Mixed Shots

Last Drink Before 10

Sitting round late at night drinking was, er, considered high-spirited performance in the British Parliament. But politicians will have to curb their imbibement. Bars and restaurants in the UK have been ordered to shut at 10 pm as part of anti-coronavirus measures, but catering facilities in Parliament were exempt under a loophole that allows workplace canteens to keep longer hours. After a backlash, a parliamentary spokesman clarified that no alcohol “will be sold after 10 pm anywhere on the parliamentary estate”. How would Churchill have reacted? “I’ve gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

The Wife-Beater Cop

Madhya Pradesh DGP (prosecution) ­Purushottam Sharma is a wife-beater, says his son, Parth, who is a deputy commissioner in the income tax department. Parth sent a video showing his father assaulting his mother to the state home minister and several senior bureaucrats, and requested a complaint against his father. As the video went viral, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan relieved the senior IPS officer of his duties. The unconfirmed buzz is that his wife of 32 years caught him at another woman’s house. Sharma is ­unrepentant, though. He says his wife enjoyed all comforts, including foreign trips, on his money. So, she must save the family’s reputation.

The Peshawari Havelis

Raj Kapoor’s ancestral home, Kapoor Haveli, in the fabled Qissa Khwani Bazar of Peshawar city was built between 1918 and 1922 by his ­grandfather. That’s where Raj Kapoor was born. Actor Dilip Kumar has his roots there too—his century-old family home is nearby. Pakistan had ­declared both as national heritage properties—among the 1,800 historical structures that are over 300 years old in Peshawar. But like most things in Pakistan, the Bollywood actors’ houses are in a shambles. There’s hope: the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government has decided to buy these houses and save them from land sharks, and for posterity.

She Got New Hands

Monika More lost her balance while boarding a suburban train or ‘Mumbai local’ at Ghatkopar railway station in 2014. She was dragged onto the tracks and the wheels severed both her hands. All these years, her father had a dream—a limb transplant for his daughter. She got new limbs at a private hospital this August and was discharged a month later after intensive therapy, including suppressing her immune system to let her body accept the transplanted organ from a brain dead man, whose hands were airlifted from Chennai to Mumbai. Any regrets? Yes, her father died before the transplant.

The Sore Loser

The prolonged Covid-induced lockdown has brought families together—and broke some in strange ways. Like the case of a 24-year-old woman in Bhopal who has filed a suit against her father after repeatedly losing in Ludo against him. A family court counsellor says the woman told her she lost respect for him and even hesitates to call him father after the board game defeat. She expected her father to lose at least a game to make her happy, but he didn’t. Well, such psychological distress is not uncommon and psychiatrist Richard Gardner coined a term for it in 1985—paren­tal alienation syndrome, which includes showing extreme but unwarranted hostility towards a parent.

Brevis

Illustrations: Saahil, Text curated by Alka Gupta