The restless traveller: A vignette | A Bengali Story in Translation
He was walking through an impassable thorny way. At one stage he turned back and saw millions of steadfast gazes fixed upon him. An incandescent lustre of seething excitement and expectation radiated from those gazes. It filled the traveller’s heart with an intoxicating pride. With a smile of profound satisfaction,
Ranjit Hoskote’s Translation of Mir Taqi Mir: An Attempt of Failure
Mir Taqi Mir in 1786. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Let me admit that I am a votary of the following falsifiable proposition that is almost a cliché among those who follow Urdu poetry: A great poet creates a new idiom for the language. This proposition yields the following corollary
Baburao Bagul’s ‘Lootaloot’: A Deep Dive into the Struggles of the Oppressed in Mumbai
In the titular story of Baburao Bagul’s classic short story collection Maran Swasta Hot Aahe (Death is Becoming Cheap)—published in Marathi in 1969 and now available in translation as Lootaloot—a poet and short story writer walks through the city in search of a muse but finds, instead, sordid stories of the dispossessed. “This
Charlie Chaplin: Keeping a comedy genius in business
Do icons need agents? Well, when it comes to Charlie Chaplin, the answer is, Yes! The film legend was born in England, made his most important films in Hollywood and spent his last decades in Switzerland. Yet, it is on a quiet street in Paris not far from the Louvre
The Flood of Mediocrity: Examining Art’s Value in the Digital Age
Not too long ago, one of the more common refrains from adults was that things were much better when they were growing up. However intolerant, churlish, and prejudiced that sounded, there was some truth to it, at least in the quality of our cultural and artistic life. Today an unmitigated
How Watching Films Influences Perceptions and Emotions: The Impact of Cinema in Society
Watching a documentary film about a wrongly incercerated man caused participants in a study to be more supportive of reforms to the US criminal justice system. | Photo Credit: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx/picture alliance Storytelling is about changing minds. Film is no different: since the first moving pictures in the 1890s, filmmakers