Tag: Interview

If the phrase ‘been there, done that’ is said aloud, without making concessions to the force of its clarity or its bon-vivant abandon, then that best describes Pritish Nandy. But his being there and doing that is not fraught with the usual clumsiness of the itinerant busybody. A poet, painter, journalist, columnist, filmmaker and even an MP on a Shiv Sena ticket, he has treaded the world, sometimes softly, sometimes in disagreement with it, that lie between the disquiet of…

One of Samir Chanda’s last projects in Hindi before his untimely death was Delhi 6, 2009. He is just not the most well-known art turned production designer in Bollywood but is on the wishlist of Bollywood’s biggest makers. He is on first-name basis with Shyam Benegal, Mani Rathnam and most in between. There is hardly a filmmaker he has not worked with and not one Indian award that he has not won. He is a Calcutta boy, who passed from…

Debshankar Halder in and as Oedipus Even in the dedicated community that makes up Bengali group theatre, he stands out. The director of his latest play calls him a miniature wonder. He is the only actor in recent memory who has had a festival dedicated to him. He is also perhaps the only actor whose name alone draws audiences to the theatre in a culture whose appeal historically has been the group, the play or the director. Currently, he is…

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…

Saskia Sassen, Helen and Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University is considered one of today’s most respected urban sociologists and is known globally for her landmark research on transnationalism, denationalization and the impact of globalization on the movement of labour, capital, and urban life. A prolific author, Sassen’s recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages and A Sociology of Globalization. In Mumbai to present the Urban Age Award, she speaks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about Mumbai being a…

Indian political leader Mohandas Gandhi circa 1935. In 1938, 23-year-old Phillips Talbot was sent to India on a fellowship to learn about British-governed India. An American Witness To India’s Partition is a collection that springs out of his experiences in India and the subcontinent between 1938 and 1950, chronicling the build-up to the independence of India and Pakistan, and the early experiences of the new states. The book was released in India in an event organised by Asia Society in…

MG Vassanji is best known for his novels The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. His last work, The In-between World Of Vikram Lall, gave academia a catchphrase — ‘in-between’ — to underline shifting identities in an increasingly global world. Born and brought up in East Africa, Vassanji went to the US to study and then moved to Canada. He has won the Giller Prize twice. In India to promote his new novel, Vassanji talks about The Assassin’s Song, set in Gujarat and culminating in…

Arjun Appadurai is the Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives and the John Dewey Professor in Social Sciences at New School University in New York. He was born and educated in Bombay and did his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Appadurai is one of the few scholars who have defined the way we have come to understand globalisation. He is also involved deeply with Mumbai-based NGO, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research). He spoke to Sayandeb…

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…