With the coronation set to formalise his transition from Prince Charles to King Charles III, the life of the world’s richest gardener is about to change considerably. Henceforth, the UK’s second-most distinguished symbol (the first remains Benedict Cumberbatch) can no longer do the following things without assistance from a carefully curated team of experts — button his shirt, launder his taxes or speak his mind. More distressingly for Charles, he can no longer pretend to be a box of Tampax either, as he will need an entire factory’s worth of supply to soak the blood that covers the Crown.
Meanwhile, Sonam Kapoor is the only Indian celebrity to be invited to Charles’s coronation as she is well placed to understand the compulsions of continuing a family tradition without having the necessary qualifications to do so. She has also been asked to attend to give Kate Middleton emergency fashion advice in case Meghan Markle shows up.
Elsewhere, Buckingham Palace confirms that Charles’s wife, Camilla, will be anointed as the new Queen (instead of Queen Consort), since she is found to have the same taste in horses and quiches as the late Elizabeth II.
Wondering what else happened while your search for someone to unbutton your shirt ended in vain yet again? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.
May 1
‘I’ve tried out all the wings in Indian politics. The best one is always the one that wins,’ observes Sharad Pawar TT archives
- Sharad Pawar steps down as the chief of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), since at 82, he can no longer remember what promises he made to which politician.
- After India’s oldest living urban naxal, Romila Thapar, criticises the approach to history in government textbooks, the National Council of Enforced Revisionism and Thoughtlessness (NCERT) announces a 10-year plan to gradually replace traditional history books in schools with a single, exhaustive volume containing the speeches of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
May 2
‘I’m used to hearing that it should’ve been Deepika (Padukone) instead of me, it doesn’t bother me anymore,’ responds Alia Bhatt Instagram/Alia Bhatt
- Following her appearance at this year’s Met Gala, Alia Bhatt is trolled for managing to offend absolutely nobody with her utterly conventional attire.
- Priyanka Chopra outshines co-star Richard Madden in Amazon Prime’s Citadel as viewers marvel at how her character changes her accents faster than her outfits.
May 3
Gautam Gambhir has been advised by his support staff at Lucknow Super Giants to keep his blood pressure lower than K.L. Rahul’s strike rate TT archives
- Owing to a bitter altercation during an IPL match in Lucknow, Gautam Gambhir is fined his entire match fees, thus becoming the first sitting BJP MP to face a legal penalty as well as one of only two people in recent memory to be punished in accordance with the letter of the law in UP. The other, of course, is Virat Kohli, who tried to educate Gambhir about the latest north Indian slangs, and has decided to stop collecting his match fees for the rest of the season.
- Lionel Messi has been suspended for two weeks by Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) for smiling more on a promotional trip to Saudi Arabia than he has done at PSG all season.
May 4
Rana Ayyub was given a special award for journalistic consistency in the US Capital as all her op-eds read the same TT archives
- Addressing the Nobel Prize Summit in Washington DC, part-time journalist and full-time activist Rana Ayyub argues why she should win the next Nobel Peace Prize for “surviving more than a hundred death threats on Instagram”.
- The ministry of information and broadcasting tweets: “India gets 161 on the World Press Freedom Index! Higher than any country in Southeast Asia! Proud moment!”, before Twitter users respond that 161 is not a score, but a rank. OpIndia, which had retweeted the post with the caption, “Wouldn’t have been possible in the golden era of Lutyens’ Media”, blames “the West for confusing maths” after the ministry deletes its original tweet.
May 5
Kamala Harris admits to spending one hour every day learning how to be uncharismatic from ChatGPT TT archives
- AI experts from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI meet US Vice-President Kamala Harris to assure her that their chatbots will not be taking her job anytime soon as “they, unlike you, cannot counter constant provocation with constant silence”.
- Volodymyr Zelensky and his team of comedy writers-turned-intelligence officials are left baffled after an Ukranian drone sent to the Kremlin to assassinate Vladimir Putin ends up killing four of his body doubles instead.