THE VIDEO TEASER for this issue posed the question: What do Deepika Padukone and Guru Dutt have in common? Well, it is something I did not know before Principal Correspondent Pooja Biraia travelled to the place that binds both actors. Let me be a tease and not tell you here. You will find the answer on page 42.
To live in the hearts of those you leave behind is true eternity. One hundred years after his birth, Guru Dutt remains an eternal flame. Hence, this cover to mark the life of that troubled genius who was far ahead of his time.
Dutt’s only surviving sibling, 87-year-old Devi, spoke to Pooja in what he calls his only in-depth interview about his elder brother. Among other things, Devi remembers Dutt as a “colourful live wire” who preferred monotones in clothing. Guest columns by cinematographer Sudeep Chatterjee and Ira Bhaskar, retired professor of cinema studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, complete the package.
Guru Dutt
I have always wondered about geniuses who die young and what life would have kept in store for them. I am always left with that existential question: Would they have been as adulated if their lives had run their full course? Obviously, there is no satisfactory answer to that, and it adds another layer to their mystique.
Another big article in this issue is by Resident Editor R. Prasannan on two ‘Kalam boys’ who saw their babies in action during Operation Sindoor. Missile men Sivathanu Pillai and R. Prahlada defended the BrahMos and Akash missiles like their own children, says Prasannan. And, call it karma that both were alive when their missiles were fired in anger for the first time, and successfully so.
Speaking of missiles and war, senior journalist Rajeev Bhattacharyya sounds the alarm over ‘water bombs’ that China is building upriver from Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. The dams are in Zayul (or Zayu) county in the Nyingchi prefecture of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, bordering India and Myanmar, he writes. Tapir Gao, who represents Arunachal East in Parliament, has added his voice to the alarm.
On geopolitics, Ambassador Iraj Elahi, who represents the Islamic Republic of Iran in India, has written a guest piece explaining his country’s viewpoint in the conflict with Israel and the United States of America. “A military assault by a non-NPT member state possessing nuclear weapons against an NPT-compliant state—whose peaceful nuclear programme is under constant IAEA supervision—is a grave blow to the non-proliferation regime,” Elahi writes.
Returning to the cover, I realised that Ira Bhaskar’s guest piece in this issue places her family in a unique position regarding THE WEEK. The Bhaskars are the only family, to my memory, where both parents and a child have had bylines in the magazine. Bhaskar joins her husband, defence commentator Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar (retd), and daughter, the actor and our former columnist Swara Bhasker.
I think I have said this here once before that there is one father-daughter pair who were part of THE WEEK team—Tapash Ganguly, our former senior special correspondent in Kolkata, and his daughter, Haimanti. If I were to think of couples with bylines, I should be able to find more, including two sets who shared space at home and on THE WEEK’s masthead.