Cultural Press

Photo by Karim Ben Van on Unsplash Switzerland, for Indians, is a vintage picture postcard–the splendour of the Swiss Alps lording over designer villages with pretty houses that stand in sunny glory watching glass-topped trains passing by in silent admiration. So when most Indians visit this small central west European country they are invariably reminded of Yash Chopra couples in shawls and striped sweaters drooling at each other and at nature beyond. But there is more to this…

To smoke like Belmondo In Jean Luc Godard’s Peter The Fool, anti-hero Peter/Pierre was so mesmerised by Humphrey Bogart’s buccaneer charms in the doomed love classic Casablanca that he started imitating him. And what did Pierre find most attractive about the plain-looking Bogart? His way of smoking the cigarette while it hanged incisively from a given angle in his mouth. The drifter Pierre, while running from gangsters, never lets the cigar fall from his mouth — as if that was his armour against…

The super successful Disney Franchise Pirates of the Caribbean’s new episode On Stanger Tides, which released in India within days of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, carries some of its stock characters who reboot themselves gladly for the fourth adventure, this time for the Fountain of Youth. But this time the film is helmed by Rob Marshall (Gore Verbinsk directed the first three), the director of enervating musicals such as Chicago and Nine. The movie hence carries the signature of the choreographer-turned-director’s…

Shazia goes where few have gone before She was all over the Mumbai papers in the last few days speaking about what she does best — comedy. So naturally, Mumbai was waiting for her. Had she been a he, a chubby-looking white British actor with a Yorkshire accent, it would not be news. But Shazia Mirza is brown, young, Muslim, and a woman and the British Council has taken adequate care to inform us that she makes fun of all…

So another Indian gets the Booker Prize. What shall we feel, smug or smart? Being Indian is tough enough. Being an Indian writer in English is tougher. And being an Indian writer in English who has won the Booker is the toughest business of them all. So hail the Thane of London’s Guildhall, who shall be the Queen hereafter!  If we look at the beginnings of our efforts at writing in English, it would be amusing to note how Indians…

There is a famous Laurel-Hardy strip where the two are soldiers stationed somewhere on the India-China border. They are worried about their dwindling resources till one day they chance upon the fact that the war had ended long ago and nobody had informed them. One cannot but sense a certain degree of sadness in what is an example of comic unreason. Beasts of No Nation, a ghastly tale of civil war somewhere in Africa, carries a tragic intensity that is…

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…

Yellow loves the Green Long ago a song chronicling days spent in a guiltless tavern, said: We’d fight and never lose/ For we were young and sure to have our way. The winners and losers of the first round of the soccer World Cup possibly lie printed, clearly, on a chart near you — the names are mostly predictable, the bets have been worked this way or the other. But the song keeps coming back reminding us that the…

He won the Sahitya Akademi award way back in 1991 and is the author of novels such as Hero, The Brainfever Bird, Trotternama, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and The Everest Hotel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Irwin Allan Sealy speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about his latest novel, Red, which was launched in Mumbai last week.   You once wanted to be a painter. And finally, there is a book about Matisse.  Oh yes. I wanted to be very early in my life. But I…

Samuel in style Writing about Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright and novelist is an act of supreme dilemma. Because, here is a man who gambled with meaning-making, eschewed verbosity to manufacture silence and played upon language to extract its hidden humour and cruelty. When the war-weary mid-century Europe was looking for a structure of belief, a frame of reference, Beckett gave it none and instead recalled even the last strain of certainty that could hang on to literature’s hoary claims.