The Lightening Rod Strikes Twice
A week ago, a beautiful young woman dining in a small Versova restaurant asked, “Who is Anurag Kashyap? Is he the director of Fashion?” Gasps rose from the crowded table. It was an exceptionally bad place to ask this question since Kashyap was sitting at the same table and all around were the fanatic Passion...
Abhay Deol
To follow the Deol men would be one way of tracing Bollywood’s history. From Dharmendra, rarely allowed to dip into his deep well of comedic ability, to Sunny Deol, whose big battered body gave us a sweet-natured bull, forced into brutishness by a relentless world, time after time. Then, there was Bobby, askew enough to...
Daljit Nagra
Two very different meetings. Now photography I know next to nothing about and poetry I imagined I understood a lot about. It’s surprising but not disturbing to realise that every year you know less and less. I don’t know much but I know Daljit Nagra is adorable. No Gunga Din, this gig WHEN DALJIT NAGRA...
Swapan Parekh
IN CONVERSATION, Swapan Parekh alludes to the annoyance that iconic photographer Raghubir Singh faced from casual viewers who felt, “I could have taken that picture.” He alludes to it in the context of a danger that he, too, could face. The photographs in his new show Between Me & I, do not possess prettiness, drama or...
Fellowship of the ring
So for a couple of weeks my colleague Uzma Mohsin and I have been trailing after women boxers. We started in Kolkata and ended in Guwahati where 35 women were in the national camp before the Asian Women’s Championship. Uzma’s photos are quite extraordinary for which you really should get last week’s Tehelka but my...
Manjunath Kamath
You know my heart is with NS Harsha but I could love Manjunath Kamat just for this. He is like Kay Ryan in watercolour.
Mathew and Ghosh
The architect couple who have redesigned the old Bangalore jail. BANGALORE’S OLD Central Jail is surprisingly busy for a prison that has been defunct for five years. Small, white structures have sprouted over the 27 acres of land as it is slowly being transformed into an urban park. Unlike Bangalore’s better-known parks, the focus at...
Dark Horse, White Knight
THE FEVERISH speculation around a young person poised for stardom in Bollywood is one that only people who follow racehorses would understand: the endless studying of form, of bloodlines, of gossip from the stable. There’s no telling which odds-on favourite will stumble, or which robust survivor of indifference will astonish on a Friday evening. And...
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang but slowly
An interview with the perfectly adorable Sriram Raghavan. ’S ODD THAT 44-year-old Sriram Raghavan’s better-known movies have been tales of wickedness that could not wait, people who snatched and were burnt. Raghavan’s best stories about himself are about lost opportunities and of waiting; but in noir — the last bastion of the morality tale —...
The Siren Who Stayed Away
Sometimes I am terribly eager-beaver about an interview and then I screw up the writing. Here is Chitrangada Singh. WHEN CHITRANGADA first appeared on our horizons in 2005, she was set to make herself a thinking person’s pin-up. What could make a jholawala’s heart beat faster than a movie about politics, sex and sexual politics...
The Boy who made Advani Cry
AT THIS stage, one is losing count of the many unlikely people who have cried during Taare Zameen Par. Even if you begin watching it with grim determination to not cry, fifteen minutes in, you feel your face crumpling. Ishaan Awasthi taps into our purest, shallowest lode of tears, prodding at our collective sense of...
Sudhir Mishra
On a day that I am still bemoaning a major work-related fuckup, this is comforting to post. KHOYA KHOYA CHAND has all the trappings of an old-fashioned romance but when the lovers, Zafar and Nikhat, are in bed together for the first time, director Sudhir Mishra signals to us that he has no intention of...
