All We Imagine as Light, Malayalam-Hindi film by film FTII alumnus Payal Kapadia, makes history, wins Grand Prix award at Cannes 2024
Director Payal Kapadia poses after she won the Grand Prix for the film All We Imagine as Light during the Closing Ceremony at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 25, 2024. | Photo Credit: LOIC VENANCE Payal Kapadia has scripted history by
Interview with Amal Allana on the biography of her father, theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi
The March 22 launch in New Delhi of the theatre director and art gallery owner Amal Allana’s biography of her father, the multifaceted Ebrahim Alkazi (1925-2020), was unusual in many ways. Allana organised a reading of passages from the biography (titled Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive) in a kind of partial
2024 Women’s Prizes: V.V. Ganeshananthan wins Fiction award for ‘Brotherless Night’; Naomi Klein takes inaugural non-fiction honours for ‘Doppelganger’
The Sri Lankan Tamil-origin author’s novel highlights the “epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war”. American writer V.V. Ganeshananthan won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction on June 13 for her novel Brotherless Night, about a family torn apart by Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its sister award, the
12 years of Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards: Providing a Platform for Young Indian Dancers
Dancers in India’s contemporary dance landscape stretch the field’s meagre resources to grand ends, working alone and together, juggling any available space, time, and funding to sustain their practice. Any emergency throws their carefully wrought budgets and lives into chaos. In 2017, the dancer and choreographer Diya Naidu found herself
Saikat Majumdar: ‘The scariest thing is the chance to live by your own convictions’
aikat Majumdar is one of the most talked about writers in India today. The author of critically acclaimed novels such as Silver Fish, The Firebird, The Scent of God, and The Middle Finger as well as important non-fiction works like College: Pathways of Possibility and Prose of the World, Majumdar
Tribute | Ismail Kadare (1936-2024): A writer who used metaphor and irony to reveal nature of tyranny
Novelist Ismail Kadare, who has died aged 88, used his pen as a stealth weapon to survive Albania’s paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha. His sophisticated storytelling—often likened to that of George Orwell or Franz Kafka—used metaphor and irony to reveal the nature of tyranny under Hoxha, who ruled Albania from
Francis Newton Souza Went Against all the Aesthetic Norms of His Day to Paint Poverty, Religion, and Sexuality
The artist Keren Souza Kohn, daughter of the legendary artist Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), narrated an anecdote her father had once shared with her at his New York apartment. It was about his days in his home State, Goa, where he would often sketch outdoors and small crowds of onlookers
Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg: The Revolutionary Missionary Who Fought Caste Discrimination in Tamil Nadu
In the latest Assembly session, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin unveiled plans for a memorial hall in Tharangambadi (formerly Tranquebar) to honour Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, the founder of the Protestant mission in India. This memorial will celebrate his remarkable contributions to Tamil literature, ensuring his legacy endures for generations to
Rediscovered 1956 Buddhist Monk Diary Reveals Insights on Post-Independence India
On March 29, 1956, 27-year-old Bandara Manatunga left his hometown of Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka and embarked on a singular expedition to India. His destination was Nalanda, where he would be ordained as a “temporary” monk in the Buddhist monastery there. During his two-month stay in India, Manatunga maintained
Gandhi Ashram in Bihar’s Khoraitha, Which Played Pivotal Role in Independence Movement Lies in Shambles
At the height of the Independence struggle in 1920, a group of young freedom fighters from Bikram, in erstwhile Bihar, were training in arms and ammunition on an island in the Sone River in Dullahpur village in preparation for a secret mission. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, in 1919,