Move over match scores—Sonal Chauhan is stealing the show this IPL season, and not from a film set but straight from the Wankhede Stadium stands! The Jannat actress, known for her charm and elegance, has unexpectedly become the internet’s new favorite cricket fan.
Stadium to Spotlight
Sonal, 37, has been spotted cheering for her favorite team, Mumbai Indians, during their recent games, and her vibrant presence hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, her appearances at the stadium have created a mini internet frenzy, with fans flooding social media with memes, reels, and screenshots of her on the big screen. The best part? She had no idea it was happening until her phone started blowing up!Reacting to all the unexpected buzz, Sonal shared with Hindustan Times that she was genuinely taken by surprise. She had just gone to the stadium to enjoy the match like any other fan and had no clue the cameras had picked her up—until her phone started buzzing with screenshots and memes from friends. The social media attention, she admitted, has been a happy surprise.
Cricket + Glamour = Viral Moment
Turns out, Sonal is a die-hard MI fan and couldn’t have picked a better time to show up. She got to witness Rohit Sharma’s epic comeback live and couldn’t stop praising his effortless game and synergy with teammate Suryakumar Yadav. Their magic on the field had her—and clearly half the internet—hooked.
Not Just a Pretty Frame
While some online chatter hinted at the “male gaze” often discussed during IPL broadcasts, Sonal kept it cool. She brushed aside the objectification angle and pointed out how cameras simply capture what naturally grabs viewers’ attention. After all, who hasn’t seen that viral reel of a guy joking about not getting enough screen time?
Fans Still Manifesting a ‘Jannat’ Sequel
Even as she goes viral for her cricket enthusiasm, fans haven’t forgotten Sonal’s unforgettable on-screen chemistry with Emraan Hashmi in Jannat (2008). The demand for a sequel hasn’t fizzled, and she continues to get messages from fans hoping to see the duo reunite on screen.
From the silver screen to stadium stardom, Sonal Chauhan is proving that sometimes, you don’t need a blockbuster to go viral—just a love for the game, a genuine smile, and a bit of unexpected screen time!

A few months after my little boy turned three, we went to stay with Phuphee for a few weeks. He loved playing in her garden and we would go on all sorts of adventures in the apple orchard that sprawled behind the house. It was a wonderful time, or so it seemed until he would have a tantrum.

It would start with something insignificant like him dropping a ball, and from there on it would snowball into hours of crying and screaming. What frustrated me most about the situation was that no matter what I tried, nothing would help or soothe him. Sometimes after hours of trying to distract him, I would begin to get frustrated with myself and end up scolding him. At times, it worked, and while I was grateful that it did, something about the way it ended didn’t feel right. But, I knew of no other way to console him and dealing with that failure on my part was probably harder than dealing with his emotions.

We had been at Phuphee’s for about a week and a half, when one morning a young woman with a child around the same age as my little one walked in. We were having breakfast. Phuphee had made malai tchot (malai roti), which my little boy loved. She asked the woman to sit down and join us, and then asked what she could do for her.

‘Yemis maeynyis bachas haz chu jinn tchaamut, shaayad ches nazar. Amyis deetav taeveez, ye gatchihaa theek [this little boy of mine has been possessed by a jinn, or maybe someone has given him the evil eye. Please give him a taveez so he can get better],’ she said.

Phuphee asked what exactly the matter was. The woman explained that he never listened, got angry about the smallest of things, and generally behaved like a rogue dictator. Phuphee smiled at her and asked her to come into the orchard, where I could see her talking to the woman and picking apples at the same time. After about half an hour or so, the mother and son duo left with a dozen red apples.

When Phuphee returned, I asked her what taveez (spiritual prescription) she had given them because I felt that I could probably do with one, too.

‘I told her to try making malai without boiling the milk,’ Phuphee replied.

I looked at her, confused. My little one was sitting in the corner playing with the dishes and pretending to make breakfast. Phuphee sat with her box of cigarettes, playing with them, taking them out, but not lighting them.

‘You still haven’t figured it out, have you?’ she asked.

‘The greatest responsibility you will perhaps have as a parent is to hold space for the difficult emotions your child will have. It is easy to accept your child when they are happy or even sad, but what brings real discomfort to a parent is when their child shows anger and frustration. Do you understand what I am saying?’

I thought about it and wondered if my son’s anger made me uncomfortable, and she was right. I had navigated a range of emotions with him, but it was always his anger and frustration that defeated me. And no matter what I tried, I didn’t know how to deal with it.

‘Myoan gaash [light of my eyes], anger is not the same as disrespect, remember that. Anger is simply anger. Frustration is simply frustration. You cannot stop your children from having either, but you can teach them how to deal with them.’

I sat there looking at Phuphee, and my son, and thinking about how she had dealt with my anger when I was little. I remembered her dropping down to her knees to look me in the eyes, whispering, when I too was shouting like a rogue dictator. At the time, I hadn’t understood what she was trying to do, but I knew my anger had dissipated. It was only now, sitting with her here, that I understood that she never tried to distract me from my anger. On the contrary, she let me feel it, but then helped me work my way out of it.

‘You know when I had my first child and she got to the stage of throwing tantrums I too felt frustrated. I tried disciplining her in all the usual ways, but all it did was make her afraid of me. I knew that there had to be a different way. I went back to Mitrigam [her maternal village] and spoke to Aapa. She said, ‘Taahira, in exactly the moments you want to yell is when you should lower your voice. You are the shore against whom the waves of all their emotions must break sometimes, so that they may know the strength of their own emotions and ultimately learn how to tame them. The gentler you are with them now, the gentler they will be with themselves and the world tomorrow.’

I sat there trying to gather everything she had just said and what Aapa had said to her. When we returned home, I put Phuphee’s advice into practice and often imagined myself as a never ending coastal shore and my son’s tantrums as waves breaking against me. There are still times when I fail but those are far and few in between, and as I have learned to navigate his difficult emotions, it has turned out exactly as Phuphee said it would. He too is learning how to deal with his emotions.

Saba Mahjoor, a Kashmiri living in England, spends her scant free time contemplating life’s vagaries.

Changing his name to GauZ’ at the age of 15 was Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé’s first real political act. “You know, in France, Armand is a very sexy name,” says the Ivorian writer with a laugh. But, for him, it is also a name intrinsically linked to France’s cultural imperialism that had eroded the customs, traditions, languages and societies of the people it colonised. “Colonisation was not [just] about physical violence, about exploitation of resources. It is [also] about cultural invasion,” says the 54-year-old author, journalist and screenwriter, a speaker at the recent Kerala Literature Festival. “The colonisation victory was to transform our culture.”

Culture is a word GauZ’ frequently uses, whether it is in relation to the richness of his own country or the violence wreaked by colonialism and now its surrogate, capitalism, which he thinks of as a sneaky system with no boundaries. “For me, it is more brutal now. You don’t know the frontiers of your opposition with the system,” says the author of several novels, which explore colonisation, immigration and identity — including Standing Heavy, Black Manoo, Portes (Doors) and Comrade Papa, pointing out that in a world shaped by a persistent want for more and more, “we are in permanent contradiction. And living in contradiction is a great violence because you don’t know who you are.”

What counts is power

Standing Heavy, his debut novel, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, is a sharp, scathing satire of France’s colonial legacy, race politics and the interrelatedness of colonialism and capitalism. “We are always being colonised by something or some people. They call it soft power, but in the expressions of power, there is power. Soft doesn’t count; what counts is power,” says GauZ’.

The novel, initially published in French in 2014 before being translated into English by Frank Wynne and then republished in 2022, is told from the perspective of undocumented African security guards working in a Parisian shopping mall — people who are “doubly invisible,” he says. “Someone told me that you are the writer of the invisible, and I am OK with that. Is it not crazy to ignore a human being in a place you enter?” The book’s title refers to both the security guard job that demands people to stand for their supper, so to speak, as well as to the heft of France’s colonial legacy. “People thanked me for writing it, telling me that now they actually saw the security; I think that is the greatest success of this book,” he says.

Standing Heavy, crammed with perspicacious commentary and wry observations, takes an anthropological approach towards shoppers in retail spaces, thus subverting the traditional white gaze. According to him, for the last 400 years, the western world, which has constantly exerted power over other people, often sees itself as a paragon of civilisation. “They are sure that things cannot change because they don’t have the memory of lost civilisation.” But, in his opinion, for colonised people, colonialism was simply a new layer in their already culturally rich lives. “We have their languages, and we know their classics. But we still have our storytelling: of the bush, of the Savannah. We still have our own cosmogony, our own anthropology, our own way of seeing the world.”

Storytelling, therefore, can be a powerful tool in the fight against a dominant Eurocentric world vision. “You cannot fight against this vision with ideology and politics. To change things and fight this system, you have to propose new imaginations, new science, new ways of thinking, new fictions,” he says. “This was my first step towards inventing this new fiction: by describing them how they used to describe us.”

GauZ’ at the eighth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival

The ‘fiction’ of immigration

While Standing Heavy was first written nearly a decade ago, many of the questions it raises will always be relevant to humans, especially those around immigration policies, more pertinent now than ever before in the face of the ongoing crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the United States.

“The question of immigrants is a fiction served to western people because they are losing their stature and are afraid,” he says. “I want to say to them, welcome to the real world. You did that to other people, and they didn’t have a choice. So, you don’t have a choice, too.”

Also, as GauZ’ reminds us, all humans originally come from Africa. “We are big animals with long legs, high respiratory capacity, thermo-regulation and a brain. We are built to move, and nobody can stop that.”