Leisure

ai-vs-artistry-how-hollywood-is-in-a-dilemma-over-future-of-filmmaking

Sat Mar 28 17:05:01 IST 2026

One of the most pivotal scenes in All The President’s Men unfolds in a dim underground parking space. Bob Woodward, a Washington Post reporter investigating the Watergate scandal, has come to meet his secret source—an influential FBI official known only as Deep Throat. Woodward is frustrated, chasing leads he cannot yet weave into a coherent story.

In the shadows, where words must be whispered because truth can be dangerous, Woodward confesses his desperation. He asks for something more concrete, promising not to quote Deep Throat—even anonymously. “The story is dry,” he says. The fragments he has are not enough.

Deep Throat offers two pieces of advice. First: stop assuming the White House is staffed by brilliant minds. “The truth is, these are not very bright guys,” he says. “And things got out of hand.” Then comes the line more famous than the film itself: “Follow the money.”

All The President’s Men was released in 1976, less than two years after Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Post exposés. Directed by Alan J. Pakula from a William Goldman screenplay, it was a commercial and critical triumph—winning four Oscars and cementing its place as a landmark of the New Hollywood era. In the 50 years since, “follow the money” has become cultural shorthand for a guiding principle: to uncover truth, look beyond personalities and events and trace the movement of money itself. Where it comes from, and where it goes.

That principle might well have resonated with anyone watching the Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 15. The ceremony, though celebratory, underscored grim realities.

“I am honoured to be the last human host of the Academy Awards,” comedian Conan O’Brien quipped at the opening. “Next year, it’s going to be Waymo in a tux.” Waymo is the AI company that operates driverless taxis across parts of Los Angeles, including Hollywood. The joke landed because it tapped into something real.

In the months leading up to the Oscars, anxiety had been mounting about AI’s expanding role in filmmaking. The technology is already reshaping visual effects, sound design, animation and concept art. Tools like Runway and Midjourney can generate storyboards, de-age actors, fill backgrounds, and automate colour grading—and, crucially, reduce crew sizes and production costs.

That anxiety found strong expression when Will Arnett—known for voicing the cynical, alcoholic horse in BoJack Horseman—took the stage to present Best Animated Feature. “Tonight we are celebrating people, not AI,” he said. “Because animation is more than a prompt; it’s an art form and needs to be protected.”

The resistance was even sharper offstage. Director Guillermo del Toro, whose Frankenstein received nine nominations, said he would “rather die” than use generative AI in his films. Frankenstein, he said, was a celebration of handmade creation, with human artistry shining on “every single frame”.

The unease had intensified weeks earlier when an AI-generated video of a hyper-realistic rooftop fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt went viral. Created by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson using a model called Seedance 2.0, the clip rivalled Hollywood productions in motion, choreography and camera work. Robinson reportedly generated it from a two-line prompt.

The backlash was swift, with alarms raised over the unauthorised use of actors’ likenesses. The labour union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) condemned it as “unacceptable”, saying tools like Seedance 2.0 “undercut the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood”.

Days after the Oscars, Congresswoman Laura Friedman noted that her Los Angeles County constituency had lost around 42,000 film and television jobs between 2022 and 2024, with working-class crew members losing an estimated 45 million work hours.

Whether governments will act remains uncertain. For now, Hollywood finds itself not unlike Woodward in that parking space—frustrated, overwhelmed, chasing leads. Filmmakers are cautiously experimenting; studios are integrating AI to cut costs; actors are attempting to legally protect their likenesses; and technicians are racing to acquire new skills. But a coherent view of the future remains elusive. Everyone has fragments; no one has the full story.

Which is why Deep Throat’s advice feels newly relevant: follow the money.

Waymo offers an illustrative case. It began as a Google project called Chauffeur. In 2014, after years of limited progress, Google overhauled its neural network architecture to train AI models by making the shift from standard computers chips to GPUs—faster, more efficient and considerably more expensive. As the New York Times technology correspondent Cade Metz reported, Google purchased an initial batch of 40,000 GPUs for $130 million. Within a month, Metz wrote, “all 40,000 of them were running round the clock, training neural network after neural network after neural network”. Google rebranded Chauffeur as Waymo in 2016 and spun it off as an independent company. Four years later, it became the first in the world to offer driverless taxi services. Today, it provides 4,50,000 rides per week; tomorrow, as O’Brien noted, it could be “Waymo in a tux” hosting the Oscars.

Nvidia, which sold those GPUs to Google in 2014, has built a pervasive but largely invisible presence in Hollywood. For more than 15 years, every film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects has used Nvidia-powered server farms and technologies. The company has also been actively championing AI in filmmaking—most recently sponsoring the India AI Film Festival at Qutb Minar in New Delhi in February.

The studios themselves are betting heavily on AI, many with deep financial ties to the companies driving it. Paramount, one of Hollywood’s Big Five, is controlled by David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison owns Oracle and is a close ally of President Donald Trump. When Trump pressured ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations, it was Larry Ellison who acquired a significant stake. He also extended a substantial loan to his son to buy Paramount, which is now in talks to acquire Warner Bros.

This year’s Oscars proved a crowning moment for Warner Bros. Its 11 films earned more than 30 nominations—an all-time record. The two films that dominated the night—One Battle After Another and Sinners—were both Warner productions, and both were as ferociously political as All The President’s Men was. One Battle After Another offered a searing indictment of anti-immigrant politics; Sinners used a vampire story as an unexpectedly powerful parable about technologies that enter the bloodstream—and the humans who consent to let them in.

Yet, the flow of money—spent on technology used to cut costs, which drives further investment in technology—has Hollywood entering genuinely uncharted territory. “There was no mistaking the faintly elegiac cloud that hung over this year’s Oscars,” noted one review, “the sense of a ceremony, and of an entire industry, unable to stop memorialising itself.”

These upheavals unfold against the backdrop of what may be the largest wave of media consolidation in US history. In the 1980s, 50 companies controlled 90 per cent of the American media market. That number is now five. Last week, a Trump-backed deal to create a TV network reaching 80 per cent of US households was cleared by regulators—with authorities agreeing to waive a rule capping household reach at 39 per cent. The deal first drew wide attention last year when the network, Nextra, blocked a broadcast of Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show.

This year, Kimmel appeared at the Oscars as a presenter, saluting documentary filmmakers who tell dangerous stories. “Telling a story that could get you killed for telling it is real courage,” he said. “As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I am not at liberty to say which.”

Kimmel, it seems, knows exactly how the money flows.

The situation Hollywood find itself in may not be so different from the world depicted in All The President’s Men. In the film, a fellow journalist tells Woodward about Charles Colson—special counsel to Nixon, and one of the most powerful men in the US. “There is a cartoon on his wall,” the journalist says. “The caption reads: ‘When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’” This year’s Oscars showed Hollywood firmly in that grip.

the-unsung-hero-rao-tula-ram-and-the-battle-of-narnaul

Sat Mar 28 16:57:45 IST 2026

Have you ever driven past the Rao Tula Ram flyover in Delhi, cursed the traffic, and thought nothing more of it? That is reflective of an inherent problem: we preserve names and abandon stories. The Battle of Narnaul, by Kulpreet Yadav and Madhur Rao, is an act of recovery. It tells the story of Rao Tula Ram, king of Rewari, and does so with remarkable power.

The authors bring complementary strengths to the table. Yadav, a former Indian Coast Guard commandant who has previously written about the battles of Rezang La and Haji Pir, brings military precision to the narrative. Troop movements, logistical constraints, and tactical decisions are rendered with clarity rather than jargon. Rao, a historian deeply rooted in the cultures of Ahirwal and Rajasthan, provides the intimacy and local texture that lift the book from dry campaign history.

Tula Ram did not treat his throne as a privilege, but as a responsibility. Rewari was no insignificant place. It was a thriving trade centre, dealing in iron, cereal, pulses, brassware and salt from the Sambhar lake. It was also famous for its glass bangles. It had industry, commerce, and a culture worth protecting. The king understood the value of what he governed, and more important, he understood the threat of losing it. He saw the East India Company’s systematic destruction of India, not just through taxation and military oppression, but also through a calculated dismantling of the country’s culture and identity. It was this outrage that transformed a regional king into a revolutionary.

From the beginning, he despised the foreigners. He watched as the East India Company’s interference dismantled the panchayati system; matters once settled by village elders and community heads were now being overridden by foreign laws. “They drain our wealth, delay justice, and embolden criminals,” he said. As early as the 1850s, he began quietly preparing his forces and building alliances for resistance.

When the flames of 1857 torched the subcontinent, Tula Ram did not wait and watch. He raised a force of 5,000 men, set up a weapons workshop in the fort of Rampura, sent funds and supplies to Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, and when the time came, led one of the fiercest battles of the uprising at Nasibpur, near Narnaul, on November 16, 1857. His first charge against Colonel John Grant Gerrard’s British column was so ferocious that the enemy forces scattered before him.

The book does not limit itself to Tula Ram alone. It introduces a vivid cast of characters on both sides, like John Nicholson, a Company official whose ruthlessness made him formidable. Surviving an Afghan prison and enduring the brutal murder of his brother made him hungry for revenge. He killed a young cook for accidentally crossing his path, beating him to death without remorse. Against this, the book shows the quiet dignity of some sepoys who simply saluted their officers and released themselves from Company service rather than commit violence, a detail that poignantly humanises the revolt.

What makes the story especially compelling, however, is not just what it says, but how it says it. Yadav and Rao made an inspired choice: to write history as a living, breathing narrative. The book pulls the reader into the heat of the battlefield, into the corridors of alliances and betrayals, into the quiet anguish of a king who refused to bow. The research is extensive, with the authors drawing from British military dispatches, intelligence records and historical archives, without the facts ever overwhelming the storytelling.

Shedding his royal identity and disguising himself as a merchant named Gosain, Tula Ram carried his war beyond India’s borders, to Persia, Afghanistan and even the Russian empire, seeking a global coalition against British rule. He died in Kabul in 1863, at the age of 38, without ever seeing his homeland again. History gave him a road. This book gives him back his story.

THE BATTLE OF NARNAUL

By Kulpreet Yadav and Madhur Rao

Published by Penguin

Price Rs499; pages 304

remembering-atal-bihari-vajpayee-a-statesman-loved-across-the-political-spectrum

Sat Mar 28 16:53:27 IST 2026

If Indian politics had a category for ‘widely liked without trying too hard’, Atal Bihari Vajpayee would top it. Vijay Goel’s coffee table book, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: The Eternal Statesman, leans into that image, and the nostalgia largely holds up.

The coffee table book brings together photographs and anecdotes to build a portrait that feels personal without becoming excessive. Goel, vice chairman of Gandhi Samriti and a former minister in the PMO, writes as an insider. He has marked each of Vajpayee’s birthdays with cultural programmes, and that 50-year-old association shapes the tone.

The photographs do much of the work. Mostly in black and white, they suit Vajpayee’s personality. There is no visual excess. The images are restrained and effective, capturing the essence of the former PM’s multifaceted persona.

The book is strongest in its attention to detail and anecdotes, like Vajpayee enrolling for postgraduate study at DAV College, Kanpur, only to find his father studying alongside him, sharing his hostel and classes.

Vajpayee’s arrest during the Quit India Movement of 1942 and his 24-day detention are noted without embellishment. The political journey is familiar, but clearly narrated—his early years in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh under Syama Prasad Mukherjee, his association with Deendayal Upadhyaya, and his gradual rise to leadership after Upadhyaya’s death.

The partnership with L. K. Advani is given due space. Together, they expanded the BJP’s reach. Vajpayee’s remark that he would not have become prime minister without Advani is included, offering balance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long association with the leader is acknowledged in photographs and text. There are also moments from across party lines. His support for Indira Gandhi during the 1971 war with Pakistan is cited as an example of political conduct that is rare today.

Some of the most captivating parts are the smaller anecdotes, like Vajpayee cooking khichdi for J. Jayalalithaa during a dinner in 1999. It is a minor detail, but it reflects the leader’s ability to lower tensions. Another is an account involving former president Pranab Mukherjee. For a time, both were neighbours in Delhi’s Lutyens’ area. Once, Vajpayee was bitten by Mukherjee’s dog during a walk. When Mukherjee enquired about his bandaged hand in Parliament, Vajpayee smilingly replied, “It was your dog who was to blame.”

The section on personal preferences adds texture. Vajpayee liked fish, Chinese food, khichdi and malpua. Favourite haunts ranged from Paranthe Wali Gali to a south Indian restaurant in Delhi. He had a fondness for the music of S.D. Burman, Mukesh and Lata Mangeshkar. Favourite films included Devdas (1955), Bandini (1963), Teesri Kasam (1966), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Born Free (1966), and Gandhi (1982). It builds a picture of a leader who was culturally refined, reflective and introverted at heart—a loner who transformed before crowds.

The oratory, predictably, gets attention—his pauses, his timing and the ability to switch between Hindi and English. The book argues, correctly, that he was as much a listener as a speaker. That part tends to get ignored because speeches are easier to remember than silences.

His years as prime minister are suitably outlined—the 13-day government of 1996, the 1998–1999 term with Pokhran-II, and the 1999–2004 period with infrastructure expansion and diplomatic efforts. There is little critical engagement, which is consistent with the book’s intent. As is the limitation of coffee table books, Goel’s closeness to Vajpayee results in an admiring tone. Even so, its central claim is clear. Vajpayee was a leader who remained acceptable across political divides. Atal Bihari Vajpayee: The Eternal Statesman works as a visual and personal account. It does not aim to be definitive, but offers a curated glimpse of his life and does so effectively.

ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE: THE ETERNAL STATESMAN

By Vijay Goel

Published by Heritage India Foundation

Price Rs4,000; pages 312

meet-house-of-bhaitak-five-artists-bound-by-passion-for-gifts-of-life-nature

Sat Mar 28 18:11:19 IST 2026

What binds five artists together? For Anupama Rajiv, Asha Nair, Prasanth K.P., Aswathy Raveendran and Mayera Suman, it is a shared passion for nature, life and painting. They named their collective the House of Bhaitak. When asked why a Hindi word for a Kochi-based group, Anupama described the feeling it evokes—a relaxed, informal setting where creative passion can breathe. “We thought it would be cool to have the word in our name,” she says. “You are sitting with your friends in a carefree setting, discussing, painting and exchanging ideas. Think of it—it’s so cool.”

HoB has arrived in Hyderabad with five solo exhibitions at the State Gallery of Art, running from March 25 to 29. The titles offer a glimpse into each artist’s thinking: ‘Lives Entwined’ (Anupama), ‘The Fly’ (Mayera), ‘Footprints’ (Asha), ‘Vembanad’ (Prasanth) and ‘Mist and Memory’ (Aswathy).

Anupama explores bonds—among humans, between humans and nature, and within nature. Her subjects are mostly women, portrayed in their raw feminine energy. Women at the Pool shows a group relaxing poolside, one bathing, projecting an intimacy that needs no explanation. The Bark draws you in differently: black ants, ladybugs and moss coexisting on tree bark so harmoniously that calm settles over you just looking at it. Anupama declines to explain her themes. “I don’t premeditate my art,” she says. “I just let it come alive and stop when I feel it’s good.” Her journey reflects the same instinct—she tried pottery and ceramics before settling with the brush.

Mayera’s paintings are deliberately colourful, built on contrast. Her canvases are populated with animals—bulls, chimps, dogs, lion cubs, horses, tigers—each accompanied by bees and flies in flight. The animals respond with cheerfulness, curiosity or nonchalance. The theme, Mayera says, is our tendency to notice small things in life. Whether that is a positive or negative trait, she doesn’t know.

Prasanth’s acrylic works draw from the Vembanad lake—India’s longest, spreading across Alappuzha, Kottayam and Ernakulam. “I chose this theme because I live next to it and carry a lot of childhood memories of it,” he explains. The Green Paddy Field and The Fishing bring the lake’s world to life—the Dheevara fishermen, the Pulaya women catching fish with bare hands, grey-headed swamphens and otters moving through the water.

Asha began her art journey at 18 and brings an intense sensibility to her work. For ‘Footprints’, she turned to kathakali and theyyam—not to celebrate them, but to negotiate their inner life through paint. Chamayam depicts a makeup artist preparing a performer for a show lasting over 12 hours. “The artists would be well-known, but the makeup artists slog their lives to ensure the performance is perfect,” she says. Sacred Grove portrays a mystic assembly of Nagadevathas forming a temple. These groves preserve local ecology—their trees cannot be felled. “Unfortunately, real estate interests are knocking them off,” she adds.

Aswathy immerses herself wholly in nature. The Fallen Tree depicts the micro-habitat a tree’s body creates around itself—trunk swallowed by green growth, drenched in rain, alive with hundreds of worms. The Sacred introduces a mystic Ganesha idol from Nepal. “I was fascinated by the very way the idol looked, so I wanted to bring him alive through my art,” she explains.

The five found each other at the Prussian Blu Art Hub of Suresh T.R. in Ernakulam. “We share the same passion for the gifts of life and nature,” says Anupama. “I think that’s why we get along so happily.”

the-creative-evolution-of-director-krishand-from-graphic-novels-to-genre-bending-cinema

Sat Mar 21 17:37:42 IST 2026

Asuffocating, hyperreal vertical sprawl of tightly stacked skyscrapers defines “Neo Kochi” in the 2040s. Flying police cars slice through a permanent neon haze. Ultra-personalised AI ads resurrect the voices and faces of your dead relatives. Leaked memories circulate in shadowy tech markets—only to return later as grotesque immersive porn. Celebrities endlessly refashion their bodies, each transformation pushing them closer to the Ship of Theseus paradox: after so many alterations, does the original self remain original?

This is the chaotic, unnervingly plausible dystopia filmmaker Krishand conjures in his latest film, Masthishka Maranam: A Frankenbiting of Simon’s Memories—a cyberpunk carnival that is wildly inventive and, beneath all its technological madness, hilariously, disarmingly human.

For those who have followed Krishand’s work—a filmography that includes the genre-bending Aavasavyuham: The Arbit Documentation of An Amphibian Hunt and the visually unconventional Purusha Pretham—Masthishka Maranam feels like a natural continuation. Yet, as his first wide theatrical release, the film has also drawn sharper attention, bringing with it both immense admiration and biting backlash.

“The people who liked it really loved it,” he said. “But I received ample hate too. Those who didn’t like the film were angry at me.”

A conversation with a friend helped him contextualise that response. She mentioned a record-breaking blockbuster and asked if he connected with it. He didn’t—he said he hated it. “That’s when she told me to look at cinema as a spectrum,” he recalled. “You are on one side and they are on the other. That’s okay.”

The thought stayed with him. Every kind of film, he said, finds its own audience—and its own detractors. Cinema is wide enough to hold many sensibilities. “We can’t stand here claiming we are the only intelligent ones and everyone else is wrong,” he said.

Krishand’s journey into filmmaking, he said, began with a childhood habit: sketching: “I grew up on graphic novels. Near my school there was a shop that sold old comics—old DC Superman and things like that.”

Alongside a friend who wrote the text, he began creating graphic-style stories: “Sequential storytelling felt very innate to me. It was almost like a primal skill—drawing and telling a story, with the book moving forward frame by frame.”

The connection to cinema came later. “Films work in a similar way—you just don’t have to draw everything. I realised that around the time I was in tenth standard.”

Years later, at the IDC School of Design at IIT Bombay, he still saw himself at a crossroads: filmmaker or comic-book artist. At the time, he leaned more towards comics. His early experiments featured Tintin-like characters and, after watching Jurassic Park, even a dinosaur hunter. As he grew older, the worlds he imagined darkened, often drifting into the post-apocalyptic terrain. “But since I am Malayali, there was always a certain Malayali flavour in those stories,” he said.

That instinct sharpened after he showed one his works—a graphic novel about the end of the world that, he admitted, was partly a rip-off of I Am Legend—to a faculty member. “He told me, ‘You keep making these end-of-the-world stories, but you come from a rich cultural place—you have Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and so many other writers. Why are you still copying the movies you have seen?”

The remark nudged him toward Malayalam literature. He began reading Basheer and M.T. Vasudevan Nair more deeply. Around the same time, filmmaking started pulling him in, and the visual instincts he had developed from comics translated naturally into storyboarding.

The comic-book sensibility remains visible in his films. Even as he explores globally resonant themes—ecological fragility in Aavasavyuham, or voyeurism and objectification in Masthishka Maranam—his work stays rooted in a distinctly Malayali cultural landscape.

But these explorations often lead him to an important paradoxical question: can cinema critique objectification without participating in it?

“It’s a very important question,” he said. “In war films, if you show war, you are already dealing with that paradox.” He cited François Truffaut’s famous observation that every anti-war film eventually becomes a war film.

That paradox shaped his approach to Sangharsha Ghadana: The Art of Warfare. Instead of depicting war directly—with bullets and heroism—he approached it obliquely through a gangster narrative. “We tried to see if you can make a war film without glorifying war itself,” he said.

A similar dilemma arose with item songs. “Can you talk about objectification without showing it?” he asked. One approach, he said, was to present an objectifying image in a B-grade style to provoke a strong reaction from the audience. When an item song from Masthishka Maranam, featuring Rajisha Vijayan, was released before the film, it triggered exactly that reaction.

“Even if a small section of viewers watches the full film, they might understand why we created that discomfort,” he said. “Others may remain angry. Both reactions serve a purpose.”

The challenge, he added, lies in the age of fragments—where provocative clips circulate without context, a phenomenon his film itself grapples with.

Beyond directing, Krishand has also worked as cinematographer, editor and producer. In Purusha Pretham, his use of negative space—the empty or unoccupied space surrounding and between the subjects in a frame—creates striking effects, while Masthishka Maranam carries an editing rhythm reminiscent of comic panels. Taking on multiple roles, he said, is partly practical. Translating what exists in his mind to someone else can feel like doubling the mental effort.

In his early years, Krishand largely self-funded his films—a limitation that restricted resources but also enabled creative freedom. After Aavasavyuham, his work began attracting producers. For Masthishka Maranam, Ajith Vinayaka Films mounted an extensive promotional campaign. Still, many producers found his projects “tricky”, given his experimental storytelling. That same trickiness has so far delayed some rumoured mega-projects with Malayalam superstars.

Across his films, one detail remains constant: the long, quirky titles that even a Malayali might struggle to grasp at first glance. Fittingly, his own name, Krishand, is just as unusual.

“My grandmother gave me that name,” he said. “She had heard names like Krishnakant or Krishnanand somewhere and suggested, ‘Krishand would be a good name.’ My father finalised it. No one else seemed to have it. There’s something a bit crazy about that.”

Once, when he was in college, he asked his father about its meaning. He replied that it didn’t really have one. But during a visit to an ISKCON temple, someone offered him an interpretation. “They said Krish could mean ‘darkness’ and ‘anth’ could mean ‘end’—the end of darkness’. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got a new meaning for my name’,” he said.

It feels apt. Krishand’s career, in many ways, is an ongoing search for new meanings—pushing beyond rigid conventions and templates to shine a light on the possibilities on the other side.

literary-reflections-on-lifes-end-julian-barnes-tolstoy-and-the-meaning-of-mortality

Sat Mar 21 17:28:26 IST 2026

When one reads Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011)—about a man revisiting his past after being bequeathed the diary of a school friend who committed suicide—one gets a flash of certainty, as though Barnes was confirming something you had always known. He made you see things you had been looking at all your life without really seeing. By voicing your deepest fears, which you thought were yours alone, he forced you to confront your humanity. When the narrator, Tony, talks about his apprehension that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature, you knew exactly what he meant, because after all, isn’t that your fear also? Was it only in Literature that real, true and important things happened? Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal—did they have meaning outside Literature the way they did inside it? Was there a narrative arc to your life, some point to it, or was it all mere junk to be discarded when you came to the end? In other words, do you really matter in the grand scheme of things?

Fourteen years later, this is a question that Barnes, 78, revisits in his latest novel Departure(s), but with an added sense of urgency because, being diagnosed with blood cancer, he says this is going to be his last book. He likens the diagnosis to life itself—both being “incurable but manageable”. In the book, he writes about two of his friends who dated in university, separated and then came together in a doomed marriage years later. He makes his friends’ relationship, and his own part in it, a meditation on memory, meaning, life and legacy. This is not the same Barnes of The Sense of an Ending. The scathing wit and ability to see the irony in life are still there. But somehow, it’s all a little jaded. It is like cynicism, or something resembling meaninglessness, has tipped the scale for Barnes and taken his Life far beyond the realm of Literature. Life is no longer a grand, sweeping story. It is merely something that happens to you while you are looking the other way. “Neither happiness nor misery are controllable,” he writes. “Joyfulness, pleasure, passionate interest—like their photographic negatives, sadness, grief and boredom—flow over us in waves. We can take precautionary measures, seeking to prolong the former and delay the latter, but these make only a minor difference.”

He says by writing this last book, in a small way, he is taking control of his fate and denying agency to death—an ever-present reality. In one sense, Departure(s) joins a long list of books that look at life through the prism of death. Non-fiction writers like Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture), Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air) and author Mitch Albom (Tuesdays With Morrie) have written on how to live life with joy, purpose and meaning when you come to the end of it. But really, it is the fiction writers who have poked and prodded at death, forcing it to give up its meaning. It is a recurring theme in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, approached philosophically, sentimentally and even humorously. “I do not fear death,” wrote Twain. “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Or take Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. His novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), is an intimate exploration of a man’s final days, and how facing your mortality shifts your perspective. Ivan Ilyich is a high-ranking judge in 19th century Russia. He is comfortably settled, well-respected and at the peak of his career. He has everything going for him, but when he loses his health, he realises that respectability is merely the fancy dress you wear to camouflage the emptiness within. He desperately fights death, scorning the hypocritical sympathy shown to him by his wife and daughter. The only person whose ministrations he welcomes is the butler’s assistant Gerassim, whose genuine compassion is presented as the antithesis to the falseness of his friends and family. In the final reckoning, Tolstoy posits, it is not your wealth or position that lends meaning to life; it is living it authentically, being true to yourself.

Tolstoy wrote the book after his conversion to Christianity in the 1870s, and it shows in the climax, where Ivan, after days of fighting his destiny, finds redemption and a clarity that only comes with death. “‘Where are you, pain?’ Ivan examines himself. He began to watch for it. ‘Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be. And death? Where is it?’ He searched for his former habitual fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death either. In place of death there was light. ‘So that’s what it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’”

While Tolstoy is vague about the nature of this ‘light’ that is there in place of death, some like American musician and author Paul Harding have gone further in examining it. His Pulitzer-winning first novel Tinkers (2009) is about George Washington Crosby, a dying New England clock repairer. Surrounded by family, he starts hallucinating in his final days, his mind wandering to a childhood dominated by his tinker father Howard. As the clock ticks relentlessly toward his death, all the clocks of his past that he has repaired become a metaphor for the universe, to which we are all returned—the clock hands winded to the beginning—upon our death. “For is it not true that our universe is a mechanism consisting of celestial gears, spinning ball bearings, solar furnaces, all cooperating to return man... to that chosen hour we know of from the Bible as Before the Fall?” he writes.

Authors have spilt much ink tracing the contours of death and how it relates to life. For all its pain and pathos, life is still a privilege. As Harding says, “the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world….,” And in the final reckoning, the charm of living might lie in its central paradox: the more we solve its mystery, the more mysterious it becomes.

how-springsteen-u2-are-using-music-to-confront-societal-injustice

Sun Mar 15 14:00:54 IST 2026

Bruce Springsteen’s guitar came alive the night Alex Pretti was killed.

It was a Saturday in January, when officials from the US Department of Homeland Security were executing what the Donald Trump administration called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever conducted”. Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse in Minneapolis, was among the thousands who took to the streets in protest. During a demonstration, two officers deemed Pretti threatening enough to pepper-spray him. Then, they shot him dead.

That night, Springsteen sat down and wrote ‘Streets of Minneapolis’—a furiously passionate song condemning what he called state terror. He dedicated it to innocent immigrants, to the people of the city, and to the memory of Pretti and Renée Good, a 37-year-old writer killed in a similar operation weeks earlier. ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ was released on YouTube, streaming platforms and social media simultaneously. It went viral within hours.

The intensely polarising lyrics had liberals embracing the song and conservatives attacking it. Trump’s former campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who knew the power of a protest song better than most, conceded that the piece was “kind of catchy”, saying, “Bruce is such a blue-collar guy. He is throwing in for the revolution—going on offence, folks!”

Apparently, among those who took the cue, across the Atlantic, were the members of U2.

On Ash Wednesday, February 18—as Trump issued a formal presidential message wishing Americans “a meaningful Lenten season” and Catholic bishops in the US responded by celebrating mass in federal detention centres—the Irish rock band released Days of Ash, a surprise collection of original songs. It addressed not just the killings in Minneapolis, but also Palestinian suffering, the war in Ukraine, and the upheaval in Iran.

Like in the case of Springsteen, nobody saw this musical resistance coming.

U2’s last original material, Songs of Experience, had arrived in 2017, and a full album was expected later this year. But no one had anticipated this EP—an extended play, or half-album—in the interim. “These EP tracks couldn’t wait,” said Bono, U2’s frontman and chief songwriter. “These songs were impatient to be released. They are songs of defiance and dismay, of lament.”

The past decade had not been kind to U2. The group had been drifting toward irrelevance since 2014, when it partnered with Apple to release a fiasco of an album called Songs of Innocence. Apple had made the unusual decision to automatically add the record to the libraries of all iTunes users. This was meant to be a generous gift, but most people saw it as an intrusion that violated their digital privacy. The backlash, swift and vicious, forced Apple to offer users a removal tool. By that time, fewer than one in ten users had ever pressed play.

U2 survived the fallout. They have since kept themselves busy. Over the past decade, they released reimagined versions of their classics, completed a triumphant world tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree—the album that had made them internationally famous—and held landmark concerts in venues outside Europe and the US, including one in Mumbai in 2019. Bono even wrote a memoir and filmed an Apple TV+ biopic, even as he kept his activist profile alive.

But for all their restless dynamism, U2 badly needed a comeback.

Days of Ash, happily, does half the job—even before the new album is out.

The EP lands on the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation—one of rock’s longest unchanged line-ups—and a full decade since U2 first sounded the alarm about Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Bono had warned that his presidency could hollow out America, eroding the values of equality, justice, and opportunity—turning the country, as he put it, “into a casino”.

“America is like the best idea the world ever came up with,” Bono had said. “But Donald Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America.”

Days of Ash is a six-track collection—five new songs and one poem set to music—offering a direct commentary on the tragedies of the Trump era. The standouts are ‘American Obituary’, a protest anthem and opening track that serves as a both lament and hopeful farewell for Renée Good; ‘The Tears of Things’, a longer, Dylan-esque piece capturing sorrow and resistance against authoritarianism; and ‘Song of the Future’, the EP’s most optimistic entry.

The most politically charged tracks are ‘Wildpeace’, a short interlude in which Nigerian artiste Adeola (of the African ensemble Les Amazons d’Afrique) reads a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; and ‘One Life at a Time’, an introspectively humanist piece referencing figures such Sarina Esmailzadeh, the Iranian teenager who died after being beaten by security forces, and Awdah Hathaleen, the Palestinian activist killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

There are moments in the EP that are cloyingly sentimental—a recurring weakness in U2’s recent work—but the raw earnestness just about holds it all together. The EP also has strong echoes of War, the 1983 album recorded during the Falkland War and the Troubles in Ireland, with hits such as ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘New Year’s Day’ that are still regarded as U2’s most politically charged work.

Some lines offer striking resonance.“America will rise, against the people of the lie,” goes ‘American Obituary’. Bono has said, in the band’s long-running zine Propaganda, that the song’s title was almost ‘People of the Lie’—taken from a book by American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. “The book makes the case that at the very heart of evil, there is the ability to easily lie, and worse, believe our own lies,” Bono says. “At a quantum level, the death of truth is the birth of evil.”

Peck argued that human evil—distinct from its religious conceptions—is manifested in people who attack others instead of facing their own failures. His framework feels like a running commentary on the Trump era. So, too, does Bono’s casino metaphor for the Trump presidency: betting markets have now expanded to encompass wars and global conflicts. Users of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction platform in which the Trump family has invested, recently bet more than $4 million on whether the US and Israel would strike Iran on February 28.

There is a genuine urgency running through Days of Ash that has been missing from U2’s work for years. And, somewhat surprisingly, a near-total absence of overthinking that plagued Bono’s songwriting in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The best of U2 has always emerged from an eager spontaneity bordering on carelessness. A good example: ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, their tribute to Martin Luther King Jr from the 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. “Early morning, April 4/ Shot rings out in the Memphis sky,” sings Bono—except King was shot at 6:01pm local time. Bono has openly acknowledged the error over the years. Days of Ash, even as a minor entry in their sprawling discography, belongs to this unforgettable tradition of fiery imperfection.

What pulls the EP back from greatness is something that critics have long said about U2—they aim to please, sometimes too hard. This quality has made them the biggest band in the world, turning even a misfire like Songs of Experience into the sixth bestselling album in 2017. ‘Yours Eternally’, the closing track of Days of Ash, features the artist who topped the charts that year: Ed Sheeran.

There is a case to be made that Sheeran’s presence here is a shameless concession to commerciality, one that somewhat dims the EP’s impact—but then, U2 has always been U2. “Forget whatever doesn’t fit/ Regret, regret none of it,” go the lines, “Don’t bet on getting rid of me/ Yours eternally.”

Days of Ash may be an Irish stew of a half-album, but it has put U2 firmly back on the map.

from-seashore-to-stage-kr-sunils-lens-on-fading-folk-art

Sat Mar 14 17:13:11 IST 2026

Since childhood, it has been the deepest emotions and the fragile persistence of memory that have driven photo-artist and writer K.R. Sunil. At the heart of Chavittu Nadakam: The Storytellers of the Seashore, his photo-series now on display at the Photo Brussels Festival—a major global celebration of contemporary photography—lies that same fascination: to capture the extraordinary colours of ordinary lives, remembered, performed and preserved against time.

Chavittu nadakam is a vibrant classical folk-art form that emerged within the Latin Catholic coastal communities during Portuguese colonial rule. Today it survives largely through the dalit and fishing communities, many of whom are descendants of those converted to Christianity by colonial-era missionaries. Performers appear in glittering costumes resembling European royal robes, and the narratives often recount legends of the Roman empire’s Christian warrior-kings.

More than a decade ago, Sunil watched a riveting performance by a troupe from Chellanam, a coastal village near Kochi, where the form still retains its early 16th century structure. The performers were fisherfolk and daily-wage labourers. The encounter stayed with him. He began visiting their village repeatedly to watch their rehearsals. Soon he was invited into their homes where he noticed a haunting dissonance: onstage they were kings and courtiers, but off it, they lived in ramshackle, flood-prone homes.

He realised that the real story behind the “kings and nobles” was one of pain, neglect and constant stress. “So, instead of palace backdrops, I photographed them in front their own homes,” Sunil says. The images—royal figures standing before waterlogged walls and crumbling doorways—became Chavittu Nadakam: The Storytellers of the Seashore, a series where performance, memory and survival occupy the same frame.

Sunil, who calls himself an introvert, says it would not have been easy for him to reach out to people and understand their stories if not for photography and art. Born into a communist family in the town of Kodungallur, from a young age he was involved in painting political graffiti and other artwork for the party. “I was taken to places a child my age would never normally go, painting and writing on walls day and night. Through this I encountered ordinary people’s lives very early, and that helped me a lot,” he says.

In college, portraiture became his favourite subject across drawing, sculpture and photography. An encounter with local photo-artist Krishnakumar—a close confidant of the legendary filmmaker G. Aravindan—introduced Sunil to international photography books. “Soon I bought a camera and took up photography,” he says. “The camera allowed me to approach people intimately. They began sharing their life stories. I realised what excited me was not the beauty of images, but human faces and untold stories.”

Sunil takes each photo series seriously. Most of his projects take years to complete as he believes a bond with his subjects is essential. At times, that intimacy has also brought painful experiences. His series Vanishing Life-Worlds was a result of more than three years of close engagement with people in the harbour town of Ponnani. While researching it, he befriended Azeez, a pickpocket who shared many stories with him. They parted with the promise to meet again, but when Sunil returned to Ponnani, Azeez had been murdered.

One of his most acclaimed series, Manchukkar: The Seafarers of Malabar, presents portraits of dhow workers from the Malabar coast, where a distinctive tradition of building wind-dependent urus, or dhows, once thrived. “From shipwrecks and uncertain voyages to life-altering journeys, their stories are nothing short of extraordinary,” Sunil says.

Many dhow labourers began as adolescent boys often taken aboard as cooks. They endured harsh conditions and, at times, cruelty from senior crew members. In his research, Sunil met men who had spent up to 45 years at sea. Cyclonic winds frequently wrecked the vessels and death was a constant presence. He encountered survivors who had drifted for days on broken hulls before being rescued.

One story that stayed with him was narrated by a former sailor, Usman. During a voyage to Mumbai with his three brothers, their boat was caught in a violent storm. As the crew struggled to save the cargo, lightning struck the vessel, killing the youngest brother. The remaining brothers were forced to remain at sea for days with the body, unable to bring it ashore because of maritime regulations.

Sunil’s latest series, Thambu: Tales from the Great Indian Circus, is a similar excavation of fading memories—this time those of Indian circus performers from Thalassery, long regarded as the cradle of the country’s circus tradition.

Beyond his photo-series, Sunil has also published books and co-written the script for the Malayalam blockbuster Thudarum (2025). Yet the medium seems almost incidental. Whether through a camera, a page or a screenplay, he keeps returning to the same terrain: lives lived far from the spotlight. His work gathers voices that history rarely archives—dock workers, folk artistes, sailors, wanderers—and holds them still for a moment before they disappear into the anonymous flow of time.

what-happens-to-your-social-media-accounts-after-death

Sat Mar 14 17:07:53 IST 2026

Howard Hughes died aboard a private jet, somewhere between Acapulco and Houston in April 1976. The billionaire industrialist (who was also a filmmaker and aviator) had spent his final years as a drug-addled ghost, his windows sealed with black tape against a world he no longer trusted. He died without a will.

What followed was a spectacular legal circus. Some forty people crawled out of the woodwork claiming to be his heirs. A gas station attendant from Utah produced a handwritten will (of course forged). States fought over jurisdiction. Lawyers grew rich. Hughes’s $2.5 billion fortune sat in legal limbo for years before courts finally distributed it among distant relatives and his medical institute. The richest man of his time could not be bothered to write down what should happen to his things when he left.

Hughes’s chaos was born of physical neglect—no signed paper, no named heir. But consider what his predicament would look like today, when most of us carry not just bank accounts and property, but entire digital lives: thousands of photographs, years of videos, monetised YouTube channels, verified social media accounts, loyal followings. We are all, in our own modest ways, building estates we never think to bequeath.

Major platforms have all their own answer to the question of what becomes of you, but none of them is particularly satisfying.

Facebook offers something called a ‘Legacy Contact’—a nominee to manage a memorialised version of your account after you die. The nominee can pin a tribute post, respond to friend requests and update profile picture. She cannot read your private messages, remove you from friendships you had in life, or access your data. Facebook will also delete your account entirely if that is what you have instructed in advance through its Memorialisation Settings. Without any instruction, your profile quietly becomes a memorial, frozen in time.

Instagram, also owned by Meta, follows a similar path. A verified family member can request memorialisation or removal. There is no legacy contact feature as robust as Facebook’s. Your grid of photographs stays up, but the account goes dark—no new stories, no activity.

YouTube is where things get financially interesting. In terms of access, Google—YouTube’s parent—allows family members to request account closure or the downloading of content through a process called Inactive Account Manager, which you can set up in advance. Google will close an account deemed inactive for a certain period, though it will notify your chosen contacts first. You can even pre-write a farewell email to be sent after your death. It is both thoughtful and quietly morbid.

X has a rather blunt policy: family members can request deactivation of a deceased person’s account, but there is no memorialisation. No tribute mode, no legacy contact. You either remain active on the timeline in frozen form, or you disappear.

Things get genuinely complicated when it comes to monetised accounts, and this is where most families are caught completely off guard.

A successful YouTuber earning revenue through Google’s Partner Programme does not actually own a transferable business in the traditional sense. The contract with Google is personal—it is tied to the individual. When that person dies, the revenue stream doesn’t automatically get passed on to their spouse or children. Google will typically freeze the account upon notification of death and may eventually close it. Getting the accumulated balance paid out requires navigating a process that Google handles on a case-by-case basis, usually requiring legal documentation like a death certificate and proof of next-of-kin.

For Instagram and Facebook creators earning through brand partnerships or Meta’s monetisation programmes, the situation is similarly murky. The contracts with brands are usually personal agreements. Unless there’s a clause addressing death— and most don’t—those revenue streams simply stop. The content remains, the followers remain, but the money stops flowing.

There is no platform today that has a standardised system for transferring creator revenue to an estate. What families are left with is a tangle of legal correspondence, account verification hurdles and platform support tickets.

The sensible solution is to include your digital assets in your will. Document your usernames, platforms, monetisation accounts and the instructions for each. Appoint a digital executor. Some forward-thinking jurisdictions have begun to formalise this in law, but India, where over 700 million people are online, has not quite caught up.

India does not have a specific law governing digital assets after death. The Information Technology Act of 2000, even with its 2008 amendments, does not address posthumous digital rights in any meaningful way. The Indian Succession Act of 1925 governs inheritance of property, but courts have not clearly established whether a social media account, a monetised YouTube channel, or a Gmail inbox counts as ‘property’ in the legal sense.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, India’s new data privacy framework, is focused primarily on how companies collect and process data of living users. It does not contain provisions specifically governing what happens to personal data after the account holder’s death.

In practice, this means that Indian families have almost no legal leverage when dealing with foreign platforms after a loved one’s death. If YouTube refuses to release a deceased creator’s earnings, there is no specific Indian statute to compel them. If a family wants access to a deceased person’s Gmail account to find important documents, they are at the mercy of Google’s own internal policy, which is governed by American law.

Law reformers and digital rights advocates have been calling for India to develop a digital assets succession framework—something that would give digital property the same legal standing as a house or a savings account. As of now, that legislation does not exist.

The future, interestingly, seems stranger than the present.

In December 2025, Meta was granted US Patent 12513102B2. Filed back in 2023, it lists the company’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth as its primary inventor, and describes something that would not feel out of place in a Black Mirror episode. The patent outlines an AI system trained on a user’s historical data—every post, comment, like, voice message and reaction—and capable of simulating that user’s social media presence when they are absent. The filing specifically mentions two scenarios: a long break from the platform, and death.

The AI would not merely preserve the account. It would participate—generating new posts in your voice, responding to comments, sliding into friends’ DMs, and potentially even simulating audio and video calls. It would reconstruct your digital persona and keep the conversation going, indefinitely, on your behalf.

Though patents are often filed to protect ideas that may never become products, this one’s existence tells a story regardless of whether the product ever ships. Platforms have an enormous financial incentive to keep popular, high-engagement accounts active. A deceased influencer with a million followers represents real advertising value.

The ethical questions are significant enough to keep philosophers busy for years. Who consents to this—the user, who is dead and cannot update his preferences? The family, who may disagree with what the AI posts in their loved one’s name? Researchers at the University of Cambridge have warned that such “grief tech” could cause genuine psychological harm—imagine a child being messaged by an AI version of their dead parent, or a widow receiving a birthday greeting from an account her husband no longer controls.

Howard Hughes left no will and created years of legal chaos. Most of us will leave no digital will and create a quieter, more personal kind of chaos—passwords nobody knows, accounts nobody can access, revenue nobody can claim and photographs floating in servers nobody can reach.

fashion-as-activism-how-prabal-gurung-champions-diversity-and-inclusion

Sat Mar 07 17:08:35 IST 2026

At a business meeting, Nepalese-American fashion designer Prabal Gurung was asked how he could define American fashion when he did not look American. His answer was his collection titled ‘Who gets to be American?’ at the New York Fashion Week 2019. He sent models down the runway in red, white and blue tie-dye dresses. It was a bold political statement that questioned when finally he could lose his outsider status. Many, however, were not surprised. After all, this was the designer who made his models wear statement shirts with slogans like ‘I am an immigrant’, ‘Girls just want to have fundamental rights’, ‘We will not be silenced’, and ‘Our bodies, our choices, our power’. He had always been outspoken about sexism and racism in the country, and had once collaborated with Lane Bryant, a plus-size retailer.

There was also his commitment to diversity. At one Met Gala, Anna Wintour, then editor-in-chief of Vogue, invited him to host and dress a table that reflected his ethos. One of the first Asian fashion designers to get the opportunity, he went beyond the expected Hollywood celebrities to invite the likes of Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh, Indian-American actor and producer Mindy Kaling, Cuban-born American singer and actor Camila Cabello and Alaskan model Quannah Chasinghorse. “Together we checked many boxes: Asian, black, Latinx, and indigenous, each woman undeniably chic and powerful, a dazzling array of skin tones and experiences that proved my decades-in-the-making hypothesis: Everything is better in colour,” writes Gurung in his memoir Walk Like a Girl.

It took a long time—years of bullying, and facing racist and sexist slurs—for him to get to this place of power and privilege. “For most of my childhood ‘walk like a girl’ was not advice,” he tells THE WEEK. “It was ridicule. It was correction. It was a warning that I was not performing masculinity properly. For years, I tried to adjust myself. I tried to take up space differently. To deepen my voice. To harden my gestures. But no matter how much I tried, something in me resisted that erasure.” The book is more than a memoir; it is an exploration of identity, vulnerability and resilience. The struggles he faced as a queer person in conservative societies coupled with the racism and elitism of New York’s fashion circles are dominant themes. “Exclusion sharpens your sensitivity and also teaches you resilience,” he says. “When you are made to feel wrong simply for existing, you are forced to build an inner foundation that does not depend on applause. You survive by discovering your own worth before the world confirms it.”

Gurung was born in Singapore, where his father served in the Singapore Police. At the age of four, the family shifted to Nepal. In the book, he relates how his father used to physically abuse his mother. It was his mother, however, who was his staunchest support. She let him wear her lipstick and try on his sister’s ruffled dresses. “She raised me in a society that did not always know what to do with a child like me,” says Gurung. “And yet she never tried to shrink me. She taught me that dignity is not dependent on approval.”

He moved to New York in 2000 to study at the Parsons School of Design. After interning for Donna Karan while at Parsons, he worked as design director at Bill Blass for five years, but lost his job during the 2008 recession. As Bill Blass wound down its operations, Gurung used its discarded fabric to design his first collection, which he debuted at the 2009 New York Fashion Week. He wasn’t expecting overnight success, but that’s what he got when a red silk dress he had designed got featured on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Celebrities started knocking on his door in droves, starting with actors Demi Moore and Rachel Weisz. Today he has dressed the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Kate Middleton, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kamala Harris. “I don’t dress women to look beautiful; they already are,” he once said. “I try to bring out their innate strength and grace.” The women, it seems, would agree. “He can be very exuberant and loves all the glitzy stuff,” television host and model Padma Lakshmi said. “But he is also a deep person. He contains multitudes.”

Gurung’s story is filled with the complexities of being an outsider and finding his place within the global fashion industry. The narrative is intensely personal and raw, capturing moments of triumph and heartbreak with unflinching honesty. It was not easy to write it, he says. Putting these truths on paper felt more vulnerable than sending a political message down a runway. “There is nowhere to hide on the page,” he says. “When you describe trauma, loneliness or shame, you are not speaking as a designer. You are speaking as a child. As a son. There were nights I questioned whether I should soften certain memories. Whether I should protect myself. But then I asked a harder question: if I do not tell the truth, who benefits from my silence? Vulnerability felt terrifying. But it also felt honest. My sister Kumudini became my guiding light. She encouraged me to tell my story honestly and with grace, without pretence or posturing.”

In the end, however, writing the book turned out to be an act of healing. “It allowed me to honour the child I once was,” he says. “To say to him, you survived. You were brave. That acknowledgement felt like a release.” Through Walk Like a Girl, Gurung extends an invitation to all those who feel marginalised. His story, at its core, is about embracing one’s vulnerabilities instead of hiding them. The book is not just about Gurung’s life; it is about anyone who has ever had to carve their own path in a world that demands conformity and assimilation.

WALK LIKE A GIRL

By Prabal Gurung

Published by HarperCollins

Price Rs799; pages 320

kayaks-on-the-tawangchu-how-international-paddlers-are-redefining-arunachal

Mon Mar 02 10:33:18 IST 2026

TAWANG

Down the high ridgelines of Tibet into the glacier-carved valleys of Arunachal Pradesh is the remote eastern frontier of Tawang, where the Dalai Lama and his entourage entered India in 1959. They halted for the night at Gorsam Chorten in Zemithang, where villagers gathered to catch a glimpse of the spiritual leader. A 100-foot stupa here has become a point of attraction for visitors.

Today, Tawang is no longer a remote frontier with memories of hoofbeats and foot trails. This became evident recently, when elite paddlers from Europe and across India straddled the icy-blue, snow-fed waters of the Tawangchu river in bright, colourful kayaks—a sight that reflected the sporting transformation of the Himalayas.

From the placid flatwaters of Coesfeld in Germany to the glacier-fed currents of Arunachal Pradesh, the journey of international kayakers like Marisa Kaup has been one of discovery—both personal and professional. “I grew up in a place where we did not have whitewater around—just a few slalom gates on a flat river. That’s where I learnt to paddle,” she says. Now based in Augsburg, Kaup still chases rainfall for natural river runs. “I always have to drive a few hours and it’s dependent on rain,” she says.

In contrast, glacier-fed rivers offer consistency and thrill. “The Tawangchu river wasn’t very hard for me, but the race section is fun. It has some good whitewater upstream,” she says. Kaup’s victory at the recently concluded Tawangchu Tides International Kayaking Championship (TTIKC) has given her confidence to face tougher challenges. She plans to return to India to compete again with Indian paddlers, whose skills are honed in the Tawangchu tides.

French kayaker Benjamin Jacon conveys a sense of awe. A former world and European championship slalom competitor, Jacon has travelled the world chasing whitewater. Though it was his first visit to Tawang, he had earlier experienced the coastal connect at the Malabar river festival in Kerala. “This place is very special, beautiful, far from big cities and close to Bhutan,” Jacon reflects. “It is a real playground for kayakers.”

What made his experience unique was the cultural immersion and local hospitality that forged bonds deeper than the one between paddle and current. “I have so much more now. It is a strong emotional moment for me,” he said, receiving his medal from Kiren Rijiju, Union minister for parliamentary affairs. Rijiju himself stepped into a kayak during the closing ceremony of the technically demanding competition, lending warmth to the proceedings.

The championship also highlighted India’s rising homegrown talent. Shikha Chouhan and Bhumi Baghel from Madhya Pradesh clinched top honours, alongside Elizabeth Vincent from Meghalaya. Shikha, 18, and Bhumi, 20, were training in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh, when they were spotted by Bilquis Mir, chairperson of Indian Kayaking and Canoeing Association. Bilquis mentored them for six years, until they became champions in wild water canoe slalom.

Hailing from Kashmir, Bilquis is a beacon of inspiration for young athletes, especially those from the margins. She began kayaking at the age of six on Dal Lake in 1998, training with a modest canoe club and ageing boats. Through perseverance and international exposure, she rose through the ranks and went on to serve as a jury member at the Paris Olympics 2024—a milestone for Indian women in water sports. A passionate advocate of scouting for grassroots talent, she is now grooming young paddlers from across the country for international competitions.

Support from Pema Khandu, chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh and a sporting enthusiast himself, is making her task easier. Urging the youth to shape a “Viksit Arunachal” by 2047, Khandu recognises that sporting events such as kayaking can boost infrastructure and jobs, and bring a renewed sense of vibrancy to border villages. The championship had made remote villages such as Kharung and Bongleng come alive.

Once the spiritual gateway for the Dalai Lama’s India entry, Tawang has travelled far—thanks to the civil administration’s efforts to improve infrastructure, communication and tourist facilities. The frontier that once symbolised exile is now evolving into a sporting arena for kayakers from across the world.

click-clack-and-heartbeat-the-enduring-romance-of-vintage-typewriters-in-a-digital-age

Sat Feb 21 16:22:16 IST 2026

There was a time when doomscrolling wasn’t a thing. Situationships, breadcrumbing, ghosting—words uncommon even today—had not yet been invented. Love revealed itself through effort. It was measured in patience, in waiting, in words that crossed oceans. Emotions were spilled, sealed and sent.

Letters carried emotions people could never say aloud. They carried hearts willing to wait weeks for a reply. Life was simple, and simply beautiful.

Fragments of that world still survive in some corners. One such corner hides in the bustle of Delhi—a workshop at Nehru Place that smells faintly of dust, oil and memory.

Famous for computers and electronics, Nehru Place is where you go if you need anything that has wires, chips or screens. But among the glow of monitors and the blinking of hardware is a shop proudly generations behind—Rajesh’s typewriters.

An occasional click-clack… ting echoes through the shop. Rajesh Palta guides me into a dim storage room, where the guarded silence feels as if it were protecting secrets from another age. Shafts of light fall through high windows, turning drifting dust into a quiet ballet of gold. The room is crowded with typewriters. As I stand in awe, Rajesh walks straight to a forgotten shape in the corner, draped in a brown cloth. He brushes his fingers across it, and pulls the cloth away. Dust rises—an exhale after decades. When it settles, the curves of a Remington shimmers faintly.

The room feels alive. The machine seems to stretch its iron bones. The carriage sags, the keys resist, the brittle ribbon feels heavy with words it once carried. “Ah,” Rajesh sighs, as he runs a hand along its frame, “this feeling… this is what it’s all about.”

Typewriters have always been part of his life. Rajesh’s grandfather sold Remingtons in Lahore under Universal Typewriter Co. “I’ve been seeing typewriters since pre-school,” he says. “It’s safe to say we have been breathing typewriters.”

After the partition, his father started the business in Bombay from scratch. The machine became more than livelihood for the Palta family—it became their identity.

“Back in the day, Godrej used to make both refrigerators and typewriters,” Rajesh says, laughing softly. “Their technicians used to say, ‘Our giant refrigerators have 270 parts.’ But this tiny typewriter has more than 2,000. That’s how intricate these machines are… and so are the men who repair them.”

He gestures towards his senior technician, bent over a tangled metal skeleton. The man has worked here for 40 years. “That’s the dedication these machines demand,” Rajesh says.

When computers came in the 1990s, Rajesh’s family thought it was the end. “But somehow, we survived,” he says.

Manufacturers across the world gradually stopped making typewriters. Ironically, that was when his fascination deepened. “In the west, typewriters were found not just in offices; people bought them for personal use. Even the US president had one in his room. That culture is finding its way here, too,” Rajesh says.

Today, most of his customers are young—collectors, writers, romantics drawn to the wistful click-clack of keys. “Some come in to restore family typewriters,” he smiles. “Those are my favourites.”

Outside Delhi’s courts, the last manual typists still sit their ground. Once there were over 500. Now fewer than 15 remain. Among them, Balram and Vijay Pal Singh—work neighbours for more than 30 years—still hammer out rent agreements and affidavits on their Remingtons.

Back in his workshop, Rajesh dusts his hands and leans against a shelf.

“Typewriters are the means of survival for a few people,” he says. “But for me, it’s a heartbeat.”

Rajesh hosts workshops and exhibitions, and curates visits to his private museum—a 4,000sqft rooftop overlooking the Lotus Temple. More than 500 typewriters rest here—a wartime German Mercedes, an Urdu typewriter that writes backward, Hindi and Tamil machines, even the world’s largest typewriter. “This room is the summary of my life,” he says.

Somehow, the heartbeat travels beyond his workshop—through people like Vipul and Surbhi.

In Delhi, Vipul Choudhary sits on a wide veranda, hammock swaying gently. On his lap rests an old Brothers typewriter, a handmade sheet resting on its platen.

Each keystroke lands with weight—a pause, a breath, a heartbeat that time once silenced.

In Mumbai, poet Surbhi Dhoot attends small gatherings with her red Brother Deluxe 220, writing poems for strangers on the spot.

“I stumbled onto typewriter poetry,” she says. “It never starts with the poem; it starts with the conversation. Someone sits, we talk, and in those minutes, something real emerges.”

She types:

The garden slows me down,

maybe that’s why the typewriter belongs here.

Each letter lands with weight,

a heartbeat I almost forgot.

The typewriter, like me,

isn’t chasing perfection—just presence.

An effort to save how it felt;

this sun, this wind, this moment that won’t return.

Her fingers glide across keys; ink fixes fleeting conversations.

“In a time of AI and vanishing attention spans,” Surbhi says, “these poems become small anchors; little moments that stay.”

are-your-friends-different-after-having-kids-you-are-not-alone

Thu Feb 26 12:11:55 IST 2026

Some lifestyle coaches will tell you to manifest the life you want by dwelling on it constantly. If you want it desperately, they tell you, the universe will help you get it. Others will tell you to live mindfully by dwelling on what you have today, instead of what you want tomorrow. Enjoy whatever you do and give it your all, they tell you, whether it is chopping vegetables, preparing dinner or reading a book. They encourage you to slice cucumbers with mathematical precision, chew your food 77 times before swallowing and immerse yourself in cosmology if you’re reading a Stephen Hawking book. But sometimes, not all the concentration in the cosmos can prevent you from reading the same sentence in a Hawking book 10 times without anything registering.

Sometimes your mind wanders to the glory days of the past. That usually means your school and college days, when your metabolism hadn’t slowed down to the pace of an art film and you could still pull off a crop top without having to suck your tummy in. We were trim and trendy. We pored over back issues of Seventeen magazine with religious fervour and went to hair salons with Jennifer Aniston cut-outs. We were naive enough to think that if we could style our hair like hers, we could have a life like hers.

And then reality struck in the form of adulthood. All that optimism drizzled away. If earlier, our idea of cool meant edgy concerts and pub-hopping, now it meant reading romance novels in our pyjamas and going to bed at 9pm. Alcohol tolerance took a nose-dive and loud music at dance clubs invariably led to a headache. However, my theory is that the biggest collateral damage of entering your 30s is parenthood. I believe children are your get-into-jail-free card. They give you stretch marks and make you decidedly uncool. You are no longer concerned about the war in Ukraine because you have a war raging in your crib. Practically all your time is spent in drawing the line of control between your child and her screen. How much screen time is too much? Anyone who can scientifically answer that question deserves the Nobel peace prize.

Thankfully, I don’t have children. Not that they have not caused irreparable harm in my life by making my friends who are parents extremely boring. Now, whenever we meet, all they do is exchange notes about kindergarten ratings and bedtime stories. They could write an entire thesis on this strange, mythical creature called ‘Peppa Pig’, who has made my life miserable. If I ever meet this pig, I would not hesitate in turning it into pork vindaloo. Often, you don’t make your children smarter; they just make you less smart.

Sometimes my friends bring their children along for our outings. Unfailingly they ask them, “Do you remember this aunty?” The kids stare at me with no sign of recognition. Since I’m hopeless at baby talk, I try to talk to them as adults, woman-to-woman. When my friend informed me that her daughter had just gone on a fishing trip, I told her about my childhood days fishing in the river behind our home. Within moments, she was bawling for her mother’s iPad. Another time, I tried reading my niece a bedtime story. My cousin thanked me for putting her to sleep so quickly. The verdict is unambiguous: I don’t know how to talk to children. The sad part is, nowadays, neither do I know how to talk to their parents.

how-to-avoid-being-epsteined-5-tips-for-a-spotless-reputation

Sat Feb 21 12:15:16 IST 2026

When faced with temptation, wise men abstain, the rest Epstein. Unfortunately, even if you’ve been abstaining brilliantly and don’t carry a stain (let alone Epstein) on your fair name, you are not in the clear. Just remember that only two million pages of un-redacted files have been released so far and already the floor is piled high with the familiar skeletons. Deepak Chopra, Gates, Clinton, Noam Chomsky, Woody Allen, Mira Nair, Anil Ambani… all laid low. And there are six million pages remaining!

So, what are your chances of emerging unscathed from this Epstein epidemic? Like most of us, you will probably claim you belong to the ‘almost-innocent’ category. But these are difficult times. There are only sex, sorry, six degrees of separation setting you apart from the late sex offender. It is possible that someone you may know may be best friends with someone whose brother-in-law once went to college with you-know-who. Now, there are two alternatives before you. Either say a prayer or two and put your faith in God or take the DIY short-cut to salvation. If you pick ‘option B’, here’s how to go about it:

Stout Denial: If you’ve read Wodehouse, you will know Lord Emsworth’s simple method of side-stepping blame—stout denial. ‘I don’t know Epstein. Never heard of him. The closest I got to Epstein was back in school when I learnt e=mc2.

Contacts Count: If you prefer to be more creative, use Epstein’s own techniques—pretend you have bullet-proof contacts. In New York, action wasn’t taken against Epstein earlier apparently because of his high-voltage connections with Moscow and Israel. An investigating official is quoted as saying that he did not act because ‘it was above his pay grade’. In your case, your network may not be quite so intimidating. Your contacts could peak at the level of your bank manager or a head clerk in the railways or pliant supervisors in the local municipal office. But as Donald Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have. The trick then is to never specify whom exactly you know. The slight hint of mystery adds to your aura.

Philanthropy as alibi: Religious leaders and gurus have many good things to say about philanthropy. They have said it benefits the giver as much as those who receive. But none of them would have imagined the kind of benefits which are conferred upon the giver. When you get down to it, philanthropy is anticipatory bail. If things get rough, the public will hold back a bit when it is known that you are the main sponsor of T-shirts for the local school’s cricket team, scholarships for meritorious students and ceiling fans for the principal’s office and staff room.

Venues with vastu: Take a look at Epstein’s favourite haunts. Private islands with holier-than-thou names like St James, Palm Beach resorts, yachts and a jet which the locals christened ‘Lolita Express’. Such places have vibes that can dismantle your morals. The undulating contours of sand and body can push the best of us over the brink. Stick to safer ground. Choose a modest resort—like the ones on the outskirts of Mumbai. They generally have plastic chairs set around a fountain in the lawn, and serve excellent poha and double-omelette for breakfast. Simple living, sly thinking.

Stick to your 9-to-5 job: Fancy titles and vague duty rosters are ticking time bombs. Be content with your regular job. Quite apart from giving you a pay cheque every month, it delivers you from evil 24x7. What’s the worst thing you can be accused of? You could be caught claiming taxi fare to the branch office when you actually travelled by auto. Or you will be the prime suspect in the case of mackerel being heated in the departmental microwave. These are transgressions you learn to live with.

Finally, it may occur to you that there is another way to avoid trouble. It’s the safest method—sticking always to the straight and the narrow, the prim and proper. Ah, but if Adam hadn’t bitten into the apple in the first place, wouldn’t we all have been a bit bored in Eden?

ai-nation-book-review-a-blueprint-for-india-path-to-ai-power

Sat Feb 21 12:11:29 IST 2026

In 2005, after experiencing India’s IT services hub in Bengaluru first-hand, American commentator Thomas Friedman famously declared in his book The World Is Flat that technology had effectively flattened the world. Former bureaucrat and technologist Ajay Kumar, in his new book AI Nation, challenges this in one of the early chapters, ‘The World Is Not Flat—And AI Is Making It Steeper’. Kumar’s realist worldview is clear when he argues that the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ is widening because of technology, and that a small group of countries and companies is commanding the choke points in this race for techno-supremacy and, in turn, geopolitical dominance.

AI Nation is a carefully thought-out guidebook for policymakers as well as a set of reflections by a techno-realist about how India can maximise the opportunities arising from the churn in the tech sphere.

The book makes crucial observations on how this is to be done. “You cannot break entrenched monopolies by competing on yesterday’s terms. By the time a nation catches up in one technology, the frontier has moved ahead, and the incumbents have consolidated their next advantage,” Kumar observes. He suggests that innovation is no longer a mere strategy; it is the sole lever with disruptive power strong enough to crack “walls of digital concentration”.

Kumar emphasises the critical role of computational power in building India’s AI capabilities. He observes that the country’s compute capacity remains modest compared with that of the US and China, and argues that India should not blindly copy either model. Instead, he proposes a smarter, resource-efficient, fast-follower approach while building what he calls the “Bharat Compute Strategy”. The blueprint for this strategy includes suggestions like leveraging existing large language models (LLMs) to develop AI systems tailored to India’s priorities and utilising available CPU-based computing for model development.

The book presents strong arguments for embedding AI at the core of the country’s cybersecurity architecture. Kumar also addresses the reality and evolution of information warfare, warning that AI is amplifying, automating and even personalising misinformation. The book calls for urgent technological, regulatory and societal counter-measures to protect truth, democratic institutions and global stability.

AI NATION: BHARAT’S PATH TO AI POWER

By Dr Ajay Kumar

Published by Current Books

Price Rs399; pages 232

celebrating-the-many-detours-of-artist-satish-gujral

Sat Feb 14 14:52:21 IST 2026

After a swimming accident on the river Lidder in Kashmir left an eight-year-old Satish Gujral deaf, he was taken to a school for the disabled. He refused to enrol. It was the first of many conventional paths Gujral would later reject. With formal learning difficult, his father handed him a pencil and paper to see if art might be something he could take to. He did, resulting in a legendary career that progressed from painting and sculpture to murals and, eventually, architecture.

Born in Jhelum, now in Pakistan, on December 25, 1925, Gujral would have turned 100 last December (he died in 2020). His centenary is being marked by a major retrospective at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, talks and shows across platforms like the Jaipur Literature Festival and India Art Fair, the reissue of his autobiography, and, most significantly, the opening of the iconic Gujral House in Delhi to the public.

A LIVING STUDIO

The house Gujral built for himself in Lajpat Nagar rejects conventional spatial logic, the shifts in level and structure rendering it a crafted, living form. When he began building it with architect Raj Rewal in the late 1960s, Gujral envisioned it as a living studio. “He wanted to show people how art should be displayed and perceived,” says his son, architect Mohit Gujral. “That required volume and scale.”

The house remained both his residence and studio for the rest of his life. Its rooms were never fixed. “They kept changing according to his moods and needs,” says Mohit. The Gujral House, Mohit says, will be part museum, housing his works, but also “a space with rotating displays and conversations aligned with his beliefs, constantly evolving and speaking to future generations”.

THE PARTITION SERIES

Gujral built the house decades after being forced to leave Pakistan during partition. He witnessed the violence up close, an experience that later found expression in his celebrated partition series. Pained, anguished faces of men and women dominate the series, enlarged as if pressing toward the viewer. They remain among the starkest visual records of the violence of partition. “That became historic because here was an artist who had witnessed a moment of history first-hand,” says Mohit. The paintings also won him a scholarship to Mexico.

OF MURALS AND ARCHITECTURE

Gujral arrived in Mexico in 1952, taking an unconventional route when the Progressives of that time, like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza, gravitated towards London or New York. In Mexico, Gujral trained under the influential radical muralist Diego Rivera and formed a close bond with Frida Kahlo. Like Gujral, Kahlo was disabled early in life after contracting polio at six, and later, a serious accident.

In Mexico, Gujral also met the pioneering American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “He asked Wright why his buildings had no murals,” recalls Mohit. “Wright replied that murals are needed only on dead walls, that art is used to embellish what is otherwise lifeless.”

The exchange stayed with Gujral and later shaped his approach to architecture, a discipline he took up in his 50s in 1977 without any formal training. “His architecture was very sculptural and had no art,” says Mohit. “He would say, ‘My building is my art’.”

BUILDING AS ART

Few artists have experimented as much with style, form and material as Gujral. “He understood materiality and he reacted deeply to what he saw,” says Mohit. “That is why his work kept changing. He had many phases—unlike most artists. He used to say, ‘If I repeat what makes me popular, I will die’.”

That refusal to settle carried him from painting to muralism, and eventually to architecture. The most famous example is the Belgian Embassy in Delhi, where he shed conventional architectural elements. Instead, he worked extensively with exposed brick and incorporated arches, vaults, domes and turret-like forms, giving the building the feel of an old fortress. For his work, Gujral was awarded the Order of the Crown by the Belgian government, becoming the first non-Belgian to receive the honour.

“He preferred materials like brick and stone, and earth tones—those that respond to the Indian climate and are not absorptive and harsh. He always felt that we must create a new Indian style in art and architecture,” says Mohit.

Over a four-decade architectural career, Gujral has designed several buildings, including the Ambedkar Bhavan in Lucknow, Al-Moughtara Farm in Riyadh, the Indira Gandhi Centre for Indian Culture in Mauritius, Goa University, and the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. His art, whether painting, sculpture or architecture, carries a consistent signature—an underlying fluidity.

SOUND AS FORM

A sculpture by Gujral on view at his retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art looks like the inner ear. The motif appears in many of his paintings, too. The palette also noticeably softens. These works were made during the years when Gujral got his hearing back. In 1998, in his early 70s, he underwent a cochlear implant.

“I was like a child learning the world for the first time,” he told a newspaper then.

Yet, he got it removed, two years later. “It was very troublesome: You hear something and try to identify it. And the sounds! If a car door closed a block away I could hear it. A normal person learns to filter sounds; I could not,” he said.

Having produced a rich body of work across mediums, the centenary celebrations are but a fitting tribute to an artist who refused to be boxed into a single category. In a 2016 interview, he lamented, “Delhi hasn’t learnt to respect its artists yet.”

A decade later, has that changed?

“Art is more respected as a commodity,” says Mohit. “People buy it because they see it as an investment opportunity. I’m not so sure if we are deeply sensitive to the subject itself. I wouldn’t restrict it to just Delhi. We also don’t have enough art critics educating on the subject.”

fiction-fantasies-and-full-bleed-heroes

Sat Feb 14 17:45:15 IST 2026

An article recently sent me down a rabbit hole. Titled ‘The Shape of Time’, it argues that our instinct to imagine time as a straight line—the past falling behind us, the future stretching ahead—is a distinctly modern habit of mind. Ancient cultures, by contrast, imagined time as cyclical. The heavens turned above, bringing day and night, spring and summer, joy and sorrow—events both distinct and recurring, like beads on a rosary.

‘The Shape of Time’ is by Emily Thomas, a British professor of philosophy, and was published in Aeon, a web magazine known as much for its thoughtful design as for its stimulating essays on science and culture. On a desktop or iPad, the article opens with what designers call a full-bleed hero—a lavish edge-to-edge image that gives the page a cinematic sweep. The article’s full-bleed hero is a meticulously detailed foldable chart created by a 19th-century Presbyterian minister—a timeline of world history from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its publication.

The chart is not decorative; it represents Thomas’s core argument. It was in the 19th century, she writes, that the linear view of time eclipsed the older, cyclical view. By representing events in a forward-moving line, a timeline not just organises history, but also quietly trains our mind to think of time as progressive and irreversible.

One key reason for this shift, Thomas says, was H.G. Wells. In 1895, Wells published a novel inspired by a radical idea: that time might be the fourth dimension of space. The idea was first proposed by Wells’s contemporary Charles Hinton, who believed that beyond length, breadth and thickness lay dimensions invisible to humans. To help people see time, the fourth dimension, Hinton devised diagrams of what he called four-dimensional cubes. A mathematical genius, he succeeded only in producing images so complex that most people failed to grasp their meaning.

Wells transformed the diagrams into a fascinating story. In The Time Machine, a scientist invents a devise that allows him to travel through time as one might travel through space. Explaining his theory to a group of dinner guests, the anonymous Time Traveller insists that every three-dimensional object must also extend in a fourth direction. A cube cannot exist with only length, breadth and thickness; it must also have duration. “Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” he asks.

So begins The Time Machine, a classic that continues to withstand the test of time. “After Wells, time-travel stories exploded,” Thomas writes, noting how the linear conception of time is now dominant. “Time travel stories run rife,” she writes. “Back to the Future. Groundhog Day. The Time Traveller’s Wife.”

But The Time Machine itself has returned in cycles. Its first visual adaptation appeared as a BBC teleplay in 1949, starring the Australian actor Russell Napier. The first feature-film version came in 1960, with another Australian actor, Rod Taylor, as the Time Traveller.

That film’s most memorable sequence shows the Time Traveller taking his inaugural ride in the machine. A table clock’s hands whirl like fan blades; a candle burns down in seconds; buds burst into bloom. As the machine accelerates, seasons flicker, World War II erupts and ends, mannequins in shop windows go through decades of fashion. The film’s time-lapse photography—groundbreaking for its era—won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects.

When The Time Machine returned again, 42 years later, with the Australian star Guy Pearce playing the Time Traveller, I was old enough to go to the cinema and buy a ticket. I did not grasp then how uncanny his casting was. Pearce’s previous role had been as a man with short-term memory loss in Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan. That character was trapped in a time loop, unable to form new memories. Pearce was now riding the clean, forward arrow of time in The Time Machine—and that, too, under the direction of Simon Wells, the great-grandson of the man who first imagined it all.

Did the line of time bend back on itself, briefly forming a circle, to make that convergence possible?

“Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries, sometimes blurring into one another,” Thomas writes. “Yet in the 19th-century world of frock coats, petticoats and suet puddings, change was afoot.”

That change accelerates in the 2002 film as the Time Traveller hurtles into the future. Mannequins shed and acquire fashions in seconds; the sun streaks across the sky; skyscrapers thrust themselves upward; a colonising spacecraft lands on the moon, as the blue earth continues to hover in space and revolve. In the background plays a remarkable piece of music—Klaus Badelt’s ‘I Don’t Belong Here’—where a grand orchestral swell builds the film’s theme in a circular form. After all, what is music if not time rhythmically captured both in its linear and cyclical modes?

Simon Wells shifts his grandfather’s creation through space as well as time. The Traveller is no longer anonymous; he is Alexander Hartdegen. He is no longer British; he is a professor at Columbia University, New York. He is no longer rooted in the 19th century, but placed in 1903, at the threshold of the 20th.

Hartdegen builds the machine not out of curiosity, but out of grief. A mugger has killed his fiancée, Emma, in 1899. He travels back to intercept the moment of her death and save her. He succeeds only briefly. Emma survives the attack, only to die moments later in an accident. Hartdegen learns that while he can move freely along time’s linear track, he cannot extend Emma’s duration within it. Is it fate, or time’s deeper, cyclical logic, asserting itself?

Leaving Emma behind, Hartdegen becomes a full-bleed hero, sweeping towards the edges of human history. Along the way he pauses in 2030. His home has become part of a futuristic city block. A woman in athletic gear unlocks a bike-share bicycle—a system still considered speculative in 2002. “The Future is Here,” declares an electronic billboard. To watch this scene now is to feel strange, because bike-sharing has long since become ordinary. The future imagined by The Time Machine is already past.

Is time accelerating? If it is, part of the reason would be a scientist who spent decades pursuing a radical idea: that machines can think. His research birthed artificial intelligence, which is now reshaping how humans understand reality and time itself. He is Charles Hinton’s great-grandson: Geoffrey Hinton.

Philosophers, Thomas reminds us, still debate whether the past and future are real, or merely ideas we entertain in the present. Time itself remains unsettled, endlessly redefined by science and stories. Were we to reshape our idea of time, Thomas suggests, we might find reality itself bending into new forms.

Perhaps, we would discover that we are all, in one way or the other, trapped in the machine.

the-decline-of-the-hindu-civilization-lessons-from-the-past-book-review

Sat Feb 14 14:43:03 IST 2026

How did a civilisation with deep cultural continuity and intellectual achievement fail repeatedly to secure itself strategically? This is the question senior bureaucrat Shashi Ranjan Kumar examines in The Decline of the Hindu Civilization: Lessons from the Past. The book offers a balanced, analytical examination of India’s historical vulnerability and highlights ancient India’s intellectual and cultural achievements through comparisons with other civilisations.

Kumar, an IIT Delhi alumnus and 1992-batch Tripura-cadre IAS officer, is now secretary of the Union Public Service Commission. His training is evident in the book’s structured, evidence-driven method, avoiding rhetorical flourish and ideological assertion.

The book reflects a broader trend: authors outside academic history are engaging seriously with India’s past. While not formally trained historians, they approach historical questions with rigour and curiosity, signalling renewed interest in India’s civilisational experience beyond conventional historiography.

The book’s narrative places India within a long history of invasions, beginning with Alexander’s fourth-century BCE campaign. Early invasions, Kumar argues, were destructive but short-lived, as invaders were absorbed after adopting local customs. This pattern broke with eighth-century Arab invasions. For the first time, India encountered a world-view unwilling to assimilate and determined to impose itself, by force if necessary.

The author argues that Bharatvarsha represents civilisational continuity rather than a recent construct.

A central clarification in the book is there was never a time when Hindus did not resist. Resistance took many forms. Conventional warfare was pursued when possible; otherwise, non-conventional means were adopted. There was never psychological acceptance of foreign rule. Survival, however, should not be mistaken for success.

The core argument concerns the absence of sustained strategic thinking. Kumar suggests Hindu society remained inward-looking with limited interest in studying the outside world. While travellers like Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Al Biruni, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta came to observe and document India, India produced few equivalents who systematically studied rival powers, their military methods or political systems.

This inwardness had consequences. Military tactics sometimes remained unchanged for centuries despite defeats. The book highlights continued use of war elephants. At the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BCE, Alexander neutralised King Porus’s elephants using fire and cavalry. Nearly nineteen centuries later, invaders used superior artillery to counter larger forces reliant on elephants.

Geography, potentially advantageous, was often used more effectively by invaders. Rivers like the Jhelum and Indus were crossed by invading armies to achieve surprise. Indian commanders rarely employed such strategies. Planning and adaptation lagged behind courage and numbers. Kumar questions why powerful empires like the Mauryas and Guptas never conceived large defensive structures like the Great Wall of China, built by their Qin dynasty contemporaries. This, he argues, reflects lack of long-term strategic planning.

The book points to gradual neglect of realist statecraft traditions found in texts like the Arthashastra. Concepts of intelligence gathering, deception and strategic flexibility faded. Instead, rigid ethical warfare codes and, at times, excessive reliance on astrology and omens caused debilitating defeats.

By contrast, China and Japan viewed external powers with suspicion, regulated foreign contact and undertook deliberate self-strengthening when faced with western expansion.

The author avoids extending his argument into present-day politics or policy. Yet the implications are difficult to ignore—the narrative invites reflection on how modern India understands strategy, power and its place in the world.

THE DECLINE OF THE HINDU CIVILIZATION: LESSONS FROM THE PAST

By Shashi Ranjan Kumar

Published by Rupa Publications

Pages: 362; price: Rs995

what-the-dwarf-planet-pluto-taught-me-about-humans

Sat Feb 14 11:51:27 IST 2026

I relate, bro,” I thought as I heard the news of Pluto being ‘demoted’ to dwarf planet in 2006. It had not passed one of the three new rules of the International Astronomical Union. Why must these rules be so harsh, I pondered (I was struggling to pass four of my five subjects at the time).

Years later, I discovered World Pluto Day (February 18, which commemorates Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto on that date in 1930). This prompted a check-in on my old fellow underdog. To my chagrin, I learned that Pluto’s demotion apparently hadn’t even been fair.

The IAU’s new criteria for a planet had been: it must orbit the sun, be spherical and “clear the neighbourhood”. It was this third rule—Pluto’s shortcoming—that is said to have lacked nuance. It failed to consider that Pluto shares space with frozen debris of the Kuiper Belt. In fact, it has been suggested that if earth were moved to Pluto’s orbit, our home would lose its planet status; Mother Earth would struggle to clear that neighbourhood.

Several experts were left aghast by the IAU’s imprudence. I read of “stern remarks” by some guy calling the move “scientifically indefensible”. As it turned out, the remarks came from a guy named (Alan) Stern, who was the principal investigator of the New Horizons probe. He argued that by the IAU’s logic, a Chihuahua wouldn’t be a dog because it’s too small to clear the neighbourhood of a Great Dane.

In 2015, New Horizons—a part of NASA’s New Frontiers programme—showed that Pluto is a geologically alive and complex world, shattering the assumption that small, distant bodies are just dead rocks. Pluto had even preserved raw chemical ingredients of the early solar system in a deep-freeze. Moreover, as gatekeeper of the Third Zone of the solar system, Pluto is key to our preparation for potential earth-killers emerging from the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

As all this information washed over me, I realised something: the rush to label things can make us miss details. We classified Pluto before really understanding it—just like we reduce people to job titles or put names on relationships before grasping their true dynamics. We also tag emotions to escape the messy nature of feelings. It could even explain our discomfort with ambiguity, which manifests in the tendency to gossip as well as in the depths of voyeurism.

While the scientific intent of labels is utilitarian, socially, they can lead to identities that confuse and mislead. For instance, in our society a Pluto would be perceived as having failed to make the cut, by our definitions of ‘success’. It would be labelled a loser; the detail that it is a geological marvel (said to be more alive than Mercury and possibly Mars, and more complex than the gas giants and, in some ways, even the ice giants) may never come to light.

So, as we sit here, on the most happening planet in the solar system, trying to fit all we encounter into neat little categories, out there, in the frozen reaches of the Third Zone, Pluto is living its life, blissfully unaware that about six billion kilometres away, a species of opinionated, hairless apes is judging it.

will-streaming-kill-the-big-screen-the-2026-oscar-nominations-hold-the-clues

Sat Feb 07 15:44:45 IST 2026

In January 2025, Netflix acquired a low-budget period piece, Train Dreams, at Sundance Film Festival, the largest marketplace for independent films in the US.

This looked business as usual: Netflix has been picking up Sundance favourites since it bought Mudbound in 2017, which became the platform’s first Oscar-nominated feature. This set a template: Netflix now scouts Sundance every year for films to launch into the awards orbit.

Train Dreams fit the mould. It was based on a novella that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and was written by Greg Kwedar and directed by Clint Bentley. Their previous film, Sing Sing, had just earned three Oscar nods when Train Dreams reached Sundance. Post its premiere, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes described the film as a “gorgeous meditation on America, ably shouldered by one of Joel Edgerton’s very best performances”.

Last month, Netflix’s wager on the film paid off. It secured four Oscar nods: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Original Song.

Train Dreams follows Robert Grainier (Edgerton), an American logger who fells centuries-old trees to lay rail lines. The job of systematically destroying an ancient landscape to deliver modernity’s dreams leaves him with nightmares. After a personal tragedy, Grainier withdraws into solitude and starts questioning the meaning of his existence.

One of the film’s highlights is its naturalistic cinematography. Grainier’s life unfolds in the background of mountain ranges, towering coniferous forests, and wet, unforgiving climate. The epic landscape is rendered with quiet reverence.

One curious choice that cinematographer Adolpho Veloso makes is particularly notable. He sets the aspect ratio (the width-to-height measure of images) at 3:2—a format associated with still photography. “We looked at old photographs of logging from the 1920s,” Veloso said, “and that sparked the idea.” Taller and narrower than traditional widescreen formats, the 3:2 invokes family albums and personal archives—by extension, memory itself. “You find the ratio in old photos,” he said, “or even new photos on your phone.”

But the choice of format ends up exposing the problems in Netflix acquiring Train Dreams. In a theatre, the 3:2 would have been immersive, turning trees into towers, diminishing the men passing beneath them, and allowing images to breathe. But on home screens—televisions, laptops, tablets, phones—the format appears boxed-in. Start streaming the film in a widescreen television, and the black bars on either sides of the frame immediately draw the eye. At least until the viewer adjusts to the format, Veloso’s aesthetic choice risks resembling a technical error.

Why, then, did the filmmakers choose Netflix? Perhaps the deal was a rational compromise. For a film like Train Dreams, Netflix offers financial security—it ensures a theatrical release (even if only for the mandatory ‘seven consecutive days in a theatre’ to qualify for awards), and saves the gamble on ticket sales alone.

The Best Picture nomination for Train Dreams reveals the defining undercurrent of this year’s Oscars—the mounting debate about how films should be seen, and the increasingly complex compromises artistes must make in the face of commercial realities.

Even on the surface, this is an unusual Oscars. The vampire saga Sinners has earned a record 16 nominations, appearing in every category for which it was eligible, including Best Picture. There is at least one non-Hollywood nominee in every category, making this the most international Oscars yet.

But beneath the surface is the still-unfolding battle between competing visions of cinema’s future. In this regard, Sinners provides an interesting contrast to Train Dreams. One of the most expensive films of the year, Sinners is directed and co-produced by Ryan Coogler, who first gained prominence by winning Sundance’s top prize in 2013 for Fruitvale Station. A searing but polarising biographical drama, Fruitvale Station was about the controversial killing of a young black man by a California police officer that led to widespread protests and riots.

Having directed blockbusters such as Creed and Black Panther over the years, Coogler is now both a commercial force and a culturally influential filmmaker. He had cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shoot Sinners in two distinct aspect ratios: the ultra-wide 2.76:1 associated with epics like Ben-Hur, and the towering, nearly square 1.43:1 IMAX format. During key moments, the wider frame expands vertically, intensifying the visual impact. Arkapaw has done it so well that she has earned a historic Oscar nomination—the first woman of colour to be recognised in the category.

Unlike in Train Dreams, the format gamble does no disservice to Sinners. For one, viewers in ordinary theatres or on streaming platforms cannot experience the full aspect-ratio shift, because the taller IMAX sequences are cropped horizontally. The visual expansion is reduced, of course, but so is the risk of non-IMAX viewers taking it for a glitch. Sinners is also anything but meditative. Bursting with colour and energy, it is full of visual pyrotechnics. The film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan, the star of Fruitvale Station) who open a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi, only to encounter supernatural forces. To pull off the scenes where the twins interact, Coogler deploys split screens, complex choreography and effects-heavy set pieces. The format shift is just one of the film’s many big swings.

Before the film released last April, Coogler shot a 10-minute explainer about aspect ratios. He says the ideal way to watch the film is in a theatre—preferably on the largest possible screen, which would be a “true 70mm” IMAX theatre, capable of projecting the full 1.43:1 frame. “I still believe in the communal experience of going to the movies,” he says.

The problem was that Sinners was exhibited “the way it was intended” in just 10 theatres, all in North America and Europe. Worldwide, there are just about 30 “true 70mm” IMAX screens, mainly because the projection system is ultra-expensive to install and maintain, resulting in ticket prices that deter mass audiences.

Also, very few films are made for the format; the only true 70mm IMAX film this year is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. When the Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, housing the only such screen in India, wanted to purchase the reel of Nolan’s Interstellar a few years ago, it encountered an unusual problem: IMAX asked for a fee to check availability.

It seems getting movies to theatres is becoming harder by the year. According to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, filmmakers wanting to make movies “for movie theatres, for the communal experience” were clinging to an “outdated concept”. The rise of streaming, he said, had the audiences delivering Hollywood a message: “That they would like to watch movies at home, thank you.”

Hollywood has fought this war before. In the 1950s, as prosperous families took to television sets, living rooms replaced theatres as entertainment venues. Sensing an existential threat, Hollywood doubled down on spectacle, spending millions to develop technologies such as Technicolor, stereophonic sound, and film formats like Cinemascope, VistaVision and later IMAX. A new generation of filmmakers, empowered by these innovations, churned out films that were visually and thematically more ambitious than earlier, resulting in a “New Hollywood” wave that had people returning to theatres.

That history is inspiring a lot of filmmakers today. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has emerged as an Oscar heavyweight second only to Sinners with 13 nominations including Best Picture, draws heavily from the sensibilities of the New Hollywood classic The French Connection. “A lot of the movies in that period had a certain stylistic roughness,” says cinematographer Michael Bauman, who shot One Battle After Another in VistaVision, a widescreen format developed in 1954 and used for such landmark films as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). This is the first time in over 60 years that VistaVision has been used for both shooting and projecting a film.

Mixing the existentialism of Train Dreams and the spectacle of Sinners, One Battle After Another follows Bob, a paranoid, washed-up revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) living off-grid with his teenage daughter. Bob is forced to go on the run when his former lover and fellow radical, Perfidia, betrays their radical group. A relentless chase across cities and desert highways ensue, as Bob tries to protect his daughter from a deranged villain.

The film features car chases and gunfights across harsh terrains. Bauman uses VistaVision with such precision that the large-scale action and intimate human drama call for experiencing it in a theatre. The scale, according to him, is something no home screen can replicate. Sarandos might grudgingly agree.

Both One Battle After Another and Sinners come from the same stable—Warner Bros., which leads this year’s Oscars with 30 nominations. Among other major studios, Netflix has 16, Universal has 14, Disney has four, and Paramount has none. With Best Picture appearing to be a toss-up between One Battle After Another and Sinners, this seems to be a very good year for Warner Bros.

And maybe the last.

In December last year, Netflix made a surprise proposal to acquire Warner Bros. for about $80 billion, in what would be the largest media merger in history. Pending regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close later this year. If it does, it would not only be the end of one of Hollywood’s oldest and most storied studios, boasting one of the world’s largest and most diverse film libraries, but also give Netflix greater control over cinema’s future.

Times are changing in more ways than one. This year’s Sundance festival was the first since the death of its founder, the New Hollywood icon Robert Redford. Next year, the festival will leave the resort town of Park City, Utah, which has been its home for 40 years, and move to a new venue in neighbouring Colorado.

If the Warner Bros. deal goes through, Hollywood, too, might find itself packing its bags and going places.

the-personal-and-political-are-inseparable-author-jung-chang-on-life-under-mao-zedong

Sat Feb 07 11:49:29 IST 2026

It is a truth that applies everywhere, but particularly so in totalitarian China, that the personal and the political are inseparable. Jung Chang learned this early. Born in Sichuan in 1952, three years after Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China following the communist victory in the civil war, she grew up watching politics invade the most intimate corners of life. It manifested as starved bodies, dissent being punished with banishment to labour camps, and Mao exalted to the status of a god.

That entanglement of the personal and the political manifested itself even at home as both her parents were members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “My father joined at 17, and took up work as a shop assistant at a left-wing book shop in 1938,” Chang tells THE WEEK at the Jaipur Literature Festival. His motivation was simple: “At that time, there was terrible corruption, hunger and injustice in China,” she says. “The communists had promised to change that.”

Chang’s mother joined the party even younger, at 16. The appeal was partly political. Chiang Kai-shek’s party Kuomintang, then in power, was “corrupt, incompetent and quite cruel”, Chang recalls. “The communists offered an alternative.” But the appeal was also personal. The party spoke of women’s liberation—a radical idea, especially in a society where Chang’s grandmother had been taken as a concubine by a warlord. She had to endure foot-binding, the brutal practice that deformed girls’ feet in the name of beauty. The communists promised to abolish concubinage altogether.

Chang crystallised these experiences in her seminal 1991 book Wild Swans, a family autobiography that narrates a century of Chinese history through the lives of three generations of women: her grandmother, mother, and herself. Translated into 37 languages and having sold over 10 million copies, it remains the most widely-read English autobiography by a Chinese writer, even as it is banned in China.

Fly, Wild Swans

In 1978, Chang moved to Britain to study, becoming one of the first Chinese students to do so. This was no coincidence. It came two years after Mao’s death and in the year his successor Deng Xiaoping launched sweeping reforms that opened China’s economy and allowed people like Chang to travel abroad.

Wild Swans ends here. Chang resumes the story in her latest book published last year, Fly, Wild Swans, a work still shaped by loss; she has not been able to visit China since 2018. She can only communicate with her mother, who still lives there, over video.

“When I wrote these books, I was always conscious of telling a personal story and keeping the political to a minimum,” says Chang. “But unfortunately, in China, the personal and the political are inseparable, which is still true today. You can’t write a purely personal story without getting into politics.” Her own life, and those of her mother and grandmother, she adds, has been deeply entwined with the social and political upheavals of their time.

A cultural desert

Chang’s own tryst with politics began young, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when China “was a complete cultural desert”.

Launched in 1966, the decade-long socio-political movement sought to further Chinese communism by purging bourgeois elements and traditional influences. “There was no normal schooling. Books were burnt. Museums, theatres and cinemas met with the same fate,” Chang says.

While her parents had their own reasons for joining the Chinese Communist Party, Chang herself did not think twice when she joined the Red Guards—the student-led movement mobilised by Mao—at the age of 14. “I grew up under intense brainwashing,” she recalls. “When we were children, if we wanted to say something was absolutely true, we would say, ‘I swear to Chairman Mao.’ Mao was our god. It was like: you must eat food, you must drink water, and you must obey Chairman Mao.”

So when Mao called on the young to join the Red Guards, she did, too. But disillusionment set in quickly. Within two weeks, she quit. “I didn’t like what the Red Guards were doing in my school,” she says. “I hated it when they pulled down these huge tablets of Confucius’s teachings.”

It did not stop there. Red Guards raided people’s homes, carting off books meant for burning. But many books escaped the bonfires and found their way to the black market. Her brother discovered one such market, bought stacks of books and buried them underground. “That’s how I read,” she says. “Foreign and Chinese classics—the books that had survived the Red Guards.”

Fall from privilege

With both her parents being among the Communist Party’s elite, Chang grew up with a degree of privilege. For example, during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)—the ambitious campaign to rapidly transform China from an agrarian to an industrial economy—tens of millions died of starvation, but Chang’s family escaped that fate.

“My father was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party,” she recalls. “So we had more food. I remember, as a child, going with my grandmother to special shops to buy a handful of beans.”

That privilege, however, vanished when Chang’s father chose to speak up. During the Cultural Revolution, he wrote to Mao asking him to stop the violence and atrocities. “After that, my family plummeted from privilege into hell,” she says. Her father was arrested and sent to a labour camp, while her mother came under tremendous pressure to denounce him. She refused. “She was extraordinary,” Chang says. “Even though she had bitterness towards my father, she would not denounce him. It is incredible to think that during those 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, so few privileged people escaped denunciation meetings and tragedy.”

Despite the suffering, her parents’ moral resolve left a lasting imprint. “Subconsciously, they became my role models,” Chang says. “They taught me loyalty, courage and love.” It is why, she adds, she never considered giving up writing her books, including a biography of Mao. “I just decided to be an honest writer. That, I think, is my parents’ influence,” she says.

When Mao died

And on September 9, 1976, Mao died, aged 82. “I was at university,” Chang recalls. “Everyone burst into tears. I, however, was dry-eyed. By then, my father and grandmother had died. I had shed all my tears and was left with none for Mao.” But being dry-eyed, she knew, was dangerous. So she put her head on the shoulder of the girl sitting in front of her and pretended to cry. “People even suggested rubbing peppers into your eyes,” she recalls.

Soon after, the father of Chinese communism was replaced by the architect of modern China, Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as the country’s paramount leader in 1978. His rise marked a turning point: China began opening up to the world.

Moving to Britain, landing on Mars

Chang describes her arrival in Britain as “landing on Mars”. “I had never spoken to a foreigner, except for a few sailors at south China ports, where, as an English student, I was sent to practise my English,” she recalls. However, it did not take long to realise that, at their core, these ‘foreigners’ were the same as her and other Chinese.

Yet, being abroad did not mean complete freedom. “We came in a group of 14. One of us was the political supervisor. We weren’t allowed to go out on our own and had to move as a group. And we all wore Mao suits,” she recalls.

The write move

By the mid-1980s, Chang became the first person from communist China to earn a PhD from a British university. She did not set out to write Wild Swans. It was not until 1991 that her first book was published. “At first, I did not want to write,” she says. “Writing meant looking inward and into the past, and the past was full of tragedy. I wanted to forget it all.” That changed in 1988, when her mother came to stay with her in London. During the six-month visit, her mother began recounting stories of her life, as well as those of Chang’s father and grandmother. “She had so much to say,” Chang recalls. “I bought a tape recorder, and she would talk into it while I was out at work.” By the time her mother left, Chang had amassed nearly 60 hours of recording. She sat down and transcribed them, and that’s how Wild Swans began. Since then, Chang has published several works, including Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013), Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister (2019), and Fly, Wild Swans. Her books remain banned in China.

President Xi Jinping, Chang says, is “a true believer in Mao”. While China has changed dramatically since 1978, she argues that its political core has not. “It rejected the worst excesses of Maoism after the reforms,” she says. “But Mao is now being resurrected, and the parts that are anti-culture, harsh and repressive—those have not changed.”

the-spirit-of-struggle-still-defines-latin-america-oscar-guardiola-rivera

Sat Jan 31 15:31:25 IST 2026

Interview/ Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Colombian writer

January 3 was no ordinary day, when President Donald Trump announced military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. More than a decade before this, Colombian writer Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, who teaches philosophy, human rights, and global affairs at Birkbeck College, University of London, had posed a provocative question in his book What If Latin America Ruled the World? Speaking on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Rivera reflected on his 2010 assessment, Latin America’s long colonial history, and its shifting place in world politics.

Edited excerpts:

Q/ Your book What If Latin America Ruled the World? How The South Will Take The North Into the 22nd Century imagined a very different global order. Given recent developments in the region, especially Venezuela, how do you see Latin America’s place in world politics today?

A/ When I wrote that book in 2010, it was not a prediction, but a kind of bet which had to do with demography. By 2040, the US will no longer be a white-majority country. That was already a well-known fact. Rather, most calculations, including mine, were conservative. It is happening faster than expected.

Latino is the fastest-growing demographic in the US, no matter how much racism or anti-immigration policies exist. Today, in several areas in the US, you are often better off speaking Spanish. So I said that two things could happen:

First, Latinos tend to be politically progressive, but socially conservative. It has got to do with colonial violence, Christianity, and also that it was one of the first regions to fight colonialism. That spirit of struggle still defines the region. Take what happened on January 3, when the US attacked Venezuela and then immediately issued threats over Greenland. For Europeans, this was shocking. They are still running around like headless chickens, asking, ‘Why is this happening to us? We’re supposed to be white. We’re supposed to be the west. We’re allies.’

This is no longer about abstract ideas of liberty or freedom. It’s about the spirit of struggle, which remains the mark of Latin America. You see it in the way Colombian President Gustavo Petro responds to threats. You see it in Brazil, in how they dealt with their own Donald Trump (Jair Bolsonaro). You even see it symbolically: Petro standing alongside Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, speaking out for the Palestinian people last September.

But there’s another side—a less optimistic one which we also have to be prepared for. Latinos’ socially conservative tendencies are precisely what the Republicans have been more effective at cultivating than the Democrats. Machismo and the deification of the nuclear family with the wife in the kitchen and children never dissenting. Republicans have leaned into this imagery very successfully, aided by colonial Christian legacies. You can see this in election after election: a significant shift among Latinos and African Americans, particularly men, toward that worldview. Why? Because in times of uncertainty, people cling to an idea of a time of purity, a time when men knew how to be men, women stayed in their roles, and everything was supposedly peaceful.

Of course, that past never existed.

Q/ For those of us from formerly colonised countries, the contrast is hard to ignore: Europe’s response to Venezuela versus Greenland, or Ukraine versus Palestine. Given Venezuela’s oil wealth and Latin America’s resource richness, are we entering neo-colonialism?

A/ You are right to point out a new cycle of resource extractivism. But for Latin America, this is not new. It is our entire history, especially given our proximity to the US. It is not just the US, the European Union, too, does not stop at the European mainland. France still has overseas territories in the Caribbean, such as Guadeloupe and Martinique. The British still treat many former colonies as property. The relationship has always been about siphoning our wealth to make them rich, and us poor.

However, something fundamental has changed. Earlier, imperialism required territorial control, having boots on the ground. That has changed. And the perfect example is oil. The US oil majors are not in the business of extracting oil; they are in the business of making money. They don’t want to own territory. This is why, and yes, I’ll say it, Trump was actually sensible in allowing the Chavista regime to remain in power.

Q/ Given this, why have countries in the Global South struggled to unite as a bloc, the way Europe has?

A/ Actually, we did unite, which people have forgotten. After the Bandung Conference in the 1950s came the Tricontinental Conference in the mid-1960s, held in Havana. It was not funded by the Soviets, but by China. It brought together African, Asian and Latin American countries. The message was simple: racism is not about skin colour. The coloured peoples of the world uniting is a political position against any and every kind of empire and imperialism. There is also a contemporary example: The Hague Group, with countries like Colombia and Indonesia taking political positions against what is happening in Palestine, right from the heart of Europe.

Q/ You were born in Colombia. How do you see its response, given that it has Venezuela as its neighbour, has military ties with the US, and presidential elections are due in May?

A/ The Latin American left leaders are radical pragmatists. Petro understood that the US and Colombia share a problem: criminal gangs operating along the Venezuelan-Colombian border, where oil is produced. Petro was pragmatic, clever and careful enough to propose to Trump: why not help us tackle the criminal gangs that continue to pose a serious security threat even to Colombians? The future is multi-alignment, a beautiful successor to non-alignment.

Q/ The Monroe Doctrine emerged in a very different geopolitical moment, yet today we are seeing renewed assertions of the US across the western hemisphere, extending even into parts of Europe. How do you read this shift, and what are your thoughts on the so-called Donroe doctrine?

A/ Even from Monroe to Donroe, there is one thing that has not changed. In the late 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine was often explained to Americans through cartoons. In those images, Latin America was depicted as a young woman, available for the taking. That kind of language is still there. This feminisation of Latin America has long served a political function: it allows the region to be treated as a minor, voiceless, whose patrimony can be claimed by others.

That has not changed. What has changed, however, is the nature of imperial power. Resource extraction is no longer the primary driver for major oil and energy corporations. Profit is. The dominant economic logic today is financial, not territorial. Control is less about owning land or resources outright, and more about determining how profits are distributed. This is precisely what Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales did during the Pink Tide. They did not nationalise oil; instead, they negotiated profit-sharing agreements with multinational companies.

What we need to understand is that the newer conditions for imperialism will have that component, so how do we speculate? And out of that, what future do we want?

evolution-of-roshan-mathew-how-the-actor-redefined-his-idea-of-the-dream-project

Sat Jan 31 15:24:47 IST 2026

It is inevitable. Actors from the independent film space won’t remain there eternally. They eventually move on to bigger, more mainstream cinema. And their fans cannot always expect them to think as they did when they began their careers. However, the serious ones—most of them with a strong foundation in theatre—are rarely seen abandoning their roots. There are stellar examples: Jaideep Ahlawat, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Gulshan Devaiah. Roshan Mathew, originally from Malayalam cinema, sits comfortably in the same league.

It’s been a decade since the 33-year-old actor made his debut in Adi Kapyare Kootamani and an English-language web series, Tanlines. Roshan may not have found blockbuster success as a solo lead yet, but that is hardly a reflection of the astute performer he is. After all, he enjoys a career that would make any newcomer starting out today green with envy. Within five years of his debut, Roshan entered Hindi cinema with Anurag Kashyap’s Choked, followed the very next year by Darlings (co-starring Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, and Vijay Varma). There was also a significant milestone in the form of Poacher, the Prime Video web series from the makers of Delhi Crime.

A decade later, Roshan has added what he calls his biggest and most exciting milestone yet: Chatha Pacha, inspired by the WWE. It is a full-fledged commercial entertainer where he not only flexes his action-star muscles but also plays a character integral to the plot, despite sharing the screen with two other actors.

Chatha Pacha sees Roshan working with a first-time director, Adhvaith Nayar, who is actor Mohanlal’s nephew. But there was a time when Roshan wasn’t always open to working with newcomers. He admits he was prone to intellectualising. “I felt like I got into a strange kind of comfort zone when I was too careful,” he says. “I have since decided to go with my gut feeling. If I sense that a project is going to be something special, I try to make the best version possible of what we are working on. Earlier, I was sceptical because I wasn’t familiar with a director’s work. But that doesn’t mean they lack talent. Many have immense potential. They may be learning on the job, but their experience can turn out to be more truthful.”

Roshan believes that there is no such thing as a truly “ideal” or “dream” project. Earlier, he felt that it simply wasn’t yet time for him to encounter one. Over the years, his idea of the ideal has evolved with experience. His approach now is straightforward. “Grab a project with potential and make it as close as possible to the ideal I have in mind,” he says.

He also admits that being an actor today—when predicting audience response is increasingly difficult—is challenging. “There are films I have put a lot of effort into that didn’t do well in theatres. Audiences aren’t even willing to give them a shot, despite critical acclaim. But the same films perform well on OTT. Regardless, at some point you have to choose projects you feel strongly about,” he says.

So, is Roshan now working purely for the joy of his craft, or do validation and reaching maximum eyeballs still factor into his choices? “When I started out, joy was the only priority. But, very soon, I realised this is a consumer-driven industry,” he says. “It’s impossible to work here while ignoring the audience. Today, I try to find a balance. I don’t operate with the logic of chasing maximum eyeballs. It’s different, however, in Bollywood, where catering to a massive audience becomes the driving force.” When Roshan imagines operating that way, he shudders, “That is risky,” he says, “If you try to please everyone, the number of compromises just keeps mounting.”

Roshan says the only way to find more peace and sanity is to take things one project at a time and constantly better oneself. He returns to the question of audience acceptance. “For that to happen, there has to be a certain level of appreciation on their part. Obviously, we enjoy the celebrity status, fame, or money, but it has to be purely out of love for the job, first and foremost. That has to be the top-most priority.”

Chatha Pacha, which released recently in theatres, is his most ‘mass’ film yet. “I have always said that I want to be part of all kinds of films. But the person inside us selects only those that excite us at a given point,” he says, “I have gone wrong whenever I felt like doing a commercial film just for the sake of it. After a couple of bad outings, I realised that’s the wrong way of doing things. In drama school, we were taught to ask: what are you saying, who are you saying it to, where are you saying it, and—most important—why are you saying it. When some commercial films didn’t work, I shifted my attention to projects that suited me, because I knew I could do them well. At the same time, if I want to keep doing work with depth and continuing discovering myself, I will also have to also engage with commercial cinema. At the end of the day, this is an industry, and you have to earn your space. I did Chatha Pacha because it happens to be something where these two sensibilities meet.”

the-ai-war-who-is-winning-the-battle-for-tech-supremacy-in-2026

Sat Jan 31 15:18:38 IST 2026

Personalities give character to the otherwise dry realm of science and technology. How plain do Newton’s laws of motion sound without the his name? Or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? These big personalities tend to have massive egos as well, often leading to intense competition and disputes. Newton and Gottfried Leibniz fought over who invented calculus. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein waged a series of intellectual battles over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. And George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla challenged Thomas Edison over electric power transmission systems—alternating current vs direct current.

Today, that fire has moved from the laboratory to the silicon foundry. We are living in a time where names like Altman, Huang and Nadella are becoming as synonymous with the 21st century as Edison and Tesla were with the 20th. But, in this war, the battle lines are more complex.

The many battles in the war

The AI war is being fought on three distinct fronts. First, there are the Large Language Models (LLM). For a while, OpenAI sat unchallenged on the throne with its ChatGPT. However, the landscape has since shifted into a brutal war of attrition. While OpenAI and Anthropic remain the ‘intellectual’ leaders, Google has successfully weaponised its ecosystem, integrating Gemini into every corner. A surge of ‘open-weight’ models—led by Meta’s Llama and China’s DeepSeek—have commoditised AI. In the LLM space, the ‘winner’ is no longer the one with the smartest model, but the one with the most efficient distribution. At the moment, Gemini seems to be winning the war.

The second front is the chipmakers, and here, the spoils of war are far more concentrated. NVIDIA remains the undisputed leader, effectively acting as the ‘arms dealer’ to everyone. However, the tide is turning toward custom silicon. Amazon, Google and even Tesla are desperately trying to nibble into NVIDIA’s territory to reduce their dependency on a single source of power.

Finally, we have the gadget makers. This is a chaotic front. Traditional smartphone manufacturers are locked in a race to prove their devices are ‘AI-native’, while a host of startups are attempting to kill the smartphone altogether with wearable ‘companions’.

The everyday AI

Where is this war actually being won? By 2026, standalone AI platforms have surpassed 1.5 billion monthly active users. However, the vast majority of people don’t go to AI; it comes to them.

For instance, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have turned AI into a silent ghostwriter for billions of emails and documents. Meta AI, integrated into WhatsApp and Instagram, has become the default ‘search’ for the younger generation, particularly in emerging markets like India and Brazil. Then there is the invisible layer, where AI optimises traffic lights, manages power grids or filters your spam—tasks where the users do not even know they are interacting with a machine.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of the AI war is the traditional search engine. The ‘blue links’ that defined the internet for two decades are effectively dead. In 2026, AI overviews are the default.

Search has shifted from ‘discovery’ to ‘synthesis’. Instead of navigating a website to find an answer, the AI reads the web for you and presents a summary. This has triggered a seismic shift in SEO (search engine optimisation) to GEO (generative engine optimisation). Businesses no longer fight to be ranked top on a page; they fight to be the ‘cited source’ inside an answer. If you aren’t referenced by the LLM, you don’t exist.

New rules

While smartphones still dominate AI usage—accounting for over 70 per cent of consumer AI interactions—the era has triggered the invention of entirely new device categories.

Devices like the Limitless Pendant and Plaud NotePin act as passive observers, recording and summarising our daily lives so we never ‘forget’ a conversation. We’ve also seen Spatial AI gadgets, such as smart glasses that actually understand what the wearer is looking at, providing real-time translation or step-by-step repair instructions for a leaky faucet.

In the corporate world, 2026 is the year of the ‘Great ROI Appraisal’. The winners: Companies that have moved past ‘chatbots’ and integrated AI into their core unit economics. Logistics firms using AI for real-time route optimisation and coding houses using AI to double their output are seeing massive gains.

The losers: AI-washing firms that added a thin layer of GPT to their existing products without changing their business model. Investors are becoming increasingly discerning, punishing companies that cannot show how AI translates into actual profit.

The next frontier

The conversation has moved beyond models that ‘talk’ to models that ‘do’. Agentic AI—systems capable of planning, using tools and executing multi-step tasks autonomously—is where the industry is headed.

In 2026, an AI agent doesn’t just help you write an email about a flight delay; it logs into your airline account, finds a new flight, books a seat and updates your calendar. This shift is turning AI from a novelty into a utility, but it also raises the stakes for security.

Is it a bubble?

A bubble, by definition, is a good thing that has gone too far. With trillions of dollars flowing into AI, the question of a ‘bubble’ looms large. Critics point to a worrying trend: circular deals.

Many AI startups receive billions in funding from Big Tech giants, only to immediately spend those same billions back on those same giants’ cloud credits and chips. This creates artificial revenue that can mask a lack of true market demand. While some analysts compare this to the 1999 dot-com crash, others argue the infrastructure being built (data centres and energy grids) has real, tangible value that the 1990s fibre-optic ‘dark cables’ did not.

Whether a bubble or a boom, the sheer scale of investment—projected to hit $4 trillion in by 2030—means the AI war will not end quietly. And the winners will be the ones who not only invent the technology but also claim its name. We may not remember the specific version of an LLM, but we will remember the personalities who dared to automate our lives.

stephen-fry-how-a-love-for-language-shaped-a-comedy-legend

Fri Jan 23 18:44:35 IST 2026

British actor, comedian and writer Sir Stephen Fry is one of the most seriously funny people I have ever met. His brand of humour is erudite and polished, but still, unmistakably funny. There is an entire generation who grew up on the jokes of A Bit of Fry & Laurie—a sketch comedy starring Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcast on BBC between 1989 and 1995. Who can forget Fry’s caustic wit and Chaplin moustache as the barman sympathising with his customer’s marital troubles with unintended sexual innuendos?

“She takes no interest in my friends,” says Laurie as the customer disillusioned with his wife. “She laughs at my….”

“Peanuts?” asks Fry, holding out two bowls of peanuts.

“Hobbies,” answers Laurie. “So what if all the men have got larger…”

“Plums?” asks Fry, holding out a plate of plums.

“Salaries and better prospects,” Laurie continues. “She’s going on and on about her appearance. It is not as if she is an oil painting. She’s….”

“Plain and prawn-flavoured,” deadpans Fry, pointing to the bowls of peanuts.

Fry was at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, discussing P.G. Wodehouse (whose character Jeeves he essayed in the television series Jeeves and Wooster, partnering once more with Laurie), Greek mythology (based on which he has written a trilogy) and the “strange affliction” that has been both his curse and blessing—his love for language.

He discovered it at boarding school, where he was sent at the age of seven. He was hopeless at everything else—art, music and sports (“I couldn’t run in a straight line without colliding into a tree”). He was resigned to the possibility of his life being one of loneliness and failure when, one day, his music teacher wrote a word on the blackboard: “Orchestra.” Fry looked at it and screamed: “Cart horse.” It was, of course, an anagram—something that had always happened with him: letters rearranging themselves into different words. He compares it with Russell Crowe’s character of a Nobel-winning mathematician in the film A Beautiful Mind. “He sees numbers going around him,” said Fry. “Presumably, mathematicians have the same relationship with numbers as I do with letters.”

His humour, too, is rooted in this play with words and phrases. “God knows I love slapstick,” says Fry. “I love the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But I also love things that tickle the mind.”

He first realised the link between humour and language when he was 10 and living in a large British country house. His scientist father and historian mother were never into entertainment. There was a small television kept in the cupboard which would be taken out only to watch important events—like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon or the wedding of a member of the British royal family. One day, when his father was away, he took out the television from the cupboard and watched a scene playing out in a black-and-white film—a man kneeling before a beautiful woman and telling her, “I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.” Fry had never heard language like this, its formality enhancing the humour. He ran to his mother and told her, “I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” his mother asked him.

Fry described the scene to her, which she explained was from Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

“That line is so funny because you normally express love in the simplest way,” said Fry. “You say ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re great’. You don’t say ‘the visible personification of absolute perfection’. That is preposterous, and yet it is a gift because you have presented someone with a parcel of words that is so exquisite that you cannot but be charmed by it.”

Thus began his relationship with comedy. If A Bit of Fry & Laurie launched his career, then the comedy game show QI (2003-2016) sealed his place in the canon of humour greats, for which he was nominated for six BAFTA awards. He was voted among the all-time top 50 comedians by fellow comedians. For his role as Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (1997), he got a Golden Globe nomination for best actor. His other notable films include Chariots of Fire (1981), V for Vendetta (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and Love & Friendship (2016).

G.K. Chesterton once said that solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light. “One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness,” he said. “A man ‘falls’ into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.” But everything that goes up must one day come down. Fry would know this best, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 37. He had never heard the word before his diagnosis, but it explained the “massive highs and miserable lows” he had lived with all his life. It explained many things in his life—like the misbehaviour that nearly got him expelled from prep school, stealing credit cards as a teenager, walking out on acting projects, fleeing to Europe and attempting suicide by consuming a mix of drugs and alcohol. Fortunately, the producer of the film he was shooting for found him in an unconscious state and rushed him to the hospital. He spoke about his condition in the Emmy-winning documentary, The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive (2006).

But perhaps it is only when the lows are juxtaposed with the highs that you get to understand who Fry truly is—someone who knows that it is always darkest before dawn, who is confident enough not to be ashamed of his vulnerabilities, who believes that his failures define him as much as his triumphs. He wants to taste every fruit of every tree of every orchard in the world. “Some are addictive or dangerous,” he said at JLF. “Others are toxic or mechanical. Yet others are boring. But to end your life not having tried them all is an insult to creation.”

Fry’s experiences have not jaded him. Much like the world of the Greek gods and heroes about whom he has written three best-sellers, the latest being Odyssey published in 2024, his world, too, is filled with action, pathos, meaning and drama. His retelling of Greek mythology is witty, humorous and irreverent in a way that Homer probably did not intend it to be. In this, Fry has learned a secret that many wise men have missed: if you cannot laugh at life, then life is going to laugh at you.

amitav-ghoshs-ghost-eye-review-a-powerful-tale-with-a-faltering-finish

Fri Jan 23 18:39:10 IST 2026

Even after the last page of Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, the spell lingers. The magical realism of his world is slow to loosen its grip; the real world seems subtly altered. The book sharpens one’s attentiveness—even the sound of leaves rustling assumes new significance. This enduring effect is a testament to Ghosh’s formidable narrative control.

And yet, the novel falters at the end.

More on that later. Let us begin at the beginning.

The novel opens in 1969 Calcutta, in a wealthy Marwari household. A commotion breaks out at the Gupta mansion when Varsha, the three-year-old daughter of the family’s business scion, declares that she wants to have fish—an insistence that is deeply unsettling in a strictly vegetarian family. Then she goes further. Looking at her mother, she says: “That is not my mother. My real mother… doesn’t live here. Our home is beside a river.”

A therapist, Dr Shoma Bose, is called in. She identifies Varsha as a “reincarnation type” —a phenomenon she has studied before. As Shoma investigates Varsha’s supposed past life, the novel opens onto a wider, otherworldly terrain in which hierarchies between humans, nature and non-human forces begin to dissolve.

Running alongside this is a second narrative, set during the pandemic. Shoma is now 85; her nephew Dinu, a middle-aged antiquarian, lives in Brooklyn; and another character, Tipu, manages an NGO in the Sundarbans. Tipu has a “ghost-eye”. Medically, it is heterochromia—a condition in which the eyes are of different colours.

Tipu is intrigued by a trip Shoma took to the mangroves in 1969. “I don’t understand what my eighty-five-year-old aunt in Calcutta, who has trouble breathing without a machine and can hardly get out of bed, has to do with wildfires and droughts and neo-fascists,” Dinu says. Yet that journey might hold the key to saving the Sundarbans from a destructive coal-fired power plant promoted by “an immensely powerful crony capitalist who had ensured the media’s silence”.

The Sundarbans, as in many of Ghosh’s works, remain central—its imagery evoking both mystery and a fragile ecosystem in urgent need of care. The tension between nature and development is palpable, and the book seems to suggest that addressing the climate crisis may require thinking out of the box.

Those who have lived in harmony with nature for generations—people for whom rivers, ponds, trees, reptiles and even stones matter more than so-called development—are presented as central to the solution. Local fisherfolk, the novel conveys, understand the ecosystem far better than climate experts. In fact, science is offered as only one mode of knowing among many.

Ghosh’s descriptions make his fondness for 1960s Calcutta evident—the power cuts, the communist movement, the many strikes the city witnessed. His fondness for, and his knowledge of, fish is also unmistakable. He lingers over varieties, markets and dishes, imbuing them with a narrative richness that goes beyond mere detail.

With its multiple storylines and timelines held together by motifs of reincarnation and climate crisis, Ghost-Eye is an expansive novel—a wide canvas where several colourful elements coexist beautifully.

Still, it falters at the very end. The conclusion arrives rather abruptly, and despite the richness of what precedes it, it does not have the impact one expects. Even so, Ghosh once again succeeds in drawing attention to the ecological crisis, employing a narrative approach marked by far greater delicacy and care than is usually seen.

GHOST-EYE

By Amitav Ghosh

Published by Fourth Estate India

Pages 336; price Rs799

rakesh-marias-when-it-all-began-inside-the-evolution-of-mumbai-underworld

Fri Jan 23 18:36:11 IST 2026

Former Mumbai Police commissioner Rakesh Maria’s When It All Began: The Untold Stories of the Underworld attempts to slow down the rush of recollection. It is neither a crime chronicle nor a self-congratulatory memoir. Instead, it reads like a carefully assembled archive—part police diary, part oral history—of how Mumbai’s underworld took shape, professionalised violence, and eventually faded from public memory.

Maria’s central argument is deceptively simple: organised crime in Mumbai did not disappear; it evolved. The dons who once controlled visible territories, cultivated street reputations, and ruled through proximity have been replaced by figures who operate remotely—across jurisdictions, borders and platforms. Crime, he argues, has become less theatrical but more elusive, as command centres have migrated digitally, geographically and psychologically.

For nearly four decades, he documented everything: meetings, movements, names, rivalries. This meticulous record-keeping has resulted in a book thick with dates, transactions, relationships, and cause-and-effect sequences. Mumbai underworld is shown as a functioning ecosystem that responds to political shifts.

Maria traces the trajectories of early dons, many of them migrants, labourers or refugees who arrived in Bombay and turned to crime when legitimate avenues closed. Childhoods, formative experiences and loyalties are placed alongside acts of violence.

Maria contextualises crime. The early underworld, he suggests, emerged in a city still negotiating law, labour and survival. Crime became organised not simply through individual ambition, but because it learned to mirror business, contracts, payments, logistics and enforcement. The emergence of the supari system marks a crucial shift in the book, when murder is seen as transaction, not vendetta. Violence becomes professional, efficient and morally detached.

Maria’s own career intersects with this transformation. Though the book avoids casting him as its protagonist, his postings—especially during the volatile years of the 1990s—anchor the narrative.

The 1993 serial blasts form a turning point. In this part of the book, Maria shows us how fear, responsibility and institutional pressure surface, offering glimpses of policing under extraordinary stress. The Mumbai Police emerge as a learning force, often reactive, sometimes overstretched, occasionally innovative. Crime detection, according to Maria, is less about dramatic breakthroughs and more about accumulation of details, tracking patterns and interpreting silences.

The book’s most compelling passages reveal how crime adapts faster than law. As Mumbai globalised, so did its underworld. Financial flows became more complex, communication more encrypted, and physical presence less necessary.

The gangster no longer needed to inhabit the city to control it. Today, Maria says, invisibility makes crime harder to dismantle.

Maria’s vantage point—he writes from within the institution he served all his life—shapes the narrative. Structural questions about political patronage, or the porous boundaries between legality and illegality, remain largely implicit. Crime is treated as a phenomenon to be documented and countered, rather than interrogated. Readers looking for sociological or political analysis may find the writing to be conservative.

Maria is most comfortable as a chronicler. His book insists that the real story of Mumbai’s underworld is procedural, patient and unfinished. Crime did not end; it learned to disappear. For a Mumbai still tempted to believe that its worst years are behind it, When It All Began offers a quiet, unsettling reminder.

WHEN IT ALL BEGAN: THE UNTOLD STORIES OF THE UNDERWORLD

By Rakesh Maria

Published by Vintage Books

Pages 424; price Rs999

drowning-in-waffle-the-frustrating-search-for-a-good-indian-podcast

Sat Jan 24 16:19:26 IST 2026

Absolute waffle. That is what I had to sit through to get that one sliver of insight. It was a three-hour podcast, one of many that clog our online space. The host was wearing glasses, so I knew he was serious.

Unfortunately, I had to stop after 45 minutes. The performance of intelligence was too much.

I had felt the same when I heard an Indian billionaire talking to an American multi-billionaire about the future of the world. The former wanted to sound prescient; the latter wanted to tell jokes. Both failed miserably.

Oh, and then there was the “scoop”—an infamous fugitive who had duped a national bank was sitting there, claiming that he was unfairly targeted. I had tried to help him out by drinking a lot of his beer over the years, but alas.

The problem is that there are just too many podcasts in India. Or rather, too few good ones. My first editor and his acid tongue would have lashed me for speaking to just one person for a story. And yet here I was, engrossed in stories about the rot in Bollywood, coming from one bitter director.

The core attraction of podcasts lies in our DNA—Indians love stories. The person telling them could be our grandmother or a fitness influencer.

Not surprisingly, we are only behind the Americans and the Chinese in terms of podcast consumption. As per a PwC report, there are over 5.6 crore monthly podcast listeners in India. It’s a booming market, which explains why anyone with two mics and a few hours to kill has started one.

But, as with anything in life, you have to work hard to get to the good stuff. So, as a man of rigour, I did just that. I hopped from pod to pod, looking not at the host but the guest. If someone I admired—a prominent Hindi writer-lyricist, for instance—had gone on a show, perhaps it was worth a listen.

Following this plan, I discovered a podcaster whose unpolished English belied his fresh perspective. He would talk about influencer culture, brain rot, and subaltern life beyond the binaries of popular politics. Heck, he even gave me a new take on my hometown—a hotbed of caste pride and Toyota Fortuners—and told me that “cringe” content could be a tool of subversion.

Sometimes, though, you don’t need to flip through nonsense. A good voice can fall into your lap. Like in 2020, when an Australian writer filled my ears with stories and data, and changed the way I looked at my favourite sport.

From tales of a bygone era—where square cuts and syphilis went hand in hand—to the modern age, where precision is not only about where you bowl, but also what you tweet, this guy’s voice has been the one I have heard the most in recent years. After the sweet voice of my wife, that is.

And if ever the day comes where we Indians become podcasting kings, I can rest assured that my earphones and I did more than our share and suffered for the greater good.

kochi-muziris-biennale-a-triumphant-return-to-art-and-activism

Sat Jan 17 15:02:55 IST 2026

A New York Times article, while critiquing the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale for being too preachy, made an important observation—that we are all quick to point out the problem without being willing to do the heavy lifting necessary to solve it. “In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain,” it said. “An elegant museum gallery is actually a record of imperial violence; a symphony orchestra is a site of elitism and exploitation…. But when it comes to making anything new, we are gripped by near-total inertia.” In our case, the country’s largest and South Asia’s longest-running contemporary art biennale—the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)—was beset by financial and organisational woes, and detractors were quick to write it off.

After its first edition in 2012, the Kochi Biennale Foundation that hosts the event was in a debt of 6.5 crore. Things came to a head with the 5th edition in 2022, curated by Singapore-based artist Shubigi Rao. It seemed like Murphy’s Law—that everything that can go wrong will go wrong—seemed to be playing out right in front of the organisers’ eyes: shipments delayed in transit and at customs past the opening day; confusion regarding the sale of one of the main exhibition sites, Aspinwall House, to the government; delay in opening due to the pandemic; rain harming many of the exhibition spaces; lack of funds to pay the workforce; a lack of steady electrical power; and an open letter from the artists asking the biennale management to move away “from a system of accepted dysfunction, structural helplessness and fear of failure….”

“I was a jury member at the Singapore Biennale just before KMB started,” says Bose Krishnamachari, one of the co-founders of KMB and president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation. “Some of the artists’ works were in transit and had not yet been installed, but no one made any fuss about it, unlike here, where most of the problems were caused by maybe four artists.” He contrasts it with the first edition of KMB, when contributing artists like Vivan Sundaram, Subodh Gupta and Anish Kapoor paid out of their pockets to ensure that the event was a success.

Before the politics behind the art, like a rising tide, could submerge it, something had to be done. And that, in a way, is what the ongoing edition of the KMB is about: placing art at the centre once again. It has been an attempt at healing, a quest for redemption. For that, the organisers seem to have decided to go on the offensive instead of being on the defensive. The sixth edition, curated by Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces, Goa, returns bigger than ever, with the work of 66 artists/collectives displayed across 22 venues, apart from parallel shows like the Students’ Biennale, Edam (a show by Malayali artists) and Art By Children. Of the Rs30crore budget, Rs7.5 crore was promised by the Kerala government.

Exploring the biennale is like visiting another world—one where hierarchies are overturned and the view is bottom-up, rather than top-down. The voiceless are given a voice, and the world is turned off-kilter just for the time it takes you to see it from its underside.

“A biennale is an opportunity to bring to the forefront practices that have existed outside the mainstream and hegemonic powers,” says Chopra. “It is a moment to recognise the subaltern and the marginalised, what sits on the borders and the boundaries. If we have been asked to invite 33 artists from the subcontinent, I’m going to go as far to the border, because there is a politics embedded in that as well, which is why there are artists from Kashmir, Assam, Nagaland and, of course, Kerala at this biennale.”

Take, for example, Assamese artist Dhiraj Rabha’s exhibit, The Quiet Work of Shadows. Part documentary, part installation, Rabha creates a garden of flowers, with eight watchtowers overlooking it modelled on the surveillance structure found in every United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) camp. The watchtowers hold video displays of conversations with former ULFA members, each sharing their stories of loss and violence. The work is a commentary on the impact of decades of insurgency on Assam and its people.

“Because of me, my mother and my wife had to suffer torture, so I had to return,” says one of them. “We took an oath with a bullet in our mouth that we will give our lives for the movement, but we failed. Now we are like the antlers of a dead deer.”

Some distance away, at the Anand Warehouse in Fort Kochi, is another striking work—Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts. Mahama furnishes a room with rows of discarded chairs from public institutions. Unlike the parliaments of the world—neoclassical spaces of supremacy—his parliament is built with materials from the second-hand markets of Kochi. It is a striking subversion of power to give voice to labourers who are usually left out of political decision-making. The project originally stemmed from an exploration of the promises of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana right after independence, which remain unfulfilled following several political and military coups.

But for Chopra and his team to be able to do their work, there was an army of players—from sponsors and trustees to legal advisers and auditors—working silently behind the scenes. First, the organisational structure had to be overhauled so that they could pay off old debts and start this edition on a clean slate. The benefactor and patron programmes were instituted, where each platinum benefactor would contribute Rs1 crore every year for five years, and each platinum patron would contribute Rs1 crore for this edition of the biennale. There are gold, silver and bronze benefactors and patrons as well.

“We are surrounded by so much divisiveness, disinformation and hate, and are hurtling from a vibrant, colourful and multicultural past to an increasingly monocultural future,” says Mariam Ram, trustee, Kochi Biennale Foundation. “It is more important than ever to seek spaces that promote and showcase the multiple cultures of India and the world as seen through the beauty and thoughtfulness of the arts. I think this is the reason to support the KMB, with its respectful irreverence and creative disruption, and to ensure its future.”

The organisers also brought in new auditors and consultants. Dr Venu V., former chief secretary of the Kerala government, came in as chairperson of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and Thomas Varghese, who had previously worked with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific in Bangkok, as its CEO. “One of the weaknesses of the biennale over the years was that we did not build a strong institutional framework,” says Venu. “We were not a good professional organisation. We did not invest in a robust structure. We always had a fund crunch so it was difficult for the foundation to find the money for a full-time workforce.”

The organisational restructuring has proved effective in enabling the biennale to restore its original vision—of celebrating contemporary art from around the world by invoking the historic, cosmopolitan legacy of Kochi. As Riyas Komu, one of the co-founders of the biennale and co-curator of the first edition, said earlier, it is easy to quantify the economic benefits of the biennale, but not so much its wider socio-cultural aspect. “There is no cultural audit, and nobody has actually looked into its effects,” he said. “But there is a great energy coming in; it is like an acupuncture that is happening in Kochi….” He could not have put it better. It is something in the air which must be felt to be understood, like the smell of sea salt on the shores of Kochi. It is something more than the 1.6 lakh visitors who came this December to view the biennale. Something more than the increase in tourism or the locals of Kochi who have made it the ‘people’s biennale’. Something more than the ‘Guggenheim Effect’ of what a landmark cultural building or event can do to revitalise a city.

Perhaps it is about the shift in perspective that art always brings, a new way of picturing the world. As Shabana Faizal, vice chairperson of KEF Holdings and one of the platinum benefactors of KMB, put it, “Art helps us understand what is happening around us, question it and reflect on who we are.” It helps us see what’s near by taking us afar. It shows us the new by unveiling the old. It alienates in order to explain, binds in order to set free.

why-longines-year-of-the-horse-watch-is-a-collectors-dream

Sat Jan 17 14:53:53 IST 2026

Longines’s new Master Collection Year of the Horse watch is not just a timepiece that commemorates the Chinese Lunar New Year, but one that also celebrates the brand’s long-standing association with the equestrian world.

It’s commonplace to find luxury watch brands associating with sporting events—timing a match is the easiest way to establish a partnership. But there are few watchmakers whose ties to a sport run as deep as those of Longines to the equestrian world. Established in 1832, Longines’s archives show that its first pocket watch featuring a horse motif dates back to 1869. In fact, one of the brand's early pocket watch chronographs, engraved with a jockey and his mount, found particular popularity on American racetracks as early as the 1880s.

In 1912, Longines partnered with a show jumping competition, setting the stage for a relationship with the world of horse racing and show jumping to flourish. Today, the brand is a major partner and official timekeeper for equestrian events worldwide, including show jumping, flat racing, eventing, and dressage. This includes prestigious events such as the FEI World Equestrian Games, The Hampton Classic, The Kentucky Derby, Royal Ascot, and the Dubai World Cup. Its Ambassadors of Elegance include prominent figures like Swiss showjumper Edouard Schmitz, German Olympic equestrian Sönke Rothenberger, and dressage rider Sabine Schut-Kery.

In this regard, 2026 is a particularly auspicious year for the brand. As the Chinese Year of the Horse, Longines is commemorating its historic ties with a new timepiece: the Master Collection Year of the Horse. Inspired by Xu Beihong’s iconic painting ‘Galloping Horse’, the watch’s oscillating weight has been engraved with the horse motif. As the weight moves with the wearer's wrist, the horse appears to be galloping in a continuous loop.

“The Galloping Horse is very inspiring because it reflects moving forward,” says CEO Patrick Aoun. “The horse is a symbol of loyalty, power, and momentum. This constant movement is the spirit that I want for the year 2026. It was the perfect time to celebrate this—we've been part of the equestrian world for more than 150 years.”

Launched at the recent Longines Hong Kong International Races, the watch features a vibrant red dial, a colour considered auspicious in Chinese culture. A 42 mm stainless steel piece, it features a moon phase framed by a date indicator at the 6 o’clock position. The watch is powered by the automatic Longines L899.5 movement, equipped with a silicon balance-spring and offering a power reserve of up to 72 hours. Paired with a black strap, the watch is limited to 2,026 pieces worldwide.

can-music-forge-bond-with-animals-meet-plumes-the-artist-proving-it-can

Sat Jan 17 16:06:15 IST 2026

It is said that when Krishna played his flute, the Yamuna slowed, cows stood still and peacocks fanned their feathers in quiet awe. Lorris Assadian, better known by his stage name Plumes, was not aware of this when he began playing for animals. There was no mythology guiding him, only curiosity and instinct.

He soon learned that the animals respond. Some walked towards him, pressed their heads against him, rubbed their faces on his guitar, and lingered. Others gathered close to listen.

Plumes, 29, is a French singer-songwriter, whose performances for animals with his flamingo-pink guitar have gone viral. Raised in the suburbs of Paris, he began his musical journey on drums in elementary school. “Later, around eleven, I switched to guitar because you could only choose one instrument, and guitar is easier to travel with,” he told THE WEEK.

It was during a particularly low phase in his life that Plumes developed a connection with animals. “I was kind of lost,” he said. “I was busking in the subway, and people weren’t really paying attention. They were just passing by, not looking at me. I didn’t really know whether I should keep going with music.”

To clear his mind, he moved to the countryside—his grandmother’s house in Valence, around 500km from Paris. He had once read that cows enjoy music. “My grandma doesn’t have a farm, but there are farms near her place,” he said. “The area is always peaceful—there are more cows than people around the house.” So, Plumes decided to play for the cows.

“I was not really expecting anything,” he said. “I thought maybe they would just lift their heads and it would be cute.” But their reaction surprised him. “They came to me and started rubbing their heads against me, [continuing] for almost an hour,” he said. “That was special and it completely changed my perception of animals.”

The experience felt different, he said, because there was a real connection. “I kept thinking about how mistreated animals are—so many are being slaughtered as we speak,” he said. He became vegan from that day.

Plumes wanted to share these moments online. “I thought, ‘How can I ever abuse animals?’,” he said. “When you pay for a system that abuses them, you abuse them as well. I didn’t want to do that again. I hoped people would think the same way if I shared the videos.” The videos spread rapidly. He soon began receiving invitations to perform at sanctuaries and zoos across Europe.

Over the past three years, he has played for numerous species, including endangered ones. He notes that many animals seem to enjoy classical music—especially horses and cows. Elephants respond more to low vibrations and are particularly receptive to drums. “However, I’m not great with classical or drums, so I just play my songs,” he said. “It’s folk-pop. But it feels like they enjoy it.”

He always plays love songs for animals. “Because intention is important,” he said. “Animals are intuitive.” ‘Flou’, an original composition, has been performed for at least 50 species.

He says serenading animals opened his eyes to the dark realities of human behaviour. “When I visit sanctuaries, most of the animals have been rescued from mistreatment,” he said. “Some were abused horribly—there was a pig that had been sexually abused by its owner. There are also animals rescued from slaughterhouse after workers grow attached and save them. Those are beautiful stories, but they make you think about the animals who never got that chance.” Recently, he played for tigers once kept as pets by a celebrity.

There have been many magical moments. One involved a pig who refused to come out of his shelter until hearing the music. “He was rescued from the meat industry, where animals are given [steroids and hormones] to make them grow fast,” he said. “They often develop health problems. This pig didn’t want to move. I played and he finally came towards me.”

When Plumes saw the pig again, a year later, he was doing much better. “The people at the sanctuary worked hard to make that happen,” he said. “Seeing the health of an animal improve is always special.”

He is now collaborating with researchers studying animal behaviour and artists and activists working in animal welfare. He notes that animals brought him well-being. “I used to be stressed about singing for humans because I was afraid of judgment,” he said. “I worried about singing a wrong note. With animals, I just focus on connecting. They don’t care if I make a mistake.”

That lesson, he added, has begun to shape how he performs for people as well. “Now I try to do the same with humans—connect and have a good time,” he said. “If I sing a wrong note, I don’t care as much any more.”

from-ravi-shankar-to-the-dagars-the-enduring-legacy-of-harivallabh-sangeet-sammelan

Sat Jan 10 15:52:45 IST 2026

JALANDHAR

Forty minutes into the alaap (the improvised section of a raga) in Raga Bageshwari, it became difficult to tell whether the notes were coming from an instrument. Dhrupad singer Ustad Faiyaz Wasifuddin Dagar paused, which might have gone unnoticed if not for what followed: a faint but clear response from the audience, as if the sound had radiated outwards and returned.

Dagar resumed and paused again, this time deliberately. He gestured gently towards the listeners, most of whom were sitting cross-legged under a pandal (marquee). There was again a soft response. For those moments, there appeared to be little difference between the performer and the listener.

“It was anahat naad—unstruck sound, or the sound heard when nothing is played,” Dagar said later.

In Hindustani classical music, especially dhrupad, audiences do not usually hum along as they do at popular music concerts. What happened here was different. The listening was so deep that sound appeared to emanate on its own.

Dagar belongs to a family of dhrupad singers. He said four generations of his family had performed at the venue, with records going back to 1920, when his great-grandfather Allahbande Khan had performed there. He said listening to dhrupad for long periods required a trained ear. On that cold December night, Dagar’s performance lasted over two hours. The notes stayed with the audience long after the concert ended.

The Dagar tradition is considered to be one of the oldest living traditions of dhrupad. It traces its lineage to Swami Haridas, a 15th-century musician. Behram Khan of Jaipur was one of the key figures who trained generations of Dagars. According to Dagar, his ancestors had performed at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the first king of the Sikh empire.

Dagar was performing at the 150th edition of the Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan in Jalandhar, Punjab. Founded in 1875, the festival is widely regarded as one of the oldest continuously held Hindustani classical music festivals in the world. It has survived colonial rule, partition, the formation of the Indian republic, years of militancy in Punjab, and the economic changes brought about by the Green Revolution.

Despite its long history, the festival is not widely known outside classical music circles. Many listeners travel from across India and abroad for the three-day event, held every year in the last week of December.

“My father, uncle and grandfather all performed here,” Dagar said. “They told us how people came wrapped in blankets. Some brought cots because concerts went on till morning. The audience here is different. It expects more. Elsewhere, performances are constrained by time. Here, artists are pushed.”

Many musicians see performing here as an important milestone. Sitarist Shubhendra Rao said his guru, Pandit Ravi Shankar, believed that unless one had performed at Harivallabh, they were yet to make a mark. Rao performed a duet with his wife, cellist Saskia Rao-de Haas. Their performance continued past midnight and received a standing ovation. This was Rao’s fourth appearance at the festival, after first performing here in 2002.

✱ ✱ ✱

The Harivallabh festival did not begin as a classical music institution. It began as a barsi, the death anniversary of Swami Tulja Giri organised by his disciple Baba Harivallabh. Musicians sang dhrupad and dhamar (two of the oldest forms of Hindustani classical music) at the gathering. Saints, sadhus and fakirs joined the anniversary langar.

Next year, well-known musicians of undivided Punjab turned up, including Mian Ahmed Bakhsh (Phillaur), Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (Hoshiarpur), Vilayat Ali and Mira Bakhsh (of Sham Chaurasi gharana), along with musicians from Amritsar and Lahore. Baba Harivallabh died in 1885 and the tradition was continued by his disciple, Pandit Tolo Ram. Then, the tradition was to play Raga Basant in the evening, Bihag at night and Bhairavi in the early morning.

Jalandhar tabla player Pandit Ramakant, now in his 80s, said, “I have been coming here for the past 75 years. Earlier, musicians would gather near the pond by the ancient goddess temple. Arrangements were made for firewood for sadhus to set up their dhunis (sacred fire pits). Dhrupad was sung. One moved from one gathering to another. The singers saw it as their duty to perform here and did not charge anything.”

Initially, the festival involved only singers from Punjab. In 1901, it opened to others upon the chance arrival of Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, who was on his way to Jwalamukhi, now in Himachal Pradesh. That year, Paluskar had set up Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Lahore. He surprised the gathering with his rendition of Raga Jaunpuri. As he became a regular fixture, he brought musicians from across the country, including his disciples Vinayakrao Patwardhan, Narayanrao Vyas and Pandit Omkarnath Thakur. Then came two more significant interventions, with senior IPS officer Ashwini Kumar helming the organising committee, and the North Zone Cultural Centre (NZCC) in Patiala getting involved in 1989. Those were the days when terrorism was at its height, when artists were brought with police protection so that festival could continue without disruption.

The festival’s long history has been mostly recited orally or through news coverage, with a rare book by Joginder Singh Bawra. One famous incident relates to the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi in 1919 at the festival, as he was in Amritsar for the Congress session held in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Gandhi reached so late that three key musicians—Bhaskar Rao, Ramakrishna Bua and Pandit Krishna Rao—were asked to perform together.

In 2001, Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty from the Punjab gharana sang so heart-rendingly that the audience was moved to tears. The state higher education minister of the time, Master Mohan Lal, went onstage to touch Chakraborty’s feet.

Bawra recorded an incident from the 125th edition when former Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah was in attendance. Inspired by the performance of those like Meeta Pandit, he insisted on singing onstage. He sang, More Ram, kab aayoge more angna (My Ram, when will you visit my home).

A year later at the same venue, two tabla players—Bhore Khan and Mehmood Dhaulpuri—clashed over who would go onstage first. But the more famous duel in music history was from 1912 or 1913, between Pandit Paluskar and Ustad Kale Khan, the durbari musician of Kashmir. At 1am, Khan sang Raga Darbari, mesmerising the audience. When Paluskar’s turn came, Khan sarcastically challenged him to do better. They were both called onstage for a competition, which continued for two hours until Khan caved.

A little known fact associated with Jalandhar is how it shaped one of India’s greatest singers. In the 1940s, an adolescent Bhimsen Joshi spent two years here searching for a guru. Jalandhar musician Bhagat Mangat Ram trained him, after which Joshi met Vinayakrao Patwardhan at Harivallabh, who guided him to Sawai Gandharva of the Kirana gharana, a tradition he adopted.

✱ ✱ ✱

One could get a feel of Punjab as one travelled by road from Delhi to Jalandhar, with trains running late due to fog. Hundreds of langars could be seen along the national highways, commemorating the martyrdom of the four sons of the last Sikh Guru Gobind Singh. At the venue, a pandal inside the temple complex with a food court outside greets the visitors. Over the years, the pandals have been made water proof, unlike two decades ago when this writer first visited the festival. Early mornings, in the biting cold, water would leak inside. Many carried their quilts inside.

In this edition, shehnai exponent Pandit Shailesh Bhagwat regaled the audience with Saraswati Vandan and a Punjabi dhun (tune) in Raga Bhairav. In 1996, when he had performed here, the listeners would not let him go even after midnight as they wanted more. “Music is a form of God for me,” Bhagwat said.

Addressing the tussle between popular and classical music, he said that the latter cannot be imposed. “It is not to be forced,” he said. “Whoever wants to learn will learn.” He described three kinds of sound created by God: music, human speech and noise, the last of which must be avoided. Cities that heard music of such intensity were blessed, he said. It takes decades of practice for maestros to perform before a receptive audience.

On the second day of the festival was another uplifting experience. Santoor player Abhay Rustam Sopori, who had performed here in 2001 with his father Bhajan Sopori, struck soulful notes on his instrument. He had a legacy to preserve as he was acutely aware that many in the audience had listened not only to his father, but also to generations of maestros. His performance was memorable. At one point, he said softly, “I lost track of time.” The audience had, too.

But the real show-stealer was Pandit Ronu Majumdar, who seemed to win hearts even before lifting the flute to his lips. Speaking in fluent Punjabi, this Bengali musician expressed his affection for Punjab’s musical traditions. His evocative, strong notes coupled with a high energy duet with flautist Shashank Subramanyam captivated the audience. He also played Gandhi’s favourite bhajan, ‘Vaishnav Jan To’. The festival ended on the third day with a moving performance by Pandit Sanjeev Abhyankar, which went on till 4am. It was his eighth time at the festival. According to tradition, the final artist was showered with marigold flowers till the stage was covered in petals.

✱ ✱ ✱

The festival is not only a platform for established performers, but it also helps identify new talent. Music competitions are held every year, with the winners invited to perform at the festival.

S.S. Ajimal, an octogenarian and long-time director of the Harivallabh organising committee, recalled how the festival was sustained in its early decades. “After Independence, people contributed whatever they could, sometimes even a rupee,” he said. “Today, in the age of live streaming and social media, physical audiences have thinned. Most listeners now come from outside Jalandhar, but the sarais (resting places for travellers) are full and langars continue.” The festival operates on an annual budget of around Rs80 lakh and depends on support from the state and Central governments.

Music in Punjab has become louder and more global, and sustained engagement with classical music has narrowed to specific communities. Traditions now survive largely among groups such as the Namdharis (a Sikh sect) and within gurdwaras. “As more gurdwaras have come up, young Sikhs are learning tabla and other instruments to become ragis,” tabla maestro Pandit Ramakant said. “It provides stable livelihoods.”

Harivallabh has endured for 150 years by adapting without surrendering its core. In the past, it shaped musical practice across the region, influencing local festivals and social rituals. Today, in an era of digital access and fleeting attention, its relevance rests on something that remains unchanged: the discipline of listening.

vodka-a-book-and-two-films-an-accidental-journey-into-ramanujans-genius

Sat Jan 10 15:44:18 IST 2026

Sometimes a film, a book, and a bottle of vodka blend in ways so unexpectedly perfect that you feel grateful simply for having been present.

The blending began on a weekend. I had bought a bottle of Polish vodka whose USP, according to the internet, was that each bottle contained a blade of bison grass from the Bialowieza forest. This was no small thing. Bialowieza is one of the last surviving fragments of the immense primeval forest that once covered most of western Europe. To sip a vodka infused with its bison grass is, in theory, to slip through a tear in time—to be carried back to a continent before maps, borders or even civilisation itself.

But when I opened the bottle at home, I discovered a problem. It contained no grass.

I had chosen the wrong label. The bison grass belonged to a more expensive variant, not the budget bottle I had picked after a cursory Google search. It got worse. The bottle was only 700ml—50ml short of a proper Indian ‘full’—and the alcohol strength a timid 37.5% v/v, well below what any self-respecting Indian brand would offer. By every metric, I had made the wrong choice.

I drank it anyway.

I like to rewatch films when I am tipsy. The emphasis is on ‘re’. New films demand focus and discipline—qualities ill-suited to merriment. Rewatching is easier, like listening to a familiar song: you know the tune, but there is pleasure in catching notes that you missed earlier.

I wanted to watch the Dev Patel film in which he plays the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, with Jeremy Irons as his mentor, G.H. Hardy. The choice was somewhat deliberate. Earlier that week, I had discovered The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph, described by the publisher as a “pioneering critic of colonial knowledge systems”.

Joseph’s own life mirrored his argument. Born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, raised in Madurai and Mombasa, and trained as a mathematician in Britain, he identified with four heritages: Middle Eastern Christian, Indian, African and Western. “To keep a balance between my four heritages and not allow any one to take over permanently is important to me,” he writes in the preface to The Crest of the Peacock. Published by Princeton University Press in 1991, the book is a landmark study of mathematics in non-European civilisations—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mayan, Indian—written at a time when Europe still had a strong claim as the sole custodian of reason. By the time I brought the vodka home, it had become the highlight of my reading year.

Joseph opens the book with Ramanujan. A natural genius, “the like of whom could be found only by going back to Euler and Gauss”, Ramanujan was almost entirely ignorant of modern mathematical conventions. He scribbled endlessly on a slate, transferring only final results to notebooks. One such “Lost Notebook”, written while he was dying at 32, later prompted a mathematician to observe that Ramanujan had achieved in a single year what a great mathematician would in a lifetime.

This was why I wanted to revisit the film.

One of its most memorable scenes shows a brooding Hardy watching a restless Ramanujan. Despite producing work praised for its “richness, beauty, mystery—its sheer mathematical loveliness”, Ramanujan remained, to Hardy, a diamond in the rough. An Iyengar Brahmin, he credited many discoveries to Namagiri, his family deity, which was an embarrassment to Cambridge rationalists. Hardy believed Ramanujan needed to learn discipline by training in western proof.

“Mr Hardy,” Ramanujan asks, “why do we waste our time doing proofs?”

Because mathematics, Hardy replies, is an art. “Just as Mozart could hear an entire symphony in his head,” he tells Ramanujan, “you dance with numbers to infinity.” But without proof, and without something that enabled others to reproduce his dance, his discoveries would be dismissed as conjuring.

The film is titled The Man Who Knew Infinity. That night, however—vodka glass in one hand, remote in the other—I could not remember the name. I used the voice command and said simply: “Ramanujan.”

What appeared was not the Patel–Irons biopic, but Ramanujan—a 2014 Tamil film I had never heard of, which went on to win the State Award for Best Film.

The film runs close to three hours—well over an hour more than its English counterpart. It opens with a classroom scene in which a young Ramanujan confounds his teacher with a mathematical problem, before segueing into a devotional song praising Namagiri. Typical of the sensibilities of a south Indian film. Ramanujan is shown solving problems even in temples. In one scene, he tells a priest distributing peas as offerings that his stock will fall short: there are 142 devotees, Ramanujan explains, but the container can hold only 8,710 peas. If the priest continues to distribute fistfuls of pea, at least eight people will be left without prasad.

Ramanujan’s Cambridge years form the film’s core: cold weather, scarcity of vegetarian food, racism, homesickness, and the mathematical culture clash between western preoccupation with proofs and eastern faith in intuition.

Joseph delves deep into this friction in The Crest of the Peacock. Western mathematics, he writes, had declared itself “modern” by erasing its eastern roots, even though this “modern mathematics” was merely one way of doing mathematics. “We use the term ‘triangle’ (three angles) rather than the Babylonian ‘wedge’ (three sides),” he writes. The concept of an angle came with the Greeks, who absorbed Babylonian knowledge without giving due credit.

Ramanujan’s “sums”, apparently, belonged to a more embodied mathematics. Digits, after all, means fingers; the decimal system exists mainly because humans have ten of them. Its global dominance owes as much to cultural consensus as conventional logic.

Even bottles, I realised that night, carry such histories. Traditional glassblowers produced vessels of roughly 700–800ml because that was what a single lungful of air could manage. Metric standardisation later fixed this at 700ml, which explained my mild disappointment with the vodka.

Which is why the Tamil Ramanujan, for all its lack of subtlety, felt oddly truer than the restrained English biopic I had intended to rewatch. The Tamil film trusted intuition, faith and music to show how Ramanujan danced with numbers to infinity.

By the time the credits rolled, the vodka was nearly gone, like much of the bison grass in the old Bialowieza forest. But it left a heady feeling of realisation: knowledge, like art, does not travel a single road. But occasionally—by accident, algorithm or alcohol—it can blend together in exquisite ways.

And, when it happens, you feel grateful simply for having been present.

meet-saz-the-band-reviving-forgotten-songs-from-the-heart-of-rajasthan

Sat Jan 03 11:42:56 IST 2026

JODHPUR

It was almost sunset at the Sam dunes near Jaisalmer, where the sand glowed in hues of gold, amber and rose pink. As light gave way to darkness, sound took the place of sight. You could hear camels grunting, crickets chirping, travellers laughing softly, and cameleers coaxing tourists into taking one last ride before dusk.

Amid this desert symphony floated a familiar melody—a Rajasthani folk song I first heard only a few days ago at the hilltop Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur during the Rajasthan International Folk Festival (RIFF), which completed 18 years recently.

The song was ‘Sundar Gori’ (Pretty Girl)—not an age-old tune but a contemporary composition by the Rajasthani folk trio SAZ, comprising Sadiq Khan, Asin Khan and Zakir Khan of the musical Langa community. That song has garnered more than 8 lakh views on YouTube alone.

In Rajasthan’s musical communities, where every family member practises music and tradition dictates form, a band is unconventional. But what takes tradition further into new territory is composing original music within these deeply rooted styles. And that’s exactly what SAZ—short for Sadiq, Asin and Zakir—is doing, thus preserving and reimagining their heritage at once.

A band is born

Divya Bhatia, festival director of Jodhpur RIFF, first brought the three together for a performance at Yue Opera Town in Shengzhou, China, in 2019. “They came back and told me they wanted to be a band, which was odd, as in Rajasthani folk music, typically there are groups with one person leading and the others transitory,” recalls Bhatia, also the band’s producer. “So I put the condition that all three would be equal. And that I wanted them to learn and grow, so they would have to make new songs, rehearse, record and play with whoever, whenever and wherever.”

Initially, there was the temptation to call it the Asin Khan Ensemble, given the awards the singer and Sindhi sarangi exponent had won, including the prestigious Aga Khan Music Award (2022). But they finally settled on SAZ, which, aptly, means melody.

“Our traditional songs are disappearing, and so is the sarangi (bowed string instrument). People now prefer singing with the harmonium,” says Zakir, the khartal player who recently joined Asin on vocals. “Bollywood music and ghazals—like those of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—are hugely popular, but our own musical traditions are fading. So we asked ourselves what we could do. With SAZ, we are first reviving the old songs that people have forgotten, the ones no one sings anymore. And we are also writing new songs, so we can give something to the next generation, just like our ancestors [did].”

The trio has now recorded an album.

A seamless fusion

Unlike traditional folk groups where one artiste—often the most acclaimed—takes the spotlight, what sets SAZ apart is the way its members blend seamlessly with one another. None overpowers the other; instead, they balance each other perfectly: Zakir’s flamboyance on the khartal—a wooden percussion instrument, sort of like a castanet—finds its counterpoint in Sadiq’s understated dholak (hand drum), while Asin’s vocals and sarangi bind it all together.

From the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre to The Royal Opera House, Mumbai, SAZ has played on some of the most prestigious stages in India and abroad. Yet, what further reveals their musical depth is the ease with which they cross boundaries, performing as comfortably with jazz saxophonist Rhys Sebastian and Syrian-Swiss musician Basel Rajoub as with Kathak dancer Tarini Tripathi.

Here, Asin emphasises the importance of listening. “There is a lot of difference, for example, between jazz and folk music,” he says. “So listening helps in understanding the other form, which, in turn, enhances our craft as well.”

Traditionally, classical and folk artistes rarely shared the stage—a reflection of the country’s social hierarchies. While classical art forms thrived in elite circles, often upheld by forward caste practitioners, folk traditions were nurtured by marginalised, largely hereditary communities. Yet, when these worlds come together—as they did when SAZ performed with Tripathi for ‘Inayat: A Duet of Four’—the result is sheer harmony, both musical and cultural. Though the trio usually performs seated, they rise to match Tripathi’s taals (rhythm) and chakkars (swirls), with Zakir often breaking into dance himself, his feet and khartal matching the flow of the Kathak dancer.

Pairing folk instruments with Kathak is no mean feat though. “It took a lot of practice,” says Zakir. “We would explain the meaning behind our songs, and she, in turn, taught us about taal and kavit (poetic composition).”

The trio’s performance with Tripathi was as effortless as the one with Sebastian of Bombay Brass and The Bartender (bands) fame. They came together for The Cool Desert Project, a cross-genre collaboration that emerged from Jodhpur RIFF in 2023.

While the sounds of a saxophone and khartal, or a sarangi and guitar, don’t usually share the same stage, the collaboration came together effortlessly at the recently-concluded edition of RIFF as Asin, Zakir and Sadiq performed alongside Sebastian, guitarist Amandeep Bhupinder and pianist Merlyn Dsouza. And as they moved from traditional folk songs like ‘Kesariya Balam’ and ‘Hitchki’ to their own compositions such as ‘Sundar Gori’, sax blended with the sarangi, the guitar with the dholak—the joy palpable on stage and in the audience alike.

“I just love the sound of sax with the sarangi,” says Sebastian, recalling his initial uncertainty about how different instruments would blend. Reflecting on the collaboration, he adds, “It is really credit to them. They don’t just work with me, but with artistes from all over. They are the ones taking the plunge, not only stepping out of their comfort zone but also beyond cultural expectations.”

Bhatia, who initiated these collaborations, says, “That’s what I want to show—that Rajasthani musicians can play and well with a lot of people,” he says. “We are making new songs, bringing back old songs, doing collaborations, trying out new things, new ways of presenting.”

Tradition lives on

In the end, it boils down to the community and to the musical traditions the trio was born in.

“The audience often asks us to present qawwali, such as songs of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which we do, but those are not our songs,” says Zakir. “If we will be [famous], it will be because of our folk traditions, which is why, through the band, we are trying to keep them alive.”

Adds Bhatia: “And if you don’t invest time and effort, it is very easy to go the Bollywood way.”

But things are changing, says the trio.

“Kids are interested now,” says Sadiq. “When they hear Asin sing ‘Sundar Gori’, they want to [sing along].”

a-kind-of-meat-and-other-stories-review-lighting-up-the-dark

Sat Jan 03 11:36:42 IST 2026

Reading Catherine Thankamma’s A Kind of Meat and Other Stories is a sobering affair. It discomfits and jolts you, drawing you outside your own insular world. Her heroes are ordinary women battling a system rigged against them. The tone is dark; Thankamma does not blunt the sharp edge of reality. There is death, violence, sacrifice—yet, they never overpower the narrative. In fact, the charm of Thankamma’s world might be at the other extreme—the gentle, everyday rhythms of life: friends of different faiths encountering each other after many years, a woman’s shifting relationship with her garbage collector, life after the death of a spouse…. Through what is, Thankamma spotlights what should not be—the subtle shades of patriarchy, the societal pressure to conform, the cumulative injustices, the lack of agency.

In Thankamma’s world, however, the women never let fate drive their destiny. The societal pummelling does not break their spirit. In one story, for example, Madhu is a garbage collector whom the neighbours hate because of her filthy language. The narrator’s misgivings about Madhu, however, disappear when she realises that, in a society where untouchability is still an unspoken evil, the cards are stacked against the garbage collector. Later, when she sees a heavily pregnant Madhu bending over the trash, her pajamas rolled up to her knees, she is struck by the woman’s resilience. She is a survivor; she will not let the trash she collects contaminate her soul.

In another story college professor Rukmini, sleeping in a train, is mistaken for a prostitute because she had not tied up her wet hair and lay asleep like one dead to the world. It is disconcerting for her to know that her accusers are all women. “Their principled womanhood must make them feel they had the right to judge,” she thinks. As soon as they realise that she is a teacher, their attitude changes. The contempt turns to inquisitiveness, and the women start fishing for details. There is, after all, only one way to respect in this society—the respectability bestowed by your social standing.

In Polling Day at Nenmara, Alli is the presiding officer in a general election. She is to spend the night in a high-caste Hindu’s house. The head of the household—Acchan Namboodiri—superciliously points her to the room where she is to stay. The next day at the polling booth, two long serpentine lines have formed. As the voting progresses, Acchan Namboodiri arrives with his retinue of followers expecting to be ushered to the front. But he might be in for a surprise.

Thankamma’s prose is sparse, saying more by what she does not say. In the story Ellunda, for example, a young girl Ria is brought to a different church by her friend because of its superior offering of the sweet ellunda. Without spelling it out, Thankamma brings attention to the segregation in society through the description of the church and its parishioners. Soon, Ria realises that she and her friend are the only ones wearing fancy frocks; all the other girls are dressed more commonly. The church is just a whitewashed building with a small yard, unlike Ria’s huge parish church with its vast grounds.

There is a lightness to Thankamma’s storytelling that belies the dark realities it conveys. In her world, darkness does not mean the absence of light; it only amplifies its brightness. Amid the injustices and insults, Thankamma’s women shine with hope and humour. They make no apology for who they are, rebelling in some ways, assimilating in others. They might be vilified, but they are not weak. Their voices, they insist, must be heard. Their stories must be told.

A KIND OF MEAT AND OTHER STORIES

By Catherine Thankamma

Published by Aleph

pages 206, price Rs699

a-good-life-review-the-other-side-of-pain

Sat Jan 03 11:31:39 IST 2026

The last person you would expect to write a book on palliative care is the author who had earlier shot to fame with a bestseller on the Bollywood star known by her single, unforgettable name—Helen. Delving into the guilty delights of watching a cabaret artiste sizzle on screen hardly qualifies a writer to handle a deeply sensitive medical and sociological subject. But, Jerry Pinto, known to pull off surprises, has pulled off yet another with A Good Life: The Power of Palliative Care.

Most of us have hazy notions of palliative care. It is a chapter in medical care that we quietly skip. Such indifference has bred idle and unfounded speculation. Palliative care has to do with slow and lingering death, doesn’t it? Actually, the opposite is true, and that’s what makes A Good Life such a significant book. It tells us, palliative care is, in fact, life-affirming.

The book is also important because it highlights a point that is becoming lost in these days of ‘friendship recession’. The author argues that human beings “are evolutionarily ill-equipped to face the world independently. We have survived and even achieved dominance because we learned how to work together”. Iconic anthropologist Margaret Mead is quoted to have said that she saw the first historical sign of civilisation when she found a healed femur. Else, broken thigh bones would have been common back in the day. But someone had paused, cared and tended to a wounded fellow being. And he/she started the timer on our civilised world.

The book has real-life stories from across the country—from Mumbai, where India’s first hospice came up in 1986, to Thiruvananthapuram, Guwahati, Pune and Hyderabad. There are stories of patients, caregivers and doctors. Different streams flowing in, to add to the body of the river.

Over the years, the horizons of palliative care have been stretched by trailblazing doctors. New concepts recognise that physical pain is only one part of the problem; financial distress, social discomfort and the psychological suffering arising from both are equally significant.

Given the volume of information conveyed, you would expect the book to end up as a mound of data. But the stories are as delicately strung as a web. Jerry’s narration is as usual masterly. He is not a writer as much as a figure-skater on ice—light, fast and arrestingly beautiful.

Reading him, one could be lulled into believing that palliative care is turning life into paradise. But uncomfortable reality stares us in the face. If everything is working well and everybody is as kind as Jerry makes them out to be, why is there still so much suffering in the world? Statistics show that worldwide only 14 per cent of the people who need palliative care receive it. Still, it seems churlish to deny Jerry his truth. One can’t deny that a lot is being done across our country by brave and dedicated people, and if their numbers grow, life will certainly be better.

Decades ago, Malcolm Muggeridge turned from hard-nosed satirist to high impact follower of Mother Teresa. He came up with Something Beautiful for God. Jerry’s offering could come close: ‘Something Beautiful for Those in Distress’. And that includes us all, for who among us is not under some kind of stress?

A GOOD LIFE: THE POWER OF PALLIATIVE CARE

By Jerry Pinto

Published by Juggernaut

Price Rs699; page 252

why-deepika-padukones-8-hour-day-demand-is-a-wake-up-call-for-bollywood

Sat Jan 03 11:25:31 IST 2026

A while ago, actor Deepika Padukone spoke about the need for eight-hour workdays in Bollywood, sparking conversations about the unregulated state of affairs behind the screen. Her comments are symptomatic of a chronic issue that plagues any sector struggling to get organised. Except that Hindi cinema was granted industry status in 2001—almost a quarter of a century ago. The film industry’s reluctance to fully embrace its organised industry status reflects in the less-than-satisfactory working conditions and remuneration for lakhs of artists. Padukone’s call for eight-hour workdays is the norm in most professional industries. The “creativity cannot follow a clock” reasoning does not quite hold up. Hollywood’s regulated hours produce creative work, too. Rules and regulations that are conducive to the industry’s functioning can definitely be framed. Things do need to change.

If there is one framework that can guide this change, it is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Yes, DEI is under unfortunate attack in several parts of the world, but that is all the more reason to earnestly engage with this progressive framework. The Hindi film industry needs to change, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because its future may well depend on it. An unrepresentative and exclusivist creative industry will struggle to sustain itself in the long run.

What used to be a fairly diverse industry, producing films across different budgets and sensibilities, has increasingly become dominated by a handful of massive tent-pole productions. These tent-pole films, mounted at enormous costs, need extensive release windows and maximum number of screens to make a profit. The most obvious problem is the shrinking space for medium and small films. A debut director’s thoughtful drama or an experimental genre production struggles to get even limited theatrical release, let alone the time to find an audience.

This concentration of resources creates a self-reinforcing pattern. As a lot of money rides on tent-pole projects, they become increasingly star-centric. These productions demand big, established names who can provide some insurance against box office unpredictability. The logic becomes somewhat circular: tent-pole films need stars to justify their scale, and stars command premium fees. Everyone knows these projects are “too big to fail”, and that results in frantic efforts to contain cost overruns, forcing everyone to do more work for less.

Projects driven by innovation, compelling stories or distinctive voices rather than star power get pushed to the margins. As a result, young writers and directors find fewer opportunities. Mid-budget cinema has largely disappeared. You either make a Rs100-crore plus spectacle or scramble for whatever is left. It is a crisis that affects the entire production ecosystem.

So what can be done? Reform needs coordinated discussions and action on multiple fronts.

Producer bodies should ideally take the lead in ensuring diversity in scale, themes and genres. This means a deliberate effort to support mid- and small-budget productions, genre experiments and new voices. The current model, where a handful of massive bets crowds out everything else, does not serve creative health or economic stability. A diverse portfolio approach makes both artistic and financial sense.

The star system is complicated. It may seem unjust that individual performers command such disproportionate resources. Yet you could argue that stars embody what is essential about cinema’s magic—the charisma, screen presence, and emotional connect that make movies more than just stories. Rather than trying to dismantle star power, which probably is not possible anyway, the solution might be to redirect it. Established stars could use their influence to support varied projects. When a major star like Nicole Kidman, who has resolved to work with women directors once every 18 months, publicly backs diverse talent and emerging filmmakers, she sets an example for others. Stars’ advocacy could also pressure exhibitors and distributors to treat smaller films more fairly.

Cinema halls are, somewhat ironically, constraining cinema. The growth of premium multiplexes with enhanced amenities sounds good, but it comes at a price. Tickets at these venues often cost more than what even a middle-class family can afford for a regular outing. Producers and exhibitors need to seriously think about programming diversity, pricing and accessibility. The aim should be to make people go to cinema halls several times a year, and not just for occasional blockbusters.

OTT platforms, despite their current limitations, offer genuine possibilities. Many of the platforms are sponsoring research studies, talent development programmes and providing platforms for diverse voices. They could do more, though. A family wanting access to varied content today might need subscriptions to four or five platforms. It is an expense many cannot afford. Other than bundling access with voice and data plans, smarter simplified payment systems, and region and demographic specific affordability initiatives could dramatically increase access.

Better working conditions produce better work. An exhausted, exploited crew cannot deliver their best. Industry associations should demand, establish, and enforce basic standards around hours, pay, safety and dignity. We need union negotiations establishing clear boundaries about AI use, worker compensation and consent. In Hollywood, when studios tried to short-change writers and actors over streaming revenues and AI, the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA (the American labour union for performers and media professionals) won significant protections through collective negotiation. Recent court cases around personality rights show that individual battles can succeed, but they are expensive and exhausting. Collective bargaining through unions distributes this burden and creates industry-wide standards. This is particularly urgent with AI; as studios experiment with AI-generated scripts and digital doubles, individual contracts will not suffice. Associations like the Screenwriters Association are already taking it up in a substantial manner.

The Hindi film industry’s problems are real but fixable. The current trajectory does not serve most filmmakers or viewers. It does not even serve the industry’s long-term commercial interests. Change requires acknowledging this and acting collectively. The magic of cinema depends not just on stars and spectacle, but on diversity, equity and inclusivity, and the idea that cinema can speak to and for everyone. Getting back to that is what reforms should aim for.

Faiz Ullah is associate professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi Paromita Ghosh is a Mumbai-based media professional

the-making-of-a-legend-how-a-bet-a-hall-and-wwi-forged-agatha-christie

Sat Dec 27 11:48:17 IST 2025

Not many people would know Margaret Frary Miller; she is one of those people who tip-toed incognito through the hallways of history. Still, if it was not for her, the world might never have gotten its most beloved crime writer—Agatha Christie. Agatha—and the world at large—has two things to thank Margaret for. First, for challenging her to write a crime novel. It happened after both read Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Margaret made a bet with Agatha: that she would never be able to pull off a book like Gaston’s. Agatha, of course, took up the challenge and the rest, as they say, is a legacy in crime.

Second, Margaret gave her a setting for many of her novels—Abney Hall in Cheadle, which was Margaret’s married home, where Agatha spent many happy days as a young girl. Later, its “quantities of rooms, passages, unexpected steps, back staircases, front staircases, alcoves, niches” would become the site of many bloody murders, served Agatha style. They made an appearance in her books like 4.50 from Paddington (in which it was described as a “proper old mausoleum”), They Do It With Mirrors and, of course, her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

In the last, it had to compete for attention with perhaps Agatha’s greatest literary offering—the flamboyant Belgian whiz Hercule Poirot, whose head was “exactly the shape of an egg”, whose moustache was “very stiff and military”, and for whom a speck of dust on his suit would have caused more pain than a bullet wound. He became so popular that when his creator killed him off, The New York Times published an obituary. Together, Agatha and her master detective trudged the corners and crevices of the English countryside, snooping in vicarages, coastal resorts and English girls’ boarding schools for clues, interviewing passengers in trains and ships, and using their “little grey cells” to solve the unsolvable. Agatha’s quintessential Englishness provided the backdrop for a little-appreciated facet of her writing—her humour. Often, she was at her sassiest while taking a potshot at her own people. In her short story Triangle at Rhodes, for example, she wrote of an Englishwoman: “Unlike most English people, she was capable of speaking to strangers on sight instead of allowing four days to a week elapse before making the first cautious advance as is the customary British habit.”

In fact, if you solved the mystery of Agatha’s life, you got an insight into the machinery of her mind. For example, her favourite murder weapon of choice—poison—was developed during her years working at a Torquay dispensary during World War I, when she was married to her first husband Archibald Christie and living with her widowed mother. History has lost count of the unsuspecting men and women who have been bumped off with Agatha’s strychnine-laced cocoa and thallium-spiked tea.

But some of her best books—like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile—were a result of her travels to Egypt, Iraq and Syria with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. In fact, it was recently revealed that the couple also visited India in January 1960 for an archaeological lecture tour. The next year, she visited Kashmir on a leisure trip. “Lake and mountains rather lovely,” she wrote her daughter Rosalind from Srinagar’s Oberoi Palace. “This is a hotel rather like at Jaipur—converted rajah’s palace—miles and miles of corridors, enormous rooms and we are in a kind of super suite looking over the lake.” Pity her imagination did not poison the walls of the hotel with arsenic fumes; unfortunately, the queen of crime did not set any of her novels in India.

So how was this maverick writer—whose 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections have made her the best-selling novelist of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare—in real life? “She was incredibly loving,” says her great grandson, James Prichard, CEO at Agatha Christie Ltd. “She shared extraordinary experiences with my father—her grandson—taking him around the world, to the theatre, the opera and all sorts of experiences. I tease my father that he was the most spoiled grandchild of the 20th century.”

According to James, she was also a great listener. “My father says she was the best listener he ever met,” he says. “She was very shy, and was happier listening to people and asking them questions than regaling them with stories or anecdotes about herself. There is a piece of advice she gave aspiring writers. She told them that if they wanted to learn about people, just ride around on the bus and listen to their conversations.”

It is difficult to reconcile this shy and gentle grandmother with the ace crime writer who plotted countless gruesome murders. But perhaps one can get a clue to the mystery of Agatha from what she herself once said: “I had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions.” To think that if it was not for Margaret, the world might have gotten a seamstress instead of a crime writer. Thank God for the bet that gave us corpses and not cushions.

agatha-christie-is-bigger-now-than-she-has-ever-been-james-prichard

Sat Dec 27 11:41:20 IST 2025

Interview| James Prichard, CEO at Agatha Christie Ltd

Q/ How was it growing up as the great grandson of Agatha Christie?

A/ I did not know anything different because that is the way I grew up. And to me it feels perfectly natural, although, obviously, I understand that it was not. What is interesting from my perspective is how, when I was growing up, Agatha Christie was not cool. She certainly was not as popular as she is now. I think about how different my own children’s experience is than mine was. My kids have the advantage of a time when she is bigger now than she ever has been. And that includes when she was alive. Film and TV are just bigger media than books and stage, which were the pools she played in.

The other thing is that I have always thought of Agatha Christie as two people. There is the world-famous icon, the author, the genius, and then there is the private person, who I think of as my father’s grandmother. I was five or six when she died. But my grandmother, her daughter, lived until 2004. My father is still alive. So, obviously, I have a lot of reflected knowledge and experience of her. I do feel as if I have a personal insight into her. I teased my father about how I thought she was the most extraordinary grandmother and how he was the most spoiled grandchild of the 20th century. And I don’t mean that purely in financial terms, although there was an element of that. She was incredibly loving. She shared extraordinary experiences with him, took him around the world, took him to the theatre, opera, and just all sorts of experiences.

Q/ Do you have any memory of her?

A/ I do have vague memories. She was obviously very old when I was a child and I remember being asked to behave and not run around too wildly by my mother, in case I knocked her over or something. I also have a very vivid memory of the day she died. I remember coming back from school and my father was sitting in this room with the curtains drawn, and was obviously very upset. I remember watching the six o’clock news and she was the lead item. Even then I realised that was not normal, and not what happened to everyone else’s great grandmothers. But obviously, I never got to sit down and discuss her work or her feelings on life, the universe or anything else. So I miss that a bit.

Q/ What is her first novel that you read?

A/ The first book I read was Death on the Nile. I think I was around nine. And bizarrely, I seem to remember that I read it surreptitiously. There was a paperback on the passage or something. I took it to my room and read it under the bed cover, because I was not sure that my parents would be happy with me reading it. I guess I just thought they would think it was too adult and I was too young, but it has always stuck with me as one of my favourite stories.

Q/ What are some memories or anecdotes that your father or grandmother might have told you about her?

A/ One of the most interesting things my father always says about her is that she was the best listener he ever met. She was a very shy person, and I think she was probably happier listening to people and asking them questions than she was regaling them with stories about herself. Her books are at heart about human nature. They are about people.

Q/ Could you describe the work that you do as chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Ltd?

A/ I do think of her books as being the heart of the business. We certainly make as much money now as has ever been made from publishing. It is extraordinary how many books we still sell. As a child, I was told that books and reading were going to come to an end. People have always been prophesying that the book is dead; it really isn’t. And then you get new versions of the book, like the e-book. The growth of audio over the last five years in the UK and the US is unbelievable, and is now a very significant part of our business. We have done some really interesting multi-voice audio projects.

I have been probably doing this job properly for 10 years or so, and have had to learn the worlds of TV, film, adaptation and stage. But the main thing is that it is still a fascinating business. It is extraordinary to see how many people still love Agatha Christie. Last week I was in China and went to see a play in Beijing—an English version of Murder on the Orient Express. There was a packed audience of about a thousand people. And then on Saturday night, I went to see a Chinese version of Murder on the Orient Express in Shanghai and it was a packed hall of 1,200 people, all having a good time. That kind of blows my mind. Her work still has an extraordinary impact on people all over the world. That is just an aspect of her genius that perhaps we will never understand, and perhaps there is no point in trying to understand.

Q/ According to you, what is the essence of her enduring appeal?

A/ I think it is a very simple thing—the stories. She had a genius for plot. And the thing about great stories is that they don’t age. They stand the test of time. They thrive across boundaries, across borders, across languages. You can translate a great story into any language in the world. And it is no accident that she is the most translated author of all time. But I also think that her understanding of human nature is completely underestimated. Bizarrely, I think she is criticised occasionally for not having enough characterisation in her books. What people underestimate is how she managed to pack everything in 70,000 words; her books are relatively short. That is part of her ability to sketch a character. We know who these people are. We still know people like them. You don’t need another 10,000 words to understand them. And I think that is part of her skill. She is criticised for something which actually was at the heart of her talent.

Q/ She wrote her first book in the aftermath of World War I. If she was writing her novels today, how different would they have been?

A/ The first part of that question to me is always fascinating, which is that essentially the murder mystery genre came out of a time of horrible bloodshed and killing. Why people came out of World War I and wanted to read about murder, I don’t know. But I think one of the things about these books is that, despite the horrible things that happen, at the end, things are all sorted and the world is put back together again. And I think that was a reassuring concept for readers at the time.

understanding-ukraine-does-a-1000-year-russia-west-conflict-hold-the-answers

Sat Dec 27 11:34:33 IST 2025

Nothing exists in isolation, more so in history. A case in point is the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict—it has its roots not only in recent developments but also in the past.

Pushkin Medal recipient Achala Moulik puts the Russian perspective in focus, placing contemporary events in the backdrop of a west-Russia conflict over 10 centuries. Hence the title of her book—The Thousand Years War: Russia and the West. If anything, the book helps understand the raging conflict in Ukraine.

Russians have had a unique and troubled relationship with the west. They are Europeans and Eurasians at the same time, which has led to a civilisational conflict. Parallelly, there was the clash between the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, as also the political-economic contradictions between capitalism and communism.

Tsarist Russia had recurring conflicts with other imperialist powers—Britain, France, Ottoman Turkiye and Austria-Germany. The invasions by the Vikings, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and later on the power play by the US and NATO only continued the thread.

Moulik writes in her prelude: “Unable to defeat Russia in a direct armed confrontation, the west waged proxy wars against nations friendly to Russia, which would draw Russia into conflicts. This inflicted irredeemable damage on the hapless pawns in the game—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and now Ukraine.”

There were economic reasons, too. Russia was home to 28 per cent of the world’s natural and mineral resources. So it has been a conflict not just for power and influence but also natural riches and territories.

The book, which can be blamed for its overwhelming Russian point of view and for being over-simplistic, is also a commentary on Russian resilience, underlining the victories against the invading Swedes, French and Germans.

Nine of the book’s 38 chapters are articles by other writers. Moulik’s final chapter expresses hope of a multipolar world, “where the weak are defended, the poor are aided, the humiliated are respected, where might is not right and where justice and equality for all are not empty pledges, and where powerful states cannot destroy those who oppose them”.

The book also has mentions on the elephant in the room, China, and the rising giant, India. “Now we can assume that the massive emancipation of mankind from western control is of central importance, the most important factor of which is the growth of China’s economic and political power,” writes Moulik. “If China itself, as well as India and other major states outside the west, cope with the task entrusted to them by history, in the coming decades the international system will acquire features that were completely uncharacteristic before.” Given their growing importance, India and China deserved a little more space in the book.

Nonetheless, The Thousand Years War: Russia and the West will go down as an important view of an outsider, with the Russia-Ukraine conflict providing the perfect setting.

THE THOUSAND YEARS WAR: RUSSIA AND THE WEST

By Achala Moulik

Published by Har-Anand Publications Pvt Ltd,

pages 296, price Rs999

the-unlikely-redemption-of-harry-maguire-from-slabhead-to-manchester-united-stalwart

Sat Dec 27 11:28:58 IST 2025

What a specimen, I thought, as I watched Matthijs de Ligt. It was May 2019; the Dutch centre-back had just captained Ajax to a domestic double. The Amsterdam club had also reached the Champions League semifinals after 22 years. Mic in one hand, champion’s shield held casually in the other, the strapping 19-year-old listed the European giants Ajax had beaten—Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Juventus. “We have shown the real Ajax,” he thundered, as 1,00,000 delirious fans cheered. I had been enthralled by his physicality, tactical awareness and on-the-ball ability for well over a year. But, it was at that moment that my heart said: “I do.”

I wanted him at my club—a big-spending, mid-table team called Manchester United. But, it wasn’t to be. Matthijs chose the Old Lady of Turin. I was shattered. To pick up the pieces, my club brought in Harry Maguire. We even one-upped Matthijs’s new club by spending a world-record (for a defender) £80 million on Harry—they spent only €75 million on Matthijs.

It started well. Harry, 26, towered over opponents, read the game well and was good on the ball. Within six months, he was named skipper. Meanwhile, in Italy, Matthijs was struggling to meet expectations.

However, despite a solid first season, Harry was soon overwhelmed by United. The new captain sank with his ship. His highlight reels show gems like pulling down a teammate to clear a path for an opponent to score, dawdling to kill counter-attacks, missing simple passes, and sundry assaults on teammates—Paul Pogba got a scorpion-kick; Cristiano Ronaldo, a headbutt.

United fans cried, laughed and despaired (some dregs of society even made a bomb threat against Harry). For many fans, the only hope was that Harry might go to jail. Back in 2020, at a Greek night club, two men allegedly injected his sister with a rape-drug. Unlike on the field in years to come, Harry spotted danger and stepped in. By the sound of it, he sent bodies flying. Every sinew in me wanted to support the gallant brother; yet, I also wanted him out of my club. However, nothing came of the case.

Notably, in November 2022, a Ghanaian MP mocked Harry, calling the Ghana vice president an “economic Maguire”—a liability. And in 2023, Harry was stripped of captaincy. It was a big blow and rumours swirled he’d leave. A London team made a good offer, but Harry, aka ‘Slabhead’, refused a wage cut. Now, I was furious. I had been supportive (except for briefly wishing him incarceration), but, he had stayed for money; this was too much. Millions of United fans, myself included, sharpened our knives. The next mistake would not be forgiven.

Infuriatingly, relieved of captaincy, he improved drastically (at times, he has been the team’s best defender and its most potent attacking threat). The Ghanaian MP said sorry; Slabhead’s response was gracious and warm. In that warmth, we melted; the knives were gone. He was ours, to deride, yes, but, also to cherish. A rare modern footballer who tackled mind-numbing, often deserved, criticism head-on and came out on top. He has athletic limitations. In character, he is not lacking.

Now Matthijs is here, 26 and battle-hardened by stints in Turin and Munich, to take over as the big man in United’s defence. Yet there are no complaints when Harry plays—he has earned it.

jane-austens-enduring-legacy-why-we-still-love-her-250-years-later

Sat Dec 20 18:44:15 IST 2025

On a windy English morning, Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet stands on a cliff, her skirt whipping in the wind as Dario Marianelli’s piano score swells behind her. She has just learnt that Mr Darcy—the man she both resents and is drawn to—engineered the collapse of her sister Jane’s relationship with Mr Bingley, Darcy’s best friend. That windswept pose captures Elizabeth’s inner turmoil, but also her quiet independence. She is alone, shaken and yet resolute after refusing the rich Mr Darcy’s marriage proposal, accepting which could have changed her life.

Nearly 20 years after Joe Wright’s 2005 film reframed Regency England—its romance, patriarchy, feudalism and the politics of marriage and money, not to mention gowns and bonnets—Jane Austen, whose 250th birth anniversary was on December 16, remains the quiet architect of our most enduring romantic fantasies, from Darcy’s iconic hand-flex (not in the original book, though) to Colonel Brandon’s contained devotion. Austen’s women, meanwhile, continue to stride, question, rebel and negotiate a world that feels both unchanged and unsettlingly familiar.

The many Austens

“Jane Austen was writing about extreme patriarchy and the role of women in such a world. And sadly, we still live in a patriarchal society where women are often judged the same way, especially if they remain unmarried. I think she was raging against that,” says British-Kenyan filmmaker Gurinder Chadha. She brought that critique to life in Bride & Prejudice (2004), a cross-cultural, east-meets-west adaptation of Austen’s most beloved novel Pride & Prejudice.

Starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Lalita and Martin Henderson as Will Darcy, she transforms Austen’s 19th-century feudal England into a fairly contemporary millennial India, where arranged marriages continue to be determined by status and security. It is only startling how Austen’s opening line—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—perfectly fits across centuries and continents.

Author Mahesh Rao found a similar echo when he reimagined Emma in Polite Society (2018). Here, Ania Khurana becomes the “handsome, clever and rich” meddling matchmaker—snobbish, sheltered, but compellingly charismatic.

For Rao, too, the parallels feel natural—between Austen’s Georgian Highbury and contemporary Lutyens Delhi where he sets his story, which he describes as a tightly packed radius of influence with just a few streets holding a huge concentration of political and economic power. And much like Austen’s Highbury, “where everyone’s houses are close to one another, and everyone is going to the same balls, churches and parks,” Lutyens Delhi, too, resembles a cloistered village. Rao describes it as, “A small group of wealthy families knowing one another, marrying one another, and everyone is connected, while the rest of the world is excluded.”

Bringing Emma into a fashionable Delhi was Sonam Kapoor’s rom-com Aisha (2010)—another reminder of Austen’s enduring appeal, but also of her literary brilliance.

Among the most celebrated Austen adaptations is Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), which won her the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The film boasts a charismatic cast—Thompson as the steadfast Elinor, Kate Winslet as the impulsive Marianne, Hugh Grant as the awkwardly charming Edward Ferrars, and Alan Rickman as the quietly smouldering Colonel Brandon.

If Thompson’s version was definitive, filmmaker Rajiv Menon’s Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000) remains one of the most inventive. A modern Tamil retelling of Sense and Sensibility, it transports Austen’s world to millennial south India, in the middle of the IT boom, with remarkable ease. The film was powered by A.R. Rahman’s music and featured a stellar cast, including Tabu, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Ajith Kumar, and Mammootty. It reshaped the Dashwood sisters into working women whose choices drive the narrative. Their heartbreaks, losses and reinventions feel contemporary.

“Strip the story down to its bones and the parallels are unmistakable,” says Menon. “Women seeking love, women at the centre of their own romantic journeys. Austen was among the first to write these stories within the structure of comedy.” What keeps readers returning to her, he adds, is that she wrote about a world where women had almost no agency, and yet found ways to carve out space for themselves. “Her characters grow, intellectually, emotionally, romantically, and ultimately arrive at what is right for them,” he says.

Coming-of-age

Almost all Jane Austen novels centre around this growth of her heroines. Such as Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey—an unassuming 17-year-old whose imagination has been shaped by the Gothic novels. Over the course of the book, she confronts the gap between fantasy and reality, and what emerges is a heroine who sheds her naïveté without losing her innate goodness.

If coming-of-age is about growth, so too is the power of second chances, a theme Austen explores in Persuasion. At 27 and still unmarried, Anne Elliot is Austen’s most mature heroine, having once ended her engagement to the dashing naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Seven years later, he re-enters her life, just as her family is forced to rent out their ancestral estate to ease their debts.

Of marriage and money

What further cements Austen’s literary genius is that she garnered an endearing global legacy. Interestingly, in each of her six novels, her fascination with money—its power, the social standing it confers, and the ways it leaves women at a disadvantage—is unmistakable. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, the Dashwood sisters are disinherited after their father’s death and left at the mercy of their half-brother.

Nowhere is the interplay of wealth and social hierarchy more pointed than in Austen’s often-underrated Mansfield Park. Poor Fanny Price, abandoned by circumstance, is sent to live with her affluent relatives at Mansfield Park, constantly reminded of her inferior status while her privileged cousins go through life with ease. Yet these constraints never dim her moral clarity, as she resists even the prospect of marrying the rich and charming, but manipulative Henry Crawford.

“For most of her writing life, Jane Austen was extremely worried about her finances,” says Rao. Ironically, for a writer so attuned to the power of money, Austen was celebrated on the £10 Bank of England note in 2017, marking the 200th anniversary of her death.

Alongside money, marriage is another recurring theme in Austen’s novels. “What is fascinating is that someone who never married herself wrote so many endearing love stories,” says Menon. Even more striking is that virtually all of her heroines end up married.

Who was Austen?

Little is known about Austen’s personal life—her sister Cassandra famously burned most of her letters after Austen’s untimely death in 1817 at just 41. What is known, however, is that she had a brief flirtation with the Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy, whom she described in a 1796 letter to Cassandra as “a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man”. Unfortunately, Lefroy had to leave the country.

She was also engaged, in 1802, to Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy friend’s brother, breaking it the next morning. In doing so, Austen appears to have chosen singledom—a bold and unusual choice, both for her time and ours.

Beyond romance & money

Every reader takes something different from Austen—for some it is the romance, for others the class divide. But one thing is clear: she was a keen observer of Georgian England, from the constrained place of women in a patriarchal, feudal society to the ways wealth was made, including through the slave trade.

Sense and Sensibility hints at British colonial ventures through Colonel Brandon’s departure to India, while Mansfield Park is more direct: Fanny Price is sent to live with the wealthy Bertram family, whose estate includes holdings in Antigua. The reference is more than symbolic—the estate gets its name from the real-life Lord Mansfield, who, childless, adopted his grand-nieces and famously presided over the 1772 Somerset case that helped outlaw slavery in England.

A year of celebration

It is a year of celebration for Jane Austen fans, known as “Janeites”, a term coined in 1894 by British writer George Saintsbury. The label even appears in Rudyard Kipling’s 1924 short story The Janeites, about British soldiers bonding over Austen during World War I. England is at the heart of the global festivities: Austen-themed parties, exhibitions, and events are marking the author’s birth anniversary. The New York Times even named ‘Jane Austen’s England’ as the top place to travel to in 2025.

“Jane Austen fans have a good reason to explore the south-west of England this year: It’s the 250th anniversary of her birth, and celebrations abound. Hampshire was both Austen’s birthplace and a source of inspiration; as a novelist, she was most prolific in this bucolic setting. Start out at Jane Austen’s House, her former cottage, featuring an exhibition and themed festivals,” it wrote.

In India, while universities are holding readings, discussions, and performances, book stores are witnessing a notable rise in sales. “Jane Austen’s books are perennial bestsellers and continue to perform exceptionally well in our classics section, with a significant and sustained upward trend so far this year,” says Nidhi Gupta, director of Crossword Bookstores. Highlighting the impact of the 250th birthday celebrations, she notes, “We have observed a marked increase in interest across all our platforms. Importantly, this surge is not limited to long-time fans; it also includes a growing number of younger readers discovering the original novels after engaging with modern film and television adaptations.”

Among her works, the perennially popular Pride & Prejudice remains the top seller, with Emma following close behind.

Speaking on Austen’s enduring appeal among young readers, author Malashri Lal, a former English professor at Delhi University, said, “Reading Jane Austen and watching films based on her novels has become a ‘cool’ pastime for today’s youth.”

On whether girls engage with Austen differently from boys, she explains, “While universal themes such as romance, relationships, class hierarchies, and the visual glamour of the Regency period attract both genders, they approach Austen’s writing in distinct ways. In our egalitarian times, girls often focus on the emotional growth of characters like Emma Woodhouse, while boys tend to notice Mr Knightley’s gentle corrections of Emma’s assumptions, learning how to be critical yet courteous.”

The enduring legacy

Austen wrote just six complete novels, with one—Sanditon—left unfinished due to her untimely death. She pioneered the use of free indirect discourse, seamlessly blending a third-person narrator’s voice with a character’s inner thoughts and feelings, creating an intimacy that was revolutionary for her time.

Her legacy continues to thrive in countless adaptations and retellings, including Netflix’s upcoming series adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, starring Emma Corrin as Elizabeth, Jack Lowden as Darcy, and Olivia Colman as Mrs Bennet, proving that Austen’s world still captivates hearts and imaginations across the globe.

kanchi-and-i-caroline-caseys-bittersweet-journey-back-to-kerala-after-25-years

Sun Dec 14 11:11:57 IST 2025

Caroline Casey makes as if to hug me, and then pauses. “Are you a hugger?” she asks a little doubtfully. I am not really, but I don’t want to make a bad first impression. After all, I am going to be spending the next three days with this Irish woman and her friend Andy (Andrea Webb), traversing Kerala from north to south. Caroline envelops me in a warm hug and leads me to the outdoor dining area of a hotel in Fort Kochi, where the two are just finishing breakfast. That hug, I realise later, says a lot about her. Not many Indians would meet a stranger with a hug. I don’t know if it is an Irish thing, but it is definitely a Caroline thing, as I observe her warmth and friendliness towards everyone we encounter—from waiters to receptionists to taxi drivers. As she speaks with them, her tone is light-hearted and jaunty, although the jokes go over most of them who struggle to comprehend her words, let alone her humour. But they all gamely laugh, probably associating the familiarity with her foreignness.

Caroline also cries as easily as she laughs, and the first sign of tears I see is in the car on our way to Kappad beach in Kozhikode, as she remembers the last time she was there on a journey that would change her life. Nearly 25 years ago, she came to India to ride an elephant across three south Indian states (Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka), covering a distance of 1,000km and raising money for 6,000 cataract operations. This sounds difficult as it is, but there was a factor that made it near-impossible: Caroline is legally blind.

As a child, she did not know it. On her 17th birthday, she accompanied her visually-impaired sister to an eye specialist. After an eye examination, the specialist asked her how she was going to celebrate her birthday. “I’m going to learn how to drive,” she told him. He turned to her mother and said, “You haven’t told her yet.” That is when she learned about her condition—ocular albinism, which restricts her vision to about half a foot. Her parents had made the radical decision of not telling her, instead raising her as though she was sighted.

With dogged determination, she decided to believe that herself and not to tell anyone about her condition. She worked as an archaeologist, a landscape gardener, a waitress and a masseuse before getting a global consulting job at Accenture. More than two years later, in 1999, at the age of 28, she temporarily experienced significant sight loss. That is when she decided she could not do it any more. “I was so lost,” she says. “I did not know who I was any more.”

It was another eye specialist who changed her life. He told her it was time for a change. “What did you want to be when you were little?” he asked her. Slowly, an idea began to form in her mind. As a kid, she had always wanted to be Mowgli from The Jungle Book. Why not try to make that dream a reality? Some years ago, she had read the book Travels On My Elephant by Mark Shand. As she re-read it, she formulated her plan: she would become an elephant handler, riding an elephant across south India and raising money for the blind. With Mark’s help, she came to India in 2001 and met her elephant Bhadra (who she later renamed as Kanchi) at Kappad Beach, from where they began their journey together.

This trip is a homecoming of sorts as she relives that long-ago journey with Kanchi who, at 38, died during the Covid pandemic in 2020. After Kappad, she plans to visit Kanchi’s grave in Thiruvananthapuram.

KOZHIKODE

On the way to Kappad, Caroline tells me about some of the adventures she had with Kanchi. Once, while travelling through the forests of the Nilgiris, they heard a rumour that the sandalwood smuggler Veerappan had heard about her expedition, which by then had got much media coverage. A white woman on an elephant was unusual, but a white woman travelling through forests thick with dacoits, raising money for an international NGO, was downright dangerous. At night, Caroline and her team took turns keeping watch. One night, she saw flares and heard panicked shouts. “Oh no, Veerappan is coming for me,” she thought.

But it was not Veerappan. Instead, it was a herd of wild elephants who had caught the scent of Kanchi. Wild elephants approaching your camp was perhaps as dangerous as a wild dacoit, so they spent the whole night clanging pots and pans to keep them away.

Another time, they crossed into Coorg from Kannur and were enjoying a family’s hospitality. That night, Kanchi woke up screaming. They rushed outside to see a hissing cobra circling her. It had somehow found a way around the boric powder they had scattered all around to keep snakes away. Fortunately, they managed to scare it away. By then, all the villagers had gathered outside. A young boy approached Caroline and when he heard she was Irish, told her about his love for the work of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Amazingly, Caroline had a collection of Seamus’s poems in her rucksack, with the boy’s favourite, ‘Blackberry Picking’, being one of them. So she sat with the villagers around a bonfire and read to them Seamus Heaney poems.

The journey was by no means easy. Usually it takes several years to learn to be a mahout and master how to feed, bathe, train and build a connect with the elephant; Caroline had to do it in a few weeks. Matters were further complicated by her blindness. Because she could not understand Malayalam, she could not comprehend mahout Jayan’s lessons. And after mounting Kanchi, she could not even see his gestures to instruct her. She was, literally and figuratively, in the dark. Her feet got badly injured by the jute rope around Kanchi’s neck, and sitting for hours atop Kanchi was a strain on her back and shoulders. Still, she persevered. Her courage and determination earned her the nickname ‘Casey Boy’ among the mahouts and others on the trip.

As we approach Kappad, Caroline’s mood becomes contemplative. Except for the seawalls, where there used to be trees before, things have not changed much, she says. The place has not developed as much as she thought it would have. Kappad beach is a picture of serenity—a few Muslim families clustered on the far end; some young men taking a dip in the sea; children holding ice-creams that melt into their clothes; couples eating peanuts from newspaper cones, with the shells drifting in the wind. The sea is calm, the waves gently lapping the shore. The dimming sun bathes the beach in an amber glow. It is as though the stage has been perfectly set for Caroline’s return. This sunset might mark the end of the day for Andy and me, but for Caroline it is the end of something more. Returning to the place where it all began 25 years ago, this is closure. Life, for her, has come full circle.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

The next day, we return to home base—Kochi—and then set out to Thiruvananthapuram the day after. There, we are meeting Vikram, the second mahout whose bond with Kanchi was much more profound than that of Jayan. After she returned to Ireland, Caroline had bought Kanchi and gifted her to Vikram through an intermediary. She does not know how exactly Kanchi died or where her graveyard is; she is counting on Vikram to enlighten us. On the way there, I am amazed by the child-like enthusiasm of Andy and Caroline for the smallest things—the balloons outside a temple, a packet of tapioca chips, a bright orange autorickshaw parked outside a restaurant, the huge knotted trunk of an oak tree.... Despite Caroline being blind, she can see things in my state to which I, ironically, have become blind. These are sights I see every day without really seeing. Familiarity, I think to myself, is perhaps the greatest obstacle to one’s sense of wonder.

As I speak with her, I also realise that despite her humility, humour and ability to not take herself seriously, Caroline might be one of the most powerful women I have met. After returning from her journey with Kanchi, she founded the Elephant Family with Mark Shand, the younger brother of Queen Camilla, Lord Robin Russell, Dugal Muller and Nicholas Claxton. It brought to fore the plight of the endangered Asian elephant. Then she founded The Valuable 500, a global business collective which brought together some of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world and ended the CEO silence on disability. Currently, she is president of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, which aims to end avoidable blindness in the world. She has received an honorary doctorate and several awards for her work as a disability activist. But behind this veneer of success and fame, there is, I realise, another woman—someone who once wanted to race a motorbike across the desert listening to Led Zeppelin’s ‘A Whole Lotta Love’; who lives with the soul of Mowgli in her; who is blind, yet sees the blinding beauty of life; who has learnt, she says, to own her shadow as much as her light.

A few kilometres from Thiruvananthapuram, we park the car near the turn that leads to the seaside town of Kovalam. There, Vikram, his wife and his brother meet us. The meeting between Caroline and Vikram is almost cinematic. For a moment, there is hushed silence. All around us, there is colour and activity—cars whizzing by, horns honking, roadside hawkers selling wares.... But in this tableau that I am witnessing, the air is still and vibrates with a strange tension. A man and woman gaze at each other, separated not by distance, but by time—a yawning gap of 25 years that might have rusted their friendship, but not their bond. Then Caroline walks over and embraces him, and they hold on to each other for a long time. With Mark Shand (who died in 2014) and Kanchi no more, Vikram is one of her last remaining links to another life, another time, and a journey that helped her find her way back to herself.

As she pulls back, a rude shock awaits her. In the years since she left India, Vikram has become paralysed in one leg after suffering a fall from a coconut tree. Without his source of income, the family has been in a bad state. Worse, the intermediary to whom Caroline had entrusted Kanchi to be given to Vikram appropriated the elephant for himself, employing Vikram as her mahout. He gave Vikram a meagre salary while making money off Kanchi, Vikram’s wife Lali tells us. Some time ago, the intermediary rented out Kanchi to someone in Thiruvananthapuram who replaced Vikram with another mahout. It is at this person’s home that Kanchi died of a uterine cyst. All this is new information to Caroline, who is crushed.

Afterwards, along with Vikram and his family, we travel to the home where Kanchi died; she was cremated in its backyard. The mood is sombre as Caroline and Andy do a little puja for her. The fragrance of incense and the call of crickets fill the air, and as the light begins to fade, the pain, longing and joys of yesterday segue into a bittersweet hope for tomorrow. The girl who once rode an elephant across India is gone, and in her place is a woman who laughs as easily as she cries, whose joy is born of her pain, and who believes in the magic of small things as much as she does in the power of dreaming big.

indian-army-men-fighting-for-british-against-japanese-were-also-patriots-author-gautam-hazarika

Sun Dec 14 19:47:40 IST 2025

Interview/ Gautam Hazarika, author

Readers in India may be misled by the title of Gautam Hazarika’s new book, The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell. It is not only about the INA prisoners who were put on trial in the Red Fort by the British, but about all the 67,000 men who fought the Japanese in Singapore, Malaya and Burma alongside the British, and who had to surrender, were taken prisoner, put to torture and hard labour by the Japanese, refused to join the INA, and faced death or managed to escape. While recounting their stories, Hazarika also gives an insight into the INA movement. Edited excerpts from an interview with the author:

Q/ What prompted you to look at this particular chapter of Indian history, when new narratives are coming in about the INA and its collaboration with the Japanese?

A/ This book is not about the INA, but about the 67,000 Indian troops who were defending Singapore and Malaya when the Japanese invaded. One part of the book is about what happens to them in Singapore. Another part is about what happens to them in Papua New Guinea, yet another about what happens to the INA in Burma.

Q/ Papua New Guinea?

A/ When the Japanese invaded, they captured all of Southeast Asia. They were wanting to fortify Papua New Guinea, to use it as a springboard to invade Australia. They needed labourers; they started using Allied PoWs (The Bridge on the River Kwai movie). They also took the locals. Of those 2,20,000 men and women, 1,20,000 died. They shipped about 17,000 Indian PoWs from Singapore to Papua New Guinea; 3,000 of them died on the way. Of the 14,000 survivors, most were on this small island called New Britain, north of New Guinea; 3,000 on the island of New Guinea. They were made to do hard labour, build fortifications, dig trenches, tunnels. They had very little food. They had very little medicines. They were forced to work to death by the Japanese.

Q/ How many escaped to tell the story?

A/ Of the 3,000 Indian soldiers in Papua New Guinea, 185 escaped in 1944. They reached India. Of the remaining 2,815, only one reached home. Just one. So horrific was the death toll. Half of the 11,000 soldiers died in two years. After the war, when the Australians found survivors, they saw them as almost skeletons. They told stories of how the Japanese had slapped, kicked.... The Australians held 100 war crimes trials. For this, we owe a great debt to Australia; 36 Japanese were sentenced to be hanged.

Q/ What was happening in the INA in the meantime?

A/ It consisted of both surrendered Indian prisoners and recruited civilians. It had three phases—under Captain Mohan Singh, under Rash Behari Bose and finally under Netaji Bose.

Mohan Singh was the first. He had been a captain in the Indian Army. The most senior was Lt Col N.S. Gill. He didn’t get along with Mohan Singh because it was not pleasant for him to take orders from a junior. This was an experience many other officers had.

Q/ So what happened to Gill?

A/ Gill was upset. So the Japanese said, why don’t you run our spy network out of Burma? He went to Burma, but instead of running the spy network, he tried to escape. Unfortunately, he was not able to escape.

Basically, Mohan Singh had formed the INA, the army. He recruited them; he trained them. He put them into divisions, with regiments named Gandhi, Nehru and Azad, etc. He formed the army with whatever few weapons the Japanese had given. But he didn’t trust the Japanese at the end. He refused to cooperate and was arrested.

Q/ And Rash Behari Bose?

A/ Even though he was not a soldier, he was able to keep the army together. By now, the INA had become more of a political entity than an army. They had only a few rifles and machine guns, but not enough bullets. It was, if I may use a term, a paper army. Rash Behari Bose was able to bring it back. Then Netaji arrived, and Rash Behari handed over the army to Netaji. Netaji focused more on the civilians, getting them organised into a movement. He had the brilliant idea of the Rani Jhansi Regiment, a fantastic idea. The INA had become more of a political army now.

Q/ How serious or sincere were the Japanese towards the Indians’ cause?

A/ The Japanese had no intention of arming them. They did not want 40,000 well-armed Indians behind their backs. They wanted 2,000 or 3,000 men. Eventually, they arrived at a compromise of 17,000, which was the strength of the INA under Mohan Singh: 16,700 to be exact.

Q/ Would it be correct to say that recruitment of civilians was at the behest of the Japanese, because the Japanese wouldn't have trusted the surrendered soldiers from the British Indian Army who had sworn allegiance to the King and the Crown?

A/ I don't think so. The civilians joined as a result of the enthusiasm that the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia felt for Indian independence. But yes, the Japanese were not trusting the soldiers. Netaji found that the Japanese didn’t want to use the INA to fight. He said, "Look, you must." They gave exactly the same reason that you mentioned: that they had surrendered and also joined their enemy. Even if your enemy happens to be us, you are doubly beyond the pale.

The other reason they gave was that the Indian officers had not commanded more than 100 men. Even though Gill was a lieutenant colonel, he had not commanded a battalion, because the British had not allowed Indians in field command. So, the Japanese told Netaji that just because one has promoted oneself to command a regiment of 3,000, it doesn't mean one knows how to command a regiment of 3,000. So, there were three reasons: one, you surrendered; two, you joined your enemy; three, you don't have command experience. So, we don't want to use you to fight.

Q/ But finally, they did...

A/ Netaji insisted. He said, "Indians must be seen to be fighting for freedom." They [The Japanese] finally agreed in Singapore to use a regiment of 3,000. That regiment, called the Subhas Bose Regiment, was formed by mothballing the rest of the INA. It was the one that was sent under Shahnawaz Khan to Burma. When Netaji arrived with Shahnawaz Khan in Burma in January 1944, the Japanese commander said, "Yes, we will use your 3,000 men, but we are going to split them into small units of 50-60 across our army." Netaji said, "No, no, no, that will not work; only if you're a joint unit of 3,000 can you achieve something." Finally, they said, "Okay, we'll use you in battalions of 1,000." So, one battalion of 1,000 was sent to the subsidiary Arakan sector that was very far away from Imphal, Kohima.

Q/ The other two battalions under Shahnawaz Khan?

A/ They were in the rear of the Imphal sector. Shahnawaz Khan writes in his diary that his men were being used as laborers. Only at the end when they were retreating, when they were failing, facing a problem in Kohima, did they ask Shahnawaz Khan to help. Yet, many INA soldiers got out of hospital because they got a chance to fight for, or retake, India. Unfortunately, it was too late; the retreat from Kohima had already begun. Indeed, there were some INA soldiers who unfurled the Congress tricolour above the hills of Nagaland and Kohima, but those men were really not used for fighting.

Q/ Perhaps, India was secondary to the Japanese war goals; their main theatre was the Pacific, against the Americans. On the other hand, for the British, India was the main theatre to be defended with all their might?

A/ Yes, for Japan, the Indian sector was a subsidiary sector. Their main fight was against the Americans who were coming closer. They not only supplied the INA very poorly, they even supplied their own men in the India theatre very poorly. When the Japanese invaded Manipur, they had supplies for 21 days because they expected to succeed and capture the supplies from the Indian army in Manipur. When they failed to do that, they also died of starvation, as did the INA soldiers. I don't know what would have happened to my family if the Japanese had come to my father's hometown, about 100 kilometres from the Burma border. I am very grateful that they stopped. As far as the British were concerned, you're right. India was the jewel in the crown, very critical for Britain’s global war effort.

Q/ Coming back to the heroes of your book—the soldiers who were taken prisoners by the Japanese and refused to join the INA—was any of them taken back into the army when they returned?

A/ There are two sets of people. One, those who had refused to join the INA after surrender. They were all taken back into the Indian Army. Then those who joined the INA. They were interrogated by the British and categorised into what was called black, grey and white. ‘White’ was considered loyal; they were allowed back into the army. ‘Black’ was considered fiercely disloyal; they were dishonourably discharged and not allowed to rejoin. The ‘grey’ were sent to rehabilitation camps. If rehabilitation worked, they would be allowed back.

Q/ There has been much controversy about the ‘blacks’ not being taken back into the army.

A/ I’d like to mention two things here. The INA had one General Mohan Singh, four major generals, several colonels. All these men had been lieutenants and captains in 1942. Now, if they were to rejoin the Indian Army, what would have happened? Would they be taken in their earlier ranks or INA ranks? It was a very, very complex issue. There have been lots of blame about Nehru being cajoled by Mountbatten to not take them back. I’m sure Mountbatten did give him that advice. I’m sure it was one of the factors that Nehru considered, but there were many, many factors.

You see, the Indian Army men fighting [on the British side] against the Japanese in Burma were also patriots. They wanted to make sure that Japan did not enter India. And after that, I was told by one senior army officer, we would tackle the British in India. It’s not that Brigadier Thimmaya was not patriotic. They were all patriotic Indians, but they had a different way of fighting for India.

Q/ One last question: what was Japan’s larger imperial scheme for Southeast Asia, Burma and India?

A/ Japan started this greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, Asia for the Asiatics, etc. But if you see what they really did in Malaysia, in Singapore, or most importantly in Burma—they could have made those countries independent, but it never happened. They committed atrocities. Indian civilians from Burma, Malaya were press-ganged into labour. Secondly, there were some unofficial groups in Japan, who had plans to split India up. They didn’t look at India as one country; they were going to combine Sri Lanka with the southern part of India and things like that.

As to the official Japanese policy, the best example is what happened in Burma. Or what they did after capturing the borders of India. There was euphoria in the beginning, because the Japanese were advancing towards Kohima and Imphal. Soon Japanese scientists, businessmen, bankers all were brought to document and take over all the natural resources of the northeast. There was, and it has been documented, a big tussle between Netaji and the Japanese about who would control these resources. Eventually they failed in the campaign. You look at what the Japanese did; they were an imperialist power, they were going to replace Britain. They were not freeing Asia for the Asiatics. They were freeing Asia for the Japanese.

THE FORGOTTEN INDIAN PRISONERS OF WORLD WAR II: SURRENDER, LOYALTY, BETRAYAL AND HELL

By Gautam Hazarika

Published by Penguin Vintage

Price: Rs799; pages: 346

what-video-games-can-teach-you-about-yourself

Sat Dec 06 15:54:22 IST 2025

I will come see you when they let me

Until then close your eyes

and I will walk with you,

even if it is only through

your memories of a country

we no longer recognise

Written from the perspective of a political prisoner in India writing to his lover, this is poetry at its most haunting. Yet, it is not just poetry. This is the text for the video game ‘Folds of a Separation’, inspired by the Bhima Koregaon 16, a group of activists, lawyers and journalists arrested in 2018 for reportedly inciting violence at an event in Pune. ‘Folds of a Separation’ was created by Dhruv Jani’s Studio Oleomingus, an independent game studio in Gujarat. Its games are deeply rooted in the Indian idiom, addressing head-on issues that the traditional media would give a wide berth to. But how do they get away with it in the current political climate where the space for dissent is fast diminishing? According to Jani, this is because, unlike other media, video games are strangely under the radar despite being so big.

“We seem to be in a small window of time where video games are treated as irreverent,” said Jani at a session with author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Rollo Romig on the politics of video games, at the second edition of Manorama Hortus in Kochi from November 27-30. “They are placed well outside the spectrum of both popular and critical culture. And that’s great because it lets you, as a video game author, say things that you cannot get away with in other media right now.” What was eye-opening for many at the session was the immense potential of video games, far beyond the realm of a ‘fun’ pastime for teenage boys, nerds and social outcasts. Video games, said Romig, can make you look at the world in new and wondrous ways. In fact, you do not just ‘look’ from a different perspective. Because of how immersive and interactive they are, video games let you ‘live’ that perspective. Take ‘Papers, Please’, a simulation video game created by indie game developer Lucas Pope, in which you play as an immigration officer at the border of a fictional country who has to process the papers of those who want to cross the border. As the game progresses, the rules around who you are allowed to let in become increasingly elaborate. If you let in too many of the wrong people, your pay is docked and your family suffers. “And so there’s this enormous tension,” said Romig. “On the one hand, it is about the process of borders and immigration and how tense this process can be. On the other, it is also this ethical simulator where there are people coming to your booth who desperately need to get into the country, but whose papers are not in order. And so you are confronted with a moral choice: am I going to let this person suffer or am I going to suffer by letting them in?”

This idea of complicity is encoded deep in the DNA of some of the best video games, in which you are not an indifferent observer to injustice and violence; often, you are a participant. Take Studio Oleomingus’s game ‘The Indifferent Wonder of An Edible Place’. Inspired by the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the razing of Muslim homes and buildings in recent years, the game compels you to play as a municipal building eater. Even as you are increasingly aware of the horror and damage you are causing, you continue to ‘eat’ buildings, tacitly acknowledging your complicity, not just in what is going on in the game, but in what is going on in your country at large.

So why take up the challenges that video games offer when you have enough challenges in your life as it is? “It is because we want to feel something,” said Romig. “Often, video games give us an opportunity for self reflection, the experience of watching ourselves taking on challenges.” He referred to something that a video game writer called Frank Lantz once said. If paintings are the aestheticised form of looking and music is the aestheticised form of listening, then video games are the aestheticised form of thinking. They provide an opportunity to watch yourself make decisions, analyse how you react to situations and overcome challenges.

The charm of video games, said Jani, is also that they do not yield to propaganda, unlike films, because those who make the games often have to relinquish authorial control once the game is made available to players. “With films, it is possible to bend them to propaganda or violence in very particular ways,” said Jani. “Video games have proven incredibly resistant to this. When they are used for propaganda or used to advocate a specific kind of violence, they break miserably and often turn out to be pretty bad games because they are not open enough to other authorial interpretations. You have to relinquish control and allow players to interpret the game as they are playing it. That is a fundamental tenet of making games.” Romig gave the example of ‘Disco Elysium’, a video game designed by a group of Estonian Marxists, in which you play as a detective trying to solve a murder mystery. Even though the designers have a specific political stance, they don’t impose it on the players, who are given a lot of latitude in choosing their political perspective. “But no matter which approach you take, the game is going to roast you, even if you become a Marxist,” said Romig. “But it roasts you the hardest if you choose to be a centrist, because it knows that some people try to get out of being political by choosing the middle road.”

But the world of video games is still veiled to many, mostly because we lack the critical vocabulary to understand and describe their impact, and to codify which ideas they are uniquely suited to explore. That is because video games are still a relatively young medium. Just like cinema, in its first few decades, was not taken seriously or considered as art, the potential of video games today is also largely not exploited.

Also, the video game industry, for the large part, is still insular and has, for a long time, been a medium of privilege, said Jani. Even as indie games explore the world through nuanced perspectives in weird and wonderful ways, the mainstream industry continues to remain fascinated by first person shooter and third person adventure games that have very little to do with detailed storytelling. And it offers stiff resistance to those who try to break the mould. Jani gave the example of Gamergate in 2014-2015, when a group of right-wingers and white male players organised an online harassment campaign against diverse voices and representation in video games and game cultures.

But resistance has a way of thriving the more it is quenched. In increasingly popular corners of the internet, developers continue to play around with form and content, coming up with fascinating video games like ‘This War of Mine’ (which explores the mental health of youngsters in conflict zones) and ‘Consume Me’ (about the compulsive nature of eating disorders), which let you experience in ways that no other medium can the incredible privilege and pain of being human.

how-india-shaped-the-life-and-poetry-of-mexican-poet-octavio-paz

Sat Dec 06 15:52:16 IST 2025

Mexican writer Octavio Paz was the most prominent Latin American to understand, analyse, interpret and promote India—intellectually and culturally—from a Latin American perspective in the 20th century. He had first-hand experience of India, having lived in Delhi for nearly seven years as a diplomat. Paz wrote numerous poems and articles on India, and his book Vislumbres de la India (In the Light of India) is regarded as one of the finest introductions to the country produced by a Latin American thinker. Even today, cultural visitors from the Spanish-speaking world travel across the country with Paz’s book as an “intimate guide”, seeing India through his eyes, trying to grasp its immense complexity.

In his new book, Indranil Chakravarty offers a comprehensive account of Paz’s years in India and his writings on India. Based on extensive research—including declassified diplomatic files and personal letters, and interviews with Indians and Latin Americans and Paz’s close associates—the book situates Paz’s engagement with India in a broader intellectual and historical context. Chakravarty’s knowledge of Latin America and Spanish literature, along with his fluency in Spanish, allows him to examine Paz’s work with Mexico’s longer cultural connections with India, predating Paz himself.

Paz’s first encounter with India was negative. Posted in 1951 as a junior diplomat to the newly opened Mexican Embassy in Delhi, he found himself deeply unhappy. Confronted by what he described as the “atrocious and immense Indian reality” of the early 1950s—an India grappling with poverty and post-Partition trauma—he withdrew into himself. During this six-month stay, he made few friends, stayed largely confined to his hotel, and felt miserable in the heat and dust of Delhi, where his status as a writer was not recognised. Later, Paz would reassess this response as partly a projection of his personal marital unhappiness and partly the result of unconscious western prejudices he had carried with him.

The Delhi posting stood in stark contrast to his colourful life in Paris, from where he had been transferred against his wishes. In Paris, Paz was enjoying his emergence as a poet and was immersed in a vibrant circle of European and Latin American artists and writers. As a low-ranking diplomat in Delhi, he sorely missed the Parisian charms and cafe conversations.

When Paz returned to India in 1962 as Mexico’s ambassador, remaining until 1968, the experience proved transformative. His ambassador status afforded him access, mobility and opportunity to travel widely. His relationships with people like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi enabled deep engagement with India’s political and cultural life. In fact, when Paz left India in 1968, Indira hosted a farewell party for him at her residence. During these years, Paz forged lasting friendships with leading Indian artists and writers. His large house on Prithviraj Road became a hub for creative exchanges, hosting Indian and Latin American thinkers alike. It was there, under a neem tree, that he married Marie Jose, his second wife.

Paz has repeatedly characterised his years in India as momentous. Paz said, “India has been my sentimental, artistic and spiritual education. Its influence can be seen in my poems, prose texts and in my life itself.” His creative output during his second stay in India was astounding. He wrote poems on Indian places and themes, and on figures such as the painter J. Swaminathan.

Paz immersed himself in India’s contemplative traditions, history, philosophy, art and literature, seeking to understand the country through its contradictions. He referred to Varanasi as incarnating ‘the sacred in all its incredible banality’. He found resonance in India as a spiritual home to his complex and labyrinthine Mexican identity. He said, “The strangeness of India brought to mind that other strangeness: my own country.”

Paz had planted ‘India’ in the minds of many Latin American artists and thinkers. His writings became a bridge between continents—blending eastern and western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both.

Paz also left a deep imprint on modern Indian art. As a junior diplomat in 1951, he recognised Satish Gujral’s potential and selected him for a scholarship to Mexico, defying the opinion of other committee members. He also mentored several young Indian painters, helping them secure international scholarships and introducing them to major European and Latin American artists.

In his poem Cuento de dos jardines [A Tale of Two Gardens], Paz imagined his life as bookended by two gardens, primal in their association. One was the fig tree of his childhood home in Mexico, whose branches seemed to reach out to him through the window; the other was a sumptuous and evergreen neem tree at his ambassadorial house in Delhi, under whose shadow he took his marital vows with the woman of his life.

Excerpts from the poem:

A tree grew inside my head.

It grew inward.

Its roots are veins,

its branches nerves, thoughts its confused foliage.

Your glances light it up

and its fruits of shade

are oranges of blood, and pomegranates of fire.

Day breaks in the night of the body.

There, within, inside my head, the tree speaks.

Come closer, can you hear it?

There are already a number of articles and some publications on Paz’s passion for India. Chakravarty’s book is a valuable addition with new information and perspectives.

R. Viswanathan, former ambassador of India to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela, is an expert on Latin America.

THE TREE WITHIN—THE MEXICAN NOBEL LAUREATE OCTAVIO PAZ’S YEARS IN INDIA

By Indranil Chakravarty

Published by Penguin

Price: Rs460; pages: 555

how-a-grammy-nominated-dalai-lama-album-counters-a-chaotic-world

Sat Dec 06 11:29:05 IST 2025

The announcement arrived without fanfare—almost in keeping with the quiet radiance of the work it celebrated. Meditation: Reflections of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, an intimate collaboration featuring the Tibetan spiritual leader with sarod virtuoso Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and his sons Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash, has been nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Audio Book, Narration and Storytelling Recording.

In an age ruled by spectacle and algorithm-driven sound, the stillness of this album lands with an unusual force. Its nomination has become one of the year’s most meaningful cultural surprises, drawing in listeners who may have little prior connection to Indian classical music, Buddhist philosophy or spoken-word albums. Yet the project’s originality—anchored in the Dalai Lama’s voice and the Bangash family’s six generations of musical lineage—has generated a quiet but sustained global resonance.

The album weaves His Holiness’s reflections on compassion, harmony, and interconnectedness with original sarod compositions by the Bangash family. Produced by multi-Grammy and Emmy Award winner Kabir Sehgal, it also features contributions from artistes such as Andra Day, Ted Nash, Debi Nova, Maggie Rogers, Tony Succar and Rufus Wainwright. But at its emotional core, the work is a contemplative dialogue between the Dalai Lama’s measured voice and the Bangash family’s restrained, spiritually aligned musical phrasing.

For Amaan, 48, the project was much more than a recording. “Every time we met His Holiness, there was a moment when the entire room seemed to fall into silence. Not the silence of emptiness, but of presence. Our music had to honour that quietness,” he says. He recalls a particular interaction in Dharamshala when the Dalai Lama greeted him not with words, but by taking his hands gently and examining them. “He looked at my hands for a few seconds,” Amaan says, “and then smiled and said, ‘These hands must never lose their kindness. Music without kindness is just noise.’ I have carried that line with me ever since.”

Another memory stands out. While discussing the album’s themes, the Dalai Lama suddenly began laughing—a full-bodied, infectious laugh that rippled across the room. “He told us, ‘Don’t think so hard. Peace is not made by effort. Peace is what remains when you stop trying to be important.’ We were supposed to be discussing recording logistics, but he turned it into a life lesson. That was his way.”

These encounters shaped the album’s deliberate minimalism. “We weren’t trying to dazzle anyone,” Amaan explains. “His message was the real melody. Our sarods merely held space for it.”

The collaboration unfolded over two slow, reflective years. The production team, based partly in the US, required extensive coordination, but the pace felt organic. “You can’t rush something rooted in silence,” Amaan says. “Working with His Holiness felt like entering a different sense of time.” The prolonged exchange became a form of musical meditation, where the Dalai Lama’s voice acted as the primary instrument and the sarod responded with breathlike phrases and carefully placed pauses.

The seven reflections anchoring the album—heart, harmony, water, health, peace, essence and journey—function like small rituals. Each piece invites listeners not to consume, but to inhabit a soundscape shaped as much by stillness as by melody.

The album’s subtlety may be its most radical gesture. In a world of shrinking attention span and hyperactive media consumption, it offers a cultural counterpoint—a reminder that introspection still has a mass audience. Its success reflects an unexpected global yearning for contemplation, proof that serenity can travel across borders even more effectively than spectacle.

Behind the project lies the Bangash family’s nearly two-century-old musical lineage. Ustad Amjad Ali Khan’s sarod style—lyrical, precise, imbued with emotional depth—has shaped the international identity of the instrument. Amaan and Ayaan continue to carry this legacy while extending its vocabulary. Yet, in this album, virtuosity gives way to simplicity. The brothers chose emotional clarity over technical flourish, guided by the classical idea of music as seva, or service.

Amaan’s views on classical music reflect a similar faith. The suggestion that the art form is losing relevance doesn’t persuade him. “People never lose interest,” he says. “Art has phases—high tide and low tide. If a concert doesn’t connect, that’s not the audience’s fault.” He rejects age-based assumptions as well. “A 10-year-old is as important to me as a 100-year-old. And social media hasn’t diminished classical music. It has multiplied it.” His own experience confirms this. “I get paid far more now than I did 20 years ago. So clearly, the audience is very much alive,” he says.

Amaan’s performances underscore that vitality. Such as his recent concert Waah Ustad, a tribute to the late tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain, presented by the Aalekh Foundation in Delhi. “This concert is like an ibadat (prayer) for me,” he says. “Hussain saab gave me so much—the kind of guidance that shapes not just the artist but the human being.”

As Meditation: Reflections of His Holiness the Dalai Lama moves through the awards circuit, it offers a striking counterpoint to the noise of contemporary culture. Music rooted in humility, stillness and shared humanity can still travel far, still reach wide. And for Amaan, the true reward is not the nomination but the album’s effect on listeners. “If even one person finds a moment of peace through this work, then everything we put into it was worth it,” he says.

In a world growing louder by the day, the Dalai Lama’s voice—carried gently on the strings of the sarod—reminds us that listening is its own form of compassion.

jamdani-sari-the-woven-poetry-and-the-unseen-struggle-of-its-artisans

Sat Dec 06 11:24:03 IST 2025

When actor and Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan visited Bangladesh, she met Sajib and Nashidul Rasal, the country’s iconic jamdani sari weaver brothers, and chose a set of four weaving marvels, recalls Sajib. Every year Sajib gets orders from around the world for some 15 jamdani masterpieces, each worth half a million Bangladeshi taka.

Bangladesh holds the GI tag for jamdani, a sari that is extremely popular in India. It was the centrepiece at a recent exhibition at the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy in Delhi. Speaking at the exhibition’s inauguration, Muzaffar Ali, director of the iconic film Umrao Jaan (1981), shared why he chose jamdani for his heroine Rekha in the film, and his intention to make a film on jamdani. In classics like Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964), in fact, there was a tradition of featuring actors in jamdani saris, especially to depict the Tagorean time.

Jamdani is a portmanteau of two Persian words—jam (flower) and dani (vase)—referring to the rich floral motifs on the sari. The UNESCO-recognised industry can be traced to an area by the bank of the river Shitalakshya in the Narayanganj district of Bangladesh, not far from Dhaka. Most of the jamdani weavers are settled in the Rupganj sub-district, with some in Sonargaon—once the estate of the 16th century ruler Isa Khan. Around 2,500 families are engaged in jamdani creation. According to experts, jamdani saris are difficult to replicate anywhere else due to climate and artistic heritage, though there have been attempts to do so. Once upon a time, jamdanis were mainly woven by the Basak community, a Hindu weaving caste. But when they left Bangladesh, they trained local fishermen and muslin weavers in exchange for money.

Kolkata-based Jaya Ahsan, Bangladesh’s iconic actor who has performed in Bollywood and Persian films, feels that jamdani is poetry woven into fabric. She describes her large collection of jamdani saris and how she carefully chooses one to fit the occasion—whether it be for a film release or during Durga Puja. She has also appeared in a Coke Studio music video in a jamdani sari.

Jamdani can be made of cotton, half-silk, silk or even muslin. The sari has a connection with Bangladesh’s liberation movement. Former prime minister Sheikh Hasina used to be fond of it, although jamdani weavers from Rupganj say she did not introduce any schemes to safeguard their livelihood. Her political rival Khaleda Zia hardly ever wore jamdani saris and instead favoured Pakistani attire. Khaleda’s firebrand spokesperson Rumeen Farhana, however, could often be seen in one.

“Jamdani is a must-have piece for everyone. It’s a cultural tradition just like kanjeevaram in south India,” says Dr Sharin Shajahan Naomi, a post-doc fellow at Krea University in Andhra Pradesh. “Every household would cherish jamdani just like every family would love kanjeevaram silk in southern India.”

Unlike venkatagiri and uppada saris, which depict deities as well as flora and fauna, jamdani saris are purely aesthetic. To make one, a particular geometrical grid is followed with great precision. Other than Bangladesh, there is a jamdani weaving community in West Bengal as well. The thread count, 80 in Bangladesh and 100 or 120 in West Bengal, indicates the number of threads per square inch of fabric. The higher the thread count and finer the threads used, the softer and smoother will be the resultant sari, explains a weaver. “But power loom products resemble the handwoven ones so closely that sometimes even we can’t tell them apart,” says jamdani weaver Nitai Chandra Basak. According to Sajib, their products range from Rs14,000 to Rs4.5 lakh. “The high price of jamdani is one of the main reasons why they remain beyond the reach of the lower middle class,” he says.

Because power loom saris are cheaper, handwoven jamdanis have taken a backseat, leading to anxiety among jamdani weavers. The younger generation is no longer interested in handwoven jamdanis, they say. On the other hand there are fabric mavens who earn in millions. “We weave saris worth Rs2-3 lakh with immense effort, but the money goes to the proprietor,” says Nitai’s father. Unlike sari types like tangail which need a machine, jamdani is extremely labour-intensive. Chandrashekhar Saha, a textile maven and jamdani expert, emphasises the skill and memory needed to weave a jamdani sari. “The memorising part is highly essential, and that’s how it turned into a generational art that did not spread across many regions,” he says.

In the age of technology and AI, the jamdani puts premium on human creativity, showing that no machine can replicate it. “The play of opacity and translucency lends the jamdani an ethereal look,” says Chandrasekhar Bheda, textile designer and jamdani specialist from Rajasthan. Jamdanis crafted with special cotton have a lightweight texture and lend the wearer elegance and class. But despite its popularity, it is high time Bangladesh finds better channels and strategy to market the sari and protect the livelihood of its artisans.

WHAT IS JAMDANI?

Jamdani is a time-consuming and labour intensive form of weaving known for its intricate designs, lightness and elegance.

HISTORY OF JAMDANI

Sulaiman, a 9th century Arab traveller, wrote of cotton fabrics made in undivided Bengal so fine they could pass through a signet ring. Islamic experimentation around the 12th century resulted in decorating the fabric with elaborate patterns. But it was during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar that jamdani truly became an art form.

HOW IS A JAMDANI SARI CREATED?

In jamdani, fine warp threads are added to a denser thread to create intricate motifs that are woven directly on to the loom with no mechanical means. Originally, jamdani was woven on muslin, typically by two weavers for each sari.

WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT JAMDANI?

Jamdani is often described as the most advanced hand weaving technique in the world. The saris are incredibly lightweight and breathable, combining comfort with style. They are also known for their intricate patterns, often inspired by nature and typically geometric in shape.

how-theatrical-dining-is-redefining-india-nightlife

Fri Nov 28 13:22:54 IST 2025

It’s 9:30pm. Velvet drapes shimmer under flashing ceiling projections. Greco-Roman statues and a pillared colonnade lead to the stage. The nightclub bass fades into slow jazz, and the mood shifts. Cabaret dancers in ruffled gowns, jewelled masks and elaborate peacock feathers step on to the stage. The sequence starts slow, almost teasing, before erupting into splits, cartwheels and aerial contortions. The performers then step off the stage and thread between tables, as if the diners are a part of the spectacle.

This is not an auditorium. This is Dramique, billed as India’s first theatrical dining experience, newly opened at Delhi’s The Grand Hotel. The food and drinks are designed to complement the spectacle. Think ‘Golden Affair’, a cocktail of turmeric infused gin, lime acid, honey and ginger beer, paired with mushroom dim sums or sushi rolls.

“The idea for Dramique was born from a desire to create something that goes beyond a restaurant or a show—a space where fine dining, storytelling, and performance merge seamlessly,” says Samir Sehgal, whose brainchild it is. “Our culinary and bar teams worked closely with the creative directors to ensure that every dish and cocktail fit into the larger narrative of the evening. It is about harmony—the visuals, flavours and music all come together to tell one cohesive story.”

Nearby, The Piano Man at the capital’s buzzy Eldeco Centre staged a different kind of theatrical dining earlier this year. In collaboration with Sunset Cinema Club, the jazz club screened the quintessential millennial comfort film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) under its ‘Gourmet Cinema’ experience. The twist: every location the characters travelled to and every turning point in their journey arrived with a new flavour on the plate. Barcelona came with Churros con Patatas and La Tomatina with La Tomatina chicken and a goat cheese and tomato puff tart.

The decade-old Piano Man is often credited with putting performances at the centre of the dining experience. Today, it operates three outlets, two in Delhi and one in Gurugram, and has become known for its consistently stellar live music performances. But making the diners receptive to such experiences has not been easy. Founder Arjun Sagar Gupta, a musician himself, recalls nights when guests walked in expecting the typical Delhi bar: loud conversations, clinking glasses and music reduced to background noise. “I have personally had to step in and ask people to lower their voices during performances,” he says. “We also introduced a ritual called the ‘Silent Song’, where every night we pause all service and bar activity so that the room is wholly focused on listening. We have had over 44,000 minutes of music performed during Silent Songs, and they have been crucial in shifting audience behaviour.”

The shift has allowed The Piano Man to expand its repertoire beyond music to other performance-led evenings like ‘Gourmet Cinema’ and ‘Superqueens the Musical’, a drag spectacle that highlighted inclusivity and identity and became a stellar hit.

Speaking of drag, Kitty Su, the bustling nightclub at The LaLiT in Delhi, has been hosting drag performances for years. In 2022, drag queen Betta Naan Stop even performed at The LaLiT Great Eastern in Kolkata.

“In Delhi and across India, the theatrical dining scene is entering a beautiful period of evolution. Guests today seek experiences that go beyond a traditional dinner or night out—they want narrative, immersion, and artistry woven into their evenings,” says Aashin Moitra, general manager, Kitty Su. “Nationally, too, India is embracing concepts that combine performance with gastronomy, signalling a future where dining becomes an immersive cultural experience rather than a linear one.”

Interestingly, even as bars and restaurants embrace theatrics, the spaces traditionally built for spectacle are moving the other way. Multiplex chain PVR INOX recently opened India’s first luxury dine-in cinema in Bengaluru, where the movie watching experience comes with chef-curated menus from the chain’s in-house brands like Crosta, Wokstar and Local Street.

“Cinema today is as much about the overall outing as it is about the film itself. Audiences want comfort, food and entertainment to blend into one seamless experience. That became the starting point for reimagining what a movie can be,” says Aamer Bijli, lead, marketing & innovations at PVR INOX. He says that the theatrical dining space in India is moving from being a nice-to-have addition to a core part of the premium cinema experience.

While still nascent, theatrical dining is clearly on the rise, buoyed by packed shows and entrepreneurial backing. “The energy, the applause, the repeat visits—it has been incredibly rewarding,” says Sehgal, who is already eyeing other cities. “Internationally, destinations like Lío Ibiza or The Theatre Dubai have set the bar for immersive dining, and we want to bring that world-class energy to India with our own cultural twist.” The audience, too, has evolved, according to him. “They want to be surprised, moved, immersed. Dramique is our way of giving them that—a world where dining becomes art,” he says.

While essentially a space centred around music, The Piano Man, too, is looking to expand to cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru. According to Gupta, the momentum feels overdue. “From day one, we focused on showing that it is possible to build a secure, sustainable business with art at the centre. Since then, there has been an exponential rise in performance art across Delhi and that is a very healthy sign,” he says.

Deeply immersive and offering something beyond just a culinary experience, theatrical dining is in its way multi-faceted: whether in a group, as a couple or alone, there is something for everyone.

And the drama isn’t garnish any more—it is the point.

how-bb-benegal-studio-revolutionised-indian-film-poster-art

Sat Nov 22 18:09:44 IST 2025

In India, ‘Benegal’ has always been a name to reckon with, belonging to such illustrious personalities as the Benegal brothers (Sanjiva Rao, Sir Narsing Rau, Sir Rama Rau and Shiva Rao), Air Commodore Ramesh Benegal and filmmaker Shyam Benegal. But there was a family of Benegals from Calcutta—Balkrishna, Sudarshan and Arvind, fine artists all—who, though they were famous within the city, were virtually unknown outside. It is time they were brought out from the shadows.

It all started with the B.B. Benegal Studio, founded in a nondescript two-room flat in Calcutta in 1930 by Balkrishna Bhawanishankar Benegal, a Konkani-speaking Mangalorean Saraswat. He was born in Udupi in 1905 and won his first gold medal for painting at his Mangalore school. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Mangalore in 1922 inspired the young Balkrishna to move to Calcutta after school to join the Government School of Art and Craft. Seeing his sample work, the English principal Percy Brown admitted him to the third year straight-away, and he completed his five-year degree in fine art in just three, by the end of which he had won several gold medals.

Noted publisher and printer Chintamani Ghosh, whose Indian Press in Allahabad had first printed Rabindranath’s works, including the Nobel-winning Gitanjali, spotted Balkrishna’s work early at an exhibition at the GSA. As soon as he passed out of art school, Chintamani invited him to Allahabad to work as resident chief illustrator with the Indian Press.

Chintamani died in 1928, and two years later, Balkrishna left Allahabad for Mangalore, where he got married and returned to Calcutta. He found work as a poster artist for Hindi movies, which brought him into close contact with the celebrities of the time like Begum Akhtar, Devika Rani, Sabita Devi, V. Shantaram and K.L. Saigal. His work was soon in demand. He shifted to a two-room flat on Dharamtalla Street in central Calcutta and set up his studio in one of the rooms.

Around 1939, his nephew Sudarshan Benegal (eldest of a brood of ten which included filmmaker Shyam Benegal) came from Hyderabad, also to study fine art at the GSA. An extraordinary artist himself, he too sailed through the course in just three years and joined the B.B. Benegal Studio as its manager and poster artist, becoming an integral part of the studio and the family. Thanks to him, the studio’s business began to boom.

Sometime in the early 1940s, Balkrishna moved his studio and family (he had four children by then) to a bigger rented place further down the road, next to the recently built Jyoti Cinema. After the city was evacuated following the Japanese bombing during World War II, accommodation became cheap. Balkrishna rented two flats: one to live in and another above it for his studio.

He found that Hindi film distributors were tardy paymasters and gradually began working only for foreign movies, where assignments were regular and well-paid. The B.B. Benegal Studio was emerging as a name to reckon with. “As one of the first Indian print designers to embrace the emergent new art deco style, Balkrishna’s work uniquely bridged American influences with Indian themes, crafting a distinct visual language for film promotion,” says Rajesh Devraj, author of The Art of Bollywood, a book on publicity design in Indian cinema.

Balkrishna was closely associated with the erstwhile Lighthouse and New Empire, two premium theatres in Calcutta, as well as the Globe, Elite and Minerva. All of them primarily screened foreign movies. New Empire had a unique movie hall which could be converted into a modern stage when required. Celebrated performers there included dancer Uday Shankar and his younger brother, sitar player Ravi Shankar; celebrated dancers Shantha Rao, Balasaraswati, Indrani Rahman and Yamini Krishnamurthy; violinist Yehudi Menuhin and music conductor Zubin Mehta; P.C. Sorcar the magician and even the Westminster Choir. The B.B. Benegal Studio painted posters for all of them. Uday and Ravi, who were new at the time, would plead with Balkrishna for a hefty discount. Having struggled in life himself, he would readily agree. Ravi never forgot the favour.

In his early years, Guru Dutt, another nephew of Balkrishna, was keen to be a dancer. Balkrishna filmed his self-composed snake dance, (inspired by one of Balkrishna’s paintings) and showed it to Uday who enrolled him in his India Culture Centre at Almora in Uttarakhand. However, a disillusioned Guru Dutt soon returned to Calcutta. By now he had begun to dream of becoming an actor.

Balkrishna painted for himself, too—large oils, mostly with poetic or patriotic themes, using pet symbols like the lotus (for peace and love), flames (for violence and anguish), and eyes (for the ever-watchful universe). However, for some reason, despite repeated requests from galleries and collectors, he neither exhibited nor sold his paintings. Two years ago, his oil paintings were found vandalised in his studio. Neither the culprit nor the motive was discovered.

Balkrishna’s studio went on to produce enormous posters and mammoth cutouts for the Lighthouse for blockbusters like King Kong, The Ten Commandments, Ulysses, and Samson and Delilah. Massive life-like images of Moses, King Kong or the Cyclops of Ulysses loomed over an awestruck public from the iconic mast outside the Lighthouse. The lobby of the theatre would turn into a snow-covered Vermont for Danny Kaye’s White Christmas or a sultry Egyptian landscape for The Ten Commandments.

Those were the halcyon days of the studio. In 1974, Balkrishna’s youngest son Arvind Benegal also joined the studio. He was a similarly prodigious talent who, a year after joining the GSA, was given membership of the Academy of Fine Arts, normally reserved for established artists. By then, the government had replaced out-of-turn promotions with scholarships. True to tradition, Arvind won the scholarship and effortlessly breezed through the course. Initially, he set up his own studio in his house with a partner, but this did not work out and he moved to Bombay to work with Guru Dutt’s brother Atma Ram. This also was a failure and in 1974, he returned to Calcutta to join his father’s studio.

However, by then the import of foreign movies had begun to shrink, and with it, the studio’s chief source of income. They were now compelled to work for Hindi movies, which was not as lucrative. The studio limped on painfully. Paying the staff was becoming increasingly difficult. One by one, they left. They had worked with Balkrishna for more than 30 years and were heart-broken.

Balkrishna died on January 25, 1987, but his legacy lives on. “His work embodied a rare blend of artistic depth and commercial appeal, transforming film publicity into an artform in its own right,” says Aparna Subramanian, a Fulbright Fellow and audio-visual archiving expert. “His creations reflected precision, imagination, and a deep respect for his craft.”

Sudarshan retired in 1993. Arvind tried hard to keep the studio running, but by 2000, thanks to the advent of cheap, digitally printed high-resolution posters, work further dwindled. The B.B. Benegal Studio officially closed in 2002, foreshadowing the end of the era of hand-painted posters in India.

Asha Gangoli is an author and daughter of B.B. Benegal