“Bhakti Is A Matter of Fire and Blood’: Jerry Pinto on Translating Bhakti Poetry, Its Challenges, Rewards, and Cultural Bridges
It is hard to find a form of writing that Jerry Pinto does not revel in. He started as a poet. His 2006 biography of the Bollywood dancing star Helen (Helen: The Life and Times of A Bollywood H-Bomb) changed that. These light-hearted literary avatars were pushed aside by the tender
Nobel Laureate Han Kang Declines Celebration Amid Wars in Ukraine and Gaza
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her craft, the South Korean writer Han Kang was immediately faced with her sense of political responsibility. A writer is not an isolated being lost in the island of literature. She is a political being who lives in the midst of the world
Filmmakers Vikramaditya Motwane and Dibakar Banerjee are Playing a Tricky Game of Hide-And-Seek with Their Messages
A subtle film is also a misunderstood film. While speaking to the director Vikramaditya Motwane at a Q&A session after a screening of Indi(r)a’s Emergency—his documentary on Indira Gandhi and the clamping of both freedom and sperm ducts under her and her son Sanjay Gandhi’s forceful thumb between 1975 and
Baba, Bollywood, Bishnoi and Brand Mumbai: How a Politician’s Murder Shook Mumbai’s Power Corridors
In this photograph taken in July 2013, then Congress leader Baba Siddique is flanked by actors Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan at an Iftar party in Mumbai. | Photo Credit: PTI This story has all the elements of a crime thriller. Former Maharashtra minister Baba Siddique (66) was killed
Book Review of 2024 JCB Prize Longlist The Distaste of the Earth
Exotic Landscape (1910), oil on canvas by Henri Rousseau. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s enigmatically titled new book, The Distaste of the Earth, retells a Khasi folktale of star-crossed love. Similar to Funeral Nights (Context, 2021), which offered a documentation of the Khasi people’s traditional stories and cultural practices tied around
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,
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
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