Let's talk about Bollywood!

The great value of animation movie Bombay Rose (Gitanjali Rao, 2019) is multifaceted. The pleasure to watch it is constantly multiplied by such techniques as colour and black & white shift, eye-dimming, mythological or religious symbolism, dream sequences,...

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Well, perhaps not so new if you knew it, naturally. But here I found some 400 pictures of the actress, a number of which do not come out in the English-based search engines, probably because the language used on the website is Cyrillic Russian (АКТРИСЫ...

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Difficult Daughters, by Manju Kapur, written in 1998, tells the story of Virmati, an Amritsar-based young girl, the eldest daughter of an middle-class Arya Samaj family in which nevertheless certain traditions weigh as much as in any other more backward...

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Arvind Adiga's story has been turned into a movie, shot by Ramin Bahrani and which has just come out on Netflix. It's an excellent movie, which does full credit to the novel; I really have no negatives about it. The cast is great, led by a glorious Adarsh...

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Nutan, who loved bhajans and classical music, has written some poetry, of which I have collected a little over the years. Given her talent and the quality of what I present here, there must be much more, so I went to Lalitha Tamhane's book on Nutan Asen...

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Alas, I was not the person who interviewed Nutan's son! But thanks to Seema, my desi Nutan-collaborator, I would like to indicate the recent interview which appeared in Filmfare. You'll find it here . It's by Farhana Farook, whom I'll thank in advance...

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This blog has already reviewed collections of short stories ( here and here ) and rather similarly, this volume contains stories which revolve loosely around the theme of femininity and motherhood of desi women abroad. To be more precise, the 11 stories...

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Here's a beautiful and poignant little movie (2014) by Souvik Mitra featuring Soumitra Chatterjeee and Roopa Ganguly (above; I had seen her - much younger, it was 1989 - in Ek din achanak ); but what makes its beauty? Probably its story, its poetic charm,...

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Have you ever wondered why you were born poor and not rich ? (if it’s the other way round, you often don’t wonder) Have you asked yourself why this injustice continues in today’s developed world? And if you are a victim of this injustice, have you never...

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First the story for those who don’t remember Basu Chatterji’s Rajnigandha (1974): it’s based on Mannu Bhandari ’s book Yahi Sach Hai. Deepa (Vidya Sinha) and Sanjay (Amol Patekar) are a young, aspiring couple living in Delhi. He’s a jolly, outspoken civil...

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Below you'll find a number of the folders in which I have collected pictures of Nutan over the years. Most of them have been found on the net, but if some readers consider their posting an offense to their rights, please contact me so I can remove them....

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So much has already been said about this Yash Chopra 1981 movie… And here I am adding to the pileup! Well, I hope it won’t be too long and too boring to read. In fact what I want to say can be quickly summed up: I’m perplexed at actors accepting to stage...

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Watching Sone ki chidiya (the golden bird, Shaheed Latif, 1958) has been a bit of an adventure, because even though I knew it was good, it doesn’t exist with subtitles, and some time has passed before I could get round to understanding everything. And...

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Last addition to a programme begun 10 years ago with Pather Panchali, here are a few words about the trilogy's n°3 about which I'm sure that nothing has been left unsaid (check story here). It's a vision of tenderness; centered around the character of...

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My discovery of Maitreyi Devi happened, probably like so many outside of India, through Mircea Eliade’s novel which I read in French, La nuit Bengali, written in 1933 three years after this Romanian scholar, who later rose to become an influential ethnologist...

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