Is BTS' Jungkook teaming up with Charlie Puth again? J-Hope suggests so
(Video Credit: Instagram/uarmyhope)In addition, other members were seen recording in what appeared to be a well-known studio in the US, the same one where 'Standing Next to You' was reportedly produced.J-Hope's post, simply captioned 'I'm out in LA', offered glimpses of BTS members hard at work, taking part in multiple recording sessions. In one clip, Suga could be seen playing the guitar, a rare sight that delighted fans eager to see him back in creative mode. Meanwhile, RM was also spotted in the recording booth, likely working on his rap verses.Their downtime included light-hearted moments with Jimin and V, the latter also posting his own update. One of the standout highlights in the series of images and videos was Charlie Puth playfully entertaining the members with a fidget spinner. Jungkook was seen laughing alongside him during what appeared to be a muted conversation.V's update included a photo of the American artist riding a scooter, while Jimin was seen wearing the same outfit as in J-Hope's post, suggesting the group were indeed together, except for Jin, who is currently on his solo tour.The group has been hard at work in a private location in Los Angeles, preparing for their much-anticipated new album, scheduled for release in spring 2026. The members have been travelling between the US and South Korea as they complete the project, which will mark their first full release following the conclusion of their military service.Earlier today, BTS firmly denied any involvement in the rumoured Michael Jackson tribute album, refuting circulating reports and quashing the accompanying 'song stealing' accusations. The group reaffirmed their commitment to combating misinformation.- EndsMust Watch
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Scroll.in
27 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
‘So That You Know': In Mani Rao's new book of poetry, formal precision meets playfulness and depth
The poems of Mani Rao, one of today's renowned poets, are known for their astute lines, closely observed details, and striking poetic images. They often leave readers smiling, wondering, awed, perhaps, with a sense of having discovered something elemental about 'the human condition,' or about themselves. Their concrete images and crystal-clear coherence stay with readers long after. Her latest collection, So That You Know, launched at the 2025 Bengaluru Poetry Festival, carries all her signatures – and more. The book carries new work as well as selected poems from eight previous collections, and avant-garde pieces, such as a staggering poem-essay on the life and work of noted American poet Lorine Niedecker, published elsewhere. It is a fascinating journey through Rao's new and selected poems, written over almost 40 years. Poetic truths Curiously, the Preface begins with Rao recollecting an incident where a reader asked her whether, in real life, she was like the speaker of her poems. She clarifies that the somewhat mysterious, multi-layered relationship between life and art, and more importantly, between the speaker in poems and the writer of poems, cannot be reduced to a simplistic yes or no binary. Artistic or poetic truths often, though not always, expand upon and transcend the truths of their makers. Which is not to say that their makers lack truthfulness. Only that the writer of a poem may not have the same purchase, or power to reach a reader – emotionally, morally, temporally – as the speaker of the poem will, or indeed, a poem itself does. To my mind, that reader's troublesome question stemmed from a fundamental human impulse – to know what a poem means. And reducing the poem to the imperfect, flesh and blood person of the poet is one way, perhaps the easiest way, to mitigate this ambivalence of knowing, that 'good poems' often cause in our hearts. Rao ends the Preface by expressing her 'need for privacy'. This perhaps means, she wants, like any other poet, for the reader to search for, engage with, and rely on the poems themselves to know what they mean. Hence a lot of her new poems in the book explore what it is to 'know', and how that knowledge often transforms the knower, and if not the knower in the poem, then at least the reader of the poem, who, at any rate, is the other half of its meaning-making machine. One of the facets of existence where this need to know – both the Other and oneself – manifests most strongly is in romantic relationships. Thus, Rao offers us a series of compelling, what I call 'about love' poems (I borrow this term from a title of a poem in Arundhati Subramaniam's book, When God is a Traveller). These 'about love' poems are, by turns, exuberant, playful, seductive, or melancholic, depending on which page you land on. In 'This Marriage', seven lines capture the politics, through the image of an overcoat, of a marriage that has grown lukewarm with time. It starts with, 'It's not too cold, I know, / but I had nowhere else / to keep this overcoat', and ends with, 'So I just let it sit / upon my shoulders'. In seven lines, she captures the security, safety, and even obsolescence of marriages that often outlive their necessity, or fail to redress new necessities with time. The voice of the poem, in its confessional earnestness, is reminiscent of the speaker of William Carlos William's famous poem, ' This is just to say '. If the questioner from the Preface were to ask Rao, what does it mean, then? Is she supporting or critiquing the institution of marriage? Rao would have perhaps replied, 'make what you will of it'. This ability to either remain open to interpretation, or open new ways of interpretation, is one of the powerful characteristics of most poems in the book. One also observes sudden changes of scale in poems, which lead to unexpected turns, and juxtaposition of disparate images, that, as a result, unexpectedly surprise the reader. In 'So Yes, but No', a poem about two 'about lovers' who also happen to be poets, in the first line the reader stares at 'two rivers laden / with lands and legends', and suddenly, 'Like two celestial objects / may we revolve around each other', but then we are, 'In any room, there's only room / for a single poet. Take turns'. Throughout 12 of the 14 lines of the poem, these lovers do not meet, and the last two lines reveal that it was never feasible for them to meet, given that they are 'poets'. Does it mean that poets are incapable of love, or egotistic, or worse, misanthropic? One wonders. Interestingly, the poem prescribes 'taking turns', suggesting the importance of recognising, respecting, and mutually giving each other space. We would never know for sure. And perhaps, that is the point. Rao's poems complicate what 'knowing' means, by destabilising the way we arrive at knowledge. To be precise, the poems challenge our elemental need for certainty in texts, in arguments, in narrative. They seem to be saying, that ambivalence too, is part of the human condition. Taste it, feel it, embrace it. Take turns. Such ambivalence exists, most tellingly, in poems which contradict themselves, sometimes consciously, formally, and other times, through their argument structures. 'Just Looking' uses anaphora, in the form of the phrase 'there is no love', to foreground what one is looking for, i.e. love, but that such love is not to be found anywhere (in my right pocket, left pocket, shopping cart, behind curtains, in the freezer, on the cutting board etc), and in this failure to 'find love' the poem ultimately performs the paradox that love often eludes our grasp, existing in the spaces between, or beyond, our searches and desires. Such a poetics reflects a profound understanding of human emotions, inviting readers to engage with ambivalences interwoven in human emotions. Likewise, 'Story Moon' is a hyperbolic, exaggerated meditation on the role of essential love-objects, or objects we think of as essential, in romantic narratives. In the poem, this object happens to be the moon, a staple cliché in love narratives across cultures. The poem begins with, 'Pair of lovers coupled with a full moon – formula for romance', but soon enough, after, 'Silhouetted faces cradled in a generous moon curve – Pregnancy.', we realise, 'If there is no moon, oh no moon, there is no moon at all, where is the moon, there is no moon… moon what's a poet to do without moon', The poem ends playfully, hysterically, exaggeratedly, making the reader wonder whether it is possible to conjure love, write about love, think of love, testify to love's existence, without its associated objective correlatives. And suppose it is indeed possible to conjure love beyond the concreteness of its objects, what roles did such objects – love letters, old photographs, the first trinkets and souvenirs – play in concretely marking, manifesting, and objectifying love? Conversely, the poem may simply be mocking the overuse of clichés or critiquing the unnecessary emphasis on rituals and clichéd patterns of representation in love narratives, when in fact, love requires a very different dynamic to sustain. Read either way, most of Rao's poems invite readers to delve into the ambivalences, the in-betweenness, the liminal spaces that lie between human emotions, experiences and what we make of them. The dualities Consider the poem, 'Happily M', which likens a 'happily m / couple' to an apple who 'blushing / for the tableau / shows no sign' of a worm eating its insides. Such precision! The poem ends with, 'secrets buried / in the back garden/ ferment'. The word 'marriage' is reduced only to its initial letter, m. Is there some symbolism in this? Perhaps. Working as a companion piece to 'This Marriage', the poem realistically foregrounds the ambivalences and difficult spaces in any marriage. The tableau motif indicates the performative nature of marriage. There is blushing too, and concealing of things that cannot be shown to the public. But whatever these secrets are, they are buried, they are fermenting. Reading along the grain, one could easily read the poem as a critique of marriages made merely to gain societal approval through show-off and performance of shallow rituals. However, to my mind, the last three lines, 'Secrets buried / in the back garden / ferment', indicate change, transformation. Fermentation, as a process, entails breaking down complex sugars to simpler compounds. Later, new materials emerge from this process – bread, yoghurt, beer. Perhaps, the metaphor suggests that beneath the pressure surface of societal expectations lies the potential for growth and renewal for any marriage, much like the fermentation process that transforms ingredients into nourishing staples. Another facet of the collection that stood out to me was the 'place poems', such as 'Waiheke Within', 'Vacay at Myrtle Beach', 'Kashi Triptych', and 'Tiruvannamalai'. Rao reconstructs space by chiselling images from words. Precision and clarity of her descriptions allow readers to immerse themselves in the landscapes she evokes, creating a vivid sense of place that resonates with emotional depth. Gaston Bachelard, in this regard, has written in his book, The Poetics of Space, that 'space that the imagination has seized upon cannot remain indifferent to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of imagination'. In 'Kashi Triptych', the city of Kashi is reconstructed through meditations on the cycle of loss and rejuvenation that are imposed upon it by the images of the poem. In Kashi, where, 'shadows hover anxious like dogs marking corners of terraced ghats as lovers drink mirrors a curly soot rains upon the free bereft and pundits claim ashes still warm from midnight pyres for altar coffers at dawn' The quest for salvation commingles with concern for altar coffers. The poem sharply captures the duality of existence that is performed each day in the city, whose funeral ghats are busy 24x7. But it turns upon itself and expands what it set out to say, with the end lines, 'Ash can't swim Hangs on to algae on hulls Falls into arms of corals Scraped and bitten by fish Shat along gorges and flats Why else do river beaches shine' Thereby showing how the act of dying becomes the prerequisite of living/sustenance. The poem is rich with dualities: dying–living, human world–natural world, movement–stasis, and so many more. This act of expanding upon itself, transcending its own boundaries, provides the poem with the potential to capture 'fuller', 'deeper', 'higher' truths about human existence. And perhaps, that is why in the Preface, Rao subtly urges the reader to seek the meaning of a poem in the poem itself. As she writes, 'You are multitudes'. And so is 'good' poetry. Mani Rao's poems offer the space to encounter multitudes of meanings and possibilities of being, in all their rich, in-between ambivalences. Read them. Ankush Banerjee is a poet, a masculinities studies research scholar, and Reviews Editor at Usawa Literary Review. His book of poems, Field Notes on Kindness, is forthcoming.
Hindustan Times
27 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Meet Mr Alex: The ‘gentleman' calf living on a 28th-floor apartment, enjoying balcony views and cuddles
Pets don't always fit the usual mould. Sometimes, rescue stories lead to unusual yet endearing companions, breaking the regular pet-keeping norms. On that note, let's take a closer look at the story of Mr Alex, a well-mannered calf who lives in an apartment. Mr Alex is a well-behaved rescue calf who loves pretty balcony views.(PC: IG/@saianimalactivist) Animal activist Sai Vignesh, who frequently shares heartfelt animal rescue stories on Instagram, posted on August 8 about a calf living with his rescuer, Thejaswini S Rangan, in a 28th-floor apartment. Mr Alex is the calf who loves balcony sunsets and panoramic views, unconventional, yet absolutely adorable. Thejaswini shared the story of Alex, a three-month-old bull calf rescued from the streets of Neelankarai. The calf met with an accident then. She recalled how fragile he was, but with care, he turned into a beautiful, healthy calf. Thejaswini said, 'When he was about barely a month and a half old, he was crossing the road and he was hit by a speeding vehicle. So when we found him. His limbs were badly bleeding, his back was swollen, so we brought him home immediately, and we thought we should give him first aid and we gave him good rest. We gave him enough security and he has blossomed into a fantastic calf.' Mr Alex has many special quirks that set him apart from other calves, as she added, 'I have seen many bull calves before. They are all very naughty and very sassy. But this boy is such a gentleman. He doesn't headbutt, he doesn't kick and he loves cuddles. He loves getting cuddles both us and the dogs as well.' Adding to the list of the calf's adorable traits, Thejaswini further shared that he loves spending time on the balcony, enjoying the sunrise and sunset views over the Bay of Bengal and the Buckingham Canal. Thejaswini also mentioned that the calf shares a special bond with the dogs. The calf loves cuddles from everyone, even the dogs. Even more surprising is that the dogs eat with the calf. She said, 'The dogs eat along with the calf, even the grass. They all eat together. So it is a community table where they are all eating everything that he is also eating.' Now, finally, how did this charming calf come to be known as Mr. Alex? His name's inspiration comes from Alex Pandian, a character from a Tamil movie known for his unmistakable swag, which the calf embodied right from the beginning. Thejaswini added, 'Because of his swag, he got the name Mr. Alex. When he was injured and walking towards us with his head tilted, it looked exactly like how Alex Pandian moves.' Internet reactions The comment section was in awe of the gentlemanly calf who loves watching the sky from the balcony. One user appreciated the rescue effort, writing, 'mr. Alex is such a handsome fellow, truly adorable, and hats off to you. Great work. God bless.' Another highlighted that pets aren't limited to the usual cats and dogs, adding, 'This proves that pets means not only the dog and everyone sees the animals as babies.' Another commented, 'I hope his biological mom knows how happy and well he is now.' However, one user raised a practical concern, asking, 'What is she going to do when he grows too big for the flat and the elevator?' In response, Thejaswini explained that she has a farm where Alex will be moving soon. She shared that he stayed with her only until his wounds healed completely. Now, since he is healthy, Alex has gained six kilograms in the past month and a half. ALSO READ: No walks for pets this monsoon? Vet shares 6 indoor games to keep them active
News18
37 minutes ago
- News18
Prateik Babbar Missing From Raksha Bandhan Celebrations, Juhi Babbar Says ‘Life Goes On…'
Prateik Babbar's half-sister Juhi shared photos from Raksha Bandhan celebration with Arya Babbar. Acknowledging Prateik's absence, she wrote that a part of her heart is missing. Raj Babbar's daughter Juhi Babbar has shared some lovely pictures with her brother Arya Babbar as the brother-sister duo celebrated Raksha Bandhan together. While they seemed joyful in the photos, Juhi expressed her sadness over her half-brother Prateik Babbar's absence during the Rakhi celebrations this year. Acknowledging his absence, Juhi wrote that a part of her heart still feels incomplete without Prateik. She then added that the bond of blood remains unbreakable, and that nothing can ever change it. Juhi Babbar took to her Instagram account to share a series of photos from her Raksha Bandhan celebration with Arya Babbar and their cousins. Prateik Babbar was nowhere to be seen in the photos, and while she did not directly mention his absence, she wrote that the celebration feels 'incomplete'. 'Some celebrations are full…and some feel incomplete. Today is Raksha Bandhan, and while the joy is here, a part of my heart is still missing," she wrote. She further added, 'But life goes on…and NOTHING can change the bond of blood. True blood remains, always (grace | resilience | love) #RakshaBandhan2025 #FamilyTies #TrueBlood #BrotherSisters #BabbarandSonis." Her husband Anup Soni was also seen in the pictures. Check out her post below! Prateik is the son of Raj Babbar and the late Smita Patil. Raj married Smita while still married to Nadira Babbar, with whom he has two children—Juhi and Arya Babbar. While Prateik has been seen with his half-siblings and father on various occasions, he decided to exclude them from his wedding with Priya Banerjee in February this year. This created a stir on social media. Amid this complication, Prateik dropped his father Raj Babbar's surname and shared that he will now go by Prateik Smita Patil to honour her legacy. He told the Times of India, 'I need to be wholly and solely associated with my mother (Smita Patil), her name and her legacy. I don't think any other name needs to taint that legacy, if you understand what I mean. It needs to just be her name and her legacy. That's what I'm striving to be. I'm striving to be like my mother and not like my dad. It feels like a new chapter." However, in April, Juhi Babbar shared a picture with Prateik and Arya Babbar, and wrote, 'Raj Babbar Ji Ke Teeno AARYA PRATEIK… A FACT NOBODY CAN CHANGE". First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
