Category: Culture

If India ever needed an eye to look at itself visually and viscerally, it would have its task cut out. It just has to borrow RAGHU RAI’S lens, because no other lensman has so vividly captured the country’s inexhaustive diversity and energy. The endearing Raghu Rai started as a photo-journalist with The Statesman in Calcutta in 1965 and has later been associated with Sunday and India Today as the photo editor. In 1977, at the behest of none other than…

Pablo Bartholomew needs no introduction. But then, he does. Because his repertoire is ever-increasing, prompting the photographer in him to reinvent his worldview, to visit places and people not many would want to, to keep renewing his faith on the wonders of the planet, wonders that have time and again appeared in myriad forms of hope, earnestness and even devastation in front of him, for him to lovingly and keenly capture them for eternity. Before his new show in the…

A review of the exhibition This is Unreal by RAQS Media Collective, Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair at Experimenter, Calcutta  Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. In their own declaration, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits in their enquiry into the ways in which meaning is made. At their ongoing exhibition at Experimenter in Kolkata, Raqs has teamed up with Susanta Mandal and Yamini Nair…

William Kentridge is as different in his art as in his films. William Kentridge is a South African artist and animator and an influential figure in the country’s art scene. His exhibition, till recently on display at the Seagull Art & Media Resource Centre, gave a sampling of his art and cinema much of which has been viewed widely across the globe but not in India. This exhibition is, however, a sampling of his vast body of work and in…

Ranjan Palit is so soft speaking that in between the first and the fifth row at Max Mueller Bhavan’s partly refurbished auditorium, his voice was almost lost. But he is not a singer but a cameraman and filmmaker, a maker of some of the most well-received and critically acclaimed documentary pour une cause in the last three decades, and hence it was film and his camera that did all the talking. And what a cracker of a film he showed! He…

Once the Bengali bands made a splash with new albums and signature shows but now it’s all whispers with no new bands making any impact. Is this about the short shelf life endemic to bands globally or have Bangla bands lost their way? Mohiner Ghoraguli was the Frantz Kafka of Bengali rock scene — avant-garde and discovered to high critical acclaim only much after its death in 1981. Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod brought Kafka to the world. In case…

Nemai Ghosh has been capturing well-known Indian artists at work for years now. But his favourite time was spent with Satyajit Ray, he tells Sayandeb Chowdhury It was in late 1967 or early 1968. Nemai Ghosh was deeply involved in theatre. He was also an observer of endless card playing sessions at his south Kolkata apartment. Ghosh was not a photographer by any stretch of imagination. Then one day, purely by chance, he acquired a fixed-lens QL 17 Canonette. And…

There is a new graphic novel in town – Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Steven Spielberg is producing a Tintin film, and noir director Anurag Kashyap is directing Hanuman 2. Suddenly, animation is threatening to grow up and rival adult live-action entertainment in a big way. Disney, Chandamama, and Superman creators Siegel and Shuster are in danger of being left behind for SFX, CGI, 3D, ‘comix’, manga, anime, graphic novel, and video games, as visual narratives ramify into widely varied,…

He is a multifaceted, Oxford-educated intellectual: playwright, film actor, scriptwriter and producer. He has received several major awards— Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, the Jnanpith and the Sahitya Academy Awards and has been the director of the Nehru Centre in London. His plays Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagamandala, Agni Mattu Male (The Fire and the Rain), most of them complex re-enactments of Indian myths, are landmarks of Indian theatre. In Mumbai for his latest play Bikhre Bimb (A Heap of Broken Images), Girish Karnad speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about his latest play…