I had been to Simla when I was 11 and even then people spoke about the crowd, excessive development, commercial establishments ruining the city and the downward slide of the once summer capital of India. I don’t remember much about that trip. I had gone with my parents and my cousins, and like all family […]
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Category: Feature
Step Into Change
So the new year was here and you wrote your resolutions and swore to stick by them only to find yourself stuck. Stuck with the same old, same old. Many of you started making changes and then found that your enthusiasm fizzled out and some of you haven’t found enough strength to take that first […]
Jagjit Singh: Beyond Loss
I have been thinking of pain lately. The pointlessness of it. The inevitability of it. Why some people court it and others shun it. Some hide it and others hide from it. Some people gather painful moments like they were spring flowers. Their life is defined by pain, what it did to them, will do […]
Ascetic
In a rustic hut near a river tributary On a secluded land with living serenity In a small temple of a beautiful deity A peaceful mind in an agile body Seeking truth in breath and life in beauty O’ ascetic.. immerse..immerse me in divinity On a hilly terrain inside a forest Beside a Buddha statue […]
India Art Fair: A Retrospective
When Philip Dodd, Chairman of the creative industries company Made in China, claimed that the future “belongs to a constellation of India and China”, he may not have been exaggerating. Dodd was one of the many luminaries visiting the ongoing India Art Fair in Delhi and is credited with bringing for the first time to the fair Chinese […]
Jackson Pollock: Art That Roared
There is a moment in the 2003 Julia Roberts starrer Mona Lisa Smile where Katherine Ann Watson, an art lecturer introduces her students to Jackson Pollock’s art and there is a hush in the room as a larger-than-life canvas fills up the silence with a wordless roar. There is nothing to say really because Pollock’s art […]
Nirbheek: A Solution to Rape?
I read this article in The Times of India the other day, with a growing sense of dismay. No – am not talking of accidents, murders or rapes. Those seem to be happening as routinely as clockwork, even now. I’m talking of Nirbheek (I believe that’s what it is called). Nirbheek is said to be India’s first gun for women, a […]
Tracking The Bollywood Art Project
“I was really sad when I heard about the demise of Rajesh Khanna. And so I decided to pay a tribute to my favourite Bollywood hero,” with that Ranjit Dahiya went looking for the perfect canvas on the streets of Bombay. A resident of Bandra, he knew the landscape quite well and soon found the […]
The Lives Of Others
There is something sickening and violating about the way Sunanda Pushkar’s life and death are being played out round the clock on our TV screens. Her voice, images, letters, life and death make for compulsively watchable television. One channel even played an “exclusive” mobile camera footage of the suite where […]
Suchitra Sen: The Independent
Yes, the Garbo analogy is the easiest to draw from. It is the only easily available reference point to understand Suchitra Sen. The fact is we will never really know what made her withdraw from the public life that had created layers of myth, mystery and cinematic lore around her. She had had enough perhaps. […]
Farooque Shaikh: The Humanist
We all knew of his talent as an actor, his passion for theatre and the dexterity with which he anchored enjoyable television programs. Many articles discussed these as we bid farewell to Farooque Shaikh. But his contribution to the world’s most successful public health programme is perhaps less well known. The polio eradication campaign in India, had roped in a […]
Kunal Karan Kapoor: Honestly Once More
Honesty..passion and connection are words that Kunal Karan Kapoor uses a lot in his conversation. Every sentence either begins or ends or draws from what these words stand for. After chatting to him today, I was watching a tribute to RD Burman and someone said about him, “he always believed that rhythm was within. […]