Jangarh, Mayank and Gond art
ON 2 JULY 2001, on the Japanese island of Honshu, Jangarh Singh Shyam hanged himself from the ceiling fan in his room. He had been living at the Mithila Museum on an arts residency. He was 37. Two worlds mourned Jangarh — artists and central India’s Gond community. The rest of us barely noticed the...
I Like to Watch
YOU CAN go watch Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, Dibakar Banerjee’s set of three short interconnected films, and get excited about sex and video cameras. Surveillance and voyeurism have been hotbutton themes in the art world for a while. And it may seem like popular culture is now following in sweaty excitement. Or you could ignore...
Do you know this man?
PROBABLY NOT. Not unless you saw his face in the papers recently when Daylight Robbery — one of his 270 Hindi novels and the second translated into English — was launched. That’s 270 books, a career of 50 years and 2.5 crore copies sold. Even today, when he and other Hindi pulp writers are convinced...
Ruined by reading
AWRITER FRIEND remarked that he had not anticipated how thrilled he would be by his first visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. “Imagine all these people milling around, all there to worship a book”. He acknowledged that he was choosing to see it that way. But who can blame his poor book-weakened mind? Particularly...
Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani
YOU MAY ASSUME that Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani‘s hill station sets are so patently fake that irony is intended. But once you get past that, the film is for most part easy viewing, if rather overlong. From its comic strip opening credits to the last frame in which Prem (Ranbir Kapoor) chastely pecks Jenny (Katrina Kaif) on...
Anjum Hasan
(A shorter, annoyingly truncated version of the following piece appeared in Tehelka a few weeks ago.) Almost every reviewer calls Anjum Hasan’s novels ‘quiet and well-written’. This is currently a phrase in our literary world that veers between praise, parody and put-down. It is also a description that does disservice to at least one aspect...
Manjunath Kamath
THERE ARE urban legends about people who fall in love with inanimate objects, like buildings and cars. You may not be the lunatic who wanted to marry the Eiffel tower but Manjunath Kamath knows about your secret relationship with objects. Kamath’s art is attracted to everyday and mythic objects like a magnet tugs iron...
Breaking Bed Together
Filmmaker Paromita Vohra’s ‘Tourists’ is one of the most enjoyable pieces in Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and knits a trio of fantasies. Her perfect reader is intelligent and politically correct: hence unable to enjoy anything, even guilt. Until now. First, Vohra’s suspiciously familiar character Sartaj Khan is a sexy Bollywood star...
The Triviahound of Baskervilles
Pastiche novels are a guilty pleasure. Who are you going to admit to that you enjoyed reading about Leia and Hans Solo’s children in the Star Wars novel series? Just as you may secretly enjoy puns but are publicly obliged to groan and condemn them. But that’s about the consumer of pastiches. The writer of...
Moonward
Twenty-nine-year-old, Bengaluru- based artist George Mathen’s first graphic novel Moonward promises a dark and elaborately constructed fantastical universe quite unlike other Indian graphic novels seen in recent times. NISHA SUSAN interviews Appupen alias Mathen: Moonward is part of a series? Moonward is a standalone graphic novel but also the prologue to a series. Here I...
Outing the closet romantics
This weekend offered competing images of Big Love. A sepia-tinted runaway couple who had never had a conversation with each other but were ready to be battered for the sake of the irrational thunderbolt that had hit them; a sensible couple unprepared for the violence that love wreaks on them and their plans; a bad...
See Noir Evil, Hear Noir Evil
The award-winning New York-based Akashic Noir Books left American neighbourhoods a while ago with anthologies set in Asia and Europe. The first of the series set in India, the Delhi Noir anthology, is coming here through HarperCollins in August. These all-new stories attempt to provide an alternate, gritty map of the capital. The following are...
