Mangesh Ghogre, former executive director and head of equity capital markets at Nomura India, made it to the US on an Einstein visa, given for 'extraordinary abilities'. He is the first Indian to have constructed a crossword for The New York Times, and most recently, published a Taj-Mahal crossword ode in the paper, themed around India's Independence Day
On Wednesday, August 16, millions of The New York Times (NYT) crossword fans around the US, and the world, woke up to a surprise. The grid featured a triangular shape of solvable squares near the top, billowing out into a solid base. Once they began to work through the clues, they saw that the puzzle used typographical art to depict the shape of a famous monument, and a few circled squares unravelled the theme: TAJ MAHAL.
Each NYT crossword is accompanied with a column about the idea behind it and an analysis of the wordplay, by NYT journalist Sam Corbin. Wednesday’s started with:
“Every so often in a book of poetry, you may happen across what’s known as a calligram. These are typographical poems that when seen at a distance resemble the images they describe in their verses.
Today’s crossword, constructed by Mangesh Ghogre and Brendan Emmett Quigley, brings this whimsical art form to mind. While this puzzle is not the first to showcase a shape or an image in its grid, the detail with which these constructors have embedded the features of their theme among the squares and circled letters is a feat to behold. It also makes for a doozy of a Wednesday.”
It isn’t every day that you see an Indian constructor featured in this column; and even rarer to have the theme built on Indian culture. The crossword was spiced with answers such as ‘AGRA’, ‘SHAHJAHAN’, ‘MINARET’, ‘ONIONDOME’, and so on, and its constructor, 42-year-old Mangesh Ghogre, has made it his life’s mission to bring India into the grid.