tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50340309978573582392024-03-13T19:13:30.222+05:30chhotahazriHindi: chhoti haziri, vulg. hazri, 'little breakfast'; refreshment taken in the early morning, before or after the morning exercise. (Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, 1994 [1886])Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger897125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-4954519348905617432024-03-13T19:12:00.003+05:302024-03-13T19:12:55.879+05:30On the Indian documentary Nocturnes, shot in Arunachal Pradesh, which won an award at Sundance Film Festival 2024My review of Anirban Datta and Anupama Srinivasan's documentary Nocturnes. Nocturnes won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at the Sundance Film Festival a few hours after my piece was published on Moneycontrol.com, on 27 January 2024.A still from the Sundance-award-winning Indian documentary Nocturnes.We hear them before we see them -- a faint but persistent Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-49463147590100945852024-01-04T13:41:00.005+05:302024-03-13T12:56:39.348+05:30Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023). &Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-69155699370182855932021-08-09T12:46:00.005+05:302021-08-09T12:52:56.502+05:30Do you know who wrote your favourite film? My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column for Sun 25 July:Writers barely get the credit they deserve — a new book on women screenwriters in Bollywood illuminates a hazy corner of the glittering silver screenScreenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz ('Mank') and director Orson Welles, whose real-life collaboration and battle over writing credit for Citizen Kane is the subject of David Fincher's 2020 film Mank.“Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-58850401170233628512021-07-12T18:26:00.003+05:302021-07-12T19:34:31.994+05:30Dilip Kumar exemplified an idea of India we've lostIn my Mirror/TOI Plus column this week:Born in Peshawar and brought to Bombay, he was the true child of a country that revelled in its linguistic and regional variety, rather than craving to homogenise it.Dilip Kumar greets Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan at Meenambakkam Airport, Chennai (c. 1960). Kumar is the only Indian recipient of Pakistan's highest civilian award, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-91333751989219149892021-06-28T11:56:00.007+05:302021-06-28T12:05:15.933+05:30 Saving the tiger and wildlife will take more than a few ShernisMy TOI Plus column: The man-animal conflict in India is
a complex, burgeoning problem, and one that is left unaddressed both
by our national forest policy and by our mainstream politics Vidya Balan plays an ethical Indian forest service officer in Sherni (2021)Amit Masurkar's new film Sherni
has some things in common with his award-winning 2017 film Newton
-- the central Indian jungle Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-18965223939423232802021-06-14T18:26:00.002+05:302021-07-12T18:54:45.855+05:30Why you can't watch these films while cookingMy Mumbai Mirror/TOI Plus column:A bouquet of independent films at the 2021 New York Indian Film Festival doesn't leave us smelling of roses, but takes a wry, gentle and honest look at our lives todayA still from Arun Karthick's wake-up call of a film, Nasir (2020).What do you want to see on your screen? What you watch on your television screen, your computer screen or your phone screen is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-27401335975252412642021-06-12T17:09:00.001+05:302021-07-12T23:57:35.604+05:30How cinema uses the horror of train accidents to tell a storyMy TOI Plus column: the last in my series on trains in Indian cinema. Through
Indian film history, trains have often delivered not just the thrill of
danger, but all the terrifying finality of death. A screenshot from Do Anjaane (1976), in which the train holds the key to trauma -- and to release
Over the last few weeks, this column has touched on some
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-31172016351592747822021-06-04T23:56:00.003+05:302021-06-04T23:56:41.903+05:30How Benegal turned an '80s train ride into a journey of self-discoveriesFor my weekly column in Mirror/TOI Plus, the seventh piece in a series on trains in Indian cinema: Shyam
Benegal's thought-provoking television series Yatra gave the
Indian Railways a stellar role, as the thread that stitches the
country together
Yatra,
the 15-episode series telecast on Doordarshan in 1986, may be the
most dedicated depiction of the Indian train journey on screen.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-25494515535295993922021-05-28T14:45:00.006+05:302021-05-28T14:45:57.055+05:30A child's view of the world through a train rideThis is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a
rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe -- There are probably few Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-91547622344160993602021-05-23T22:40:00.003+05:302021-05-23T22:40:48.445+05:30The train ride as a technological fantasy
My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:In
popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined
world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still
content to live in the dream.Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }
In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in
Indian cinema starts Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-34360026203482266012021-05-09T23:36:00.008+05:302021-05-30T21:24:32.022+05:30Satyajit Ray’s world of trainsMy column for Mirror/TOI Plus, the fourth in my series on trains in Indian cinema:
On
the filmmaker’s birth centenary, a look at how the train is a motif
in many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy,
Nayak
and
Sonar
Kella
A still from Satyajit Ray's Nayak (1966), starring Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar.Satyajit
Ray, whose 100th
birth
anniversary was May 2, is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-52508027236712675912021-05-08T20:39:00.003+05:302021-05-10T17:39:17.800+05:30A lifeline, but also a harbinger of doomThe third column in my series on trains in Indian cinema, for Mirror/TOI Plus: In
the cinema of Bimal Roy, the train is often a site of unfolding
tragedy
Fiction
necessarily derives its motifs from reality. There’s a reason why
the road movie is a thing in Hollywood, while it barely existed in
India until quite recently. Trains, on the other hand, have been
integral to our cinema as sites of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-56920780730973486612021-05-08T20:18:00.004+05:302021-05-08T20:18:59.761+05:30Book Review: UR Ananthamurthy's Avasthe My piece for Firstpost on a truly great Indian novel. Politics can make things better, UR Ananthamurthy seems to suggest, but only if its wellspring is a love of the world, not a desire to conquer it. Avasthe, by U.R. Ananthamurthy (1978). Translated by Narayan Hegde (2020). Harper Perennial. 240pp. Rs 499.UR Ananthamurthy's 1978 Kannada novel Avasthe, in a chiselled new English translationUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-15890504295380982642021-04-12T11:08:00.009+05:302021-05-23T20:13:32.805+05:30Home on the TrainP { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }My column for TOI Plus/Mumbai
Mirror:What the 1956 Ava Gardner starrer Bhowani Junction
tells us about the British, Anglo-Indians and the railways in
colonial India
In last week's column, I drew on Awtar
Kaul's film 27 Down to evoke the way that India's train network can
sometimes stand in for the country itself. But of course, the Indian
Railways Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-35795981303282894012021-04-05T13:02:00.003+05:302021-04-05T13:04:41.116+05:30Book Review: Krishna learns to let go the Hindu way in this bestseller Part popular romance, part spiritual melodrama, 'Krishnayan' by
Gujarati writer Kaajal Oza Vaidya adds some real women to India’s
mythological matrix Krishnayan by Kaajal Oza Vaidya, translated from the Gujarati by Subha Pande, Eka-Westland, 272 pages, ₹499
The most remarkable thing about Indic civilisation might be the
uninterrupted Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-4291721651247710962021-04-05T12:39:00.001+05:302021-04-05T12:39:07.907+05:30Book Review: A Gujarati literary legend finds a home in English Celebrated Gujarati writer Dhumketu doesn’t get his due in the latest translation of his work Gaurishankar
Govardhanram Joshi (1892-1965), who wrote as Dhumketu, was a pioneering
short story writer in Gujarati.
(Wikipedia)“The short story is not the miniature form of the novel... The novel
says whatever it wants. The short story, by rousing Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-63085003109684909442021-04-05T11:38:00.008+05:302021-04-05T12:11:48.577+05:30Book Review: What would human history look like if told through our relationships with animals? Simon
Barnes’s ‘The History of the World in 100 Animals’ is a unique
way of looking back – and around.
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }If you have the slightest curiosity about the millions of species
with which we share the planet, Simon Barnes’s delightful new book will
satisfy and whet it in equal measure. Picking out a hundred from these
millions (a selection that ranges from gorillas to Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-49676508411857304962021-04-04T20:08:00.005+05:302021-04-04T20:10:32.448+05:30Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema My Mumbai Mirror column:Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973,
remains a visually arresting reflection on India's train journeys The
connection between films and trains dates back to cinema's origins. One of the
Lumiere brothers' first films was of a train arriving at the station in La
Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in
1895Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-54175967954106220092021-03-29T19:55:00.000+05:302021-04-14T11:05:55.641+05:30The freedom of the spirit, dead or aliveMy Mumbai Mirror column: An unexpected death opens up surprising new directions for life
in Umesh Bist's deftly-balanced new film. Umesh
Bist's new film may ride on the suggestion of quirky lightness –
even the title, Pagglait, is an affectionate UP word for
madcap -- but at its heart lies an absence. At the simplest level,
the absence is of a person. A young man called Aastik, sole earning
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-74095117772532158542021-03-22T19:42:00.000+05:302021-04-14T11:05:26.598+05:30Not quite queens of all they surveyMy Mumbai Mirror column: Bombay Begums may not have top-notch storytelling, but at least it's
willing to let its female characters be richly, complicatedly human.
With
Bombay Begums,
writer-director Alankrita Srivastava re-opens a conversation she
helped kick off in 2017 with her film Lipstick
Under My Burkha:
A discussion about what Indian women want, and mostly don't get. If Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-6055650234487631672021-03-15T19:23:00.000+05:302021-04-14T11:04:52.046+05:30When silent films speak of a lost past My Mumbai Mirror column:The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early
1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary
Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson
City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of
effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent
filmsUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-70883897255454178472021-03-14T10:59:00.000+05:302021-04-14T10:59:48.881+05:30Filming the forest and why our relationship with it is complicatedMy Mirror column:The jungle still sustains millions in India. What does indie
cinema make of the conflict that takes place when modernity vies for their
minds and hearts?Radhika Apte and Girish Kulkarni in the fine short film The Kill (2016), dir. Anay Tarnekar I have spent the
last week in a village near Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. Living with
a local Gond family in a rural homestay Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-84982443975678233632021-02-28T11:03:00.000+05:302021-04-14T11:06:42.647+05:30Good girls, bad ghosts and goddesses My Mumbai Mirror columnBulbbul reworks ideas from
several Bengali film classics to craft a superhuman response to women's
depressingly human troubles. When
Anvita Dutt's Bulbbul came out last July, several critics applauded
producer Anushka Sharma and her brother Karnesh for their trilogy of films
placing the ghost story in the service of feminist goals. The first of these,
Anshai Lal's PhillauriUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-56763366043307500502021-02-22T18:46:00.000+05:302021-04-14T11:02:33.028+05:30An India viewed through French eyesMy Mumbai Mirror column:For screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who died on February 8, adapting the Mahabharata was both a way to enter Indian culture -- and to
look at it from the outside."Writing for film is filming," Jean-Claude Carrière used to tell his
screenwriting students. "You have to know that what you write, is not
written to be published. It is written to be forgotten and to be
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034030997857358239.post-55862870772415489422021-02-20T17:51:00.002+05:302021-02-20T17:56:34.386+05:30Book Review: Archaeology and the Public PurposeA special book about a special man. My review for Scroll.This study of archaeologist MN Deshpande’s work highlights the integrity and zeal of a true scholarArchaeology and the Public Purpose: Writings on and by MN Deshpandeby Nayanjot Lahiri. Oxford University Press, 2020.Before anything else, a personal disclaimer, or rather, a claim: I
briefly had the pleasure of knowing MN Deshpande. I met Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0