Cultural Press

Tales of the arch tippler In a recent press release, spirit maker Diageo has announced the re-launch of the legendary VAT69. According to company sources, the iconic dark green, sherry-shaped bottle is a tribute to its creator William Sanderson. Is it? We all thought it was a tribute to Ajit and to Ranjeet, the arch filmy villain and his ‘rape-happy’ sidekick. Or may-be even to Pran, Prem Chopra and oh yes, even to the red-eyed, drooling, baritoned slosh of one…

Just as when you thought that Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram had, between the covers of their voluminous homage to the megapolis, had cracked open the city, comes Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, one more splendid and unputdownable ode to the city. But does this quartet close Mumbai to the hack-and-the-schlock writer forever? Hope not. Because Mumbai will always be open to multiple interpretations; because in the post-industrial, post-urban, post-Cold War and post-factum modernity of the 21st…

The arm-stretched tree-man at the Republic of Nandan. Photo by author. It is difficult to believe that there was a time when CPI(M) did not resemble a felled behemoth that was howling away on its way to dusty death. In those days it did many other things. And it also did Kaalture, so to say. It had aspired to be a party that stood erect for the working classes while sitting down to sip tea and discuss cinema with the…

The much-discussed Peepli (Live) has garnered attention to the logic of employing satire to a case (or a cause) that is hopelessly tragic. The film’s veracity, depicting one of the biggest agrarian crises to have precipitated in Independent India, is unquestionable. The makers have rightly targeted the assorted symbolisms of what we call the ‘establishment’ — the administration, the government, agencies of policymaking and the favourite butt which everybody kicks these days — the 24X7 television media. The critical value of the…

Salt. Sodium Chloride. A pinch more or less here and there and it can make or break anything between haute cuisine and physiological equilibrium. Even if writer Kurt Wimmer (The Thomas Crown Affair) finds the associations to close for comfort, his Salt nevertheless does the job of balancing Cold War geopolitics with the climactic possibility of a nuclear blunderbuss (Dr Stangelove, without being strange) with great stealth and panache. And no marks for guessing that the irrepressible Anjelina Jolie as Eveline Salt…

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…

Top shot of coffee served at a cafe in Calcutta, December 2018. Photo by author. For I have known them all already, known them all / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.  — T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.   If you are brave enough to suggest changes in an Eliot poem go ahead and substitute the ‘coffee’ in the above lines with tea and you will probably…

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…

Posters of Uttam Kumar films from the collection of Mr Parimal Ray. 24th July, marked permanently in the crowded annals of Kolkata as a day when its greatest screen actor breathed his last, is also a day of reckoning for the Bengali film industry. Uttam Kumar died at 53, leaving behind an army of admirers, a whole industry that was bent in a bow and entire demography that froze on its humble legs, unable to believe that he could die,…

If a Hindi film looks and sounds seamlessly real, tells the story of a young boy’s coming of age without over-the-top sentimentalising, nonchalantly bypasses most of the endless stocks that crowd usual Bollywood fare and extricates almost flawless performance from its lead actors, it’s a cause for celebration. In those terms then Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut feature Udaan is an event and not least for being selected under the Un Certain Regard (A Certain Look) category at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Udaan is…