Unquiet heights

Bungled take-off: After a botched plan to restart air travel resulted in about half the flights getting cancelled at the last minute on May 25, online trolls tore into Union Civil Aviation and Urban Development Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. They even compared him to a certain leader who also loves making sudden announcements. Puri, however, has nonchalantly moved on to his next project—restarting the Delhi metro. Thankfully though, the metro has been ready with protocols in place for weeks now, and is just waiting for the green signal | Illustrations by Jairaj T.G.

Reaching out: Days after he met a group of migrant workers in Delhi, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi hit the streets once again. On the morning of Eid, May 24, Gandhi met with a taxi driver at a roadside stall in Delhi, and discussed the problems drivers had faced during the lockdown. The Gandhi scion has been in outreach mode throughout the pandemic.

Breaking coconuts, and rules: At an official event on the outskirts of Hyderabad, social distancing gave way to social fighting. As Telangana Rashtra Samithi MLA M. Kishan Reddy arrived for a ground-breaking ceremony with his followers, K. Sukanya, a mandal praja parishad president and BJP member, asked why she had not been invited. Reddy ignored her and tried to break the ceremonial coconut, but Sukanya intervened. Soon, a scuffle broke out between their supporters and Sukanya fell down in the melee. She later complained that Reddy had hit her hand with the coconut and had called her by her caste name. The police has registered a case against Reddy. Interestingly, all this happened during the lockdown, and at a time when Greater Hyderabad accounts for a large part of the total Covid-19 cases in the state.

Tale for the times: Dusting off a decade-old story, J.K. Rowling is publishing a book for “children in lockdown”. The Ickabog was planned to be published soon after the last Harry Potter book, but then she decided to “step away from children’s books for a while”. Besides, she saw it as a story that belonged to her two children—she had read it aloud to them when they were little. But now, Rowling is publishing the book online in free instalments. The first two chapters are already up on theickabog.com, and the rest will keep coming till July 10 | Reuters

Unconventionally funny: Almost two years after Nanette, which won the Emmy and Peabody, Australian standup artiste Hannah Gadsby is back with another Netflix special, Douglas (named after her dog). Breaking the conventions of comedy as she did with Nanette, Gadsby in Douglas talks of patriarchy, her recent diagnosis of autism and a dog park story, and takes on her critics who dismissed Nanette as “not comedy”. Gadsby, if anything, is more self-assured and funnier this time | Getty Images

Croon, groom: This Eid, Salman Khan released ‘Bhai Bhai’, his third song during lockdown. Like the first two songs, the latest one, too, was sung by him and shot at his farmhouse in Navi Mumbai. A day earlier, Khan had launched his grooming and personal care brand, FRSH. Under the brand, he had planned to launch a deodorant first. Instead, he came out with a sanitiser, keeping “the need of the hour” in mind.

Penning glory: In the last six months, lyricist, writer and former video game artist Neeraj Pandey has done quite a bit in independent cinema, including Prashant Nair’s Tryst with Destiny, which won the award for ‘Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature Film’ at Tribeca Film Festival 2020. He was the lyricist for Hardik Mehta’s widely praised Har Kisse ke Hisse: Kaamyaab, starring Sanjay Mishra. Pandey’s next work as a lyricist is for a family drama called Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi, the filmmaking debut of actor Seema Pahwa.