We used to play a game called Madlibs Bollywood titles. Randomly mixing words like main, kash, dil, pyaar, hota (I, if only, heart, love, were) would usually yield a real Hindi film name, with all the imagination of late Microsoft branding: Microsoft Toothbrush, Microsoft Visual Washing Machine, Microsoft Enterprise Kitchen Sink.
Now Love Story 2050 takes […]
I’ve been carrying on about Ekta’s Mahabharata, but the other day I came across a show titled Draupadi, on Sahara One. Saw just 15-20 minutes of the episode (think it was a one-hour slot) and though it looked quite dreadful in many ways – with th…
[This is a quick impression of the first 100 pages, not a review.]
Bloodletting & Miracle Cures by Vincent Lam won Canada’s Giller Prize and has a nice blurb by Margaret Atwood. But it’s actually a poor man’s ER, medical drama written in simplistic, down-at-the-heels prose. One interesting bit concerns cadaver dissection, when female med student […]
Researcher Neeraj Kumar of Columbia has developed automatic face swapping software
The Wackness begins with great promise, fly girls bouncing through an empty subway car Salt ‘n Pepa style in short shorts, the soundtrack crankin’ music from one of the golden ages of hip-hop. It’s summer of ‘94. Shapiro (Josh Peck) just graduated from high school with 99 problems (and a bitch is one). But in […]
Nearly half the writers on the Booker Prize longlist this year have desi connections.
Adiga
Newcomers Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) and Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and veteran novelists Joseph O’Neill (cricket novel Netherland), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies + more) and Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence) all made this year’s […]
Here’s the trailer for I Can’t Think Straight, with its fumbly yet potentially iconic scenes of Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth getting it on. But it’s actually director Shamim Sarif’s second cross-cultural lesbian love story starring the same two actresses:
Her first is The World Unseen, a period piece about two women in South Africa during […]
Can’t recall the last time I’ve been so enchanted by the opening-credits sequence of a film as I was while watching Merchant-Ivory’s 1970 feature Bombay Talkie a couple of days ago. As a whole, the film – starring real-life couple Shashi Kapoor…
Am still following Kahaani Ekta ki Mahaabhaarat Ki (earlier posts here, here and here) on and off. Its amusement value has, alas, diminished. Ronit Roy’s performance as Bheeshma briefly threatened to salvage the show, but all those camera swooshes an…
A hearty congratulations to my buddy Amit Varma of India Uncut for landing on the Man Asian longlist for his first novel, My Friend, Sancho. You’ll recall Amit also won the Bastiat Prize for free market journalism and was kind enough to drag me along to the party in New York.
My Friend, Sancho is set […]
Norah Jones plays a synthesizer draped in fancy fabric like a harmonium in this video for ‘What Am I to You,’ a country-infused love song aching with the anomie of individualism:
What am I to you Tell me darling true To me you are the sea Vast as you can be And deep the shade of […]
It’s such a pleasure watching someone grow as a writer. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist was interesting but leaden in places. Transmission had been done better and earlier as Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs. But My Revolutions, Kunzru’s take on the rise of British radicals, is quite good. It’s his Midnight’s Children, a fictional chronicle of a hinge […]
[From my Metro Now column]Being a lit-journalist has its advantages. Among these is the daily receipt of a number of attractive-looking books from a multitude of publishers. Given the 24-hour limit on one’s day, it isn’t humanly possible to read mo…
As a techie, in some things I’m reflexively modernist and philistine. Films from ten years ago look dated to me. I’ve never been a big fan of old-skool films with their melodrama, static acting and lack of visual stim. Actors would stand rooted in one spot and deliver long, weepy soliloquies. Low frame rates made […]