We all have Rashomon realities. We may be living one story but those watching us maybe seeing something very different. The Rashomon effect of course is the offshoot of a Kurosawa classic where colliding interpretations swirl around a crime. Not hard to see why Vishal Bhardwaj would choose the same technique to tell the story […]
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Author: Reema Moudgil
The Unrepeatable Aashiqui
25 years after it was released, there may be many sequels but Aashiqui (1990) still stands for something unrepeatable, though it began as an attempt to cash on the Nadeem Shravan music bank with T-Series. The film began as a narrative woven around the songs and could have gone horribly wrong. Starting with the […]
Why Manto Will Never Grow Old
“He was chewing on his paan, slowly and thinking. Thick jets of sticky, tobacco-mixed gob was swishing in his mouth. He felt as if his teeth were grinding his thoughts and blending them with his saliva.Maybe that was why he didn’t wish to spit out the gob of chewed-up paan.’’ Muhammad Umar Memon’s translation of […]
Nuance Is Rare On Indian TV
Indian television does not usually allow a great deal of space for symbolism and subtlety but sometimes while surfing channels, you come across something that is done right, with a certain amount of empathy. Epic Channel for instance is replaying Tagore’s memorable fiction and even though nobody can redo Charulata after what Ray imbued the […]
Tom Alter: The Passionate Indian
Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
Katti Batti: Never Comes To Life
Nikhil Advani’s Katti Batti reminded me of one of his earlier films, Salaam-e-Ishq which had moments of real resonance interspersed with what can be only described as visual white noise. Like that strange scene in a foreign location (London?) where Salman Khan appears with a make-believe baraat to woo Priyanka Chopra. What was that, really? […]
A Disease Called Apathy
For all its commercial heft and cinematic records, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay did not win any awards except one for editing. Editor MS Shinde who gave an incredible finesse to the blockbuster with his taut sense of timing and understatement, was the only one in the film crew to have won a popular award. And yet […]
He Was Not Just Viral Currency
“As the picture of the drowned Syrian boy went viral, the emotional outpourings on social media left me somewhat cold,” so says an article in an online magazine, trying to convey that though the death of the young child, (clad fetchingly, it says, in a red T-shirt and blue jeans) was tragic, it showed […]
The Changing Face of Success
The idea of entitlement is not new to the Indian film industry. Nor is the hegemony fuelled by privileged stars and their coteries. So it took someone of Nawazuddin Siddqui’s talent, 15 years to land his first solo lead in Manjhi (though he played a pivotal part in Gangs of Wasseypur) but all it took […]
They Dare You To Dream Big
An aside. Dagny Taggart, a definitive Ayn Rand heroine and possibly the first woman to run a railroad in fiction, is one of the many inspirations behind Wishberry, India’s first crowdfunding platform. Wishberry is run by two young women who are now fuelling many dreams just because they had the courage of conviction to follow […]
Kalburgi And The Murder Of Dissent
We have been here before but let us do a body count, once again.Safdar Hashmi is a distant memory, so he does not count. He was murdered In 1989, while performing a street play. Rationalist Dr. Narendra Dabholkar (65) was shot dead near Pune’s Shanivar Peth area in 2013. Not too long ago, anti-toll campaigner […]
Teachers Who Unlock Inner Doors
“I was never a dancer, never a gymnast, never naturally peaceful, patient or confident. I generally felt socially awkward, private, introverted, comfortable reading and studying but not talking, sharing. I never ever felt beautiful or elegant, always felt like the small girl in the corner. Then one day after many years of Yoga practice, I […]