rivals crashed out perhaps), but no such luck. It would’ve been Max Verstappen’s fifth championship title, and he raced to win, like he always does. He lost by two points. Next year will be interesting, with the new car designs and DRS being scrapped. I’ll be betting on the cool Aussie underdog Piastri.

— Dakshayani Kumaramangalam

Back to Newspapers

I have been taking a lot of red eyes lately. I never liked them, but since I managed to skip the recent Indigo kerfuffle, I could notice and appreciate a more regular morning sight at airports and inside planes: of people reading the day’s newspaper. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in print journalism all my adult life, but lately that image brings me unusual joy. A few months ago, I reverted to getting physical newspapers at home after a few years of navigating epapers since the start of the pandemic. I didn’t realise how much I had missed the stillness that the act of unhurried reading of a broadsheet brings along. So now when I watch others reading the papers in transit, it feels relatable, like witnessing my own habit from the outside.

—Shephali Bhatt

A Gorgeous Setting for Horror

I think I watched most of the second half of the Malayalam horror film Diés Iraé through my fingers. But watching this Pranav Mohanlal-starrer on the big screen had one big plus: I got to see the Glass Haus, the sprawling mansion where a lot of the scenes were filmed, in its full-blown magnificence. Can a well-lit house with every inch of it done up with superlative taste be a setting for a supernatural film? In the capable hands of a director like Rahul Sadasivan, it absolutely can. I am rewatching the film on JioHotstar and while the jumpscares still send a chill, I find myself automatically drawn to the interiors of this house—a white wall done up with an abstract mural is a favourite.

—Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran

Literary Prophecies

Listening to László Krasznahorkai deliver his Nobel Prize speech this week, I thought of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” soliloquy. Like Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, the Hungarian writer grappled with existential questions of hope and despair, resilience and rebellion, humankind’s great potential that has not always been put to good. Krasznahorkai spoke like an incantation, delivering a sermon about the end of dignity, the maladies that affect the world, and ending with a story about a clochard in Berlin pursued by a policeman. Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, too, had dispensed with convention in his 2003 speech, choosing to narrate a tale of Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday instead. But Krasznahorkai took his delivery to a level of “apocalyptic sublime”, like a literary prophet of our troubled times.

—Somak Ghoshal